Interview: Aitch Fuses “Uneasiness” With Florals in Alluring Folk-Inspired Illustration

Illus­tra­tor Aitch is inspired by the offline world. Cit­ing “naive art, child­hood mem­o­ries, leg­ends, and folk­lore” as fod­der for her col­or­ful and intri­cate work, her imagery recalls a world unsul­lied by dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy. It’s refresh­ing and allur­ing, and her illus­tra­tions read like a puz­zle that chal­lenges us to unpack the mean­ing behind the dif­fer­ent characteristics.

I spoke with Aitch about her work, includ­ing how com­mis­sioned pieces have helped her grow as an illus­tra­tor and the “lit­tle quirks” present in her paint­ings. You can buy her work as prints, pil­lows, and more on Society6.

Scroll down to read the interview!

What is your artis­tic back­ground? Did you attend art school?

Yeah, it start­ed in 6th grade when I joined this local art club for kids. [I] remem­ber hav­ing that feel­ing of being tru­ly invest­ed and pas­sion­ate about some­thing for the first time, the not-being-able-to-sleep-at-night kind of excite­ment 🙂 It all went smooth­ly from there [and I] went on to study arts in high school and in college.

How do you gen­er­ate ideas for your work, and how has your visu­al lan­guage changed over the years?

For the past 3 years, I’ve been work­ing most­ly on com­mis­sioned projects and reserv­ing lit­tle to [no] time for per­son­al stuff. I’m super drawn to this side if illus­tra­tion because it’s tak­ing me places I wouldn’t have wan­dered in oth­er­wise, it’s diverse and chal­leng­ing and ful­fill­ing, so I guess that col­lab­o­rat­ing with peo­ple and get­ting a bit out of my head is a cat­a­lyst. It’s a mutu­al exchange of inspi­ra­tion between the client and [me]. Peo­ple reach out because they feel inspired by what I do and in return, I get inspired by their wish­es and requirements.

Look­ing back, it seems like time’s slow­ing down when it comes to work­ing, [and] I’m being able to sit still and digest each task for a longer time. [I am] more atten­tive and less self-absorbed, where­as five to ten years ago I went through count­less tri­als fum­bling in the dark try­ing to make sense of what type of a cre­ative path spoke most to me. [I] tried paint­ing, sewing, work­ing with clay and wood till about five years ago when an incip­i­ent phase of what I’m doing nowa­days revealed itself to me. [I] went from obses­sive­ly focus­ing on my twen­ty-some­thing-year-old anx­i­eties to a mix of all that dra­ma plus an ide­al­ized ver­sion of where [I am] cur­rent­ly in life. Peo­ple usu­al­ly tend to pick up on some sort of weird­ness or uneasi­ness when refer­ring to my work, despite the over­whelm­ing quan­ti­ty of flo­rals 🙂 and I’m proud of this lit­tle quirk.

How do you cre­ate your illustrations?

My process is super sim­ple! I sketch and paint by hand, clean things up in Pho­to­shop and bam!

What is a skill that you still want to learn in your illus­tra­tion career? 

Ummm, [it] does­n’t t count as a skill, more like a mind­set I’d like to achieve: I wish I could learn how to edit objec­tive­ly in a way that I’m com­fort­able putting more min­i­mal­ist stuff out for a change.

What piece of advice, habit, or tool has helped you the most in your career?

It’s all a per­fect con­coc­tion of all these things, they’re all equal­ly life-giv­ing so I can’t pick some­thing in particular.