Helane Freeman
email: Helane@me.com
818.889.9344
Biography
Drawing is Helane Freeman's forté; she is an illustrator at heart. A distinguished student, Helane graduated from Art Center College of Design with honors in Illustration. Her uncanny ability to turn paint, pencil and pixels into emotion, movement and perspective comes from her artistic lineage, traceable to Leonardo da Vinci via master/apprentice relationships. She has shared her lineage and inspired other artists by teaching anatomy figure drawing at the California Art Institute.
At the age of 14, Helane began selling her paintings, and her work soon adorned the walls of local banks and several neighborhood businesses. During her career as an illustrator and art director, Helane has worked on over 100 record album covers, including Frank Sinatra - Radio Years and NWA's Straight Outta Compton, named one of the 25 best album covers of all time by Digital Arts Magazine. Helane has earned six RIAA Gold and Platinum Albums, a Hollywood Reporter Key Art Award for ad design for the film Dumb and Dumber, and numerous other awards and accolades.
Helane's flexibility is astounding. In addition to her own well-developed style, she can mimic some of the world's most famous artists, from Norman Rockwell to Roy Lichtenstein. Helane's drawings and paintings don't simply evoke other artist's styles; she's so accurate in her impressions, Disney’s legal department once took three days to verify that her commissioned Jackson Pollock-style painting was an original work and not a direct copy of an actual Pollock piece!
Helane received the rare honor of having her work proudly displayed in the Smithsonian Institution as part of its Priority Records "The California Raisins" exhibit, now part of the museum's permanent collection. She has also been commissioned to draw many celebrity likenesses; her pictures of Charlie Sheen and Oprah Winfrey each received first-round approvals on the spot from Charlie and Oprah themselves!
Helane is adept at creating illustrations aross all forms of media, from traditional oil-on-canvas to airbrush to digital drawing on her state of the art Cintiq. No matter how large or small the job, Helane is always on time and on budget - with a smile!