In today's video I will be teaching you some fun facts about Ai Weiwei while turning him into
a cute anime cartoon styled character. You may recognize him as the creator of the Bird's Nest,
otherwise known as the Beijing National Stadium. As usual, I will be starting with some basic shapes: a
circle and another circle underneath. If you look at the reference photo to the left of the screen,
you'll notice there's kind of two basic shapes there. Then I'll be drawing some lines and roughly
kind of putting in where his eyes, nose, mouth, ear, hair, beard, and clothes will be! Some fun facts
you may not know about Ai Weiwei. He was born in Beijing, China in 1957. He's a Chinese contemporary
artist who mainly works in installation, sculpture, architecture, and film. His works focus mainly on
political commentary and activism. He's known best for speaking out against the Chinese government,
but still comments and creates work surrounding global politics and the politics of other nations.
Once I have the sketch in, I'm going to start cleaning up my line work.
A lot of artists tend to draw a rough sketch and create a new layer on the clean line work
on top of that, but I prefer to just work on the rough sketch and just erase the lines
afterwards. His father was Ai Qing, a renowned Chinese poet. A little after Ai Weiwei was born
his father was accused of being a rightist by the Chinese communist government. He and the rest of
his family were banished to Heilongjiang, and then to the northwestern autonomous region of Xinjiang.
They were allowed to return to Beijing in 1976. Ai Weiwei had become interested in art when he
was young, and in 1978 he enrolled at the Beijing Film Academy. He found that he was more creatively
free when working with avant-garde artists such as Xing Xing or Stars. He later moved to the united
states in 1981. He enrolled in Parsons School of Design - part of what is now The New School
in New York City, and became an active member of the artistic community while he lived there.
Ai Weiwei initially focused on painting, but found his voice within sculpture. He was inspired greatly
by the works of Marcel Duchamp and the German sculptor Joseph Beuys, so much so that in his 1988
exhibit in New York City, one of his pieces was a wire hanger bent into Duchamp's profile. However at
the time, he wasn't able to sell much of his work. Now that I'm done adding that, I am going to be
putting a colouring layer underneath my line work. I'll be choosing one skin tone to just completely
fill in everything, and then I'll select alpha lock to make sure that I never colour outside the lines.
Now I'm going to be choosing a darker skin tone and doing some shading. Then afterwards, I'll
add some highlights. You may have noticed that I chose a kind of pinkish skin tone, and used the
soft blending brush to kind of bring more life to his face - I put it a little bit in his forehead and
cheeks. In 1993, his father fell ill so he returned to Beijing. There he began to explore China's
descent into modernization away from its cultural heritage, and created pieces that transformed
historical Chinese pieces that were centuries old. These transformations were irreversible. One
famous example being the Han Dynasty urn that he painted to have a Coca-Cola label across it.
From 1994 and 1997, Ai Weiwei collaborated on writing three books about Chinese avant-garde artwork.
Since they encouraged the practice, they were published outside of government channels
and became staples of the underground Chinese art community. In 1999, Ai Weiwei built his own studio
complex on the edge of Beijing. Following this, his interest in architecture grew and he created
the design firm FAKE. The firm helped create his project Fairytale in 2007, where they transported
1001 regular Chinese citizens to explore Kassel, Germany during the Documenta art festival.
His installation piece Remembering from 2009 was the result of the 2008 earthquake. The piece was
made up of 9,000 backpacks that formed a quote in Chinese from an earthquake victim's mother.
Now that I'm done the basic coloring, I am going to fill in the background.
The background is inspired by his bike installation. What I'm doing here is I am drawing a
circle and holding my Apple pen, so that it becomes a nice smooth circle instead of a raggedy one.
And then I'm going to copy and paste this over and over, and create this kind of line of circles.
He also received praise for his 2010 piece Sunflower Seeds. Initially viewers
were encouraged to walk on top of the 100 million hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds, but had to
be roped off due to health concerns. The seeds were considered a metaphor for the Chinese population.
International coverage of the story brought more attention to Ai Weiwei's artwork. His installation
piece Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads were unveiled in New York City and London in May 2011. His
documentaries Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry in 2012, and Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case in 2013, which both were
about his achievements and misfortunes brought even further international attention his way.
Ai Weiwei's more recent work has focused on not only the politics and activism surrounding China,
but the rest of the world as well. In 2017, his film Human Flow was about the refugee
crisis, and multiple installation pieces were also created throughout New York City.
Their meaning was a response to America's strict and exclusive immigration laws. Today, Ai Weiwei
is still an active artist and activist, creating documentaries and frequenting
Twitter to add his own personal comments on current political issues. His most recent work
was his documentary CoroNation, released in 2020 which was about Wuhan's response to Covid-19.
Now I'm going to write his name but instead, I'm going to do it in Chinese.
I'm going to add some tweaks here and there, lighten some things up.
And here's the final drawing! If you enjoyed this video, give it a like. Please share it with
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