Artist Spotlight: Jing Zhang

Jing Zhang’s fun, bright and infographic illustrations have gained her worldwide popularity. Her clients have included HSBC, IBM, Canon and Samsung owing much to her skill of combining information in a truly playful and digestible format.

As our featured artist for March as part of our ‘Female Creator’ theme, we spoke to her to find out more behind her creative background and illustrative style.

ADOBE STOCK: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your creative background?

Jing Zhang: I’m an illustrator based in London. I’ve started my career as illustrator about nine years ago. My office is the studio room in my apartment, where I spend most of my time making beautiful pictures for clients around the world.

AS: So how did you get started in digital art professionally?

JZ: My original discipline was fashion design. Being quite a geek myself, I’d always liked to experiment with new technology on my fashion design subjects. This had been taken too far. I had completely devoted myself to illustrations and ditched fashion design in the end. My first ever commission was a Computer Arts cover in 2008, that paved my way to become a professional illustrator.

AS: What are your perceptions of stock images, and do you think the perception is changing?

JZ: Stock images in the last few years have become more popular, much higher in quality and in variety. Like most artists who take pride in creating the most original work, I used to think using stock images were kind of a cheat. But over the years of technology development and artistic experiments, we have seen abundant crossed disciplines artwork with stock images (e.g. illustrations with photographs). There is no reason why we should limit ourselves to what we comfortably know.

AS: How would you describe your style?

JZ: Digital, architectural, informative, 3 dimensional

AS: Where do you find your inspiration?

JZ: It changes from time to time. But I find most inspiration from childhood, doll houses, Polly Pockets, and lots of architectural work nowadays.

AS: What are you excited to work on in 2017?

JZ: I’ve been trying to finish my map illustrations. The project maps of Asia were done last year, so this year will be America, and Europe, Oceania.

AS: What music do you currently listen to whilst working (if any!)?

JZ: 80s retro, by artists like FM-84, The Midnight etc.

To discover more of Jing’s work, check out her Behance portfolio and website.