Charis Tsevis — Athens, Greece

“In portraiture, lighting is everything. It illuminates, sculpts and highlights a face. I like to use my brushes and other software or hardware tools as ‘light chisels’ to draw attention to the parts of the face that could send a message and express feeling.”

Greek illustrator Charis Tsevis is best known for his digital mosaics of public figures such as Steve Jobs and Barack Obama, which he painstakingly crafts using a complex tessellation of smaller objects. His energetic style is heavily influenced by the ideas of Gestalt psychology (which maintains that the human eye sees objects in their entirety before perceiving their individual parts), as well as Futurism and Cubism. He describes his approach as optimistic, democratic and in constant dialogue with new technology.