My first though on Thorsten’s work was: “What nice character designs.” But, as I got further and further down his tumblr , I began seeing more and more work that made this artist really stand out from the plethora of other great illustrators.

Can you find just one influence in the work below? The seamless merging of old masters Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse, and Wassily Kandinsky with ‘contemporary’ masters such as Mary Blaire and Lou Romano. This isn’t someone who just wanted to work at Pixar and started tracing animation stills from The Incredibles, but instead someone who wanted to be a great artist. His sense of design is of course in top shape, but its not just a style: he pushes the way he sees a shape, the form and function of it, and pushes that idea to become something greater than the subject he originally intended to represent.

http://thorstenhasenkamm.tumblr.com/