We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Changyu Zou a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Changyu, appreciate you making time for us and sharing your wisdom with the community. So many of us go through similar pain points throughout our journeys and so hearing about how others overcame obstacles can be helpful. One of those struggles is keeping creativity alive despite all the stresses, challenges and problems we might be dealing with. How do you keep your creativity alive?
I think the secret to staying creative is to learn something new every day. Reading can be a way of not necessarily needing to read a lot every day, but reading a short poem a day is a habit that can be maintained over time. Reading ensures that you are always in a state of thinking, and every day when I read I can generate a lot of new ideas, which I think is beneficial to my creativity. A rich imagination I think is the key to creativity, so get more exposure to new things, see more of the world around you, and stay curious.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
My name is Changyu Zou, and I am a freelance illustrator based in Savannah, Georgia. Most of my creative inspiration comes from poetry and I like to convert my feelings about words into images. Although these words are sometimes very abstract and difficult to understand, they can give me unlimited imagination. I believe that visual language and text have been influencing and blending with each other, so I try to use visual art to express and describe words. I love surrealist paintings; I am addicted to extraordinary imagination and great compositions. Hieronymus Boschd’s paintings, for example, are highly original, imaginative, and make extensive use of various symbols and signs. I think they inspire me to think about the composition, imagination, and graphic elements of illustration. Of course, my style has changed a lot from the very beginning. I think experimenting with a variety of drawing tools can help find the right style of illustration for you. Once I tried some printing tools and collages, I fell in love with these ways, so now I love to draw by hand and create illustrations with gouache, crayon, and collage. And I try to keep the traces and texture of these hand-drawings in my digital drawings.
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?
I think patience, persistence, and courage have had the greatest impact on my journey. I have been exploring my artistic style, which is a very long process. From the time I started learning to paint to now, my style has gone through many changes and finally slowly developed into the current style. I think it is a very lonely and long process because no one can really help you, the formation of a self-artistic style still depends on your own slow comprehension. So I think this process requires patience and no hurry, and only when the accumulation reaches a certain level will there be results. Of course having the courage to step out of the comfort zone I think is also a very important part, when reaching the bottleneck, I think it is appropriate to step out of the current thinking, to learn some new methods or knowledge, I think it will make more progress.
One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?
I’d love to work with writers or musicians, I recently did a book review and I found I particularly enjoyed that type of work. I think music and writing are both arts that express personal emotions, and there are no specific words to describe the emotions you feel when you read (and listen) to them. But the power of these emotions is powerful and I enjoy creating this type of illustration. I think music and words can bring me endless imagination and reflection.So I hope to draw some book reviews or album covers.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.changyuzou.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/changyu_zou/
