Painting freestyle
Cindy Wume has come full circle: after three years in an art stream in junior high, she left art to try other things in high school and college, but has now decided to return to art, to center her life around drawing and painting.
“To me, painting is something I always enjoyed, but when I got to high school I was under a lot of pressure and didn’t find the same pleasure in it.” So she switched to a regular academic high school and took foreign languages at National Cheng Kung University, where, after classes, she used to participate in nongovernmental organization projects. On one such project she went to India to provide assistance to impoverished children. “At first I was teaching them English, but then I started showing them how to draw.” That’s how she rediscovered the joy of drawing. She did a lot of doodling in India and made some local friends, both of which helped her realize that life isn’t just about finding a steady job.
Maybe everyone can find some form of labor that isn’t work. For Wume it’s painting. But enjoying something is hardly the same thing as doing it professionally. So she decided to go to England to study illustration.
She had some setbacks along the way. She went back to zero, had to start all over again when she realized how far behind her classmates she was. Sometimes she just couldn’t get it right. “I felt like I’d never see the day when I got really good,” she said, reliving her despondency. But she never gave up. She persevered, often spending over ten hours a day drawing. Sometimes it was all she did besides eating, bathing and sleeping.
Check out her Instagram account and you’ll see in over a hundred works how hard she tries. A habit she picked up in England, she carries a sketchbook with her wherever she goes and draws whatever she sees. “Less is more,” a principle she learned from her teacher in England, is her motto. Her style is simple, her palette plain, but her pictures are filled with emotion and childlike whimsy. A person who often describes her approach to drawing as freestyle, she never makes a draft before she paints. Instead, she does the composition in her mind, in order to retain freedom when she puts brush or pen to paper.
The work that was accepted for the Bologna Illustrators Exhibition is called Farewell. It was actually her graduation project for art school in England. It was a stroke of good luck that she was selected, and an affirmation. It gave her an injection of energy when her self-confidence was low. It was also an opportunity to get noticed, and to keep on moving towards a career in illustration.
Having decided to make a living at illustration, she came back from England last year. At first, she was just getting started, and felt like she couldn’t let any opportunity go. Soon, she had taken on a lot of different projects. But now she chooses to leave some space “blank” in her daily life, time she spends creating—making her own art and writing her own stories.
To Wume, painting is life, and drawing is like breathing, both natural and necessary. On her Facebook you can often see her sharing her sketches, which she makes when she is traveling or at a café.
Having entered the worlds of illustrators and listened to their stories, maybe one day you too will want to take up the pen and doodle your thoughts and feelings.
The Closest and the Farthest Distance. Hsu Ming-hung excels in developing stories set in a single space. (courtesy of Hsu Ming-hung)
Breaking the rules he learned in art school has instilled Hsu Ming-hung’s life in illustration with leisure and poetry.
Cindy Wume’s Farewell draws loneliness with simple lines and colors. (courtesy of Cindy Wume)
Cindy Wume experiments with many different media. (cover design for Artcokids magazine, courtesy of Cindy Wume)
Cindy Wume’s lines and palette may be spare, but her work is full of emotion and childlike appeal. (courtesy of Cindy Wume)