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Illustrations by artists and were recently honoured with merit awards in a juried competition for international illustration magazine .

Razor Wire by fourth-year �鶹��Ƶ student Yejin Park was featured in the special edition of the magazine, as was a selection of works from �鶹��Ƶ faculty member Amory Abbott’s 42-card deck.

Speaking via email from her home in South Korea, Yejin notes she was encouraged to enter the 3x3 competition by Amory, for whose class her winning entry was created. Razor Wire represents her current work well, she tells me, and draws in the themes and concerns she pursues more broadly in her illustration practice.

“I’m quite interested in finding ways to interpret points of tension,” Yejin says. “Sometimes that involves history, our relationships to culture, matters of identity, etc. It’s rewarding to pull at threads of narrative for further consideration, especially when they may be overlooked otherwise.”

For Amory, who has participated in the 3x3 competition each year for most of the past decade, this year’s merit award is his second. His first came in 2018, for a series of landscapes depicting places in JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth.

“It’s exhilarating to see my work in the annual — to feel part of something really big and important in the illustration community, and to know that many publishers, art directors, and editors will be collecting the annual to find new talent for their own future job opportunities,” he tells me via email.

“Even more exciting is to see students of the �鶹��Ƶ illustration program featured in the annual. I’ve had a lot of ‘proud dad’ moments over the last few years seeing my students succeed in these ways, especially this year with Yejin Park and her award in the 3x3 student show. She’s amazing at what she does, and truly deserves the recognition and success that will come from it.”

3x3’s annual competitions — one for professional illustrators and one for students — are juried by an international panel of independent judges, with hundreds of entrants representing more than thirty-five countries. Winners from across categories including book covers, editorial, comics and textiles are featured in an anthology, which is both printed and available in digital form.

�����ǰ���’s Bloodlands Oracle deck — which depicts individual geographic features such as rivers, mountains, waterfalls and forests that appear in his larger charcoal landscape drawings — is his second illustrated card deck in recent years. His 78-card deck, released in 2019, was such a rewarding project that he decided to “take my own creative route with the symbolism and meaning of a deck of divination cards.” As an artist whose practice regularly moves between disciplines including drawing, illustration and print, Amory says the distinctions between his bodies of work may sometimes feel blurry.

“Admittedly, I’m always surprised when my work fits comfortably into ‘illustration,’ but I also feel like I’m sneaking illustrations into a gallery when I have a show,” he says. “Ultimately, that tells me I’m doing something right; creating a new blend of approaches to art-making, pushing my medium and concepts beyond one niche, and championing illustration as a powerful art form — one often overlooked in the world of conceptual and ‘high-brow’ art. Not surprisingly, these are also fundamental ways of thinking that I teach students in the illustration program here, and why so many of them are so successful.”

Yejin, whose artistic practice includes “traditional Korean pottery and ink wash/sumi-e painting,” agrees, noting that part of the appeal of illustration is its potential for overlapping with other art forms and genres.

“I illustrate because it offers a way for me to combine a diverse background of inspiration into an image and respond directly,” she says. “As someone who is interested in considering who has the privilege of creating stories (over, say, representation), a medium that interacts with all these aspects is certainly engaging.”

Nor has Yejin hesitated to push her reach as an illustrator. Having decided not to wait until after graduation to pursue work as a professional illustrator, Yejin has been busy amid a “whirlwind” of projects such as variant covers for comic books distributed by Boom! Studios (including a ); contributing to the artist book; and producing key art for The Pixel Hunt’s video game, The Wreck.

“There are a few other projects lined up that I’m not allowed to talk about in detail so I will just say that I’ve been busy and looking forward to sharing those in the future!” Yejin says.

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Visit �鶹��Ƶ online today to learn more about studying illustration at Emily Carr.