Kam Tang pushes the limits of Adobe Illustrator with gummy wonders

Kam Tang is a highly accomplished illustrator with clients under his belt such as Adidas, Nike, and London’s Design Museum. He even has his own Wikipedia page! But for someone who designed The Chemical Brothers’ excellent Push The Button album cover, which is seared into my first iPod memories, his Instagram goes criminally overlooked. Featured heavily on the page are Adobe Illustrator experiments in the realm of gummy snakes, ghosts and anthropomorphic rabbits. Kam calls them Gumigos. “With some happy accidents and exploitation of program quirks I started to push what could be achieved within Illustrator,” he shares. “Challenging texture and colouring renders like mother of pearl, coral and ceramic glazes, then onto semi transparent materials like the gummy forms and tortoise shell.”

The flurry of possibilities Kam’s unique aesthetic offers is what makes these illustrative works so mesmerising. Is it frosted glass? Gelatin? Polished crystals? The anonymity of the material is brilliantly rendered through the infinite possibilities of digital rendering. “There may be 3D modelling programs and AI that can do it instantly and arguably more realistically,” says Kam. “But crafting by hand bestows that magical human touch that is found in an oil or airbrush painting.” Whether or not Kam’s world of materially beguiling characters provoke memories of Haribos or milky glass pebbles, he is determined to do it himself. “I do not use a drawing tablet or mouse, all my work is made using just the laptop trackpad.” That’s why Kam Tang has the career he does.