Meet Kevin Xu | Student & Vis Dev Artist

We had the good fortune of connecting with Kevin Xu and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Kevin, what led you to pursuing a creative path professionally?
As a kid I’d often go around running his mouth with crazy random ideas to whoever would listen. I think it started with recapping the stories of books or comics I had read. I would find a friend who had never read Calvin and Hobbes, or Percy Jackson (some books I had read religiously growing up). and would want to sell to them the story as best I could. My hope would be that they would read it and we could talk about it together. As I kept doing that, I found myself wanting to share my own stories. So I would start writing drafts of fictional scenes, and jot down random off the cuff ideas.

It was much later, around junior year of high school that I realized I wasn’t satisfied with just having these scattered word docs represent my ideas. Maybe I was just a bad writer, but rereading some of the work at the time, I felt that the emotions and epiphanies I first had time were lost in the word soup. I didn’t really have much else I felt passionate about at the time, and it was then I took my first art class. Love. Absolutely in love I was. Drawing, seeing the characters, worlds and ideas I was writing, come to life was just indescribable to me. It was like I had only lived my life on bread and just took my first bite of a frosted cake.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
I always want my works to have a story behind them. One of the most exciting things about working on a drawing or painting is that there is such a colossal library of design language to pick from. It’s so much easier than what my teachers had to do when researching references. And because of that, I enjoy putting my stories in times and places that I had no previous knowledge of. Each time I do a project, I feel like I’m getting to time travel back and forth in alternate dimensions, mashing together designs and seeing what they look like.

At first, I was really scared to go out of my comfort zone. I wasn’t comfortable with exploring new things, and thought to just stick with what I knew I could draw. If they could tell what it was, I was happy. Now, there’s just the drive to make that story as strong as possible. I stopped minding if the appeal wasn’t there, and it looks terrible. I just want to make the stories I want to tell as strong as possible. One of my teachers said something to me once that stuck: “It always looks bad until the last 15 minutes.” Here was this illustrator who had decades of work experience, and even he didn’t like how the work looked until it was nearly finished. When I heard that, I worried less about how it looked, and just focused on the problem solving.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
I think there are just so many great restaurants in the city that my favorite things to do is just do walk-ins of random places in Old town Pasadena. Although, if they were up to driving all over the place, I do have some go-to favorite food places. Roscoes House of Chicken & Waffles for the obvious, Granville, for everything American, Ji Rong Peking Duck for some lamb and sour cabbage stew, Savoy for their Hainan chicken and Lucky Boy for a giant breakfast burrito. I’d want to include a KBBQ place up in Rowland Heights too, but I just cannot remember the name.

I’m not too big a dessert guy, so I can’t really speak much too about that, so I hope they’re fine going without sweets.

As for exciting spots, I’d bring them up to the Valley Overlook in La Cañada. Its a fairly small but beautiful scenic driving spot. Of course, as an art fan, we would also need to visit the Huntington Gardens, Norton Simon and LACMA. Near LACMA, there’s the District Market, that is just an amazing place to sketch, but also, has great food!

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
I’d like to thank all my friends and family who have ever sat listening to me ramble on and on about an idea or dream I had. I still remember a senior of mine in high school , who actually let me tell her a 30 minute long story of how to make the perfect sandwich. I don’t really know what either of us were thinking letting me word vomit for that long. I feel like I am only here today, doing what I love because my friends have indulged in my crazy weirdness.

Special shoutout to the show creators of my childhood, Hiromu Arakawa and Alex Hirsh, who made Fullmetal Alchemist and Gravity Falls respectively. I’m pretty sure I’ve watched some of these shows in full at least 10 times over, and whether I know it or not, they definitely shaped my childhood.

Website: https://www.kevinxu-design.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/?hl=en

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-xu-186082180/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/home