Digital Illustrator and Character Designer
Storytelling Through Light & Color
Hi! My name is Heidi Ahmad. I am a freelance digital illustrator and character designer. I help studios, publishers & license buyers tell their stories through light & color so that their illustrations have a traditional feel with all the flexibility of digital art.
Check out my portfolio.
I graduated with honors from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Helwan University, Egypt, where I studied anatomy, figure drawing, perspective, landscape, composition, and colors. I continue to learn and improve to this day. You can follow my journey in my blog.
I started selling my art as a student and participated in several art galleries. The main paintings of my graduation project were sold to an Egyptian-Italian gallery owner.
In addition to working traditionally with pencils, markers, water colors, and pastels.... I also create digital paintings using my Wacom drawing tablet.
My first digital painting ever got me hired by a local animation studio to create unwrap portraits for their 3D characters. It was a portrait of Jack Nicholson and the studio wanted someone to create several textures, 1 of them having wrinkles, so I was hired. He found me on Behance.
The Market
175 cm * 125 cm
Oil on Canvas
My second digital painting - 2016 - Aswan
Award for my second digital painting
Even though I only started working digitally in 2016, my artistic experience transferred intact to the digital media that I won an award for my second digital painting.
I was then offered to be part of the editing team in the Design Guide Magazine, a magazine dedicated to Arab designers.
While Working as a freelance researcher, writer and translator for the magazine my goal was to bring two cultures together through art and to enrich the Arabic content.
Coming from an oil painting background, my digital painting styles resemble traditional art.
I worked as a lip sync artist for Coincide, the studio that created the popular 3D animated series Bassant & Dyasti in Egypt, so I am pretty familiar with the animation workflow.
On a side note, learning traditional animation is on my to-do list.
Bassant & Diyasti Animated Series - Credits
One more thing...
I have super powers. Mum's the word.
Thanks for stopping by!
- Heidi