CHERIN SIM, 31 @simcherin
Before marquage became a full-time gig for Sim, she made bespoke leather bags after attending a leatherworking course in Italy. To value-add to the service, she started personalising the bags she made for her customers.
From there, she refined her painting skills for her portfolio and experience by working on her own items and her friends’, at minimal or no cost.
Eventually, a paying customer commissioned Sim to paint a Louis Vuitton Delightful GM in October 2015 – the first luxury bag she ever painted on. “The owner of the bag engaged me to alter it into a bucket bag and paint the Powerpuff Girls onto it.”
But that wasn’t her “first breakthrough”, which she says happened in August 2016, when a client came to her with a Louis Vuitton Keepall 55, requested an Astroboy theme, and told her to “give me something from you”. “That was when I started looking at the canvas as my own and taking ownership of what I created,” Sim says.
“I would like to think that I can paint anything. I never paint the same thing twice, so technically, it’s always a new challenge each time as I never really know what the final outcome will be.
“My strength lies in pop art, icons, and cartoons in a Superflat style. Superflat is a term coined by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. It’s a style with no gradient or shadows, but can still look 3-D – just like old-school cartoons. I like that it looks more graphic and stands out more on the canvas. Sometimes, I also paint realistic works. But what I paint is largely dependent on my client – my understanding of the client’s preferences, the item I’m painting on, and the subject matter I’ll be painting, which will determine the suitability of the style that I choose to apply.
“Another of my signatures is imperfect symmetry, where the left and right sides of a piece are different, but look the same from afar.
“My custom work starts from $1,000. The fee goes up according to the size (very small or very big is more expensive),