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Artist Spotlight-Japanese paper-doll artist Maki Hino.

4/26/2023

1 Comment

I want to start sharing some of my favorite living artists for you to enjoy. Some of these amazing folks I collect from, some I just admire from afar and fangirl-out while stalking them online. This week I'd like to introduce Japanese paper-doll artist Maki Hino.

Artist Maki Hino is from Japan and was born in Nagano Prefecture. She started out as a doll-maker in 1993, originally studying ball-jointed dolls and then creating her figures out of clay and seashells.
In 2010 Hino began the new adventure of making 2-D dolls using acrylic paint on paper to tell these tiny flat stories filled with nostalgia and wonder.
Sometimes her narrative cutouts are presented framed, sometimes mounted direct to the wall, creating a tiny fanciful installation that could be mounted anywhere you need them to inspire you.

I adore the mix of sweet and strange she evokes with her work, and naturally the fact that many of her pieces have a cat lurking around somewhere charmed me right away.
In fact, on her website there is a blog (last updated 2 years ago) that is largely filled with heartfelt commentary about the various cats in her life, though it is all in Japanese, so you'll have to hit up the google translate to mine those little gems.
Her website is called "Kitchen", which confounded me at first, but I discovered that she originally made all her dolls in the corner of her kitchen before she had studio space in her life. :)
I hope you enjoyed her work, I'll share another artist with you sometime next month.
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1 Comment

Drawing While Delirious

4/12/2023

2 Comments

MOOD.

Last week I had a whole plan to write something funny and self-deprecating about how frustrating it is to have ideas in your head that your hand is too maddeningly dumb to put down on paper, but then it happened. I got SICK.
You know, the kind of sick where you fall asleep sitting up because you blinked too slowly.
The kind of sick where you don't know what day of the week it is.
I really feel like there should be a third thing here to balance this stupid paragraph out, but I'm too sick to think, so this is pretty much all you're gonna get right now on that topic.

Being sick is actually kind of a problem for me because I get crazy anxiety about health things and when I'm feeling really poorly my brain does mean things to the rest of me and to itself.
This makes it extra difficult to do things like write, because my head gets all filled up with Fog and Fears instead of what it should be filled with, which is, of course, Millions and Millions of Shiny Sighs. Naturally.

Anyway, I just decided to just do what I could manage and that turned out to be picking up a pencil. So what you see above is me using what brain I had left to illustrate how I feel about getting The Covid Plague after dodging it all this time.

Thanks for being my friend and let's talk again next week, when I plan to have a sketchbook sale!
You can sign up here to get notified when it goes live and I promise strange and pretty things on paper that don't cost much to ship because they are all unframed and dying to become yours forever.