It is far from easter, but I have been drawing this with delight. This is  ordered by one of my client, as a gift to an ‘IVH’ clinic for their 20th year anniversary .

IVH is fertility treatment, and my client gave me his request to feature the ‘egg’.

So I tried to draw baby bunnies sleeping in a safe underground nest, hoping it looks like in a way in a womb, and the all the wild flowers around are guarding the baby bunnies ,making a shape of egg…

Actually I have started with another piece in which the surrounding wildflowers were more real, but abandoned it, then get to this picture. it was beyond my first aim, totally out of my imagination but my hands just made it.

Drawing is so fun!

.

The new desk calendar with my illustration for 2015 has been released!!

Being titled ‘Animals in the Forest”, 12 wild animals are featured in every months.

Well…This type of design was completely new for me, and yes, I enjoyed the work so much.

Actually, construction design was done by Satoshi Maeda, my husband and ex-architect.

His idea was to make it simple enough to avoid the complicated process to construct it by the users. So it is designed to be just folded in its distribution, and the users only have to pull the front frame facing and just a bit to secure by enforcing the folded lines to make it stand up.

The publishing company of this calendar offered to collaborate with Satoshi, it was completely out of my idea at the beginning, but it appeared to be a nice idea, as we could discuss anytime at home for the design.

I feel most happy every time I get the final product that I have been working for.

Thanks so much for all the people’s honest efforts involved in this project!!

.

↑Patissiere

↑Golf players

↑Cycling

.

I have a friend, who was my junior-high classmate. She is so keen about chinese astrology.(She has her family origin in Taiwan, maybe that is the reason). She is a pharmacist, and scientifically intelligent, but also have an excellent intuition,  in a kind of super-natural way, i.e. She recognised her husband’s cancer in the very first stage in her dreaming…She is my ‘Sherman’, too.

At the very end of the last year, she told me that 2014 will be a very nice year for me. And her prophesy is already seeming to become true. Because I am so much enjoying to work for illustrations just from the very beginning of this year.

These are still the dummy works for 2015 calendar design, but it arose me quite a pure happiness to work, just fun to draw and paint, which we tend to lose in working as a professional.

This primitive happiness in art-work making is most valuable and precious, than the other goodness ever, such as the successful achievement as a business and so on.

↓Girls from Bretagne

↓Winter

↓Nicola Tesla, from ‘Great Scientists’

↓Squirrel

As you might see, those series of works can be divided into 2 categories: 1 is for animals basically in their natural appearance. 2 is the dressed animals in human world activity. I myself cannot decide which way would be nice for the calendar. We will have a talk with our publisher after 10 days, then i hope the decision will be out.

Tags: Art.

illustrated flax family, worked for the 2014 calendar of Teikoku Sen-i Co., LTD.  which is an oldest linen manufacturer in Japan. (the word sen-i means ‘fiber’ in Japanese)

.

This is the work I do monthly,  the cover art&text on ‘Tsubame no Ouchi’ (means: Sparrow’s House), which is the annex leaflet  for picture books published by Froebel-Kan Co.,Ltd.

This July issue is offering a simple recipes to make a herb tea jelly, with camomile or mint.

It is to be printed in 2 colours, but unfortunately I am not very good at working for pictures in 2 colours…  Well, actually I can draw it in black and the other colour off course, though incapable by my daily use materials-watercolours with colour pencils.

At first I tried several ways to maintain my aiming quality with softness, but finally I found it better to work with my usual materials for full colour art works, then to ask my art director to ‘divide’ the colour to print it using just 2 colour inks.

And it worked very successfully!

I am so delighted about the results, as those printed images come out in excellent quality far more than I expected. Additionally, it seems getting nicer and nicer month by month.(You can see the above image is printed just in 2 colours- blue and orange.)

Encouraged by this experience, I am now thinking that it might be nice to make a picture book in 2 colour printings.

The excellent teamwork made me awakened to get the new idea, which I have never thought of before.

.

.

This is an image of flax scutchers. I have sketched them from the old belgian photos in ‘Flax in Flanders‘.

.

.

.