What’s your name and grade? My name is Grace, and I am a junior.
What are your favorite things to do? I mostly spend my free time just drawing a lot. I mostly just draw whatever’s around me. I like to practice my flute a lot as well, or just be with my family.
What’s your favorite thing that you play on the flute? I don’t really have a favorite–it’s just, I just kind of go around playing what music I have. I remember last year, we played Starry Heavens [in Symphonic Band], and that was a song I really liked.
Favorite person–whether it’s someone you know, a celebrity, a historical figure, anyone: My favorite artist is [South Korean artist] Kim Jung Gi. It was kind of sad, because he passed away in October, about a year ago–he was a really good artist. He would just draw things without any layout, and it would be really big pieces of art.
Do you watch anime? Are you inspired by anime? I kind of used to watch it, I guess, in middle school, but I just kind of lost interest in it. The ones I really liked were the ones where I liked the art style, so I just took them to merge them together and create my own. It’s not just anime–it’s a lot of pieces I see, like, I can probably interpret it into my art in some way, but make it my own at the same time.
What are other pieces that you use for inspiration? I don’t really keep on looking at pieces. I mostly go off from imagination, or the things I like or the colors I like. I like the color blue a lot, so I like to draw water a lot, like the ocean or a lake, so I interpret blue, sometimes, in a lot of my pieces. I’m just good at drawing in the shade of blue.
What’s your favorite home-cooked meal? It’s a Korean one. It’s doenjang-jjiage [doe-en-jahng gee-jay(uh)]. It is a type of Korean stew that is made with a soybean paste (doenjang) and you can add whatever type of vegetable, seafood, or meat you like in it.
What do you love about art and painting? You can just do whatever you want with it. Or if you make a mistake, you can just–well, in painting, you can cover it up, but you just, have the freedom to draw whatever you want. You can make it however you want, and there’s no one to say how you have to do it exactly this way. You can just express yourself with it, and put out whatever you feel like.
What’s something you’ve achieved that you are proud of? Actually seeing my improvement in my own art. Looking back to my drawings from a year ago, or old sketchbooks, to where I am now,I just kept on drawing, and drawing, and drawing. Sometimes I think, like, the ones I have now aren’t that good, or from a year ago, but when I really look back at it, I realize I have actually come a really far way with how long I’ve been drawing, and I need to realize that not everything I put out there is bad. Nor is my old art bad, because, , I was still learning how to draw then, and I still am, but I have more knowledge of what I’m doing.
When you have a bad day, what’s something you do to feel better? Usually, I’ll just, like, scribble out whatever, or just like, kind of sit and do nothing. I don’t know, I just don’t really do anything. Mostly I just scribble out whatever–just take a pencil and just go roughly with it on a piece of paper, or something. Just kind of let it out. Or sometimes write some things, and then just kind of just throw them away afterwards.
Is that cathartic for you? Does it help you get your stuff out? Sometimes it kinda does when I’m really pissed or something. I don’t go really, really hard on it, but I can just do it, though.
Dream thing to do as a job, as unrealistic as you want: I kind of like character design, which I’m kind of into right now, but I’ve always wanted to be either an author or a concept artist maybe–like, design things. But, if you want a job as an artist, like, I also have to think about the fact that I want to be financially stable as well, and having a job or getting a job as an artist is kind of like a hard position for me right now, because there’s been recently a lot of artists losing their jobs, and AI art, and companies just resorting to AI. Finding work might be more difficult, but I still want to have a job as an artist and try figuring it out some way.
You’ve talked about character design. Would you want to be a comic book illustrator or work in illustration? I liked animation, it’s just–learning it, and drawing smooth motion, is kind of hard. And I’ve also thought of being an author, while I was in elementary school, but now that I look at it, there’s a lot more that goes into it, so probably I’ll have a lot more stress and pressure if I become an author. And you also have to have a full story behind it.
