This weekend, from August 16 to 18, Riga will celebrate its 823rd birthday. The summer cultural programme of the city is complemented by vibrant drawings by illustrator Roberts Rūrāns. Artworks that can be seen on posters all over the city are based on Riga’s coat of arms, which is inhabited by people celebrating the occasion. In the Nice Touch section, Roberts talks about the tool that helps his illustrations maintain their vibrancy.
«Those artists who, like me, create physical works always end up having to digitalise them by scanning or photographing so that they can be shown to the wider world online. But the problem is that what looks good in real life, when scanned, appears grey on the screen and has lost all its colour energy.
This means that extra work has to be done in digital postprocessing, adapting the colours to the possibilities offered by the screens. To save time, I use the VSCO filters in Adobe Lightroom for basic colour correction. Photoshop then comes in for the finer details, but it’s the colour filters that I choose and adapt that do the bulk of the work. Although the filters are primarily designed for photographers, I can recommend them to anyone who needs quick and easy colour correction for their images.»
Roberts Rūrāns is one of Latvia’s best-known illustrators. He has created illustrations for many influential international publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vogue, and Le Monde. Roberts creates his work by hand, and over time he has developed his own unique style, which is influenced by both modernism and medieval art. You can follow Roberts’ work on his website and Instagram account.
The slogan for Riga’s 823rd birthday, which is also featured in Roberts’ illustrations, is «Līksmo, audz, daudzini!» (Rejoice, Grow, Multiply!). You can find out more about the celebration programme here.
Viedokļi