Conversations with David Lu

Today we’d like to introduce you to David Lu.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?

I was born with a passion for art into a family that saw it as a waste of time at best and an obstacle to my success at worst. Against the better wishes of my loved ones, I would spend most of my energy on the doodles in the margins of my homework rather than the homework itself.

All this latent passion would come to a head when I went to DisneyLand as a teenager. There was this venue called Animation Academy where an actual animator would teach a bunch of children how to draw a Disney character. The animator walked up to me and complimented me on my drawing of Grumpy and said that I could be working at Disney one day. He probably did that with everyone, but that comment had a huge effect on me. I never realized a career in the animation industry was a legitimate possibility until I saw an actual animator in the flesh.

From then on I was committed. I vowed to draw everyday and become a professional artist. So it was pretty unexpected that I ended up going to college for computer science and worked as a software engineer for six years before finally breaking into the industry.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?

The road was bumpy and full of detours. I severely underestimate how much it took to be a professional artist. It’s not enough to be the best artist in your high school, you actually need to know how to draw, how to paint and how to design. That’s what I did for nine years, learn to become a proper artist while working with computers and dealing with hundreds of rejections. The pandemic was actually a positive development for me. I used to commute three hours a day between San Francisco and South Bay, but once the lockdown hit I got to work from home and use all that free time to grind away at figure drawings and color theory. My art greatly improved in these years and I finally became a professional artist in 2022 through the Nickelodeon Artist Program.

To continue the analogy, the road has not gotten less bumpy since breaking in. For now it feels like arriving at a party as the party is ending. If nothing else, my journey has prepared me for whatever comes ahead and taught me to have patience.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?

By trade, I am a visual development artist, which is a fancy way of saying concept artist but for animation. I’ve designed props, characters, environments, color keys and a variety of other stuff for television and feature.

Though I enjoy what I make at work, I’m also very fond of the art I make for myself. I spend a lot of my time illustrating stories that I got in my head. None of these projects are complete and they’ll probably never get made into anything, but I keep drawing because it’s something that I, as an audience, would like to see.

I’m pretty proud of the fact that a lot of what I make has no appeal to anyone but myself. I spent most of 2021 designing a world for Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. I showed it around and nobody liked it because it’s about a bunch of violent scalphunters in an animation portfolio that’s usually targeted towards children. Yet to this day I believe it has some of the strongest character designs I ever made.

What matters most to you?

There’s a special kind of magic in manifesting something you only had in your head. A programmer can write lines of code and get paid good money, but if they have a mental image of a character or a place, they’re incapable of conveying it exactly as they imagined it. Even with the best AI at their disposal, they can only create what the AI thinks they want. If I have an idea for something, I can just pick up a pencil and show you what I’m thinking.

This is actually a really powerful skill to have. There were no Spongebob episodes of Spongebob getting drafted for Vietnam, but with the power of imagination and a pencil I made a comic in grade school that depicted exactly that. If there’s nothing on TV or in theaters that you like, you can just kind of make your own.

That’s what’s most important to me, telling your own stories, creating your own worlds and filling it with your own characters.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.luguowei.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidludraws/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/guoweilu/