AppleInsider is supported by its viewers and should earn fee as an Amazon Affiliate and affiliate associate on qualifying purchases. These affiliate partnerships don’t affect our editorial content material.
Lettering artist and businesswoman Belinda Kou tells Apple that it’s the iPad Air that took her from finding out biopsychology, and into an artwork profession.
Within the newest of its long-running sequence on professionals and artists utilizing its units, Apple has interviewed Chicago-based Kou about her work. Now each an artist herself and coaching others within the arts, Kou says it took the iPad Air to make her depart from the profession her household anticipated.
“Whereas I am unable to converse on behalf of each Asian American neighborhood,” she informed Apple, “I personally grew up in a single the place the engineers, medical doctors, and different folks with STEM careers have been among the many most celebrated.”
“This put inside stress on me to take a type of profession paths,” she continued, “particularly since I did not know anybody else who appeared like me within the arts.”
Kou’s household immigrated from Taiwan to Detroit’s Novi, Michigan, the place she started a profession by pursuing a level in biopsychology. All the time creative, she handled her ardour as a interest, even because it spilt over into her redesigning lesson plans and worksheets for her science work.
“I used to be all the time dabbling,” she says. “It was all the time on the facet, slowly constructing right into a principal factor.”
Following a dedication with Train for America, Kou took an opportunity to enter graphic design. She obtained work as an affiliate artwork director at a advertising and marketing company, and it was there that she first used an iPad.
“As soon as I obtained my iPad and Apple Pencil, I created sooner than I would been capable of with pencil and paper, which helped me to share constantly on social media,” she says. “Drawing straight onscreen with Apple Pencil versus drawing on one machine and having to lookup at a distinct display to see the way it interprets has actually sped up my course of.”
Her work social media obtained growing consideration, to the purpose the place Kou was capable of depart the company and arrange her personal enterprise.
“Between [using the iPad Air] and honing my voice and magnificence, I began to draw purchasers,” continues Kou. “At this time, so a lot of my purchasers rent me for digital artwork. I do not assume I might run my enterprise with out iPad.”
Kou works mainly in Procreate, and teaches this as one of many apps within the tutorials she is now commissioned to provide.
Talking as somebody who, as she describes it, has pivoted away from an anticipated profession into one primarily based round her ardour, Kou is especially centered on constructing a community to assist moms who wish to pursue inventive work.
“It is by no means too late to pivot,” says Kou. “The concern is all the time going to be there; you simply must push by it to see what’s on the opposite facet.”
