Focus on: Yuko Shimizu

August 3rd, 2009 | Published in Fine Arts, Illustration | 2 Comments

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Yuko Shimizu is a Japanese illustrator, who lives and works in New York. She was born and grew up in Tokyo and she always dreamed of becoming an artist, however, growing up in a traditional Japanese family, pursuing a path in art was not easy.

She has the BA in marketing/advertising from Waseda University and worked in advertising in Tokyo for a long time till she decided it was time to change her life and do what she really wanted before it was too late.
She packed up everything and left Japan in 1999 to study at School of Visual Arts in New York.
She has been working as a full time illustrator since then. Her work has been published in US, UK, Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Spain and Turkey. Clients include: The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, Interview Magazine, Esquire and Financial Times Magazine. She also teaches at School of Visual Arts in Illustration and Cartooning Department.

http://www.yukoart.com

A closer look to Yuko Shimizu’s workflow. What fascinates Yuko in her work is the possibility to illustrate and then investigate new topics, sometimes has 20 pages of articles to read, and sometimes only one sentence to find an idea. In both cases, the first thing he does is brain-storming and research, then moves to free sketches on paper with pencil and pen to identify two or three ideas. Once she has chosen the idea, she draws the subject in the given size, after printing it she traces the drawing on a light box using pencil, and ink it with brush and India ink or or brushes for Japanese calligraphy. After the drawing is done, she scan it in and color it in Photoshop.

> More info here

Recently she has worked on four models of t-shirt produced by Gap, with great pleasure especially because the sold t-shirts will help women and children affected by AIDS in Africa.