Magomed Dovjenko Interview

Happy New Year! We hope you’ve had great Holidays. A week ago we had a little chat with a young talented German Illustrator, Magomed Dovjenko. He’s a member of tje KDU and has received a Silver-Award at the Digital Artist Awards in the Category “2D Illustration”. Reasons enough to share this chat with you! Enjoy and make sure to check out his amazing, detailed wallpaper “Panther”!

1. Welcome to WallpaperArt and please introduce yourself. Could you tell us where you’re from and how you got started in the field?
Sure, my name is Magomed Dovjenko, I’m a 16 year old freelance Illustrator and Graphic Designer hailing from Germany, in Cologne. I was born in Russia/Chechnya but moved in 1994 to Germany. I always loved to draw as my dad was awesome at doodling stuff I watched when I was a kid, like Hercules and so on, and I kinda fell in love with drawings and comics and so on so that I started to draw too. 3 Years ago I discovered the Digital world of Art which I experimented in and after 1 year of doing nothing I found myself in the world of Illustrations, which was fascinating for me, that’s why I started. Now I’ve been practicing Illustrations for 2 years and have been working with some big brands like Nike, Footlocker, Reebok, Adidas, Diesel and more…

2. Your still so young, 16 years old and already working with KDU and had few exhibitions already! How do you combine everything with school?
It ain’t a big problem really, we don’t get too much homework here so I have TOO MUCH ( ! ) time for that , hehe. I can easily work the whole day if a project needs much work, and I won’t get in trouble with school work or similar things.

3. Can you tell us something more about your wallpaper, Panther?
Panther is one of my favorite Illustrations. I did it when I moved to another house for the first time, so I thought I’d try a bit of a new style for me, new home, new style, something like that. I worked on it for several hours to get loads of details in it, and I think it was worth it.

Download “Panther” Wallpaper

1600×1200 / 1920×1200 / 2560×1440

4. your also known from your inspirational typographic artworks, can you tell us a bit more about the work, how you start on it, the whole process?
Usually I think about the theme – I don’t sketch, I directly start from scratch a type with the Pentool in Illustrator and take it from there, as soon as I have perfectionated the type in Illustrator I get it into Photoshop to postwork it, means add textures and other effects…

5. I also see you collaborate a lot with other artists, how important is it to you to collaborate with other artists?
It’s not like it’s the most important thing, but nonetheless it does advance you, means you learn a lot in the process, see a different style but with your work in it, which you try to do by yourself later without the collaboration partner, so that you see how it works and learn new techniques, maybe some nice color combination’s and more.

6. With the new year coming up, what are your goals for the new year and what are you wishes?
My goals are to work for Kanye West ( Kanye you hear me!!!! ) Haha, well it’s more of a dream-goal, but my real goals are to improve a lot and take my work to another level, quality and conceptual-wise, as well as to stand out from the masses.

Thanks for your time mate and wish you the best in the new year!
Thank you for the opportunity Bram, really enjoyed it! Cheers!