Illustrator Kim Jung Gi has died at 47

With all the hullaballoo about AI art, I think HNers might be interested to mourn KJG or learn who he was and then mourn.

Kim Jung Gi was a phenomenally talented illustrator with a rare ability to draw just about anything from any perspective, straight from his mind's eye. Where most artists or illustrators might require a "scaffolding sketch" to get started even for a relatively simple angle, KJG would draw straight into the details of complex fish-eye lens views without a preliminary sketch or reference material. Instead, he spent his life[0] building a 'visual vocabulary' of all the things he saw, and then drawing from there to illustrate his scenes. Given this, the illustrations he made are, collectively, an illustration of the artist.

This guy was a heavyweight. Watching him work really is breathtaking; it's a little like the scene from I-Robot... but more human. It is fortunate only that he has left behind so many illustrations and videos to continue to inspire young artists.

[0] He claimed to have drawn for 12-16 hours a day as a child. If you watch him draw and have any experience drawing, it's believable that he really did spend all his time drawing.