The South Korean tells Gary Evans how he went from being a college dropout to becoming a world-famous artist.
Kim Jung Gi steps up to a blank canvas. It’s huge – several metres wide. Pen in hand, he makes his first mark, drawing a mechanic working on a rally car. Another man rides a camel out into the desert. Dogs follow.
The story picks up the pace now. A shepherd appears, and he’s carrying an AK-47. Perspectives plunge, narratives arc, plots and subplots intertwine. Gi adds motorbikes, trucks, more cars. Finally, in the middle of it all, the artist illustrates himself: he wears his trademark glasses and hoodie, he sits quietly at a desk, and he draws.
In just a few hours, the Korean has covered the whole canvas, right up to the very edge. He’s used no references, no thumbnails, or rough sketches. He drew it all from memory. It looked like he could’ve kept drawing indefinitely.
“I have the ability,” Gi says, “to draw straight to paper whatever I visualise in my head. I twist stories out of everyday life, everything around me, every scene, no matter how ordinary. I observe everything. What you see is a moment in time, the present, but you have the artistic freedom to imagine a past and a future.”
Over 300,000 people like Gi’s Facebook pages. Half a million people follow him on Instagram. His YouTube video – like the one described above – attract as many as three million views. He’s both an artists’ artist and a comic book illustrator known and loved by people who’ve never read a comic. His clients include DC, Marvel, Riot Games and Universal Pictures. And Gi being Gi, he can remember the moment it all began.
A QUIET OBSERVER
この記事は ImagineFX の August 2017 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です ? サインイン
この記事は ImagineFX の August 2017 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です? サインイン
Jan Wessbecher
Dominic Carter talks to the visual artist about creating his own comic and why sketchbooks are great for creative experiments
Kyounghwan Kim
The Korean character concept artist speaks to Dominic Carter about staying open to ideas and the value of drawing regularly
Slawek Fedorczuk
Dominic Carter talks to the concept artist about what keeps him motivated and the advantages of using physical sketchbooks.
Raquel M. Varela
Raquel is inspired by magic, fantasy and fairy tales. She loves designing female characters from distant worlds. \"My greatest reference is Loish's art, thanks to her I learned to draw the movement and fluidity I like to convey.\"
Estrela Lourenço
Estrela is a children's book author and illustrator. Her work is influenced by her background in character animation and storyboards for clients such as Cartoon Network, and she channels comic strips like Calvin and Hobbes.
Daria Widermanska
Daria, also known as Anako, has been drawing for as long as she can remember. Inspired by Disney and classic anime, she loves creating new characters and often finds that a single sketch can spark a unique story.
Allen Douglas
Allen has been painting professionally since 1994 for the publishing and gaming industries. Inspired by folklore, he distorts the size, relationships and environments of animals, and calls his paintings 'unusual wildlife'.
Thaddeus Robeck
Thaddeus has been drawing from the moment he could hold a pencil, but it was the 2020 lockdowns that gave him the time to focus on honing his skills.
DRAW FASCINATING SYMBOLIC ARTWORK
Learn how JULIÁN DE LA MOTA creates a composition from his imagination with a focus on crafting figures, volumetric modelling, and light and shadow
First Impressions
The artist talks about his journey into the mythological world