Hi! My name is Sibo Pan (潘思博) and I was born in China 26 years ago. Although I study product design, I love drawing and sharing my daily stories via illustrations with other people. I also plan to complete a ‘365 day challenge’ through an illustration diary.
About two years ago, I moved from China to Germany and started studying my Masters degree and life in Weimar; a small but lovely cultural city in Germany. As a foreign student, everything in Germany is fresh, interesting and vivid. There are many various cultural customs and living habits that differ to those in China. I really cherished this new living experience and eagerly wanted to record everything I saw in order to share it with my parents, friends and more people. Therefore, I started thinking about one issue: how could I record those cultural and customary differences combined with my feelings and experience in a special and meaningful way?
Answer? Instead of taking photos, I chose drawing as the approach.
Life is passion, drawing is my way to speak it out.
At first, my life through hand-drawn records was just a hobby in my spare time. I drew the apartment I lived in and the classrooms where I had classes.
But gradually, I fell in love with this feeling: observing the moments or things that make me feel excited and give me inspiration, and integrating my emotions into them through creation. My drawings record the Weimar that I get to know during my study life. They are not just illustrations, but show a grittier, vibrant place, full of people going about their daily lives and the scenes and activities that I observe and experience every day.
Drawing is a microcosm of my life.
Illustration allows me to observe life better and to re-live it in the days to come. By drawing, I started to pay close attention to the details that I wouldn’t notice before, such as messy kitchen countertop in student apartments, a corner filled with lots of empty bottles in our classroom, dry pigment traces on the paint bottle in the printing workshop, the packages of snacks I have eaten with my friends, different expressions on peoples’ faces when they line up to buy french fries, and so on.
Those details give my life a temperature, and I hope people from Weimar or other places in Germany will be able to awake their memories and feelings when they see my drawings, and resonate with them as well.
I am inspired by daily life and my memories. I do not want my drawings to be perfect, but real, vivid and full of passion. In other words, drawing has changed the way I look at the world, and allows me to slow down and pay more attention to the small details and happenings around me.
I do not want my drawings to be perfect, but real, vivid and full of passion.
I will keep drawing until I finish the ‘365 day challenge’, trying to find and illustrate more valuable and touching scenes and moments around me. I hope you appreciate, or even love, my story and my drawings shared here and over on my instagram. Thank you so much for reading my words.
Sibo Pan (潘思博) is a Chinese international student currently studying in Weimar, Germany for a master’s degree in product design. Depicting her hectic studious lifestyle through personal illustrations, Sibo impresses many with her dedication, talent and keen eye for detail.
Explore her illustrations and work here: