Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Rishale Zou. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Rishale thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.

I know that many people, include myself, have their own comfort zones, and for artists in particular a suitable form of expression may have been going on for years, fascinating and impossible to break away from. I’ve been enjoying and creating in the field of illustration for several years now, but the reality is that it’s quite difficult to get a job just as an illustrator, especially in the area of supporting myself. I’m not a risk taker, and I couldn’t give up on my favorite field of art, so I took a cautious step out of undergrad: I applied to a whole new field of art for graduate study. Now I’m studying animation-related content and more diverse art fields, including design, 3D, Motion, and more. My portfolio at the time was not even relevant to these new fields, but I was given a chance to learn from the ground up. It was great because it actually gave me a broader range of artistic expression. Using dynamics can easily simulate a copy of a concept in parts that are difficult to express in illustration. I must say it wasn’t easy to come out of my comfort zone and had more of a social pressure part to motivate me to take this risk. But I also want to say that I met more artists afterward who were willing to learn completely unfamiliar field, and they gave me a lot of courage, including starting from scratch, including a new kind of motivation. If you want to try something, especially artists, don’t hesitate to try it.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

The story will rewind to a very long time ago.
I started painting for fun like most kids. Then I experienced a long-distance move in elementary school to a completely new environment for school and life. When everything was a new experience, drawing was the only thing that was personal, safe, and it can connect to memories. In that moment I naturally chose to pick up a sketchbook to record whatever I wanted to, including what was happening today, how I was feeling, and whatever creativity I wanted to wieldly. These drawing books were dated, some inaccurately, and all the paper creations I made before I turned to the computer side of drawing are the ones I keep to this day. They are the things that saw me really get into the art field. I knew at a relatively early age what field I wanted to go into in the future.
In January 2018, I started working on a series of illustrations that continues to this day. It’s called Traveling, and it tells the story of a child who accidentally falls into an abyss on a journey, and meets a small flying fish out of the abyss, and becomes friends with her on an adventure together. This work became more and more complete as it was polished over the years and accumulated many beautiful botanical illustrations. While I was drawing this series, I realized that I have a love for natural landscapes, flowers, plants and trees, and enjoy doing different visual designs with them. At the same time, I have a strong preference for creating cute character animal images. In other creations that followed, many of the stories centered around the animals, kids and teens. It seemed that everything was in a fairy tale.
After creating many cute characters and illustrations, my interest expanded after seeing more interesting work. I want my characters to be able to move, to come into the world in a real way, where they are interactive and touchable. So since then, I’ve picked up my interest in animation and clay sculpture again. After trying to learn animation software, I created some small frame-by-frame animations. In early 2024 I also finally created a really short frame-by-frame animation for Traveling after months of work.
As an extension of my interest in physical artwork, I was invited to work with a studio to design cute characters for use in real toy blind boxes. These designed characters have their own story backgrounds, relevant costume changes, comics I created for them, and illustrations. Although the characters didn’t end up going to market, a collaboration with the 3D artist produced physical models of them. I was very satisfied when I actually had these models physically in my hands. After finishing my work with the studio, I started trying to make some 3D models on my own, while making them in reality with resin clay and air-dry clay. After a walk in the commercial world, I returned to more personal creations.
Now, I’m continuing my path in illustration, animation, and 3D. I still really love creating cute characters and love bright colors, and I hope I’ll create the characters I already have in a more complete state. I’m continuing the Traveling related creations, it’s more of a life creation proposition, a part of the story that gets extended whenever my inspiration arrives.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

It’s very important to have a theme that you want to keep working on, that’s what drives to keep working on it. For me it’s cute things, plants and animals, or even people I like. It’s something that is not about the technical aspects required to make a career out of art or not. It can change often as we grow, but finding favorite topics in our own desire to express ourselves is very important.

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

I think it’s having the ability to describe, to create stories and ideas and show them to a wider audience. Depicting an idea or story specifically is not an easy thing to do, especially in the visual arts, where getting an idea articulated cleverly is a constant bump in the road. Every time after coming up with a superb visual idea it makes me feel fulfilled. Of course, a work and idea that is liked gives me a great sense of accomplishment and makes me want to keep creating.

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