Rabbit Hybrid Scooter

Winter Monsters and Spirits

These two illustrations on birchwood panel are up for sale at Shiwasu at Nikkei Place as part of their holiday crafts sale. It’s free admission from December 10-21 Closed Sunday & Monday – check it out and happy shopping!

Starting today there will be a monster a day! I will be playing with ‘monsters’ a lot in my work in 2012.  I will blog more about that in later posts.

These monster drawings are done on tanzaku paper that I picked up in an art supply store in Tokyo back in 2009. It is actually ‘practice’ tanzaku paper – apparently that is what is written on the cover. Normally you’d write good wishes and fortune onto tanzaku paper and hang it up onto bamboo. Sometimes you see these sheets of paper with messages in shrines and temples in Japan. So here come a collection of ‘well-wishing’ daily monsters.

I happened to visit the Drawn & Quarterly shop in Montreal on my visit there recently and was pleased to find Tove Jansson’s Moomin books! I had stumbled across Moomins while doing some research for one of my ‘monster’ projects and was pleased to find out that these creatures are actually trolls living in the forests of Finland. All this time I thought they were a family of hippos! Anyways, on my sketch table now sits my own copy of  ’The Book About Moomin, Mymble and Little My…”  - just to keep the monsters and the trolls a rollin’ through these next few days!