We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Yuanyuan (Yuanimos) Zhou. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Yuanyuan (Yuanimos) below.
Yuanyuan (Yuanimos), thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today The first dollar you earn is always exciting – it’s like the start of a new chapter and so we’d love to hear about the first time you sold or generated revenue from your creative work?
The first dollar I ever earn is from the art market my school held. It was such an exciting moment for me that I would never forget. The booth we had is MICA prepared for all students from MFA Illustration Practice and seeing customers seeing my potential and willing to choose my work among 23 talented artist also boost my confident. As a person who had no background in art, I always put myself in the position as an amateur and take art making as an hobby. I enjoy making arts on my own and did not really think of taking it as a profession. Making it to the grad school is the first turning point for me. And making the first sell is definitely the second point for me to make me taking on the pathway to be a professional illustrator.
Selling in the market is quite a unique experience compare with having a commission work with a client, because I got the experience of the customer from not knowing me and my work to getting interested in and finally making the decision on the purchase. The first customer of my print, I witnessed her came near our booth, checking around and looking at different products, then grabbing my print said it looks so cute and made the decision buying it. I was very excited and told her thank you for liking it and I am the illustrator for this print. I still remember her smile and her sentence said the more I look at it I find more details that I love about the print, I really would like to buy it. I feel so honored not only because she liked my print, but also she shared she loved the details. That’s is exactly what I paid attention to my illustration and what I enjoy making. To hear feedbacks like that made me feel satisfied with what I did and really encouraged me to keep going with this directions and creating more arts like this.
Yuanyuan (Yuanimos), 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 Yuanyuan Zhou (Yuanimos), I am an illustrator and a designer, currently in my second year of studying in MICA in MFA degree in Illustration Practice. I had my bachelor degree in Accounting and Finance. After graduation I had an opportunity to go Turkey and worked as a language teacher and an event planner for a few years there. I enjoyed teaching and the whole experience was amazing, and school principal and colleagues were very friendly. They were very open to new teaching approaches and encouraged me to explore teaching with multimedia and I had the experience design flashcards with my drawings and other illustrative teaching materials. I was creating art and incorporate them in daily work unknowingly until my colleague suggested me that I should try to make take illustration as a profession. I knew there is a word as illustration but I never give a thought about it and it feels like for the first time I understand what “illustration” really is and there is a profession like that. In 2019, I did my research and made my decision to leave my teaching position and entering grad school and pursue art creating as a career.
The experience in MICA has been amazing. In the first year, I have tried and learned so many from teachers and cohorts through various workshops and discovering my own style at the same time. I finally discovered what I am passionate about in the current. I am narrowing my direction to editorial lifestyle works and children related publication works. Now I am in my second year working on my thesis, it is a mini book collection that shares fun knowledge about tea. I know there is a lot information shared about tea that covers almost all aspect of it from culture, history, biology, medicine, pottery to farming and production. I want to play my strength and unique twist in it by adding more human aspect to the knowledge. I am creating my own creatures with the ingredients I have. When I creating my characters, I start to imagine their existence in my real life, I picture how they look, what do they feel what’s their behavior. I really enjoyed creating their own world and immerse in. I am very excited to get to share some of my creations here. Through this project, I am working hard to master my skills and hope my audiences to find themselves in the work, to resonant with details, and feel the sweetness and bitterness of life.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
Since I made the decision of entering to grad school for illustration when I still have my full time job and I had a few months with work overlapped as I had to work as a language teacher and preparing my portfolio and interview for grad school. I think I learned a lot about work life balance during that phrase of my life and I would like to share something about that. The work life balance for me comes always with a rhythm; it is a task that always need to be paid attention to and taken care of. When I was working as a teacher, it was a job with a rather stable timetable. It was easier to separate life from work, I had a clear idea of how much time I put into work. Later, after I had a plan to apply to grad school, my “life” time was mostly about doing sketches, preparing my portfolio, searching for schools, and work/life balance got a bit trickier. I felt I was working all of the time. Teaching and doing art felt like two completely different jobs, so I didn’t get time to rest.
I eventually started to find things in common between my teaching job and my portfolio. At that time, the school I was working at was holding lectures about child safety. My colleagues, managers and dean had already known what my teaching style was and sometimes I was preparing pictures and cards for our grades. So I proposed my idea of illustrating a book for child safety tips and doing demo lessons for children. My manager loved this idea. So I was preparing my lesson plans based on my children’s book and had demo lessons with five classes of kindergarteners. The children’s book was one of the projects in my portfolio for the grad school application. I really appreciated that the grade dean was very open to new ideas and made it possible. I feel finding a creative way to merge my tasks has a better result than doing the works separately, for my workload and for the results of the task itself.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
I really enjoy creating art for the purpose of communication and share information. My illustrations always been full complicated scene with details and always has a tiny bit of quirky humor in them. I would say the most rewarding aspect is to have audiences discover the trivial details and recognize things they can resonant. It could be a specific flower they loved from their childhood or a pattern from a minority group that they saw when they travelled. I would consider my piece a successful art piece if I can not only grab people’s attention at the first sight but also able to attract them keep coming back and looking for different things that they would like to find.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://yuanimosart.com/
- Instagram: @yuanimosart
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yuanyuan-zhou-568396257/