Artist Portfolio - Guweiz

In just four years, Zheng Wei Gu went from bedroom hobbyist to big-budget films. Gary Evans finds out how…

- Gary Evans

  

Prepare to feel very, very jealous. Guweiz, who took up drawing aged 16, recently completed artwork for the live-action version of Ghost in the Shell, featuring Hollywood star Scarlett Johansson. He’s 21.

Growing up in Singapore, the artist – real name Zheng Wei Gu – focused on doing well at school, passing exams and getting into a good university. He planned to become a pharmacist. Then he saw a video on YouTube, a tutorial on how to draw an anime face. He gave it a go, and managed to replicate the picture pretty well.

“It was probably a video meant for 12 year olds,” he says, “Given that I was 16, it wasn’t too hard for me to end up with a decent copy. Still, I filled up a few pages trying to copy the steps.”

Over the next year, Guweiz spent every free moment drawing. Then he enlisted for national service (a mandatory two years spent as a fulltime soldier in the Singapore army), which gave even him more time to draw and think about drawing. Yet with no formal training, he was “drawing blindly” and making plenty of mistakes. As the artist puts it, “I was like a random guy who decided he was going to start making gourmet soup, but with only memories of the really good soups he’d tasted before.”

Guweiz searched the internet for references. Photographers became a good source of inspiration. He stopped drawing blindly and based work on the real world. Social media became his art school. He used it for advice and feedback, for validation that he was moving in the right direction. His posts often reached hundreds of thousands of people.