Is it a kind of happiness to be able to do what you like at will?
The protagonist of today's story is Jiru, whom I have known for nearly 10 years, and she is now a graphic designer and freelance illustrator, and her paintings always give people a sense of absurdity, strangeness, and sometimes a unique humor.
She described herself as "always doing things that ordinary people don't do, and others will think I'm a weirdo." In my eyes, she is a very good friend and a very talented illustrator.
"Your paintings were stolen by Grandpa Santa."
Ji Ru is a native of Shanghai, who grew up in Lilang, and she has loved to scribble and draw since she was a child. When she was a child, her parents were too busy with work to take care of her, so they bought her a pile of crayons and white paper, and she could draw a day as soon as she drew.
Ji Ru, who is born with a keen sense of color, likes to paint the superposition of various colors, often drawing what she thinks, there is no so-called rules and regulations, she is happy to draw herself, and her parents are assured to leave her alone at home.
Ji Ru said that he likes to open his mind and like to imagine all kinds of things, such as every bite when eating cake, he will tell his mother that this shape looks like something, and his mother will not tire of chatting with her, not being denied and judged may be the key to Ji Ru's carefree childhood.
△ Jiru's paintings
During that time, she would paste her paintings all over every corner of the room, the more she painted, the more so that the walls of the room could not be pasted, one day she came home from school to find that the paintings in the house were gone, her father told her that she had been taken away by Santa Claus, she recalled that she should not be very happy at the time, but calmly accepted the fact that her paintings "disappeared for no reason".
"I can still draw it anyway."
Saying this, there was no loss in JiRu's tone.
In junior high school, the family enrolled her in a painting class, she started from scratch to lay the foundation, gradually learned to draw, color, every day to stay in the studio for a long time, go home to continue to paint, Ji Ru only knew that the original learning to paint is such a hard thing, so that it fell ill, until now shoulder pain will also occur from time to time, and then she also followed a painter as an apprentice for a period of time, followed by learning to draw.
"The art industry can't feed me."
Ji Ru, who said that he was "a little depressed from childhood", failed to catch the "train" of the college entrance examination to go to college, but retreated to study visual design in a junior college, and chose this major because it was related to painting, which was also conducive to choosing a career in the future and could develop graphic design.
Ji Ru confessed that she did not have the idea of learning art, she recognized when she was very young that it was impossible to support herself by painting, and those ancient European painters in the past were raised by the nobility, they could not afford it, and they did not have great ambitions, painting was a way of self-healing, nothing more.
Therefore, JiRu, who "recognizes reality", enters the company and becomes a graphic designer, drawing in his spare time. When it comes to the difference between painting and graphic design, she also sees it very thoroughly.
"Most of the graphic design in order to meet customer needs, the design center to customer needs-oriented, while the need to combine aesthetics to do the final visual presentation, some of their own more innovative ideas to achieve the possibility is relatively small, most of them need to control the cost." Painting also depends on commercial illustrations or non-commercial illustrations. Commercial illustration is also the need of Party A, you can not 100% free to paint, occasionally will cooperate to give the play space is relatively wide. My own paintings are more casual, using pictures to express an idea, an artistic conception, and a feeling of the moment."
Knowing Ji Ru for so many years, I can always feel this indifference and freedom in her, and it is good to maintain this indisputable Buddhist system.
"I don't like to be alone."
After working for a few years, for some personal reasons, Ji Ru had a "blank period", quit his full-time job, and earned a living by taking on private work. Talking about this experience, she seems to be more negative, first, she does not know much about self-marketing, the business that comes is mostly introduced by friends and colleagues, and the second is that the private life is not fixed, sometimes a lot of busy to midnight, sometimes can not receive the order and will be very anxious.
"It's really lonely to pick up work at home, no colleagues, no one to talk to and communicate."
△ Folding brochure for a friend's wedding design
Although Ji Ru claims to be a "weirdo", she also has a few good friends, and she also likes to spend time with friends, chatting on weekends, sunday worship, traveling together... I've found that the more I get to know her, the less I find her strange.
During the "freelance" period, Ji Ru tried various types of design work: packaging design, logo design, personal sticker typesetting, children's homework, etc., and also helped his friends design wedding folding pages. What is more interesting about the illustration class is the illustration work of a series of city guide books, and Ji Ru obviously has his own set of methodologies for communicating with customers and getting the design done.
△ Book illustration design works
She confessed that she was a Christian and sometimes prayed prayerfully when she encountered particularly difficult problems. "I also asked others to pray for me, asking God to give me wisdom and the ability to do a good job in the project at hand and serve my customers well." There are often times when you feel powerless in what you do best and need to ask God for power. Thank you Lord, it is generally possible to solve it relatively smoothly."
"Who wouldn't want to be a freelance illustrator?"
When it comes to the illustrators he likes, Ji Ru said that he is not good at remembering names, but he will prefer the works of illustrators with big brains, rich imagination and strange content, such as the oil paintings with realistic details such as the western Renaissance special popular paintings, which is a bit "too good student" in Ji Ru's eyes. For her, since she has painted them, if she just copied the original way of life, it would seem "boring".
"I don't like the common normative paintings, like models for compositions."
△ Other works of Jiru
postscript.
For future planning, Taurus Jiru still wants to do a good job step by step, the ultimate goal may still be to be a freelance illustrator, but still hope that she is fully prepared and mature when the time is fully engaged, at least for now she is doing her job, and in her spare time, she can receive interesting cases, and it is enough to draw what she likes.
"Who wouldn't want to do freelancing?" It's just that the fire hasn't arrived yet."
Photography: Nian Has/ Illustration Re-creation: Ji Ru