Model answer
Written by 8020 teachers. Do not memorise it — take the structure and the way ideas are developed, then speak about your own life.
I'll talk about my cousin Linh, who's a few years older than me and works as an illustrator, mostly doing book covers and the occasional editorial piece for magazines. She creates fairly distinctive digital illustrations — a lot of muted colour, slightly surreal compositions, figures half dissolving into landscapes, that kind of thing, quite different from the bright, clean style you see everywhere on social media at the moment. Her ideas come from all sorts of unexpected places, honestly — she once told me a whole cover concept came from a smell, the specific mustiness of an old family photo album, and she spends a lot of time just sitting with a feeling before she draws anything concrete, rather than sketching straight away. I find her creative less because of the technical skill, which is obviously there, and more because of how she notices things the rest of us walk straight past — an odd shadow, a strange bit of overheard conversation, and turns them into something coherent that other people then respond to emotionally without quite knowing why. We talk fairly often, and I've noticed that being around her has made me pay closer attention to ordinary things myself, which I think is probably the real mark of a genuinely creative person — not just what they produce, but how they change the way people near them see the world.