Uses This

Who are you, and what do you do?

Hello! I'm Sylvain Tegroeg, a French designer based in Amsterdam. I'm a multi-disciplinary creative with a broad background in design and applied arts. I've been working for three years as a freelance designer following my graduation at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. While working for myself, I take on commissions for a large range of projects - product design, graphics, but mostly illustrations. I also enjoy photography and 3D modelling in my spare time.

What hardware do you use?

I love to make things with my hands, and this is the reason I've stuck with hand-drawn illustrations. Most of the time I use thin fine liners/Rotring pencils (0.5mm) to create intricate details. I've been sketching in drawing books for at least 10 years, and I still feel the most comfortable with a "minimalistic" black and white art style.

And what software?

I do use high resolution scanners to copy my illustrations and import them into Adobe Photoshop, and to make minor changes to contrast and to keep the maximum authenticity and quality of the image. Once in a while I like to make vector illustrations, and Adobe Illustrator is the perfect tool for that. I used to work in Solidworks and Maya before switching to Rhino for modelling and 3D printing purposes.

I recently learned to work with Unity on the game Hidden Folks, which was a step forward in making my illustrations animated. To communicate while working in a team, I love to use Slack and Trello for their ease of use and organisation.

What would be your dream setup?

This is a tough question! I never really project myself into the future, even though I'm quite imaginative. Maybe I'm already living my dream by making my passion into my profession, working with great designers. So my wish is to keep this going as it is, and have more cool projects come along!

I might like to set myself up a bit away from the dense city life, have my own studio space/gallery or a pop-up shop to show off my earlier and upcoming projects.