Meet Kejun Zhao | Illustrator

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

Hi Kejun, any advice for those thinking about whether to keep going or to give up?
Pursuing art career is always like walking on a hard road along. Sometimes we’d feel tired or lack of confidence to keep going.

Here I’d like to share an encouraging and impressive saying from one of my intellectual professor, “Path is showing up only when you keep walking through.”

So all you need to do is keep going, and don’t be afraid of making mistakes, keep learning and keep a heart of modest, as long as you still have passion on what you’re doing. And you’ll see the path is right there.

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.
The highlight of working as an illustrator for me, is finding out the balance between commercial needs and keeping my own style at the same time, and match my style with various types of projects such as animation features, film, TV series, ad campaigns, etc. For commercial projects, I usually draw the characters and environment realistic, in order to keep the likeness and show action and expression more clearly. I also apply dramatic light on them to make the whole image with more dynamic atmosphere. For my own project such as children’s book illustration, I keep the way of dramatic light somehow, but generalize the shapes much more, so as to build up a graphic world in my illustration.

Solid painting and drawing background helps a lot. Establishing your own unique style and personality is very essential. Be brave to try various things, and it will lead and improve your understanding of your work and yourself, and then your characteristic style will grow up from a seed to a giant tree. If you are working in the production or advertisement industry, do your best on every project every time, and the market and clients will give you surprise.

I’m preparing my own graphic novel now. It’s called “The Moth”, talking about the family relationships between different generations, with love and sorrow, bitter happiness and sweet farewell. It will be facing to the public next year. So hopefully people would love to read it, and remember my art, even they don’t even know who I am.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
I’m a pretty indoor person, but it’s still great to walk around Venice beach and enjoy the sunshine, breeze, noise and happiness from the crowds sometimes.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
Robert Dacey, great professor at College of Visual and Performing Arts, Syracuse University. He’s always passionate in teaching and having extraordinary outstanding techniques as an artist. He encouraged me to observe and learn various painting skills, and helped me to jump out of my comfort zone. He gave me great confidence of keep working as an artist.

Website: http://www.kejunzhaoillustration.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kejunzhao106/