Jerusha Perera on evolving as an artist across multiple media

Jerusha Perera is a young artist who, over the years, has attracted an audience for her creative work on social media. Her YouTube channel has gained over 45,000 views within less than a year, while her comic Stir-fried Feelings has one million views on the platform Webtoon. She also recently revisited traditional art and spoke to The Morning Brunch about digital art, painting, and creating a lifestyle channel.

Perera described Stir-fried Feelings as a slice-of-life comic loosely based on her life and personal experiences. Her ideas are often based on true stories. 

“After certain encounters or experiences, the thought that this could be a great idea for an episode crosses my mind and then I map out the best way to convey the story to my reader and finally bring it to life with art,” Perera said.

In terms of her YouTube presence, Perera explained that the channel was created with the intention of making more art-related content similar to what she does on TikTok and Instagram, adding that she can’t believe it has been almost a year since she created the channel. Her YouTube content slowly evolved into a lifestyle channel, but art remains a big part of it since her life is all about creating art.

“Going from art to webtoons to YouTube happened more naturally than one might assume actually,” she said, explaining that one needs to keep evolving as an artist. “As I grew, I discovered more ways and outlets of creativity, expression, and most importantly storytelling, so I simply tried my hand at them and absolutely loved it!”

When asked what inspires her as an artist, Perera said the question always leaves her at a loss for words, because one would be surprised at the things that can trigger a creative burst for her when it comes to finding inspiration for different ideas or projects.

“My creativity comes in waves, so when I’m looking for that boost, I mostly draw inspiration from the things I see, the things happening around me and my environment. Things in the physical and most often online. I learn by observation, so having social media platforms and being exposed to the many creators on it always fills me up with tons of inspiration; not only that, but also the different methods and techniques,” she said.

Perera explained that she has been drawing for ages, but started exploring digital art around 2018. At this point, she wholeheartedly believed there was no going back from digital art, but found, to her surprise, a need to expand and improve on what she was already doing. This eventually brought her back to what she described as her first love – traditional art, specifically painting.

Her process differs significantly when it comes to the two types of art. “With digital art, you can be very precise and plan out every detail of the piece and you can keep making adjustments to the piece, but with traditional art, the way I do it specifically requires more planning beforehand and unless you’re improvising you can’t really make any adjustments to the base sketch or colours once you’ve put them down on paper,” she said.

On Instagram, the artist had called traditional art liberating and calming, and we inquired if she still sees traditional art in this light. Perera explained that one main reason that she went back into doing more traditional art was to let loose a little because you have to adapt to your mistakes. The artist went on to say that with digital art, you can go on adjusting every little detail and plan out fixing your work, until even you grow tired of looking at it. Perera added that there were times when she got stuck in her own head creating digital art.

“With traditional art, I personally just love to go with the flow, improvising and seeing what I can create with whatever I’m working on. Of course I don’t go into it totally blind, I have a general idea and build on that, but I don’t get too hung up on my errors. On the contrary, I try to use it to my advantage to create something really cool. It’s very therapeutic and really helps me get out of my head if I’m having any sort of creative block, or when I’m stressed out.”

Perera is currently a design student at the University of Moratuwa and this takes up most of her time. However, she does try to upload regularly on her YouTube channel as well as on Webtoon. She is also working on a few interesting projects at the moment. She said she couldn’t share too much information about these projects, but did say these projects include a few children’s books.