The other big thing I’ve been working on is preparing for the (drumroll) A-Yokai-A-Day project! For the entire month of October, I will complete a full illustration of one of Japan’s folkloric yōkai. Yokai are to Japan what the boogeyman, Bloody Mary, the Sandman, elves, fairies, bugbears, trolls, and ghosts are to Americans and Europeans. They run a whole range of styles and types, from cute and cuddly to vengeful, grotesque, and horrifying. And while many of them come from ancient superstitions and tales, their influence pervades Japanese culture all over — in art, in decorations, and even in Pokemon, many of which are taken straight out of the pages of folklore. There’s a lot of fun information on yokai on their Wikipedia entry, The Obakemono Project, as well as from Mizuki Shigeru, Japan’s most famous yokai expert/manga artist. Many of Japan’s famous woodblock printers and painters have also left us their own visions of yokai over the centuries, but those are a little harder to find.

Last year’s project was so much fun that I couldn’t resist revisiting it. It was inevitable anyway, as the fall weather and feeling of Halloween approaching forces my mind to dwell on ghosts and goblins and spooky things like that, so it’s only natural to want to paint those things. Compared with last year, my schedule is much fuller this October, so I’ve been spending parts of the last week and a half drawing up my battle plan to tackle this big project again. Last year I was a bit freer and so I chose whatever yokai I felt like drawing that particular day, starting with the research. This year, I’ve done my research beforehand and made up a daily yokai schedule so all that remains is to draw and paint the beasties.

There will also be a slightly different thematic element this year. Last year I started with tamer yokai and gradually moved up to scarier ones as it got closer to Halloween. This year I’ve broken it down into three sections: the first 10 days of the month I will be doing paintings of animal-like yokai; the second 10 days will feature slightly more wild and monstrous yokai; and the final part of the month is reserved for everybody’s favorite kind of yokai — haunted girls. No, I’m not a misogynist — you can blame the Japanese for the fact that there are so many evil women in their folklore — but the scary stories featuring women as the antagonists are by far the most interesting and scariest. Just look at the way Japanese horror movies have transformed the way ghosts are depicted all over the world in recent years. And then, there’s the fact that out of last year’s paintings, the ones I did of scary girls were immensely more popular than the others, and after all I do need to make a living here.

Anyway, A-Yokai-A-Day begins on October 1st, so get the kids, tell your friends, bookmark this page, and please share the link to the project (http://matthewmeyer.net/blog/tags/a-yokai-a-day) on Facebook, Twitter, and anywhere else! Help me get the word out!

And stay tuned for the first yokai on October 1st!