Marcos Chin is a name to know, his illustrative art in high demand across a range of designs and formats from advertisements, company branding, CD covers, book illustrations, fashion, and editorial commissions, and it doesn’t stop there! Chin has also created a series of ‘wonderland’ colouring-in books on elves/mermaids/fairies, helping to include a wider audience into the boundless world of art. His illustrations are explosive and justifying of attention, his work always having the power to communicate multiple messages, while including personal areas of importance such as gender, relationships, sexuality and ethnicity.
Drawn like a moth to a book cover, Marcos Chin not only tells a story that draws you into needing more, but is also engaging, reminiscent of youth and childlike dreams, challenges bias and stereotypes, whilst having a touch or more of humour. For example, in the patterned illustrations he’s done there’s an oxymoron; for within its repetition there exists a single break from it. This can be seen in his series of speculative designs for Pocky; in one a collection of gymnasts are all stretching forward, their hands reaching to hold onto the pole, but there, near the centre is one individual whose already hanging from it by her knees. Another illustration features spaceships; one plane rides high on its side while others fly belly down. Then to one of monkey gods; the legendary deities are heading into battle with a stick to fight under their arms, but one of them is trying to climb on the stick backwards. Meanwhile for the client ‘Her’s Magazine’ in the illustration Falling Off the Workout Wagon, one girl is shown to mirror the workout of the other girls on their pink balls with the joviality of blowing one smaller pink ball – that made of a bubble gum. These breaks in the repeating pattern give a sense of bucking the trend, standing out from the crowd, and a greatness in being distinct.
Falling Off the Workout Wagon, 2011, for Her’s Magazine. Marcos Chin
Chin also has a great love and appreciation of other artists, working within the community to encourage engagement. As a teacher, mentor, artist, and always with an ever-active mind that continues to study, developing new skills and viewpoints, which he then uses to help others in starting their careers.
It seems more than anything that Chin isn’t afraid of the unknown, delighting in seeing what can be possible and then going beyond that. His work always emanates a degree of warmth however it’s produced, his techniques varying from sketching back and forth between illustrator and photoshop, printing images to then painting with watercolours, or using charcoal and pencil to add texture, before rescanning them and continuing the discovery of where the image will lead. However, which-way Marcos Chin produces his work, his versatility in experimenting and discovering new techniques provides a different and captivating path in illustration. His images never stagnant but growing.
