Meet Menglin Gan | Illustrator & Motion Designer

We had the good fortune of connecting with Menglin Gan and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Menglin, let’s talk legacy – what do you want yours to be?
The initial motivation that got me started to paint was the desire to make other people happy, and that goal has not changed.

Although I took some detours in the middle of the process, through three years of study illustration, I found that life style editorial is what I am best at and most willing to create. In my future career, I will continue to observe life, record local lifestyle and locals in a funny and humorous way, while showing the charm of the city.

No matter how far apart they are geographically, no matter how different the cultures are, I hope the audience can experience the characters’ daily life, their joys and sorrows, and the local culture through my works. Like a spiritual tour in its simplest form, I want my readers to enjoy my work and laugh in the most relaxed way possible. This is what I want people to remember about me.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
I have always been committed to creating illustrations with many characters, and I am most proud of the fact that I gather a lot of information in advance to give each character, even the unassuming ones, their own stories and emotions.

Google can never provide enough information, in order to accumulate enough character stories, I will seize every opportunity to observe and record the state of passers-by, including their appearance, attitude, and the way they interact with friends and family. Combining this information with the illustrations is the hardest part. I need to set up a logical story line for the subject of the illustration, and then use the story to string together a large number of characters so that the information doesn’t look cluttered, but rich at the same time.

So never be afraid of trying to create too much, and by logically sorting through it, arranging the story line, and organizing the primary and secondary relationships, you can blend all the interesting ideas into the piece as much as possible. Unlike an artist who spends dozens of hours on his work, the reader’s eyes tend to linger only for a short while, so I want to show the reader as many interesting things at once as possible.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
The first thing I would do is take them to my hometown to enjoy breakfast. My hometown is famous for breakfast, noodles, buns, soups …… can’t be counted. And the locals are good at eating on the go, even on their bikes, which is a rare sight to see anywhere else. Then we would go shopping in small stores around the world, whether it was the streets of New York, the alleys of England, or Akihabara in Japan, wherever there was an abundance of goods and lots of locals. At the end of the day I would take them to a hot spring to open up their pores while the accumulated stress and exhaustion would disappear.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I will shout out to Takagi Naoko, a Japanese illustrator of picture book loudly.

Ever since I first saw her picture books as a child, I have inexorably bought all of her books and pored over them again and again. Her works do not have flashy techniques or exciting plots, they only describe the ordinary life of a short girl. It is this simple, sincere and realistic narrative that captivated me and made me find that ordinary life stories can be very attractive.

No matter how niche an idea is, it can resonate with many people when viewed around the world, so every emotion and life state is worth recording and drawing for more people to see. I can say that she and her works have created me as an illustrator today.

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Website: https://artbymenglingan.myportfolio.com

Instagram: menglingan_art

Linkedin: Menglin (Merlin) Gan