In this installment of Drawing the Lines, I will be showcasing the work of one artist that combines the elegance and endless creativity of fashion illustration with her original art pieces.
Zyra Bañez is an artist based in Australia. Using an arsenal of traditional mediums ranging from alcohol-based Copic markers to liquid ink, she creates pieces that have an air of sophistication and polish interwoven within each stroke lain across her paper. Zyra also manages a YouTube channel showcasing progress videos of pieces, glimpses of her sketchbook, to collaborations with other artists.  
I first ran across Zyra’s work a few years back with a series of fashion illustrations she created. Inspired by the Disney Princesses, she drew a plethora of different outfits inspired by such characters and filmed YouTube videos corresponding to each outfit. I clearly remember being captivated by her design of Elsa.

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Unofficial fanart by Zyra Bañez

(left, right)

The playlist for the collection can be found here.
Another reason I love Zyra’s work is due to her experimentation with a variety of traditional mediums. When I first followed her, she primarily created work using a combination of alcohol-based markers and colored pencils; now, her illustrations have been made using watercolor, gouache, charcoal, and liquid ink. Such experimentation is important in an artist’s journey and vital to their growth, and seeing Zyra progressively add more and more materials to her artist’s toolbox inspires me to play around with my supplies as well.
Anyone who’s kept up with Drawing the Lines until now knows how much ink intrigues me as a medium, but the way Zyra uses the material is one of my greatest inspirations for my personal experimentation. Zyra’s current pieces often utilize liquid ink, demonstrated by the examples below.

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Art by Zyra Bañez

(left, center, right)

I love how the black and white contrasts each other in the left piece, and how the delicate lines of hair stand out against the galaxy motifs in the piece on the right. Her incredible inking style also winds into subjects besides the figure. In this piece below, the intricate strokes are found in the forest surrounding the main figure — adding more interesting elements to the artwork that would otherwise seem barren and simple without them.

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Art by Zyra Bañez

(source)

The circles on the cheeks, the highlight on the lip, the little curve on the tip of the nose, to even the indication of the eyelid all add a layer of depth to the portrait, making each piece even more interesting to look over. These subtleties are found throughout Zyra’s pieces, especially in her sketching style, and I enjoy seeing how she continually incorporates them into her artwork.  (To see more of the “Generation” series, this link leads to her YouTube playlist while this one leads to more images.)
For this installment’s experimental piece, I wanted to try out gouache — a medium I’m unfamiliar with that is similar to watercolor. Just like watercolor, gouache is a water soluble paint but is more opaque, allowing for great vibrancy of color that usually are built up through layers in watercolor. As a fan of the earlier medium, I was excited to play around with this paint and see how I would fare with it. Not surprisingly, I didn’t really know what I was doing and ended up imitating my use of watercolor through thin layers that I gradually built up, though I do admit rushing through each layer. I even went back to Zyra’s channel to try and figure out how she used gouache in her first experimentation with the medium. Although I was frustrated for not understanding how the gouache worked, I enjoyed myself for exploring what the paint could and couldn’t do. Reminded by Zyra’s work, I whipped out a bottle of liquid ink and added a few lines reminiscent to those found in her own pieces.