Boris & Julie

Location: US Web: www.borisjulie.com Media: Oil on canvas

Of all the figure artists in this feature, the two most associated with a realistic art style are Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell. But that’s not the whole story. “I think that when you’ve spent many years working on realism and accuracy, it just starts to happen that you want to veer off into some stylistic choices,” explains Julie. “It’s a bit like playing with the tools that you’ve become so familiar with.”

These tools include an encyclopaedic knowledge of the human form, thanks to a background in weightlifting – but more than that, of where the action is. “I look for the basic energetic line in a pose and draw that first. And then break it down. First the energy line in the whole figure, then in each leg, arm, hand and so on,” Julie says.

Of course, all artists started making marks when they were still in nappies, but what’s remarkable in this particular fantasy art dream team is that Julie pipped Boris to the post by four years. “The first human I drew was a model in art school when I was 14,” Boris recalls. This is Julie’s cue: “Starting when I was about 10 years old, I would get pictures from magazines and draw beautiful ladies in my sketchbooks. I loved creating all kinds of cool fashions for them. It was very girly. Not the heroic stuff that I would do now.”