We recently connected with Qiyue Zhang and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Qiyue, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.
I have fallen in love with drawing since I was very young. Because of the picture book of Andersen’s fairy tales that my mother bought me, or maybe it was the comic strip of Dream of Red Mansions that I have been addicted to for a long time. I look forward to painting it in the future Works like this, and just like that, before I knew it, drawing became an essential part of my life. I have been receiving professional guidance from teachers in the studio to be admitted to the art school in the future. Practicing basic painting skills is tedious and difficult, especially for an art student. However, basic art skills that I worked hard to establish brought me a huge help later. When I was in high school, I learned that there was a career as an illustrator, and it had always been my dream to illustrate the inside pages or covers of books. So I decided to study illustration.
Qiyue, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I am a freelance illustrator currently living in New York City. I have won a 3×3 merit award, an American illustration chosen winner, and other prizes. I specialize in capturing emotions with light and shadow and love to create scenes with a sense of atmosphere and storytelling. My clients are mainly publishers. I previously made the cover and interior illustrations for a book about Korean witches for focus publishing in Taiwan. In the last year, I have been working on a science book about Greek mythology, and I hope to share it with you as soon as possible. I have also worked with the beauty brand KVD to design pr gift boxes for their new products. This is an extraordinary project for me. It seems to be a packaging design not too close to my usual field. Still, at that time, the idea given to me by the KVD design team was to make a design like the cover of a gothic novel from the last century. I am happy that the KVD team and the beauty bloggers love the final product. I look forward to working with more publishers in the future and would love to try out more different types of projects, so if anyone likes my style and wants to collaborate, please feel free to email me.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
I want to talk about a small step in my work. I have been in touch with hand drawing for a long time. Compared with purely digital works, I have more affection for the hand drawing. It’s not as easy as I thought, and sometimes I ask myself why I don’t choose a digital painting tool that is more modifiable and saves time. To this day, I still keep this step in my creative process. I am used to drawing with a pencil first. The line art is then scanned and colored, and refined in Photoshop. I don’t want to abandon my original style and try pure digital works to follow the market trend.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
Compared to my other friends in the illustration industry, I don’t consider myself someone who does an excellent job at it. I didn’t start consciously running my Instagram until my senior year of college, and I found that it’s a great platform to reach more artists and clients, and I’ve been fortunate enough to get some jobs through it. I used to feel like I needed to draw well enough to post to social media, but that’s not the case. Social media is not such a heavy thing.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.doublemooncake.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doublemooncake/
Image Credits
Illustrations for the locus publishing（image1-3） KVD Beauty MKTG Gifting （image4-5）