Jihyun Ko: Snapshots in Color

We spoke to Jihyun Ko, a South-Korean illustrator specializing in oil-pastel portraiture.

Translated by Yoojin Shin

Untitled (2019)

Untitled (2019)

๊ณ ์ง€ํ˜„ ์ž‘๊ฐ€๋‹˜, ๋ฐ”๋žŒํ•˜์šฐ์Šค์— ์˜ค์‹  ๊ฒƒ์„ ํ™˜์˜ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค! ๋จผ์ € ์ €ํฌ ๋…์ž๋“ค์—๊ฒŒ ์งง์€ ์†Œ๊ฐœ ๋ถ€ํƒ๋“œ๋ฆฌ๊ฒ ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

์•ˆ๋…•ํ•˜์„ธ์š”. โ€œ๊ณ ์ง€ํ‹ฐ๋ธŒโ€ ๋ผ๋Š” ์ด๋ฆ„์œผ๋กœ ํ™œ๋™ ์ค‘์ธ ๊ณ ์ง€ํ˜„ ์ž‘๊ฐ€ ์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์„œ์–‘ํ™”๋ฅผ ์ „๊ณตํ–ˆ๊ณ  ํ˜„์žฌ ํ”„๋ฆฌ๋žœ์„œ๋กœ ์ž์œ ๋กญ๊ฒŒ ๊ทธ๋ฆผ์„ ๊ทธ๋ฆฌ๊ณ  ์žˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

Ms. Ko, welcome to the Baram House! Please give our readers a short introduction.

Hello. My name is Jihyun Ko and Iโ€™m an illustrator working under the name โ€œGozitive.โ€ I majored in Western Painting and am currently working freely as a freelancer.

Untitled (2019)

Untitled (2019)

์ž‘๊ฐ€๋‹˜์ด ๊ทธ๋ฆผ์„ ๊ทธ๋ฆฌ๊ฒŒ ๋˜์‹  ๊ณ„๊ธฐ๊ฐ€ ๊ถ๊ธˆํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

์–ด๋ฆด ์ ๋ถ€ํ„ฐ ๊ทธ๋ฆผ์„ ์ข‹์•„ํ–ˆ๊ณ  ๋ฏธ์ˆ ์„ ์ƒ๋‹˜์˜ ๊ถŒ์œ ๋กœ ์ผ์ฐ ๊ทธ๋ฆผ์„ ์‹œ์ž‘ํ–ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์ž˜ ๊ทธ๋ฆฌ๋ฉด ์นญ์ฐฌ ๋ฐ›๋Š” ์ผ์ด ์ข‹์•˜์—ˆ๋‚˜๋ด์š”. ๊ทธ ํ›„๋กœ ์ž์—ฐ์Šค๋Ÿฝ๊ฒŒ ๋ฏธ์ˆ ์„ ์ „๊ณตํ•˜๋ฉด์„œ ์ง€๊ธˆ๊นŒ์ง€ ๊ทธ๋ฆผ์„ ๊ทธ๋ฆฌ๊ฒŒ ๋˜์—ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

Weโ€™re curious about how you began illustrating.

I liked to draw and paint ever since I was little, and my art teacher recommended that I begin painting with more intention. If I painted well, I was complimented, and I think I enjoyed that. After that, I naturally progressed to majoring in art and continued creating until now.

ํ•œ๊ตญ์—์„œ ๋ฏธ์ˆ ์„ ์ „๊ณต ํ•˜๋ ค๋ฉด ์–ด๋–ค ๋‹จ๊ณ„๋ฅผ ๊ฑฐ์ณ์•ผ ํ•˜๋‚˜์š”?

์ผ๋ฐ˜ ๊ณ ๋“ฑํ•™๊ต๋‚˜ ์˜ˆ์ˆ (๋ฏธ์ˆ )๊ณ ๋“ฑํ•™๊ต์—์„œ ์ž…์‹œ๋ฏธ์ˆ  ์ค€๋น„๋ฅผ ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์ž…์‹œ๋ฏธ์ˆ ์€ ์ •ํ•ด์ง„ ์ฃผ์ œ๋ฅผ ๊ทธ๋ฆผ์œผ๋กœ ๊ทธ๋ ค๋‚ด๋Š” ์‹œํ—˜์ธ๋ฐ ์‹ค๊ธฐ ์„ฑ์ ๊ณผ ํ•™๋ถ€ ์„ฑ์ , ๋ฉด์ ‘์„ ํ†ตํ•ด ํ•ฉ๊ฒฉ์—ฌ๋ถ€๊ฐ€ ๊ฒฐ์ •๋ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.๋ฏธ์ˆ ๋Œ€ํ•™์— ์ž…ํ•™ํ•˜์—ฌ ์ž์‹ ์˜ ์ „๊ณต์„ ๊ณต๋ถ€ํ•˜๋ฉด ๋ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

What steps do you have to take if you want to major in art in South Korea?

If you want to major in art, you have to prepare for a special entrance exam in high school. The entrance exam for art schools in South Korea gives you a particular subject and you are required to paint or illustrate it. Your acceptance is determined by your performance in the entrance exam, high school grades, and an interview. Then you can enroll and choose the specific major of your choice.

Untitled (2019)

Untitled (2019)

์–ธ์ œ๋ถ€ํ„ฐ ์˜ค์ผํŒŒ์Šคํ…”์„ ๋‹ค๋ฃจ๊ธฐ ์‹œ์ž‘ํ•˜์…จ๋‚˜์š”? ์˜ค์ผ ํŒŒ์Šคํ…”์„ ์“ฐ์‹œ๊ธฐ ์ „์—๋Š” ์–ด๋–ค ์ข…๋ฅ˜์˜ ๋ฏธ๋””์—„์„ ์“ฐ์…จ๋‚˜์š”?

๋ณธ๊ฒฉ์ ์œผ๋กœ๋Š” 1๋…„ ์ „ ๋ถ€ํ„ฐ ์˜ค์ผํŒŒ์Šคํ…”์„ ๋‹ค๋ฃจ๊ธฐ ์‹œ์ž‘ํ–ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๊ทธ ์ „์—๋Š” ์•„ํฌ๋ฆด, ์œ ํ™”, ๋งˆ๋ธ”๋ง, ์—ฐํ•„ ๋“ฑ ์ €์—๊ฒŒ ๋งž๋Š” ์žฌ๋ฃŒ๋ฅผ ์ฐพ๊ธฐ ์œ„ํ•ด ๋‹ค์–‘ํ•œ ์žฌ๋ฃŒ๋ฅผ ์‚ฌ์šฉํ–ˆ์—ˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. 

When did you begin using oil pastels? Before using oil pastels, what kinds of materials did you use?

I began using oil pastels extensively a year ago. Before that, I used lots of different materials like acrylics, oils, marbling, and pencil to find the medium that suited me best.

Untitled (2019)

Untitled (2019)

์˜ค์ผ ํŒŒ์Šคํ…”๋งŒ์˜ ๋งค๋ ฅ์ด ์žˆ๋‹ค๋ฉด ๋ญ˜๊นŒ์š”?

๋ชจ๋“  ์‚ฌ๋žŒ๋“ค์ด ์ ‘๊ทผํ•˜๊ธฐ ์‰ฌ์šด ์žฌ๋ฃŒ๊ฐ€ ์•„๋‹๊นŒ ์ƒ๊ฐํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์–ด๋ฆด ์  ์“ฐ๋˜ ํฌ๋ ˆํŒŒ์Šค์™€ ์„ฑ์งˆ์ด ๋น„์Šทํ•ด์„œ ํŠน๋ณ„ํ•œ ๊ธฐ์ˆ ์ด ์—†์–ด๋„ ๋ฉ‹์ง„ ํ…์Šค์ณ์˜ ์ž‘ํ’ˆ์ด ๋‚˜์˜ต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๊ฑฐ์น ๊ฒŒ, ๋˜๋Š” ๋ถ€๋“œ๋Ÿฝ๊ฒŒ ์‚ฌ์šฉํ•  ์ˆ˜ ์žˆ์–ด์„œ ๋‹ค์–‘ํ•œ ์Šคํƒ€์ผ์˜ ๊ทธ๋ฆผ์„ ๊ทธ๋ ค๋‚ด๋Š” ๊ฒƒ๋„ ์˜ค์ผ ํŒŒ์Šคํ…”๋งŒ์˜ ๋งค๋ ฅ์ด๋ผ๊ณ  ์ƒ๊ฐํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

If there is a particular charm that is unique to oil pastels, what would it be?

I think oil pastels are easily approachable by everybody. Theyโ€™re similar to crayons, which a lot of us used when we were little, and are able to produce works with incredible textures without requiring much technical skills. You can use oil pastels roughly or softly, which allows a diverse range of stylesโ€”which I think is a unique feature.

์˜ค์ผ ํŒŒ์Šคํ…”๋กœ ์ธ๋ฌผํ™”๋ฅผ ์ฃผ๋กœ ๊ทธ๋ฆฌ์‹œ๋Š” ์ด์œ ๊ฐ€ ์žˆ๋‚˜์š”?

์ธ๋ฌผ์„ ๋ฐ”๋ผ๋ณผ ๋•Œ ๊ทธ ํ‘œ์ •์ด๋‚˜ ๋ˆˆ๋น›์—์„œ ๋งŽ์€ ๊ฐ์ •์„ ๋А๋‚๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๊ทธ ๊ฐ์ •์„ ์žฌํ•ด์„ํ•˜์—ฌ ์˜ค์ผ ํŒŒ์Šคํ…”์ด๋ผ๋Š” ์žฌ๋ฃŒ๋กœ ์žฌํƒ„์ƒ ์‹œํ‚ค๋Š” ๊ฒƒ์ด ์ œ๊ฐ€ ํ‘œํ˜„ํ•˜๊ณ  ์‹ถ์€ ์ž‘ํ’ˆ์ด๊ธฐ ๋•Œ๋ฌธ์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

Is there a particular reason why you create a lot of portraits with oil pastels?

When I look at people, I feel a great range of emotions from their facial expressionsโ€”particularly from their eyes. I want to reinterpret those emotions and recreate them through oil pastels.

Untitled (2019)

Untitled (2019)

 
Leon (2019)

Leon (2019)

 

์ž‘๊ฐ€๋‹˜์˜ ๊ทธ๋ฆผ๋“ค์€ ์ƒ‰ ์กฐํ•ฉ์ด ์ฐธ ๋งค๋ ฅ์ ์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์ƒ‰ ์กฐํ•ฉ์„ ๋งŒ๋“ค์–ด๋‚ผ ๋•Œ๋Š” ์–ด๋–ค ๊ฒƒ๋“ค์—์„œ ์˜๊ฐ์„ ์–ป์œผ์‹œ๋Š”์ง€ ๊ถ๊ธˆํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

๊ฐ€์žฅ ์ข‹์•„ํ•˜๋Š” ๋งค์ฒด์ธ ์˜ํ™”์—์„œ ์˜๊ฐ์„ ๋งŽ์ด ์–ป์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. (์›จ์Šค ์•ค๋”์Šจ, ํŒ€ ๋ฒ„ํŠผ ๊ฐ๋…์˜ ์˜ํ™”๋ฅผ ์ข‹์•„ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.) ์˜ํ™”๋ฅผ ๋ณด๋ฉด์„œ ์ „์ฒด์ ์ธ ๋ถ„์œ„๊ธฐ์™€ ์ƒ‰๊ฐ์„ ์ž˜ ๊ธฐ์–ตํ•ด๋‘์—ˆ๋‹ค๊ฐ€ ๊ทธ๋ฆผ์œผ๋กœ ํ’€์–ด๋ƒ…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋˜ ์ง์ ‘ ์ฐ์€ ์ผ์ƒ์ƒํ™œ์—์„œ์˜ ์‚ฌ์ง„์ด๋‚˜ ์žก์ง€ ๋“ฑ ๊ฐ€๋ฆฌ์ง€ ์•Š๊ณ  ์ผ๋‹จ ๋ฌด์—‡์ด๋“  ๋งŽ์ด ๋ณด๋Š” ํŽธ์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

The color palettes in your artworks are very attractive. Weโ€™re curious about where you draw your inspiration.

I draw lots of inspiration from movies, which is my favorite mass medium. (I like movies by Wes Anderson and Tim Burton). Whenever I watch a movie, I try to remember its overall mood and color choices, and eventually channel them into an illustration. I also look at my personal photos and read lots of magazinesโ€”I just try to watch, read, and feel as much as possible.

Van Gogh (2019)

Van Gogh (2019)

์ตœ๊ทผ ์•„์ดํŒจ๋“œ๋กœ ๊ทธ๋ฆผ์„ ๊ทธ๋ฆฌ๊ธฐ ์‹œ์ž‘ํ•˜์…จ๋Š”๋ฐ, ์•„์ดํŒจ๋“œ๋กœ ๊ทธ๋ฆฌ๋Š” ๊ทธ๋ฆผ์˜ ์žฅ๋‹จ์ ์ด ๋ญ˜๊นŒ์š”?

๊ฐ€์žฅ ์ข‹์€ ์ ์€ ์žฅ์†Œ์— ๊ตฌ์• ๋ฅผ ๋ฐ›์ง€ ์•Š๊ณ  ๊ทธ๋ฆด ์ˆ˜ ์žˆ๋‹ค๋Š” ์ ์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์นจ๋Œ€ ์œ„, ์นดํŽ˜, ์ฑ…์ƒโ€ฆ ์–ด๋””์„œ๋“  ๊ทธ๋ฆฌ๊ณ  ์‹ถ์„ ๋•Œ ๊ฐ„ํŽธํ•˜๊ฒŒ ๊ทธ๋ฆด ์ˆ˜ ์žˆ๋‹ค๋Š” ๊ฒƒ์ด์ฃ . ๋˜ ๋ฌดํ•œ๋Œ€๋กœ ์ˆ˜์ •์ด ๊ฐ€๋Šฅํ•˜๋‹ค๋Š” ์ ์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ํ‹€๋ ค๋„ ๊ดœ์ฐฎ๊ณ  ์ƒ‰์„ ๋ฐ”๊พธ๊ณ  ์‹ถ์œผ๋ฉด ์–ธ์ œ๋“ ์ง€ ๋ฐ”๊ฟ€ ์ˆ˜ ์žˆ์œผ๋‹ˆ๊นŒ์š”. ํ•˜์ง€๋งŒ ๋ฐ˜๋Œ€๋กœ ์—ฌ๋Ÿฌ๋ฒˆ ์ˆ˜์ •์ด ๊ฐ€๋Šฅํ•˜๋‹ค๋ณด๋‹ˆ ๋” ๋‚˜์€ ์ž‘ํ’ˆ์„ ์œ„ํ•ด ์‹œ๊ฐ„์ด ์˜ค๋ž˜ ๊ฑธ๋ฆฌ๊ธฐ๋„ ํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋˜ ์†๊ทธ๋ฆผ์—์„œ ๋‚˜์˜ค๋Š” ์ž์—ฐ์Šค๋Ÿฌ์šด ํ…์Šค์ณ๋„ ๋ถˆ๊ฐ€๋Šฅํ•ด์„œ ๊ทธ๋Ÿฐ ์ ์ด ๋‹จ์ ์ด ์•„๋‹๊นŒ ์ƒ๊ฐํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค.

You recently began illustrating on an iPad. What are the pros and cons of digital illustrations?

The biggest advantage is that you can create irrespective of location. Like on your bed, in a cafe, on a deskโ€ฆ wherever you want to draw or paint, you can. Also, you can modify and edit as many times as you want. You can mess up. If you want to change a color, you can always change it. But precisely because you can edit infinitely, sometimes it takes much longer to complete a work. Another disadvantage is that itโ€™s impossible to create a natural texture that can only come from hand-painted works.

Frida Kahlo (2019)

Frida Kahlo (2019)

์•ž์œผ๋กœ๋Š” ์–ด๋–ค ๊ทธ๋ฆผ์„ ๊ทธ๋ฆฌ๊ณ  ์‹ถ์œผ์‹ ๊ฐ€์š”?

์ธ๋ฌผ๋งŒ ์žˆ๋Š” ๊ฒƒ์ด ์•„๋‹Œ ํ’๊ฒฝ๊ณผ ์ •๋ฌผ์ด ํ•จ๊ป˜ ์–ด์šฐ๋Ÿฌ์ง„ ๊ทธ๋ฆผ์„ ๊ทธ๋ ค๋ณด๊ณ  ์‹ถ๊ณ  ๋˜ ์ด์•ผ๊ธฐ๊ฐ€ ์žˆ๋Š” ๊ทธ๋ฆผ์„ ๊ทธ๋ฆฌ๊ณ  ์‹ถ๋„ค์š”. ๋ชจ๋“  ์‚ฌ๋žŒ๋“ค์ด ๋ดค์„ ๋•Œ ์ €์™€ ํ•จ๊ป˜ ๊ณต๊ฐํ•  ์ˆ˜ ์žˆ๋Š” ๊ทธ๋Ÿฐ ๊ทธ๋ฆผ์ด์š”.

What kind of illustrations do you want to create from now on?

I want to create works that donโ€™t focus solely on portraitureโ€”works that combine landscapes with still-life, works that tell stories. I want to create works that, when people look at them, they understand and empathize with me.


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๊ณ ์ง€ํ˜„์€ ํ˜„์žฌ ํ”„๋ฆฌ๋žœ์„œ ์ž‘๊ฐ€๋กœ ํ™œ๋™ ์ค‘์ด๊ณ  ์ฃผ๋กœ ์ธ๋ฌผ์„ ์œ„์ฃผ๋กœ ๊ทธ๋ฆผ์„ ๊ทธ๋ฆฌ๊ณ  ์žˆ๋‹ค. ํ‰์†Œ ์žฅ๋ฅด๋ฅผ ๊ฐ€๋ฆฌ์ง€์•Š๊ณ  ์˜ํ™”๋ฅผ ๋ณด๋Š” ๊ฒƒ์„ ์ฐธ ์ข‹์•„ํ•˜๊ณ , ๊ทธ ์˜ํ™”๋“ค ์†์—์„œ ์ƒ‰๊ฐ์— ๋Œ€ํ•œ ์˜๊ฐ์„ ๋งŽ์ด ๋ฐ›๋Š” ํŽธ์ด๋‹ค. ๊ณ ์ง€ํ˜„ ์ž‘๊ฐ€์˜ ์ธ์ƒ๊ด€์€ ์ž˜ํ•˜๋Š” ์ผ์„ ์ข‹์•„ํ•˜๊ฒŒ ๋งŒ๋“ค์ž ์ธ๋ฐ, ๋‘ ๊ฐ€์ง€๊ฐ€ ๊ฐ€๋Šฅํ•ด์•ผ ์ตœ๊ณ ์˜ ๊ฒฐ๊ณผ๋ฌผ์ด ๋งŒ๋“ค์–ด ์ง„๋‹ค๊ณ  ์ƒ๊ฐํ•˜๊ธฐ ๋•Œ๋ฌธ์ด๋‹ค. ์ธ์Šคํƒ€๊ทธ๋žจ์ด๋‚˜ ์œ ํˆฌ๋ธŒ์—์„œ (@Gozitive) ๊ณ ์ง€ํ˜„ ์ž‘๊ฐ€์˜ ๊ทธ๋ฆผ๋“ค์„ ์ฐพ์•„๋ณผ ์ˆ˜ ์žˆ๋‹ค.

Jihyun Ko is a freelance illustrator who focuses on portraiture. She loves to watch movies and derives lots of her color inspiration from them. Her life philosophy is to grow to love the skill youโ€™re the most good at, because she believes that the combination of the two factors is necessary to achieve the best result. You can follow her artistic journey on Instagram and YouTube (@Gozitive).

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