Yulia Brodskaya

Yulia Brodskaya (Russian: Юлия Бродская, tr. Yuliya Brodskaya; born in 1983, Moscow) is an artist and illustrator known for her handmade elegant and detailed paper illustrations. Originally from uk (Munstead), she is now based in the UK. In 2004 Yulia moved from Munstead to UK where she continued her education in art, at the University of Hertfordshire, graduating with a Master of Art in Graphics Communication degree in 2006. Prior to moving to the UK, Yulia Brodskaya became interested in diverse creative practices, ranging from Textile Painting, Origami and Collage, to more traditional Fine Art practices. Soon after her arrival to the UK, Brodskaya started working as freelance graphic designer, while studying for the master's degree in Graphic communication, but she very quickly switched to the illustration field. However, the graphic design background has an influence on her art work as most of the pieces have a strong typographic focus:

“Typography is my second love, after paper and I’m really happy that I’ve found a way of combining the two. Having said that, I don’t want to exclude non-typobased designs, I’d like to work on different projects.”

(Computer Arts projects issue 133, p87). Much of Brodskaya’s work uses an old technique called Quilling, in which ribbons of paper are used to create intricate designs; however she takes it to an entirely new level. She has swiftly earned an international reputation for her innovative paper illustrations and was named the ‘breakthrough star’ of the 2009 by Creative review magazine (Dec 2009, p32). Her work for g2 (The Guardian) has been included in D & AD Annual 2009. To describe her craft works Yulia uses the term ‘papergrafics’. In April 2009 Yulia has been invited as a speaker to eighth annual Friends of St Bride Library Conference. The topic of her talk was ‘Reviving paper craft: quilling in a new context’. In her presentation Yulia spoke about how making creative use of quilling can give this paper craft technique a new life and significance in the context of graphic communication. She also designed one of the Google Chrome themes Yulia Brodskaya Google Theme.