EXTRACTS: Illustrators issue 23 © 2018 The Book Palace (96 PAGES in Full edition)

66 ABOVE: Beam Me Up Scotty . Iressistably cutesome furry friends with a neat reference to Star Trek , FACING PAGE: Ghost Digger, Chiu’s palette is masterfully subdued, with images such as this neatly underpinnng his whimsical creations with a painterly sense of form and light. BC: I did. Working on movie-licensed toys made me want to work in the film industry so I eventually went to Sheridan College for animation and computer animation. I have fond memories of my college experience. PR: Did you always have a strong sense of the work you wanted to do? BC: Not right away. I didn’t really have a good goal at first so my career went nowhere. But when I really started to think about what I wanted to do and how I would go about doing it, that’s when my career really started to take off. You can’t hit a target when you don’t have one. PR: Teaching seems to have been a very strong dynamic for you. How did you start as a teacher? BC: There aren’t any professional artists in my family but we have a ton of teachers so you could say it runs in my blood. Even as a college student, I spent a lot of time teaching people what I had learned or discovered. It’s a wonderful feeling to teach someone but I found that getting the opportunity to teach professionally could be challenging if you didn’t study to be a teacher; you have to have experience. I decided to post online that I was starting a “Subway Sketch Group” and would teach anyone for free if they just wanted to meet up. For the first year, hardly anyone showed up but I just kept going consistently and eventually it caught on in a big way. People all around the world created their own “Subway Sketch Groups” and gave them the honorary name of “Bobby Chiu’s Subway Sketch Group”. At its height, there were over 30 Sketch Groups running in 18 countries that I knew about. PR: Schoolism appears to be going from strength to strength—would you like to tell us a bit more about how it works?