Where's Waldo, With Blood: Esra Eslen's Illustrated Chaos

Esra Eslen learned to draw by taping paper to a television.

She was a kid in Istanbul, parked in front of Cartoon Network and playing flash games on random sites, and what got her was how they looked. Colorful. Sparkly. Shiny. So she held paper up to the screen and copied what was behind it, line for line.

What she took from it is the whole technique she still uses.

"Then I learned that they're drawing lines and filling them with bright colors," she says. "And I guess my art style has started at there."

Gumball. Adventure Time. And Waldo, who she didn't meet until she was grown, and who rearranged what a picture could do.

Art ran in the house without anyone calling it that. Her grandfather designs furniture and sells it, drawing every piece himself, with no training. Her brother draws too, and his work still inspires hers. She's been at it since she could hold a pencil.

She went to Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul to study graphic design, and somewhere in the middle she figured out the design part wasn't the part.

"Yes, I do like doing design and graphic stuffs," she says, "but I am way more into illustrating and imaginations and creating new compositions. Creating world side is way more interesting and beautiful to me." Then, laughing: "So I accidentally became an artist, and I'm loving it right now."

Getting into a Turkish fine arts department means passing a talent exam, so she'd spent years in the same place every illustrator she knows spent them, working in pencil, black and white, big canvases, anatomy. She was never a fan.

The color arrived as a decision. In July 2021, getting ready to mint her first piece on chain, she picked a lane on purpose.

"I should do lines and I should do colors. I should separate them, and decide what is gonna be my artistic style, and I don't want to make any changes on them."

The other half of her education was the city. As a teenager she'd escape her high school dormitory with friends and disappear into Istanbul, a city of some fifteen million people.

"I always found myself in that chaos in the city, in ferries, in subways, in huge streets," she says. "Seeing people and cars and buildings and weird Ottoman buildings and all the vintage stuffs on the streets, like street food cars and windows and cats, of course, street animals, street foods. They are all gave my core inspirations. And I actually draw them."

There's an American accent running through her work too, in the suburbs and the brands and the junk food and the popular-girl characters, and she's straightforward about it. The cartoons she traced off the television were Americanized before they ever reached her. She likes the food and the brands, and it travels, which matters when your audience is scattered across the internet.

A big Esra Eslen street scene has too much going on, and that's by design.

"One more event here, and one more event here, and one stuff is going on in here, and a love story in that part of the artwork," she says. "I'm trying to balance the artwork with too many events, too many chaoses, too many beautiful or sad, it doesn't matter. I try to make them compete with each other." One piece can take forty to sixty hours.

The reason it holds together is the degree she thought she'd wasted. Composition, color, balance, layout, typography, and above all one thing.

"Hierarchy is the most important thing I learned."

She explains it in terms of attention rather than aesthetics. "A person came and look at it, and they want to be catched in that artwork and stay at there." 

Which is why the scroll gets to her. She builds an image to be searched, and most people move too fast to search it.

"Some of the people a little lazy, and they see and put a like and go on and go on and scroll."

When you look closer, you find the blood.

Her scenes are candy-colored and full of murder, or something close. The source material is personal, mostly her own nightmares and phobias, plus her little brother's drawings. The effect she's after is precise.

"People need to see weird creepy stuff, and they want to get shocked with what they saw," she says. "I try to catch that point, that weird, oh my God, what is this, point of the people's perspective."

She knows exactly what she's doing. "I like to see that shine on the surface, and I like to create a weird core themes." Ask what else works like that and she goes straight to K-pop. "They are so shiny, they are so sparkling, they are beautiful, yes, but also they are dealing with hard stuff on the background."

There is a line, and she's thought about it. She'll go anywhere except somebody's actual wound.

"I'm trying to not touch anyone personally, like their pains, their sensitive parts of their life," she says. "Because it's art, you should enjoy it, and you should have fun while looking at it."

She noticed something about her own work that she didn't set out to do. When things get tense with a partner or a friend, tense scenes appear on the canvas. She doesn't decide to draw them.

"If I draw so many love scenes, I'm sure in my head I was dealing with that," she says. "So my art is my brain, you are seeing my brain, actually."

The rest of the crowd comes from the same place. Whatever was in the news, whatever she saw that day, whatever holiday is coming.

That impulse shows up most clearly in the women. "I usually, always, all the time do a woman world with my art," she says of Girls! Girls! Girls! and Adrenaline, both on Ninfa, where each figure gets a world she owns and something she's carrying. "You don't need to be a woman to understand that." Never Without, a hundred pieces on SuperRare made in about a month, went the other direction, one object at a time, everyday things that "are always living in your head, but you can't do anything without them."

Music drives the whole thing. At forty hours a piece she needs it. "They are like a gas to me. They are pushing me." She builds a playlist alongside each one-of-one, and when a piece finds a collector she sends the Spotify link so they know what was in the room.

Most of what she's looking at runs on the same current. Grimes, who does illustration and AI and music at once, which Esra finds baffling in the best way. "Her brain is so weird, and I found it so inspiring." DeltaSauce, who's also been a guest on this series. Her friend Maria. A lot of EDM and house.

She's started vlogging too, shyly. She wants to document the days, the coffee shop, the house, what she's reading, how a piece gets built. The strategy is unsentimental. Nobody clicks a YouTube channel for art alone, but they'll click if they're curious about a life.

"I'm trying to be on every platform on the internet," she says, "because I love internet."

Ten thousand steps a day, ideally to hard techno. It's good for her mental health and good for the work.

Second, give yourself a small fear. Go somewhere a little dangerous, or sleep in a dark room. "If you want to explore yourself, you should be feeling a little fear in your life."

Third, buy yourself an enormous, delicious meal, as a gift from you to you. She's been doing all three lately, and reports that it works.