I’m an Icelandic illustrator and visual artist who studied multimedia illustration and animation in Italy, after finishing my studies in general arts and design in Iceland. I’m now working and living in Brighton, UK.

My passion for art is probably as old as I am since my parents always encouraged me to draw and to look at things around me with a critical mind. I loved picture books as soon as I was strong enough to hold them. I remember smelling the pages, making up new stories for the characters and falling asleep with them covering my face so I could carry on dreaming the storyline.
I still have this need to animate and make up stories for pencil lines and shapes on paper. Whether be it an illustrated book I’m working on or just a single doodle, I’m always waiting for the characters to talk to me, tell me their story and eventually leave my desk so I can start over again. The fact that I can create “life” and inspire new thoughts for the audience, just through my visual creation is a priority that to me is beyond understanding.

Growing up in an isolated country like Iceland forces people also to think about society, life and humanity vs. nature in a specific way. We have to learn how to embrace the beauty in something that usually would be considered ugly. We listen to sound in the silence, see colors in grey and understand that part of living is dyeing. These contrasts fascinates me, I love the fact that things that make us smile can also make us cry and that we can feel warm and cold at the same time. This combination of irony and humor that makes me both laugh and be scared is usually underlying in my work and I can easily connect it to my childhood, or to everyone’s childhood for that matter. We all love the bad guy just as much as the good guy in our fairytales. I need the ugly in my work to appreciate the beauty.

You can find my work in several places online, www.erlamaria.com is my personal portfolio and I would recommend to everybody to have a look at www.artsprojekt.com. It‘s a fantastic collection of amazing artists and there you can also buy some of my works and products.