Introducing Grace Teoh!

1. How did you get into illustration and design?

It's freelance work for me so it's pretty ad-hoc. Sometimes you're looking for work and other times it drops out of the sky and falls into your lap.

The most random project I've worked on was also one of the first. I agreed to design a set of business cards for a very wrinkly, very smiley old man I met on a bus going home one day. Lu turned out to be a fashion designer who had just relocated from Beijing and was looking for work. We spent the bus ride going through a folio he pulled out from his briefcase, jam-packed with his designs for dresses and blouses and skirts. We switched contact details scribbled on serviettes, and he started talking about how he needed new business cards, and it went from there.

I mocked up three proposals in Adobe Photoshop and we emailed back and forth a bit. His English wasn't very good and my Chinese was even worse so there was a bit of guesswork involved but I met him at our local McDonalds after his cards were printed and he was pleased so it was great.

2. How about in terms of technical education? 

I took two freedom subjects in illustration at University, which blew my mind.

Our teacher Jennifer was a no-nonsense but encouraging lady, who knew her subject back-to-front. She kept a treasure trove of illustration periodicals and art supplies in a spare room that we were given free access to during class so I practically lived there for half the year. Her signature look was long poker-straight blonde hair falling over a camel-beige trench coat ‑ she must have been very fond of trench coats as I never saw her in anything else.

Every couple of weeks we had a new project to make something ‑ designing stamps for the Post Office, a T-shirt, a tote bag, a pop-up storybook, a magazine cover ‑ it was way too much fun! Most of the stuff I made was pretty awful, but the joy of it was coming to class each week and watching people gradually forming their gorgeous, inspiring artworks from nothing.

Following that I realised illustration rocked my world so bad I had to keep it up. I took up night classes in fashion illustration at TAFE for six months, where I learnt about human proportions, ink and watercolour technique.

3. What are you working on at the moment?

Recently, I've been doing some casual illustration/layout work for the monthly newsletter at my company ‑ usually the cover design and a couple of inner pages. The last issue I did a couple of black and white portraits for each member of the editorial team.

I was proud to be part of the Food Fight exhibition at Sweets Gallery during the Summer Hill Grand Food Bazaar in October and there are some limited edition prints of my work up for sale at the Sweets Gallery shop.

Over the next few weeks I'll be working on an installation for an upcoming art exhibition with Artists @ Ashfield in December, at NTK Gallery.

4. What’s your style? 

Experimental, surreal. Slapdash, intricately detailed. Splatters and splash, twisting hair, swirling lines, soft colours. Busy. Minimalist. Inconsistent.

For a long time every artwork or design I did had to contain all the colours of the rainbow. There was no method to the madness ‑ my motto was 'the more the merrier'. However that's changed recently ‑ my last illustration series was two-tone, with red lineart on a cream yellow background, celebrating two themes: sensuality and the picnic. It seems that the less colours there are on the page, the more the lineart has to be able to take centre stage, and you find that you have to give your subject more careful consideration.

5. Do you tend to stick to the same style when you’re designing, or do you mix it up?

I think it adapts to fit the project that you're working on.

I'll have a go at any medium that can produce the desired effect, however so far my favourites are watercolour and gouache, fountain and nib pens with india inks, crackling medium and painting with coffee, tea and foodstuffs like marmalade, crushed berry juice and tomato sauce. There is something about the uncontrollability of these mediums that is awfully appealing!

Every mark you make is unique, and you cannot predict how it will turn out. I have a love-hate relationship with the spontaneity of water-based traditional media ‑ you must work quickly before your first mark dries ‑ and you have seconds to make your move, and the next one. It is like a game of chess ‑ you must plan ahead! There is no going back once your brush or nib touches the page.

But then if it happens right the fluid shapes of ink curling over the paper can surprise you with their beauty. These two ladies can do wondrous things with a brush ‑ Nanami Cowdroy with black and white ink work, and Stina Persson for her luxurious, rich watercolours.

6. Where do you get your inspiration from?

Music is my inspiration. The rhythm and the beat, the lyric and the sway, there's something about music that translates perfectly into lines and colour on a page.

Some favourites ‑ jazz (Norah Jones, Nat King Cole, Yiruma, Renee Olstead), soul/acoustic (Kimbra, Adele, Regina Spektor, Kina Grannis, Brooke Fraser, Jake Shimabukuro, John H. Clarke), R&B (Beyonce, Chris Brown, Alicia Keys), film soundtracks (the last five years, Coffee Prince, anything Miyazaki), indie/rock (Yellowcard, Coldplay, Death Cab for Cutie, Jason Mraz, Temper Trap, The Wombats, Two Door Cinema Club, Monkey Majik)

Other inspirations:

• Artists ‑ Alphonse Mucha, Degas, Shaun Tan, Oliver Jeffers, Yuko Shimizu, Quentin Blake, James Jean, Stella Im Hultberg, Audrey Kawasaki
• Famous faces through the papparazzi lens ‑ Coco Chanel, Babe Paley, Karl Lagerfield, Anna Wintour, Audrey Hepburn
• Folk tales, fairy tales, mythological stories, gods and goddesses
• Traditional chinese brush painting (smoke, fog, water scenes, herons and stalks, swimming carp and lotus ponds), japanese prints (cherry blossoms, wheat and floral patterns, clouds and smoke) and
• Celtic jewellery, art nouveau prints, vintage advertising, leaves, ferns and flowers.

7. What does Imagine. Create. Inspire mean to you? (Imagine. Create. Inspire is the theme for National Youth Week 2012).

It says, live your best life, love lots, have fun!

Imagine: everything worth doing starts with a thought. Let loose and give yourself the freedom to be taken with a new or exciting idea, and just go with the flow. Stay curious.

Create: bring your idea to life. It doesn't have to be art and design. Any idea can be the seed for a fabulous experience. Bake that lemon tart for your mum, jump off a plane from 10,000 feet in the air, take the road less travelled and discover a secret garden by night, enter that art competition - just give it a shot.

Inspire: share your ideas. When you bake your cake, cut it into slices and have a cake party. If you blow up eight balloons you can give them out you can make eight kids happy. If you have one enormous balloon you can float it up into the sky where one thousand people can see it and you will inspire one thousand smiles.

8. What do you do when you’re not designing?

Hang out with friends and family, check out new music or art events, kick back at a sunny cafe, make sandcastles at the beach. Dream about the next travel adventure.

9. How do you feel about having your design promoted all over Australia?

Pretty amazed, very excited! It's funny because I still have the original sketch stuck somewhere on a corkboard next to my desk.

I really love humongous designs and have a bit of a design fetish for billboards and advertising on hot air balloons, so I can't wait to see it in large format next year. :-)

10. Any tips for young people interested in design?

I'm not an expert but this is what I wish someone had said to me when I was younger:

• Start an online portfolio! Just about everyone has access to the internet these days so say you're talking to someone who's interested in your work, you can just give them your link and let them browse in their own time, and they'll come back and find you if they like what they see and have some work for you.
• Don't be afraid to offer to help people out if you see how something can be re-designed and you know you can do it. If your friends are producing a music CD, offer to illustrate the cover art. If your local library is holding a reading event, offer to do up the posters. Re-brand your local cafe. Make flyers for your school's next charity bake.
• Keep working on your ideas every day. Just live it as it comes, one step at a time, and then one morning suddenly you will wake up and realise you are smack bang in the middle of it, and it will be amazing. Will Smith spells it out ‑ "You don’t try to build a wall. You don’t set out and say ‘I’m gonna build the biggest, baddest, greatest wall that has ever been built’. You say ‘I’m going to lay this brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid’. You do this every single day, and soon you have a wall.”