jean snow, a canadian writer based in tokyo, invited me to contribute a drawing for a website called neojaponisme. he suggested i try to use the same colour scheme as neojaponisme — red, black and grey. but he was kind to say that i could use my usual style if those colours didn’t suit my work.

i was happy for the suggestion, because i’ve been wanting to do something new. when i started drawing, i did a lot of line drawings using ballpoint pens. these days i do most of my work with colour pencils, gradually adding details and shading and only using my line drawing technique to vaguely outline figure before i start colouring.

so it was a nice brainstorming project to put my usual colour pencil technique away for awhile. i enjoyed working with a pencil again. i quite like the grey colours of graphite and the nuances that can be added by that smudging.

to add a little red to the black and white of my pencil drawing, i gave one balloon head a nosebleed. truth is, it’s a carrot stain from elijah’s lunch. he likes to feed himself these days — he gets annoyed if i try to do it all for him. when he uses his fingers, he’s very accurate and doesn’t miss much. but when he uses a spoon, food ends up all over the place — on the floor, and on his clothes, and in my hair and in this case, on my drawing. carrots flew through the air from elijah’s spoon and magically landed right on the balloon head. i like it — i think it’s very natural. so i didn’t erase it.

the colour of the carrots/nosebleed was more like orange than red. so i used photoshop to color that part, to fit with the style at neojaponisme.

(title :: simple minded)

i was reviewed on the juxtapoz website last week. pretty sweet…

We’ve been seeing the work of a lot of great Japanese artists lately, and another to add to that increasingly long list is Yuka Yamaguchi. We’ve seen mentions of her around the internets, so we thought we’d get to know her work a little better and share it with you.

Yuka has taken up residence in Saskatoon to start her art career, and so far she’s on a pretty meteoric rise. We dig how her soft, colored pencil style conjures her quirky subject matter. We like how her use of organs, muscle and veins conveys emotion on a visceral level (no pun intended), and there’s a lot of symbolism about innocence and birth.

If you live in the Portland area, you can see some of Yuka’s work in a group show (also her first US show), Girls at Play at Compound Gallery, and Bay Area residents can see some very tiny work of hers in the Tinyshop show at Double Punch Gallery. The rest of us can check out her online portfolio at www.plastiquemonkey.com.

kon’nichiwa to my new visitors. my blog got linked from metafilter last night, and a couple of thousand people have stopped by already. at first, the site crashed, because i’m not used to so much attention. it took awhile to get back up. paul has turned off the lightbox pop-up effect and the flickr gallery plugin, and now things are working better.

i love the way my drawings were described in the metafilter link: “she has a way of making flayed flesh disturbingly cute.” “disturbingly cute” is the best compliment i can ask for. one of my friends on flickr, motocchio-chan, described my drawings as “guro-kawaii” (grotesquely cute). that was a good one too.

i had a good laugh reading the thread on metafilter. some people wanted a “NSFW (not safe for work)” flag in the post title, because some of my drawings show nipples. i don’t have a job, so i have no idea what’s safe for work these days. obviously, some people have issues with some body parts like, THE NIPPLES.

i’ve had this sort of excitement before. once my submission got rejected by a local public gallery due to the possibility that parents might be offended if their children saw my drawings. i guess it’s always wise to predict what people might feel and take precautions in advance, right? anyway, that precious experience inspired me to slice off my offensive body parts and soak them in bleach (warning, might be NSFW because of nipples that aren’t attached to a body anymore). in the end, the metafilter post about me was tagged “mildly NSFW”. i’m almost disappointed — might as well be “strongly” not safe.

hmm, maybe this is also “mildly NSFW” for its hallucinating effect…

anyway, welcome to my mildly controversial website. the blog has my drawings, pages from my amigurumi storybook, and some of my experimental cooking. there are some longer posts where i’m trying to be funny — don’t worry if it doesn’t make any sense. since the gallery plugin isn’t working, my temporary “gallery” is my flickr photoset page. we’re working on setting up a shop, but it won’t be ready for another month or so. i’ll be selling smaller originals, prints, postcards, palapala (flip) books, and some of my useless toys. you can read about me on the “about the author” page.

enjoy your visit! irasshaimase!

UPDATE: this is my self portrait, age 17. it’s the new header image for this blog. and i’ve made prints of this drawing, available in my SHOP.