Welcome to the Lumps: A surrealist land created by illustrator Sam Drew

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Lumps aka Sam Drew is a UK born artist interested in illustration and animation. The subject of his works tend to juxtapose the everyday with the incomprehensible; tasks like the weekly shop, visiting a museum, or eating ramen, take on a surreal energy in the world of Lumps. Exploding the mundane of our world into the extraordinary detail and delirium of a Lumps day out is Drew’s stock-in-trade.
Twitter: LUMPS_UK Artist Site: www.lumps.design

This colourful and dystopian world is created by Sam Drew, an illustrator from Cardiff who is currently based in Stevenage. As a keen advocate for the arts, drawing is something that has always been of interest and later led him to study product design at university. “This is where I learned technical drawing, but it felt a little restricting and I didn’t feel satisfied,” he tells It’s Nice That. After graduating, Sam consequently steered in a new direction and decided to take on freelancing, web design projects and “any job that came his way”. It was in his spare time that Sam would draw up his own fantastical world, which in turn “became a bit of an obsession,” he says. “I started to post them online and I was really surprised by how well it was received.”

Now revelling in his chosen profession as an illustrator – and quite rightly so – Sam has developed a distinct style that gives a firm nod to the grotesque. “My illustrations mainly portray these characters that I have created, called Lumps. They are a futuristic version of humans and live in a dystopian world,” he explains. “The weird-looking characters often have broad smiles and are placed in colourful, surreal scenes.” Indeed hinting to the familiar, what’s most unsettling is the apparent use of everyday human life and experiences that have been taken, morphed and placed into a future vision. Perhaps his version of where the world will be in a few years, Sam draws from topics such as consumerism and mental health and intertwines these themes into his illustrations. “I’m also a big fan of post-apocalyptic of dystopian worlds,” he says, “so I find myself drawing this type of scene all the time.”

Sam’s characters were initially formed out of a desire to create the “weirdest character” he could, combined with a longstanding interest in surrealism and automatism. “I loved how the first character turned out and over time they developed into their own little species,” he says. “The Lumps characters are living everyday life, laid back, happy, and some take on the form…