Quinn the Fox & The Temple of the Sun illustration
When I was at university, there was a running joke that Andy Hau didn't know how to draw a sunny day. They weren't entirely wrong. For one thing, the UK isn’t best known for its glorious sunny weather, but more importantly, because I used to commute to London for three hours every day, all I ever saw were sunrises and sunsets. Since there was nothing else to do on the train (remember a world before smartphones?), I studied the dusky hues of each and every twilight meticulously. Inevitably, that bled into all of my images – art is, after all, the result of living.
One thing I learnt from those days is how to convey emotion just by using the sky and lighting. Backlighting can evoke a sense of awe, while a sky that looks like a storm is on the horizon often brings a sense of anemoia. It may not have felt like it at the time, but I was lucky to have been forced to sit in a train carriage and observe. Nowadays, I would probably have spent the three hours checking TikTok or worse – Dribbble. Imagine that.
I am by no means disparaging technology or social media. The world changes, and we must change with it, but artists and creatives have a duty to live life and feel deeply in order to create better art. In an age of AI, it’s not enough just to be able to visually represent something realistically or to be technically brilliant. AI can do all of that - but it can’t tell you why it’s done it, besides the fact you told it to. Ultimately, it will be your ability to connect on a human level through storytelling that will set you apart from the limitations of ones and zeros. And you can only do that by living.