Liang-Hsin Huang’s comics sketch soft paths through nature

When we last caught up with illustrator and animator Liang-Hsin Huang in 2021, she was living in London. Since then she’s been on quite the adventure, moving back to Taiwan, then to France before now, finding herself based back in London. These travels have been shaping Liang’s illustration over the past few years – her drawings are now influenced by “all the landscapes I’ve encountered while moving: the forest, bustling cities, the sea, and cliffs,” she say.

Liang has found comic zines to be the perfect format for recording this latest chapter of her life, to plot her past journeys but to also collect “fragmented memories”, she says. Compared to her laborious, hand-painted frame-by-frame animations, comics have allowed her to take a different approach to drawing, one that takes the pressure off making everything a masterpiece and makes room for more fun. But Liang likes the format most of all for its ability to trace movement and capture a storyline across little square frames, quite like her animated narratives but frozen in a flat lay.

The subjects of these comics have come from a series of quite random imaginings the artist had on everyday walks outdoors. Liang’s most recent zine, The North Downs Way, was a narrative shaped by her first time seeing chalk cliffs on a walk along the picturesque trail with friends. “I transformed the memories and observations from the day into imaginative and playful scenarios: mini-golf on endless hills, or a military sound mirror turning into a huge bowl for a flower bath,” she shares.

Another recent comic, The Clouds, was based on the artist’s quite recent discovery of The Cloud Appreciation Society, a worldwide group of artists, scientists, cloudspotters and dreamers who all have quite a passion for the fluffy things. “I fell in love with people sharing clouds they had seen,” says Liang. “It made me look up more – especially in London, where a blue sky in winter is a treat.”

Collecting cloud contributions from the site, Liang began to imagine what kind of people these floating forms were connected to all over the world. Each cloud became the inspiration for a short story in the comic: “In the thunderstorm chapter, a man runs into a ramen restaurant while an explorer parachutes through clouds; in another, a couple brushes their dog, and the wind makes its fur fluffier until it resembles a cloud; in another, a girl loses her tennis game, and her friends give her a fried egg to comfort her. The yolk’s colour is just like the sunset, and all these clouds’ stories are all observed and recorded by a cloud spotter,” Liang tells us.

Making these zines has brought a leisureliness to Liang’s illustration process that’s unravelling into lots of different material explorations. For each new comic Liang doesn’t limit herself to a specific medium, instead she has been thoughtfully trialling paint pastels, digital drawing and printmaking techniques to put her comic scenes into place. “For these two comics, I used Copic markers and coloured pencils on coloured paper; white on coloured paper creates rich textures for clouds, and using chalk for the whiteness of the cliffs makes them feel more real,” Liang shares. “I love layering colours to add depth and choosing diverse palettes to immerse the reader and let them travel among the different worlds I create.”