Artist #4: Joon Kim

Unlike a lot of the other artists I’ve commented on before, Joon Kim does art for a hobby. His usual styles include Japanese animation and traditional art by pencil and paper. One of my favorite of his drawings is titled, Art is a Creation…, which in itself is a pretty neat concept. In the drawing, an artist’s hand can be seen holding out a pencil and sketching the picture of a cartoon-like girl on scratchy yellow paper. As he draws, the girl comes to life and lifts out of the simple sketch, with her torso first appearing and then her dress. An eraser is set off to the side of the paper within the drawing and the shadow of the artist’s hand is in the forefront of the image.

One of the first steps a lot of artists take when they sketch is to generally round out a few circles and ovals and thin lines before adding layers of increasing detail. Kim acknowledges this in his piece, with the thinner, vaguer sketched lines at the bottom of the paper with the “incomplete” portion of the drawing and the increasingly solid and refined detail of the created work as the girl appears, and I think it’s really neat to see this progression.  I really like Kim’s work because of these surrealistic aspects of his pieces and his overall neatness and simplicity of design. In this piece, for instance, there is really only one color tone – a yellowy golden brown, with the occasional flicker of light yellow and white, but the viewer is really able to imagine this scene taking place. In many of his other pieces like Sunset and Reflection which also have a Japanese animation-style of art, Kim chooses to shade in light, airy colors and sunny skies which give the viewer the sense of a sun-shining day. (On a sort of side note, realistic-looking clouds are very, very hard to draw — and I think Joon Kim really masters this in his sketch, Reflection, which features a girl walking on a world covered with bright blue water, reflecting the poofy, cloud-filled sky.) All of his pieces seem to have a happy, bright theme, and he occasionally draws American-styled cartoons and Disney-themed sketches from the movie Tangled with quick, strongly-defined lines of ink. According to his artist statement, he frequently uses Derwent Graphic Soft Pencils and tissues for his traditional media drawings, which are all spectacular! You can view his gallery of works here.

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