Lena Yokoyama uses illustration as a translation tool for intrinsic words or phrases The recent Camberwell graduate’s practice sees her collaborate with her translator father to visually present untranslatable words. Words Share Despite always loving the act of drawing, it was by discovering printmaking that London-based Lena Yokoyama fell head-over-heels for illustration. Joining Camberwell College of Art’s course in 2016, “as cheesy as this might sound,” she tells It’s Nice That, “I knew from the beginning that I had found my passion.” The revolution in Lena’s practice however was when she acquired her own Risograph printer in second year, not only allowing her the freedom to print, but begin an illustrative approach centring around “thinking and drawing in layers”, as she describes. Spending the next two years developing this technique, as well as hunkering down on the themes and subject matter she wished to present, Lena graduated with a tone of voice combining texture and beautifully loose line work, pushing the strict limits of Riso’s selective colour palette in her gradients. However this way of thinking isn’t just limited to Lena’s visual tendencies, with her final (and ever growing) project at Camberwell demonstrating how really, she not only thinks in layers aesthetically but contextually, too.