yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Go Behind The Scenes with Illustrator Christoph Niemann | National Geographic


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

You come to Cambodia and Vietnam going down the Mekong River, and you learn a lot here. The biggest realization I had was the only exotic thing here is me. This place has been around for 2,000 years; everything is perfectly normal. But this, for me, is the travel experience: questioning also your normal by going to a place that has a different kind of normal.

My name is Christophe Neiman. I'm an illustrator, and over the years, I always drew when I traveled. One of the most important things for me when I do these trips is not to have any preconceived notions. You come there, and of course, I feel the creative pressure to create a story in time where the good images are. But you have to live a little bit, and you have to allow for something to happen.

I go back and forth between your mind and the place when I make a drawing. What I do is utterly subjective. I look at a landscape that consists of a million different elements, and I've picked some out and made the bigger sum — through conscious decisions, some through just unconscious. Over there's this tree; I happen to have red ink, so now the tree is red. You filter the world through the limitations of ink on paper.

Another aspect that's very important for me when I create an image is a certain kind of contrast, and drawing is great because you can amplify contrasts. We go to Angkor Wat in the morning for sunrise, which is an incredible moment. But even though it's an incredible moment, I've seen pictures of that before. So, you pair it against the photos that you've seen. Real life has a lot of people with cellphones scrambling for the right position to get the right moment of the Sun reflecting in the water lily pond.

I think you can take this stock photo postcard moment that you have stored somewhere and check that against the reality. My goal for a reader is to look at that and say, "Yeah, that's my travel experience." It's not this perfect 4K; everything's amazing; every detail is photoshopped out. But it's like the moment where something is a little off. I think it becomes interesting where I see what I do is really being like a scientific amateur and almost, you know, kind of turning the lens on myself and how I experience this amazing world.

I almost feel like I'm the reader who then gets to stand in the middle of the story and we just see what happens. [Music]

More Articles

View All
How to negotiate with billionaires.
I negotiate with billionaires every day in what I do. Everybody always asks me, “How do you negotiate with a billionaire, a big corporate executive, and things like that?” To tell you the truth, you negotiate with them just like you negotiate with anybod…
Preparing for the AP US History Exam (5/4/2016)
Hi, this is S of the KH Academy, and you know we’ve always had a lot of content on KH Academy for the various AP tests, and we’ve actually been building out a lot for American history. So I’m here with Kim, who’s our AP History or American history fellow.…
Charlie Munger: We're Playing With Fire (Interview)
[Music] Hey guys, welcome back to the channel. We got something really cool to talk about today: Charlie Munger. As you guys know, one of my favorite investors, he recently did a 45-50 minute interview with the California Institute of Technology, which i…
The Market Revolution - part 3
So why do we care about the market Revolution? The Industrial Revolution and the transportation and communication Revolutions of the early 19th century had a major impact on American society both in the short term and in the long term. In this video, I wa…
WTF Just Happened To California?!
Because social media spreads the bad news so incredibly quickly, many people have now become fearful. Beachgoers watched in horror as a violent fight broke out this afternoon. This poor little girl is probably going to need counseling and therapy. I want …
Snowmobile Inspection | Life Below Zero
Go have a look at the undercarriage. I look for dead shocks, the Fela dead shocks. I want to feel some pressure and some compression. These are feeling good. One of our wear parts on a snow machine is a belt. You can burn them up, bust them, blow them; al…