When Huihan Liu was a child in rural China, he managed to save enough money to buy a small sketchbook. The store, where he could purchase it, was several miles away from his home, but Liu chose to walk instead of taking the bus, so that he could use all of his money on paper.

“It was just a little piece of a sketchbook, but I was so happy to have it,” he says. “I would draw on it and then erase it, so that I could draw on it again. I drew on that paper over and over again.”

Liu, who later progressed to drawing on the pages in his textbooks and any other scraps of paper he could find, still loves to sit down with a sketchbook and draw. “If I’m not drawing something, I feel like something is lacking,” he says from his home in San Francisco, California. “I’m not competitive about it. I just love to do it. I have always loved sketchbooks and drawing; all I need is paper and a pencil.”

Huihan Liu

Night Walk
Oil
18″ x 24″
“A night scene is fun to paint, with its simple unity and cool color palette. Moonlight creates a beautiful structure form on the horse, which was my focus, while the figure was casually in the shadows.”

Huihan Liu

Sunset Gather
Oil
30″ x 40″
“This studio piece was done by combining many photo references from a trip to the northern Tibet region. I used many snapshots taken from a distance at the market. It was so much fun to see people dressed in different, beautiful color patterns, while shopping at sunset. My focus was to arrange a foreground/mid-background as a market composition to catch a traffic sound of atmosphere.”