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

Kai Lun, appreciate you joining us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

The important aspect of learning any craft is to research/study before practice. Many people when they are trying to learn a craft go into practicing immediately. Practice does not make perfect, it simply makes permanence so it is important for us to research and study what exactly to practice first and making a game plan before doing it.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My name is Kai Lun Qu and I am a full time oil painter/educator. I’ve been an educator for the past 10 years now, teaching classical drawing and painting techniques inspired by the old and living masters. The technique that I emphasize within my work is Alla Prima (wet on wet), where a painting is usually done within 1-2 sittings. I recently started painting pop culture characters and icons that served as creative inspirations to me throughout my childhood, doing my best to bridge the idea of fan art and fine art with my paintings.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

I had a very stagnant presence on social media for the longest time, staying around the 2000 range for as long as I can remember. I believe that was due to me not posting as often as well as my skills not being where they needed to be to catch peoples attention. It was only when the pandemic happened I started painting everyday and I used social media as a way to hold myself accountable. I joined this art event hosted by Strada Easel called the Strada Challenge, which is founded by Bryan Mark Taylor (Who i am now co workers with for Sentient Academy, the online art school that he co founded as well). The Strada Challenge requires you to paint one painting everyday from life for one month for a chance at prizes. I was not too interested in the prizes, more so to have a reason to paint and build my skills up.
Because I was painting and posting consistently everyday, my followers started to grow and I reached 10k within one month. I believe the key to building a online presence on social media is to find a healthy balance of quality, quantity, and consistency.

Have you ever had to pivot?

The moment that I felt my career taking a sharp turn towards a even better path is recently when I decided to paint the things that are actual interests to me. I spend the past 10 years of my career painting traditional fine art subject matters (portraits, landscapes, still lifes, etc) believing that’s what someone like me has to paint in order to “fit in” with the crowd that I placed myself in. It was one day that I wondered what a character like spiderman or baby yoda would look like in my traditional style of painting, and I decided to make an attempt at it, which turned out to be the best decision of my career.
Not only was i having way more fun painting, since I actually had an emotional connection to the subject matter, but I realized that I didn’t have to paint subject matters thats expected of me in order to be a realist painter.
I started painting alot more characters and started venturing into comic cons to display my work as a exhibition artist. A few months later was when I got picked up at a comic convention in LA called Wondercon by the folks over at Second Dinner to be an artist for their award winning game, Marvel SNAP.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.kailunqu.com
• Instagram: kailunqu