Autobiography

Car designers aren’t the only ones who bring together art and automobiles. I’m a car enthusiast and I draw the cars I love. I modify them and perfect them in my drawings according to my personal preferences, because if I were a car designer, all reality aside, that’s how I would’ve designed them.

Here is my story of how I started to draw cars. I grew up in a small village of around 1,500 people in coastal China. I started to paint without anyone teaching me when I was ten. For the next couple of years I taught myself how to paint by painting wall murals for neighbors’ homes. Back then raw materials of any kind were very scarce. Electricity and TV didn’t show up until I was 8.  Nobody paid me for my art. The neighbors provided only the paint, but also the freedom for me to experiment freely on huge canvases, as it were. I painted murals until I was 16, when a relative who came to visit my family from Hong Kong introduced me to a traditional Chinese landscape painter. I studied under him for two years before I came to the United States.

When I came to the U.S. I was enrolled as a high school senior. One day, I saw a car magazine that had the 1990 Mercedes-Benz 560SEC AMG 6.0 wide body. I didn’t know anything about car brands then. I just liked the look of the car. So I started to draw it in my art class. Painting and drawing were the only familiar activity to me, everything else such as language and lifestyle being completely new. Since I didn’t have any of the paraphernalia like rice paper, inkstand, Chinese paintbrushes with me, I decided maybe I could change my medium into pencil — this was the birth of my first automobile pencil drawing.

After a year in high school, I was able to get a scholarship to attend a private art college called California College of the Arts (CCA). I have to thank my high school art teacher for inspiring me and showing me a path to pursue what I like, which is painting and drawing. Without her, I wouldn’t have known professions such as Graphic Design or Illustration, or even know that one could make a living doing design and drawing. Although it took me six years of work and study to graduate with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Graphic Design, the longer I studied at CCA, the more I told myself I would never give up drawing or painting.

Through the years as graphic designer, art director, and design director, I would spend all my spare time doing car drawings. Drawing cars is my hobby, the way I meditate, the way I focus and clear my mind. I'm fortunate to be able to turn my passion into a business where I can do custom car drawings for individual car collectors, automobile manufacturers, car dealerships.  The next goal is to have a car art show of my own in a major auto show.

Thanks for reading my autobiography. I root for everyone who follow their passion and pursue their dreams.

Andy Chui
agi.design@yahoo.com