ABOUT
PROJECT
EXHIBITIONS
CONTACT
AVAILABLE WORKS
ABOUT
I’m Mila Margini, an Italian visual artist, illustrator and graphic designer. I graduated in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts. After completing my degree, I spent a year in the United States, where I studied Web Design and Graphic Design at college. When I returned to Italy, I worked as a graphic designer and art director between Milan and Trento, in advertising agencies.
After ten years in the field, I chose to teach, and today I teach graphic design subjects in an art high school. It was while working with my students that I rediscovered the urge to express myself personally.
CONCEPT OF MY WORK
My work moves between instinct and control, form and rhythm. I seek balance between fullness and emptiness, between motion and stillness.
My figures are born from an investigation into the digital body and emotional distance in the age of images. They are women who do not exist, yet embody real emotions filtered through technology.
Their fragile, stylized forms speak about identity, isolation, synthetic bodies, and femininity in the digital world. There is a constant tension between the human and the artificial, a reflection of our time.
PROCESS AND TECHNIQUE
I start instinctively, sketching with a simple BIC pen on my sketchbook. It’s an immediate, spontaneous gesture that captures the idea before it fades. Then I bring the drawing into Illustrator, where the screen becomes my canvas. I work carefully on form, seeking balance between precision and emotion, between technical perfection and expressive tension. Every line is calibrated, every color
measured until harmony emerges. I often move these figures into After Effects, where I add movement and breath. Animation becomes a way to give life to my women, allowing their silent and fragile presence to unfold within digital time.
The figure grows from controlled tension. A silent balance held in place.
A new take on the Whisper figure. Same posture, different light. The softness folds into tension. The body stays inward, but the world around turns sharper, brighter, exposed.
The work explores a moment of conscious suspension. The figure observes something beyond the frame but remains still, caught between the urge to act and the fear of exposure. Her posture suggests both awareness and restraint, reflecting the fragile balance between impulse and control. The minimal composition and controlled gradients amplify this tension, transforming a private hesitation into a shared emotional state.
The figure seeks a point of support, a fragile balance between falling and holding on. Her posture stretches toward something uncertain, as if the act of reaching itself were the only form of stability. Through minimal lines and smooth gradients, the work explores the human need for grounding when the inner equilibrium falters.
The figure gazes at the moon with an expression suspended between melancholy and tenderness. She stands apart yet fully aware, silently observing what surrounds her without belonging to it. The work reflects on those who choose to watch rather than act — a quiet clarity that emerges when one steps back from the noise of the world to simply observe.
14
⌜ Ephemeral Women ⌝
In this collection, each figure stands alone, yet all belong to the same digital realm. These women do not exist in reality, yet they carry emotions that feel real. They emerge from pure vectors and gradients, suspended between abstraction and humanity. Their presence reveals what the digital can express beyond the visible: fragility, distance, contemplation. Each work becomes a fragment of a silent story, where the unreal body conveys an authentic state of mind.
13
⌜ TRANSITION ⌝
Transition_ is an open space for experimentation. I’m exploring new visual languages, especially through video and motion. It’s a phase of passage, where I’m pushing my work beyond static imagery, searching for continuity between sound, time, and form. Each fragment here is a test, an exercise, an attempt to translate my language into a different dimension.
Returning from Mortorio Island, the Sardinian sea becomes a hypnotic landscape.
Filmed with iPhone and reworked with After Effects, where illustration flows with the waves.
Filmed in Sardinia with iPhone and merged with illustration, this seagull glides between the tangible and the dreamlike.
A suspended moment beyond the horizon.
Real footage of Sardinian fish shot with iPhone, reimagined through illustration and After Effects.
An underwater rhythm between reality and imagination.
12
⌜ SUMMER VIBES ⌝
Summer Vibes is a short trilogy of hypnotic videos created during my stay in Sardinia. Each fragment blends real footage shot with an iPhone with my illustrated world, where the boundary between reality and imagination dissolves. Fish, seagulls, and the shimmering sea become part of a minimal and dreamlike landscape, reinterpreted through Adobe After Effects. The series was inspired by the return from Mortorio Island and carries the light, colors, and rhythm of a Sardinian summer.
A moment of presence and impermanence.
11
⌜ SUSPENSION ⌝
from perception to intention
Elsewhere_ is part of an ongoing series exploring stillness, tension, and emotional detachment.
Born from a fast and expressive ballpoint pen sketch, the figure was later reworked into a flat digital illustration with clean gradients, vibrant contrasts, and sculptural elegance.
The transition from raw mark-making to polished silence becomes the core of the work.
Eyes that seem present—yet gone. A posture of waiting. A gaze held elsewhere.
This piece merges analog instinct and vector precision, echoing my process:
from hand to screen, from feeling to form.
The rhythm mirrors the internal movement of the figure: slow, soft, unresolved.
No planning, no reference — just a spontaneous emergence of a shape, a look, a feeling.
This phase remains essential in my process, anchoring the final image to something emotional and unfiltered.
10
⌜ ELSEWHERE ⌝
Elsewhere_ is part of an ongoing series exploring stillness, tension, and emotional detachment.
Born from a fast and expressive ballpoint pen sketch, the figure was later reworked into a flat digital illustration with clean gradients, vibrant contrasts, and sculptural elegance.
The transition from raw mark-making to polished silence becomes the core of the work.
Eyes that seem present — yet gone. A posture of waiting. A gaze held elsewhere.
This piece merges analog instinct and vector precision, echoing my process:
from hand to screen, from feeling to form.
09
⌜ HELD ⌝
Held_ is a reflection on emotional containment.
The figure sits in ritual stillness, her body forming a closed yet balanced composition.
The bright red sun imposes a silent tension, while the blue stone she touches becomes a symbol of memory, weight, or thought.
Nothing moves, yet everything is charged.
This illustration continues Mila's research into inner states through minimal, symbolic gestures. Like in Glass_ or Waiting_, the silence is not absence — it’s density.
⌜ 𝗛𝗘𝗟𝗗, 𝗩𝗶𝗿𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝗘𝘅𝗽𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 ⌟
This is how I imagine a possible installation for the Held_ series.
Alongside the illustrations and the video, I always envision three-dimensional elements that complete the work: a sculptural presence, something physical that gives shape to what is only suggested in the images.
The central bench echoes the stone found in the series — a symbol of grounding and stillness. The suspended wires, made of red enamelled copper, represent thoughts, ideas, invisible connections between the self, the earth, and others.
An interplay of forms and materials that turns Held_ into an immersive experience — between body, image, and space.
This virtual exhibition was conceived as a personal and immersive space to host the Glass_ series. The scene was designed as a suspended, intimate, and theatrical environment, where every element resonates with silence and presence.
At the center of the space stands a female figure — a digital sculpture born from one of my drawings, processed through artificial intelligence and integrated into the scene to express a still, timeless tension. My long-term desire is to create a real resin sculpture inspired by one of my illustrated figures, translating the digital body into matter.
The exhibition unfolds around her: a looping video of the submerged figure — the heart of the Glass_ series — is projected at the center, flanked by two static works from the same series. Above, a constellation of suspended sketches floats gently, as if held by invisible threads — traces of gesture, echoes of thought.
This space is not real, and yet it is entirely mine.
08
⌜ GLASS_ ⌝
“Glass” is a visual meditation on fragility.
The female figure, multiplied yet never identical, explores the self through transparent surfaces and interrupted gestures.
Glass — now mirror, now chalice — becomes the filter between the world and the inner self.
But in the end, as the gesture spills what it once held, only the bare figure remains before her own absence.
A work on intimacy, silence, and the act of letting go.