Ti Xu

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Your background in Product Design and Illustration offers a unique perspective. How do you think your design education influences your illustrative practice?

The design education I received trains me to take on each project, oftentimes even the fun, personal projects, as a design project. I have an urge to figure out the goal of the project and to know the elements that appear in my painting by heart. The former concerns the format and usage of the work: is it going to be displayed digitally or printed? Is it an editorial piece or a narrative? And the latter is about researching the themes, contents, styles that make up the painting. This part involves a lot of picture/video searching and study drawings. Apart from familiarizing myself with the objects to be included (say for my last graphic novel, a locomotive), I immerse myself in relevant materials, regardless of medium, to absorb the emotive side of the themes. For example, while working on my latest graphic novel, the Station, which tells the story of a young traveler stuck at a rundown station waiting to set off on an adventure, I not only looked into the structure of locomotives to come up with a design for one (important motif in the story), but also watched films and documentaries and read books that either tells the history of century old railways, or conveys a feeling of lostness and hope. All those efforts might not be directly influential to the design decisions, but they make the later creative process smoother and more intuitive.

Your work spans a range of mediums, from line-based illustrations to animation. Can you walk us through your creative process when working on different forms of art?

The answer to this question will be a good complement to the designerly approach I have mentioned above. In terms of creative process I can roughly divide the forms I have worked on into two categories: “iterated projects” and “one-off projects”. For the “iterated projects”, which are usually digital and take more than a day to complete, I retain more of the designer mindset. I first do a round of sketches for ideas, then feed my imagination with research of visual references and stories/history relevant to my themes. In the meantime I keep sketching for compositions only readable to myself. Then I make critical decisions about what visual elements to include and the general composition. Before starting to work on the final I would further research the structures of my objects, depending on their complexity. Completing the final is a matter of days, after all the previous work. The “one-offs”, as the name suggests, don’t require much edits. They include on-scene paintings/drawing done with traditional mediums like gouache and ink. I am not a fan of doing drafts for line work and keep the draft minimal when working with gouache. Other “one-offs” that I keep offline in my sketchbooks are freestyle drawings or character designs or one page comics, which I start with a vague idea and carry on without knowing how it might end. I guess this approach is the improvisational me fighting back at the rigorous designer me. I really enjoy going with the whim or sensation at the moment and doing things with no returns. It leaves me numerous unfinished pieces, but many of them capture things that I couldn’t have planned whatsoever.

Ti Xu | Moon Editor | 2024

Could you share the inspiration behind your piece “Fuzzy Surfaces” and how you approached its creation?

I am happy to say that this piece is one of the long term projects that captured some of the emotive aspects in my life drawings. It started off as a school project, assigned by my instructor Lauren Berke. The guideline is to make a poster of 13.5 by 18 inches, and the image is to be inspired by a line of message, which we were free to come up with ourselves. My message was: “We love fuzzy surfaces- not on ourselves though”. It was a combination of addressing the wholesome feel of skin contact with fuzzy surfaces, and the human behavior of removing hair from our own skin. As the humor is in the contrast, I left the human figure blank and filled the surroundings with a spring meadow of textured plants. After completing the course I decided to leave out the text and let the image speak for itself.

How did your collaboration with the Hue Magazine and the Inaugural Art Festival in 2024 shape your career or artistic style?

The collaboration with Hue magazine was my first commercial project in illustration. The illustrations being done in linework was really a design decision from the graphic designer in the art direction team. Back then I was more at a loss with my diverse portfolio that did not show a clear art style. Completing the work successfully gave me the first assurance that there can be a market for one of the things I do, as simplistic as it is. The Inaugural Art Festival project was my first commissioned animation, marking a move towards what I am hoping to explore more in the future. Though I came from an illustration background, I was looking to make more than illustration with moving elements for the one minute motion design. Also an idiosyncrasy about the project is that the motion should be projected onto a massive facade of a horizontal building, which is textured and far from a high definition canvas. I ended up choosing a high contrast and limited palette and restricted my images to bold shapes, which also works in favor of animating. It is an interesting challenge that boosts my confidence in going further down the animation path.

Ti Xu | Garden Of Tears | 2023

What was the experience of working with the Longmen Grottoes (Luoyang, China) official store like? What did you learn from designing merchandise based on such a rich cultural heritage?

The experience of working with Longmen is a challenging and rewarding one, I should say. But the design to production process was filled with uncertainty. Among all the real world projects I have worked on this one took the most in depth research. I went to visit the Longmen Grottoes in person and had the pleasure to learn the historical backgrounds of it directly from a native Luoyang person, who is also supervisor of the project. I read books on the fascinating story of its construction, which is by the one and only female emperor throughout Chinese history. I had fun learning new things in the research phase, but the initial design process wasn’t going smoothly. Since the output illustration would be integral to the merchandise, be it keychain or umbrella, appeal and compatibility with the object are important. So I extended my research to products of the same nature and browsed through many of the online stores of museums. I came up with designs for keychains and car air refreshers(I picked these products based on their reasonable production cost for a souvenir and the compatibility of their craft). Three months later, one of the designs was chosen and sent to sample production.

What role does storytelling play in your work? How do you ensure your art communicates the message you want to convey?

Storytelling is a way for me to approach a blank canvas, although depending on the format of projects, the role of storytelling varies across my portfolio.So for works that have “storytelling” in its format, like comics, I use the story itself as an analogy for what I want to express. For other forms of illustration, which don’t rely on an ordered viewing of multiple images to be perceived, storytelling is about imagining and feeling the bigger world where the work only captures a significant fraction of. In either case, storytelling helps me imagine before visualizing anything on paper.

Ti Xu | Fuzzy surfaces | 2022

Your piece “Year of the Snake” depicts a strong visual narrative. What is the significance of the snake in this work, and what inspired the overall design?

As a Chinese illustrator it’s how I celebrate the new year(Spring Festival for the Chinese)！According to Chinese tradition each year is assigned a zodiac animal to represent the year, which is great for creation because it assigns something tangible to the abstract division of time. I started doing this four years ago, when it was the year of the tiger. I was surprised to see how people of my culture resonated with it and thus decided to make it a yearly ritual. The snake motif this year is trickier than the ones before, as snakes elicit fear in those who are not fans(many online voiced their feelings of unease at the sight of snake imagery for new year). So my initial idea was to abstract the motif and apply it on character designs to make up an image.Eventually the pattern composed of long sleeve dancers became overpowering to the image, and I added fragments of a giant snake hidden in the background. I didn’t do much to gain people’s love for snakes, but I’m overall happy with the work.