illustration friday (silent #2)

Here are two more from the Holiday Daruma Series, which I introduced in the Halloween post. In addition to the two etegami posted here, yesterday I finally finished the Christmas etegami I plan to send out this winter to my closest friends and family. It also features a daruma doll. I don't want to spoil the surprise for them, so that one remains secret for now. : )

halloween daruma

I don't remember the exact location, but there used to be an outdoor daruma doll market, right next to a temple honoring the Bodhidarma, founder of Zen Buddhism. Maybe it's still there. I often passed by it when I rode my bicycle on many a Saturday, during my high school years at a certain international school in Tokyo. My solitary Saturday bike rides were a precious escape from the dormitory, from high school social life, and from group-life and group-think in general.

I would pack myself a lunch and swing my leg over the saddle, give the handle bars an encouraging pat, and off we galloped (my bike and I) into the urban wilderness. I loved to get utterly lost in the maze-like sprawl of greater Tokyo, and then find my way home again before it got dark. Only, no matter how lost I thought I was, I always ended up in the vicinity of this daruma market. It became my habit to stop off there to eat my lunch and take pleasure in the piles of bright, orangey-red paper-mache dolls.

Anyway, that's part of the reason I have a soft spot for daruma dolls. I really like the daruma etegami I made for my EarthQuake Series, so I decided to do another series featuring daruma. I think I'll call this one my Holiday Daruma Series. Probably most of them will be tongue-in-cheek. We'll see.
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christmas cards

Time passes very quickly for me these days, but never so fast as when I notice that it's time to make my holiday greeting cards. I try to get Christmas cards posted before the end of November, because at this time of the year, even air mail delivery to overseas addresses can be delayed beyond belief.

The etegami pictured here is the one I drew for Christmas 2007. It depicts the berries of the mountain ash (rowan) tree, each berry covered with a cap of snow. Mountain ash is one of my favorite trees, and while they grow profusely in the mountains of Hokkaido, they are also a favorite for planting along city streets. The berries start out pale and yellow, hardly noticeable in the green foliage, but by the end of fall, when the leaves have dropped off the branches and it begins to snow, the berries are bright, bright red.

Snow is a tricky thing to depict on a white card. I added blue shadows to make the snow more distinct, but this didn't show up very well in digital form. Nevertheless, it remains one of my favorite etegami. In my next post, I want to write about nengajou, the New Year cards that are traditionally exchanged in Japan. All the mail art I do now has its roots in the tradition of nengajou. Stay tuned!

partridges on a pear (tree)

I've been doing a lot of experimenting lately, giving etegami a bit of chigiri-e accent, or combining traditional etegami with the collage-style mail art that seems to be so popular in the West. Today I was looking at some pear drawings that were left over from one year I'd used pears for my Christmas card design. Although I'd been somewhat disappointed in the drawings, I received a lot of positive feedback when I posted them online. So I ended up keeping the leftover drawings I would otherwise have thrown away. Today I decided to use them as a base for a hybrid mailart greeting card, by gluing some cutouts of partridges onto the drawings of the pears. I still have a strong resistance to messing with traditional etegami method. I'm not sure what to think of these hybrids. Shall I put them in the post? The jury is still out.