Anke Katrin Eissmann
Anke Katrin Eissmann was born in 1977 in Dillenburg, Germany. She studied Visual Communication at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany. Here she specialized in video and animation, graduating in 2001 with a partly animated documentary on the history of the town she grew up in, Herborn. Also, she studied Graphic Design at the Colchester Institute in Colchester, UK, where she completed her BA (Hons) degree in 2003, her final project comprising the creation of an illustrated edition of the Old English epic poem Beowulf. Since then, she has been working as a freelance illustrator and graphic designer, illustrating a series of historical ghost stories of her hometown Herborn, as well as books on Troy and Alexander the Great. She has just completed illustrations for a book of poems about Herborn, and is working on an illustrated tourist-guide about the city of Heidelberg as seen by Mark Twain. Recently she has also begun teaching art at her old high school.
Illustrating the works of JRR Tolkien has been her passion ever since she read Lord of the Rings for the first time (in 1992). The book has had an enormous impact on her as it seemed to combine everything she had found fascinating, moving and above all inspiring in other works of literature in an epic narrative. Apart from these books, her sources of inspiration come from history, nature, mythology in general, and the work of other artists, such as the Pre-Raphaelites, illustrators like Arthur Rackham, Edmond Dulac, Ivan Bilibin and Alan Lee, Art Nouveau, artists like Edward Hopper and Jan Vermeer, to name only a few.
Initially publishing her Tolkien-inspired watercolors on the internet (since 1997), in recent years she has gained wider recognition in the Tolkien-scene by exhibiting her artwork at the international Tolkien Conference "Tolkien 2005" in Birmingham, UK, and at meetings of the British and the German Tolkien Societies. Also, her artwork has been displayed at galleries in Germany. Some paintings were also part of the international traveling exhibition "Images of the Middle-Earth".
As someone who appreciates sensual, tactile qualities of artwork, she mostly works with classic media like pencil, ink and charcoal, without digital touches or corrections. Her preferred medium, however, is watercolor. She considers it very appropriate for book-illustration because of its subtlety, its painterly quality and unpredictability. These qualities enable the illustrator to suggest rather than dictate and thus leave room for the reader's imagination, the encouragement of which is one of her chief goals when creating book-illustrations, or indeed artwork in general.
When illustrating Tolkien's (and other) works she likes to concentrate on scenes and characters often overlooked by other illustrators: quiet, subtle scenes not charged with great action or drama, but which for her contain the essence of the stories. To retain a sense of realism in her fantasy-artwork, she uses plenty of natural and historical reference, especially for the authentic and realistic depiction of weapons, costumes and architecture. An avid cinemast, she has been using a 16:9 format for her Tolkien-paintings since 1999. It is inspired by cinematography, which also has an impact on composition and lighting in her images.
