We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Di Liang. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Di below.

Alright, Di thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?

I told my parents for the first time at the age of 12: I want to be a fashion designer! Although I am now doing something less related to fashion design, in general, it was a decision I made early on to pursue a career in the creative industry. The reason why I wanted to be a fashion designer at the time was that I grew up as a kid who was very conscious of what I wore, even being late for school because I spent too long picking out clothes. Years later, after taking a class on sewing, I found myself more interested in drawing and designing parts instead of cutting fabric. So I quit going further into fashion design and chose illustration as my professional development. And back to an earlier time, a six-year-old girl was scolded by her mom because she used a pencil to draw on the clean, new white wall when the first day they moved into a new apartment. Instead of getting mad and forbidding the little girl from drawing, her mum found an art teacher for her, one of the most important people who influenced my career life. Therefore, growing up, I became aware that I was sensitive to images and “nice-looking stuff”, which naturally guided me to where I am now.

Di, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am an illustrator based in Baltimore and currently studying MFA Illustration Practice at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). I enjoy designing characters without human faces, observing the “uncanny moment” in my daily life, and creating illustrations based on these collections of small inspirations. Most of my works are still images, but I am currently experimenting with multimedia and hand-drawn short animations. Aside from these, I also design posters.

As mentioned before, I started to draw at a very young age, but instead of considering it as my career, I regarded drawing as one of my favorite hobbies most of the time. After realizing that fashion design was not that appealing to me, I reconsidered what attracted me to that process – it was sketching on paper. So I began to study illustration, kept practicing, and applied to an art school in London for my undergraduate degree. It was an eye-opening experience. All those art museums and exhibitions were like a bomb to breaking my edge of imagination and letting me think a lot about how to communicate with people through illustrations. The experience from London brought me to MICA to keep finding out what I want to convey as an image maker.

I now would better call myself an image maker than an illustrator, based on the project I am working on now. During my graduate studies, I gradually realized that I had so many ideas that could not be presented in static images, they were all dynamic in my mind. That led me to start learning animation and developing my ongoing animation project. It is a visual thesis on how scissors bring feelings to people as an object and the metaphor of “cut and connect” behind it. I would say the working method of animation is a completely different thinking approach from illustration, the experience of learning animation refreshes my mind and open a new door for me to see more potential in illustration fields. I am excited to see how my illustrations might change after finishing the animation project.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

To know who I am, and what I want, and to be sincere. The more I draw, the deeper I understand myself as a human being. It may sound strange, but I do see creating progress as a form of meditation and self-exploration. No matter how I want to hide something from my work, work never lies. The artwork is just 100% representative of the artist. So there is no other choice but to be an honest person. My teacher always says that if you do not know what to draw, think about what you like. It is a process I have to think about something I like or not again and again. Gradually I learn more about myself. A friend of mine once told me that it might sound a little harsh, but you are a lucky person because many people may live for a long time and not know who they are. I think this is the reward of being a creator.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

Drawing for days and days may seem engaging and exciting, but it is actually not. I would say being a creator is lonely sometimes, and keep outputting ideas may cause you to be exhausted. I used to think that inspiration needed to wait, and I did not know how to keep generating new ideas. However, through consistently practicing and maintaining the output of my creation, I understood that inspiration is actually an accumulative process by doing a lot of research and looking at a lot of artists’ work. They do not necessarily have to be illustrators. I prefer to look at different types of work in various fields. In fact, there are already many parts of life that are worthy of being used as inspiration.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/di_liang_/

Image Credits
All images are my own.