Today we’d like to introduce you to Ti Xu.
Hi Ti, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
Officially I started pursuing illustration as a career in the fall of 2021, when I decided to apply for a graduate program in illustration and began putting together a portfolio. But like most others, I began to draw long before I knew the word “illustrator.”
I received general art training during high school and later got admitted to a design program for undergrad. The training before college was centered around rendering techniques, and product design during college. Outside of class people generalized my endeavor as “doing art”, but I saw the former as technical training for no clear purpose other than to stand out among other candidates, and the latter as a creative means to a rational goal. Even though I didn’t see myself as a visual creative back then, upon reflection I see the long-term influence of these experiences on what I do as an artist now.
As I draw more and more, my preferences and strengths become clearer. I love portraying organic beings, specifically plants, birds, and youth. For me, they provide the most possibilities for dynamic shapes and compositions. Genre-wise I like telling a story through a sequence of images, namely comics. I feel the process invigorated when it is driven by a story. I quit overthinking and things tend to fall naturally into place.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The fear of staring into a blank sheet of paper not knowing what to draw is one recurring struggle along the way. The tricky part is the transfer process from a spark of idea to an image. When I set myself to work on an illustration piece, the transfer process has always been unique to each project, and the unpredictability has always brought the initial “blank paper fear” to me.
But things are quite different when it comes to sequential storytelling. Many times I find myself drawing panel after panel before I have a clear idea of where the story is going. For personal fun projects I even skip the drafting part and just do the thing on paper in one go. Weirdly, I find myself the most confident and creative when my safety nets (an erasable draft, option to undo) are removed. The exploration in comic format helps me to build a connection between the invisible inner space of my mind and the visible forms.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
As an artist, I do comics, book illustrations, and editorial illustrations. Several things stand out across my portfolio regardless of genre. The fascination for intricate patterns, the approach of avoiding using direct photo references, the way I incorporate perspectives and depth on a 2D surface, and the story-driven core. I’d like my work to have complexity in depth and textures, and harmony in color and composition. I design a hierarchy so people don’t take in everything all at once and instead make a closer examination of the details. I study photo references separately and don’t start to apply the form of what I see to my work until I have a good grasp of it from every angle, holistically. The images have to live in my mind before I feel comfortable expressing them in my visual language. I hold onto the belief that to create a fantasized world, I need to study the real world well.
The most distinctive thing about my art is the story-driven core, which both allows me to fully visualize my imagination and gives an extra layer of meaning to the visuals. For any project, even if its nature is not narrative, I approach the blank canvas with a rough idea of a story, in direct words, what is going on. A touching image does not necessarily have to start with a story, the sensation it evokes in viewers can be purely aesthetic and plain in narrative. But for me, I find it more enjoyable to start with an idea for a narrative than a visual form.
Risk taking is a topic that people have widely differing views on – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
By personality I wouldn’t call myself a big risk taker. It is also reflected in my approach to art in such a way that I feel compelled to study things so well that they become “internalized” for me enough to draw at ease. But I appreciate risk taking when I feel confident in getting something unconventional to “work” as an image. It might sound paradoxical in a way but I think my fear of “out of control” is making me better in handling risk in the creation of a work. I am driven to get myself a solid understanding of structures and perspectives, and it emboldens me to challenge myself to more “dangerous” compositions or combinations of elements.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://tixuvisualgrocery.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ti_xu_art/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ti-xu-43250a227
