Hyung Joo Kim
Illustrations growing into brushes, objects & surfaces
Some drawings deserve another life.
There are a few drawings that still make my heart ache a little when I look at them.
They aren’t my newest work.
Actually, they come from the very beginning of my digital painting journey.
They were a raw part of me.
A person sitting by a window with a cup of coffee. A quiet afternoon. Someone simply looking outside.
I wasn’t trying to make something beautiful.
I think I was drawing a question:
Will a day like this ever come for me?
I had gone through several very difficult years—staying beside my parents through their illnesses and eventually saying goodbye to them. And after that came another kind of hardship, one created not by life or illness, but by people.
Somewhere in the middle of all of that, I started pulling out the little worlds that had been living quietly inside me.
Eventually, that world became LALATOWN.
And some of these drawings were born along the way.
The funny thing was, I loved them deeply—but I never quite knew what to do with them.
A sticker?
A print?
Should they just stay tucked away in an old folder?
Years later, I found another answer.
Now those little people can wander across a page again. They can follow a pencil, become a background, repeat themselves into a new neighborhood, and become part of somebody else’s drawing.
They became brushes.
And somehow, seeing those old, raw pieces of myself return to the world in a completely different form makes me very happy.
Maybe that is one of the rules of LALATOWN:
Nothing has to be finished just because its first life is over.
Here, you can have a second chance.
A third.
A fourth.
A fifth.
As many as you need.
Welcome to my Endless Opportunity Town.
Welcome to LALATOWN.
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How My Drawings Keep Growing 🌱
A drawing rarely ends as just one drawing in LALATOWN.
Sometimes I take little pieces from my original illustrations and turn them into my own Procreate stamp brushes. Then I draw with them again, rearranging and combining them until a new scene begins to appear.
From that new world, a character or a tiny moment might wander off and become a transparent PNG object. And sometimes the whole scene keeps growing until it becomes a seamless repeat pattern.
Drawing → brush → drawing again → object → pattern.
It’s a funny little cycle. I’m not really making separate products as much as letting the same illustrated world find different ways to live.
The Spring Onion Forest on Potato Hill is one of those worlds. 🌱🥔
And apparently, once you grow a spring onion forest on a potato hill, it refuses to stay in one place.
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The Spring Onion Forest on Potato Hill 🌱🥔 — A little look into how a LALATOWN world grows. I turn elements from my own drawings into custom Procreate brushes, then use those brushes to draw again — building new scenes and little neighborhoods. From there, favorite characters become standalone objects, and the illustrations grow again into seamless repeat patterns. This video shows part of that process: one drawing becoming brushes, objects, scenes, and patterns. Sometimes one drawing doesn’t end as one drawing. It becomes a whole little neighborhood.
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Meet Me at Sunrise Crumbs — Seamless Pattern
Sunrise Crumbs began as part of my original painting, Welcome to LALATOWN. From that illustrated world, I developed the characters and objects into Procreate stamp brushes, then into individual PNG elements, and finally brought them together again as seamless patterns.
It’s part of the way I build LALATOWN: one illustrated world growing into brushes, objects, digital assets, and patterns while still carrying the story of where it began.
The seamless pattern collection is now available on Spoonflower.
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