#鬼火

Kappa – Yokai exhibition in Japan

The first yokai Cecile wanted to draw is a Kappa. Since we visited the beautiful town of Tono, Japan, in summer 2012, we felt inspired by the nature and the folklore of this city in most of our projects, especially for our graphic novel Onibi.

Tono is famous for keeping yokai world alive and you can see kappa figures everywhere. Kappa are water creatures living in rivers. It is said that in north of Honshu, when the winter was too hard, people used to give their youngest child to the kappa. It probably means they abandoned the children in the river because they couldn’t feed everyone.

Like most of the yokai, Kappa are both cute and frightening. They can be friends with children playing at rivers but they can also decide to drown them.Anyway, Kappa have a lovely weakness that makes them very touching : a cup full of water above their head that must not disappear or they suddenly loose all strength and become weak.

At first, Cecile draws idea sketches, remembering Tono mysterious atmosphere and the statues of Kappa we saw there, like this kappa figure watercolor sketch in location Olivier drew. When the idea is found, she gathers documentation : books of Japanese yokai paintings, fish and turtle on pamphlets and books with seaweed references. She draws the pencil, then Olivier makes the inking thanks to a light pad and a black pencil (UniPin 0.3). He humidifies the paper (Canson 300g) with water and fixes it on a wood plate before starting to color (Winsor&Newton watercolor).

Fox lady – Yokai exhibition in Japan

In may 2010, when we lived in Niigata, Japan, we had the chance to witness a very mysterious event in the mountains : a fox wedding under the cherry-blossom trees. It remains one of our most beautiful and strange memories from Japan. The inhabitants of the village had fox makeup and were celebrating this strange slow wedding until late in the night. We saw a young lady with a beautiful yukata and a fox mask upon her head plus a fox makeup on the face. She was acting like a real fox, with the hands closed like fox paws.

In Japan, it is said that foxes change into beautiful girl to attract men in traps ! This girls was sooo strangely beautiful that we couldn’t prevent ourselves from thinking she was a real one…

We used this idea many time for our sign sessions of our graphic novel Onibi but this time we made it very close to our memory of a strange and ecstatic spring day in the mountains.

For the clothes, we use washi paper (Japanese paper) that helps us to imagine the colors and the motif.

Onibi sign on the walls of a Japanese restaurant

Yesterday, we went to one of the best Japanese restaurant you can find in France : Little Tokyo. The food is fresh, seasonal and homemade by the great and very nice chef Masako. But the most important is that the place was designed by her and her friends, including our friends Junko and Mathieu from Vigier Zoen (http://www.instagram.com/vigierzoen) who worked on the interior and exterior design.They created a place that remind us so much Japan. A peaceful and warm atmosphere where you exchange with the other customers and with the cookers. Masako support us since many years with her kind words and we were delighted she asked us to draw something on the walls of her beloved restaurant. We felt like we took part of this beautiful project gathering many artists skills and will.