Chanho Lee
California Institute of the Arts

Humanimal

Biography: Chanho Lee, born in Seoul, Korea, majored in Visual Communication Design at Hong-Ik University. He continued his studies at California Institute of the Arts earning a second BFA in Graphic design. While at CalArts, Chanho worked in its CAP (Community Arts Partnership) as a graphic designer and won a Getty Internship.

He focuses on creating unique characters which are hybrid combinations of human, animal, and object, like his main character “Choco” the dog, inspired by his obsessive passion for dogs. He hopes to launch a character merchandizing business with creations that may prove as successful as Hello Kitty.

Objective: Humanimal is a hybrid combination of human, animal, and object. Welcome to my dream world. This is the world that I want to live in. I imagine that I am a billionaire and retired from my design job and all the creatures are made from my imagination. I would like to encourage other people to use their imagination more in their day-to-day lives.

Tools used: Everything is done in Adobe® Illustrator®. I mostly used the Pencil tool to create the characters. This poster would not be possible without the Pathfinder tool. A lot of times, I needed to divide, exclude, subtract the shape, and so on. Also, it is great to have the swatch libraries so that I can use so many subtle different colors.