‘Everyone said it would be a phase’: Yuko Shimizu on her artistic evolution

I was drawing and painting almost all my life, until college. Japanese kids like to imitate anime and manga, so it's very common for kids to draw. I loved it, but everyone said 'oh, it's a phase, it will go away,' – oftentimes it does.

I wanted to go to art school, but my parents said, 'No, if you become an artist, you'll starve. Don't do that.' I didn't have the core belief that I could do it at that age, because I was young – I didn't know what I wanted to do. So I decided to pick something creative in a practical world. I went to university and did a Business Economics major with a strong advertising focus. Afterwards, I did a corporate PR job. I did that for 11 years.

I tried everything – I wanted to learn to paint and draw like Americans – but it didn't work out. At some point, my teachers tried to convince me to do what I naturally do, saying, 'It's you, and you should embrace it'. I learned to build on top of it with the skills I'd learned, like oil painting or figure drawing – things that don't necessarily come out in my work. It helped to make my work better.

The funny thing is, I drew before I went to art school, and I did a whole bunch of different things when I was there, but by the time I got out, it was the same style as when I started, but ten times better because I'd learned all those skills.

I'm a commercial artist, so it's not necessary inspiration – every project comes with a brief. If it's a magazine article, I have to read it and try to learn a bit more about the subject by researching and looking at the visuals. I have to fake that I'm the biggest fan of the subject for the duration of the time I'm working on it. Being equipped with knowledge of the subject is really helpful, more so than inspiration.

I think inspiration is really important when you're in school and developing your work, but I don't really do a lot of personal work now. It's fun to learn new things, and it's this idea of building knowledge that gives me the ideas and concepts to materialise the illustrations I'm creating.

I draw a certain way, and I can't change that. When clients give me work, it's not random. They think I'm the right person for it, so that's why I get it. I won't say it's easy, of course, but it's easier because the right things find me. My work is not applicable to everything, and [a client's] biggest, most important job is to find the right artist. If I'm the right artist and I'm equipped for what they need, it's so much easier to put my style into the work, even if it's commercial.

I often think my best work will be something that I'll create in the future, because otherwise, what's the point? As hard as it is, I like a bigger project – say, a book project. I have to put a lot of time and effort in, but I work on one thing for a certain duration of time, and that is kind of nice, because I don't have to think of anything else. I like the focus.

When I'm drawing, my favourite tool is a brush, ink and watercolour paper. I will never switch fully to digital, and not because of AI, but because there's so much beauty to things you cannot control.

I can't read the future, and my opinion is just my opinion. Generative AI has a lot of issues because it's created on top of stolen work. There's no copyright infringement. I can feed all the old masters' work into it and see what comes out. It's not that everything's bad – it's great for science. But nobody's profiting except for big corporations.

The AI art doesn't exist if artists don't create it first. Personally, I'm not worried too much about it now. If a company want to cut costs and use AI to create an ad campaign or book cover, they probably aren't going to contact me. The problem is that it's currently taking jobs from early-career artists. These young artists who are just starting out, their job security might not be there, and that's a long-term problem. I'm not worried about it, but I don't know about the future. I might be okay, but if the next generation of artists aren't, because everything is being taken by generative AI, then the industry will be over, right? Our job as artists is to cultivate the next generation, because we're only getting older.

Find out more about Yuko Shimizu.