We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Xingyi Sun a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Xingyi, so excited to have you with us today. So much we can chat about, but one of the questions we are most interested in is how you have managed to keep your creativity alive.
As an illustrator, I need to be creative to draw. For the past few years, I had time periods when I couldn’t draw for weeks because my creativity ran dry. Now that I’ve been dealing with this problem for long enough, I’ve came up with some solutions that can help with keeping my creativity alive. The first solution is to fill my head with interesting things once in a while. Some professionals like to call it “building a visual library.” Because I’m interested in making drawings with historical themes since I was very young, I would go to museum to look at things and take notes of things and ideas I can use in a drawing every time I have a creativity block, just recently I went to the Metropolitan Museum of arts to get inspiration. I also read at least two graphic novels with distinct art styles a week to expand my understanding in drawing and narrative art, for this week I’m reading “1-800-Mice” by Matthew Thurber and “Lost at Sea” by Bryan Lee O’Malley. Sometimes I would look at and study artworks in other genres like photography and sculpture as well. Another solution is that I try to draw what I like as much as possible. When I feel passionate about the things I’m working on, it’s easier for me to find inspiration, and I will have a larger and better visual library drawing the things I like. Because I like to draw historical stuff, I would try to put things like armor, artifacts, cultural clothing or weapons into illustration projects that can be related to that, or find chances to work on personal projects that revolve around the themes I like.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
I am an illustrator and Artist. I grew up in Nanjing, China. I began to draw at a very young age, and was always seen as the kid that’s going to become an artist in class. Everyday after the school’s finished, the first thing I did when I get home is not doing my homework, but drawing. I decided to be an illustrator when I was 16. I quit going to high school and spent a year staying in my room learning English, academic drawing and reading comics, I couldn’t go out anyway since it was during covid. During that period I completely isolated myself from the outside world, within that year, I made significant progress both in my language and drawing skills, at the same time the isolation shaped my personality. At the age of 18 I went to America to further my study at School of Visual Arts in New York, now I’m currently living in Queens. Drawing has always been the most important part of my life, my heroes are illustrators and manga artists. I choose a career in illustration because I want to be able to do want I like for a living, tell the stories I want to tell, and share my love for drawing with others through my works.
I took influences from many things including Japanese manga, Hong Kong comic and American fantasy illustration. I mostly use digital medium to make my illustration, I like to make semi realistic illustrations with heavy line work, intense shadow, strong shape, deep cultural and historical undertone. My most recent project is a set of book illustrations for the classic Wu-Xia novel “Legend of the Condor Heroes,” you can check them out on my website and social media. Currently my focuses are book illustration and graphic novel self publishing, but I’m willing to accept other works that’s within my ability as well.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
The first impactful skill is that I learned in my art journey is to embrace the lack of control, in my second year in art school I stated to do drawing with no construction lines, that changed the way I see art, I was no longer obsessed with anatomic accuracy, and was able to access a less rational and more sensitive state of mind when drawing. It helped a lot with the formation of my style, and made me a lot more confident with my pen. I recommend doing observational drawing for around 3 hours a week and draw without instruction line, it takes less than a year for to improve one’s drawing skills drastically with this practice. I think the idea of embracing the lack of control has also influenced the way I deal with life, once I stopped worrying about the things that I can’t change, I can have more energy to focus on the things that I can actually make a difference to.
Another impactful thing is that I found one specific area of interest, and base most of my work around it. I am very interested in ancient history, and have a lot of knowledge in this subject, so I incorporated it into my art practice. It makes my artworks stand out, attract people with similar interest, and contributes to my own personality. People are more willing to pay attention to things that are unique since we live in a world that’s filled with mass-produced bland things, so it’s always a good thing to exhibit that uniqueness. Another advantage of this is that I get to take inspiration from artists that specialize in historical art such as Angus McBride and Chen Uen who I probably won’t knew about if I didn’t have a focus on this interest.
The last thing is that I learned to connect with my experience of my childhood, I’ve been drawing since I was a child, mostly drawing insects, whales and dinosaurs, after I grew a little older I started drawing ancient soldiers. I went back to China last summer and saw my old drawings, it didn’t look as cool as I remembered, but I can recall how fun it feels to draw like that. I was making very painterly illustrations a year ago, although I liked the finished pieces, it was not enjoyable, so when I got back to America, I tried to draw like I was ten, and made a drawing of two group of soldiers riding on dinosaurs fighting each other, and it was one of the best things that happened to me because I felt the fun of drawing like a child again, while at the same time I was able to access the skills and experience I’ve accumulated in my childhood, it helped me tremendously. This applies to everyday life as well, a lot of times happiness comes from satirizing one’s inner child’s demand, I often revisits video games I played as a kid and tries to stay in touch with my childhood friends.
My advice for young artists who are starting out is that, you should always believe in your art no matter what. Especially in this age where a lot of people appreciate AI generated images more than artworks created by human, it’s easy for young artists to lose confidence in themselves and quit. I think the most important quality for an artist is to be confident of your own work so you have the strength to stay in this practice and make progress in art, drawing skills and networking skills all come after that. A lot of older professional artists and illustrator I knew all told me the same thing, there are many people who are more talented than them when they are young, but they are the one who made it in this profession because they were the one’s that didn’t quit.
Is there a particular challenge you are currently facing?
Currently the biggest obstacle and challenge for me is building my connection to the world as a young artist, especially running my social media accounts. In the past I’ve struggled with posting my works on the internet because I was frustrated by low engagements and I didn’t want my works being used in generative AI, growing up, my artworks only received good feedbacks from friends and family, compare to people who were academically trained at a younger age, I’m very bad at taking criticism, and what made it worse is that my self-confidence is directly built on the quality of my artwork, so until I turn 18, I barely showed my works to anybody. I opened some accounts last winter, but I haven’t been active for a while because it drained my energy and I wasn’t as productive as usual. I’m starting to posting my recent works again, but there’s still a long way to go for me to become someone who is comfortable presenting themselves without fearing the judgement of others. My way of overcoming this challenge is to reach out to my friends in real life and talk about my art with them more often so that the feedbacks from the Internet matters less. I also set a calendar for me to operate my accounts on schedule.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://Xingyisun.myportfolio.com
- Instagram: Xingyi_Sun293
Image Credits
Xingyi Sun
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