Aysha Tengiz

0:00 [Applause]

0:05 hello thank you so much for that my name is Aysha Tengiz I'm an illustrator my work is generally quite playful and colorful I tend not to take it too seriously and I like to focus on characters and storytelling I've worked for clients such as Facebook Stella McCartney Bombay Sapphire and print media such as the Washington Post and anorak magazine I particularly love the versatility of illustration how you can go from puzzles and homeware Design through to murals and textiles and clothing I particularly love working with textiles I think that when your job is a creative practice then your hobby has turned into work. And so it's really nice when you can find something else to kind of put all that Creative Energy and I particularly love doing this through textiles illustrating with embroidery and fabric and creating 3D pieces of work outside of my 2D practice inspiration for me generally comes from I guess anywhere and everywhere.

1:35 I really love living in London I take a lot of lots of inspiration from the city and the people I meet and the places I go all kind of feeds into my illustrations somehow but for certain my initial inspiration and my love for illustration came from picture books I've always really loved picture books and for myself and I think a lot of people they're your real first experience of enjoying art and experiencing it. And I never really grew out of them which I think is a good thing I certainly it certainly contributed to my own style that I've adapted and what I'm drawn to when drawing block colors simple and kind of clear Line work and that focus on playful characters this is a spread from cops and robbers by Janet and Alan alberg which was one of my favorites when I was younger I think it's a really nice example of pictures containing stories like stories within stories and it was something I really enjoyed looking for as a child kind of diving into the illustration and picking out all the characters and noticing what each one was doing being able to look at the illustration for ages and finding that comedy outside of the text that's on the page and it's something I really enjoy experiencing and exploring in my own work characters outfits and fashion is also something I really love I really enjoy it in real life I love clothes and it's really great to be able to play with this in drawing it kind of gives you Endless Possibilities to dress up.

3:34 This is an example of my Pinterest board I really love like 70s and 80s fashion kind of big bold colors and patterns and this is kind of where I get a lot of the inspo and for my characters and picking out all of their outfits I always find this part of people's stories particularly interesting definitely when I was studying and when I was at University I was always really curious how people went from being at University and being a student to then earning a real salary in a creative practice and working in a career drawing for me it felt like a really far away dream and a slightly unattainable goal so I just thought it'd be nice to kind of take you guys through how I got there I've always wanted to be an illustrator I'm really lucky that my parents are both very creative people.

4:37 And it was always really encouraged painting and drawing was always very accessible to me these are a couple of pages from my first book.

4:47 I think I made when I was about six called Casey the duck goes to the fair which my mom helped me put together I also find it really funny that I had a full education in the Arts and I think that my drawing style now is not really that far off what I was working with at that age I graduated from camberwell in 2016.

5:12 This was my final piece it was a woven Turkish carpet which was a really fantastic project to work on.

5:20 But it did mean that I grad I graduated with virtually no portfolio in illustration. And I didn't really have anything to kind of put out and show art directors to get them to hire me.

5:31 So I kind of had to work out how to progress from that cozy safe bubble of University into freelancing I really didn't want to leave London.

5:44 So I had to get a job. And so I didn't I did initially try to get a job in a creative outlet but as I had no experience no one would hire me.

6:01 So I ended up in retail and I actually think this was a massive blessing for me it. Actually ended up being much more of a positive experience I think than getting a creative job I worked in retail for about three to four years.

6:22 This is a picture of me in the fitting room working on my laptop and drawing on my tablet and basically building up the portfolio that I kind of so desperately needed I worked in a very quiet shop so I just used to really kind of take the piss and just do work on illustration whenever I had a possible moment and I would kind of draw on the backs of receipts and come up with ideas on the shop floor and scribble them down wherever I could because it was such a boring job as well I kind of got a lot of access to that like mushy side of your brain that.

7:03 Actually comes up with all the best ideas that when you're working particularly in other creative jobs I think I wouldn't have had the brain space for to come up with my own things. And I knew I really wanted to progress my own style I wanted to work freelance and I wanted to do my own thing.

7:23 So this. Actually ended up being quite a blessing extremely flexible hours and it also taught me a lot admin is such a huge part of my job now.

7:36 And I learned so much of that through working in a shop we had to email so many clients learning how to manage stock and where the merchandise came from that I was selling it all kind of really filtered into my practice now and helped me learn how to run my own online shop which really kind of boosted me into being able to work freelance full-time when I broke into freelancing I which was pretty much on the very first day of lockdown. So it was like early 2020 that was like my first kind of experience of being fully independent from my part-time job and just relying on my illustrations I felt very very proud of myself for being able to do that because it was a lot of work.

8:26 But I kind of hadn't anticipated how vulnerable it can also make you within illustration in particular I feel like your work is very personal it's the colors that you find endearing it's the style and the stories that you're choosing to tell and it's kind of like a manifestation of your own personality so when that's constantly being critiqued your self-worth and your value can be very much affected by the success of your work however you kind of feel what that what that's like it can feel so great getting lots of jobs but then you're you can feel concerned that your work is getting too commercialized and you feel like you build up a resentment for it to then the other side of that of having too much spare time and finding yourself in a bit of a creative block so it means that your mental health is hugely impacted by the work and that in turn impacts the work that you create so it's really nice when jobs come through that are the perfect balance of this.

9:42 And I thought I would use this as a way to kind of just show you how my process and how I kind of draw so this was a job called Helsinki curious which I worked on this year it was commissioned by the city of Helsinki and they contacted artists who had never visited the city before to create an illustrated poster of Helsinki without any visual research so it was just solely based on imagination and stories and so these are my initial rough sketches I tend to just work on lots of loose Bits of Paper to begin with scribbling down characters and colors and layouts and then.

10:27 This is a slightly more developed rough sketch so I just kind of put it all together very Loosely but a bit more finalized and then I literally just take a picture of it on my phone and send it to my laptop where I work back into it on in Photoshop honest antique to draw out that more finalized line color palette as well for me is such a big deal I love color and I tend to get a bit stuck in the same color palette because I'm very much drawn to particular colors so this was a nice one because I used a new color palette for it I had a really great interview with a guy who talked me through the colors of Helsinki the pastel colors of the buildings in contrast with this really nice natural forest green and so that was a really great way to be for me to develop my colors and this is the final illustration all the color added and then the final posters up this one was in Camden and then at the end of the project I got to visit Helsinki and I spotted the campaign in the airport so that was just really lovely to see it out in the world it was a really joyful project with Direction and deadlines and money to pay rent but it also came with complete Freedom and allowed me to be as playful and myself as I wanted to be so it was a real reminder of how fantastic this job can be and that's it thank you so much [Applause]