Blog 7: An Expert in My Field

Hello everybody! Finally, I catch up with the blogs!

So today we had the chance to decide between two topics. I decided to talk about an expert in my field, which also has a website and I would like to show you!


The person I want to talk about is Yuko Shimizu. She is a Japanese illustrator that lives in New York. Her work combines Japanese heritage with contemporary reference topics, and I really like her, because she studied another career, and then Visual Arts like me, but she leaned on the Illustration field more and became very successful.

Shimizu was born in Tokyo, Japan, and at the age of eleven, her father's company moved the family to the United States, specifically New York, and would live there for four years before returning to Japan again.

She wanted to be a manga artist (Japanese famous comics artists), but their parents made her study a Commerce career, and she did it and worked many years in a company until she realized that women in the firm who had been there for multiple decades were not advancing so she decided to try to get a major in illustration in the United States. 
As a non-U.S. resident, she needed to prove she had enough money for four years of tuition and living expenses, so she saved for two years in order to have enough money in the bank to obtain a visa and travel to New York, and go to the School of Visual Arts. She graduated in May 2003 with a Masters in Illustration.

She started illustrating CD insert covers for different musicians, and between 2009 and 2015 Shimizu created over 70 covers for the DC Comic Series The Unwritten. Her 43rd cover would win her a silver medal from the Society of Illustrators.

I really like she could be successful after so many problems she had, and also I really really like her art style, the strokes of ink in her drawings, and the topics, her art talk so powerfully with any word, and some other are really beautiful and touching.
She also has a website, where she posts all her works, there are some blogs she has written, and some articles about her. You can find it on : http://yukoart.com/category/work/



Please don't confuse her with the other Yuko Shimizu, creator of Hello Kitty lol they share names, but they are different people.







In 2018, Shimizu would win the Hamilton King Award, considered by many to be the most prestigious award in illustration.