Hyung Joo Kim - Digital illustrator | ContraWork by Hyung Joo Kim
Hyung Joo Kim

Hyung Joo Kim

Illustrations growing into brushes, objects & surfaces

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Boulder, USA

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Boulder, USA

Cover image for I thought it would be
I thought it would be simple. Draw something. Turn it into a pattern. Upload it. And of course, someone would buy it. Ha. I knew nothing. 😂 But the funny thing is, taking the long way around brought me somewhere much more interesting. I never wanted to give up drawing. And I realized I didn’t have to. My background is in craft design, with an emphasis on fabric, so function has always mattered to me. I wanted my drawings to do something. That’s how I started making Procreate brushes. I kept looking for certain kinds of brushes and thinking, “Why doesn’t this exist?” Well… then I’ll make it. So I did. I used those brushes in my own illustrations. New characters came out of those illustrations, and some of those became new brushes. Then they became individual objects. And suddenly my little drawings were wandering everywhere. Onto a ramen topper. Onto little decorations. Into PNG files. At one point I realized that asking everyone to buy my brushes, color everything themselves, and build their own little world might have been… a bit ambitious. 😂 So I began making finished PNG objects too. And then one day I looked at all of them and thought: Wait. I have always wanted to design patterns. For some reason, I had been imagining that to make a pattern I needed to open a completely empty canvas and start drawing everything from zero. But I already had all the ingredients. The houses. The people. The tiny signs. The food. The objects. The stories. So I started playing. And this part makes me laugh: fabric was actually my emphasis when I studied craft design in Korea. Back then I did everything by hand—drawing, silk screening, matching repeats, all of it. Compared with that, making repeats digitally now feels almost suspiciously easy. 😂 I even opened a Spoonflower account last year thinking I could upload an illustration and—poof!—it would somehow become a pattern. Nope. An illustration is an illustration. A pattern is a pattern. So yes, I took the long way around. But on that long road I made brushes. The brushes helped make illustrations. The illustrations gave me characters. The characters became objects. The objects became PNGs. And somehow, all those little pieces led me right back to where I started: fabric and pattern. Welcome to my LALATOWN Pattern Village. 🌿
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Meet at Sunrise Crumbs ☀️ This little LALATOWN scene began with my drawings. Some elements became Procreate brushes, found their way back into my illustrations, and eventually became individual PNG objects. Now those same little pieces have traveled again—this time into a repeating pattern. Drawing → Brush → Illustration → Object → Pattern. The individual PNGs are available on Etsy, and the pattern is coming to Spoonflower.
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LALATOWN Market Day started with my original drawings, which became Procreate brushes, then individual illustrated PNG objects. For this little journey, those familiar market-day characters traveled one step further—coming together as a repeating pattern. Drawing → Brush → Object → Pattern. One little LALATOWN story, finding new ways to live.
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A little Seoul subway story, traveling from a Procreate brush to illustrated objects, and finally into a repeating pattern. Line 2 says, “That happens too.” Line 3 says, “Let’s eat.” Line 4 takes you to LALATOWN. One small drawing can keep traveling—and become a whole new little world.
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