Shadows Fall in a Moody City

Katherine Lam is a New York City-based illustrator, who grew up in the suburbs of Maryland. Her work, deeply influenced by movies and cinematography, plays with shadows and lights to make an otherwise plain space look surreal. 
 
Lam’s work pushes us to pay closer attention to the world around us by reducing our options. By confining each view to a restrained palette of muted hues with a few dashes of color she retrains our eye to see shapes and spatial relationships that might otherwise get lost in the overabundance of detail we face every day. 
 
Her bold, stylized strokes and areas of flat color further help direct the eye. Look at her iPhone beach, for example, and you’ll find a “reader’s guide” that can be carried out into the real world, allowing us to see it with a little more awareness.

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