Process for RISE
Written by Jeff Yang, Phil Yu, and Philip Wang
pub. March 1, 2022
Purchase from Bookshop
Growing up in L.A. in the ‘80s and ‘90s as a second generation Asian American has shaped my life in so many ways. I knew I’d want to be part of a book that would celebrate the shared experiences of this otherwise incredibly diverse community.
I remember being thrilled to see the author list, as all three men have made it their job to bind this community together. I’ve followed Angry Asian Man for years, watched Jeff Yang’s son Hudson Yang on Fresh off the Boat, and shared WongFu Production’s skits with my friends!
It was fulfilling to draw so many of my Asian American heroes for this book, and to learn about those I wasn’t already familiar with. But what makes me most excited about this book is asking: What comes next?
This is one book about one period in a rich history that will continue on. I can’t wait to see how Asian America continues to evolve through this decade and beyond!
Altogether I illustrated 213 portraits for RISE over a few months! There’s often a lot of leeway with illustrations in how people or things are depicted, but with portraits of real people, there’s nothing more important than accuracy. Most of us can take a quick look at a drawing of someone you know and recognize immediately if the likeness is accurate enough.
This was a daunting task to take on, but the team pitched in to provide reference photos for these portraits. This helped out so much with time and accuracy! You can see here that I was almost creating a composite drawing from the reference photos of these celebrities.
We used minimal colors for clothing and hair in order to highlight the diverse skin tones of Asian Americans.
In addition to portraits, I illustrated 9 scenes for RISE (8 of which are 5 panel pullouts). These scenes are loaded with visual easter eggs that each labeled and annotated in the final image. Can you spot Angry Asian Man’s Stay Angry shirt? This means each scene is essentially one big collage; they remind me of finding all the gems in a Richard Scarry children’s book!
After the sketch phase, I drew and labeled each person or object as a different digital layer in Adobe Photoshop (you can see my layers panel on the right). I then colored in the image with my Cintiq and stylus similarly to my process in The Sound of Silence.