Greetings patrons!

Today I bring you January’s first yokai. At first I expected this one to be pretty simple, and I suppose it was in a way. But it was simple because there was literally only one single reference to it in all of Japanese folklore! And sometimes it takes a lot of research to find that out. This is one of those yokai for which nothing exists at all except for a single illustration, with no accompanying text at all, so everything is speculative. (I have added that image as an attachment, along with my sketch of it, if you are interested!) Still, it is a cute yokai and just like the person who requested it, I wished that there was more to know about it.

One of my favorite things to paint is waves like the ones you see above. One of my friends calls them “candy waves” and I like that. They do take a terribly long time though! I’m glad that, even if shihofuki is pretty much unknown and mysterious, I got to paint him along with some candy waves. I hope you all enjoy it!

Shihofuki

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Happy New Year, everyone!

I’m a bit behind on this final December yokai due to the hardware failure earlier this month. But I just finished her and wanted to share. I will put a longer writeup on yokai.com a little later.

This is kitsune tsuki, or fox possession. We looked at myobu and Kuzunoha, two examples of good foxes… well kitsune tsuki is done by bad foxes. They possess people, causing sickness or mental illness. In fact, up until modern medicine was introduced to Japan, many illness were blamed on foxes! And virtually all mental illness was blamed on them!

Foxes can possess the weak-minded, and are especially good at possessing women (yes, Japanese folklore is very sexist). They enter through a number of places, particularly under the finger nails. There is a long laundry list of symptoms, and the long and short of it is that you need an onmyoji to get the fox spirit out of you.

I will be posting a January yokai plan soon, so if you have any yokai you’d like to see, please leave a comment here. Otherwise, you can leave it up to me and I will choose some fun ones! 🙂 I’ll post the hi-res files separately, and I will post again when the writeup for this one is on yokai.com.

Happy New Year!

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Greetings, backers!

Today I bring you another kitsune for kitsune month! Today’s is a fairly famous one, and if you’ve read The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits, you’ve seen her name before: Kuzunoha, the mother of Abe no Seimei!

You can also view her up on yokai.com/kuzunoha

This post was made possible by the generous support from my Patreon backers. If you like yokai and want to learn more, please consider pledging $1 per month to support my work.

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Greetings, patrons!

Great news! My new painting tablet arrived yesterday. It’s been a harrowing two weeks… The customer support at Wacom was a nightmare, and very unhelpful, but I finally managed to get a replacement tablet for the defective one (at no charge… which is nice when we’re talking about a $2500 tool…). The wait time was the worst part of all, and I was beginning to think I might have to put this project on pause this month.

But luckily my new tablet arrived yesterday, and I spent the whole day updating and installing software and getting back to work. Since I finished all of the sketching and research for this month during the almost 20-day hiatus from painting, the only thing left to do is ink and paint the illustrations for this month. So, for that reason, today I can present to you myoubu, the good fox spirits who serve Inari! It’s a little later than I had hoped, but I hope you enjoy it nonetheless.

I will be creating 2 more yokai during the next week, so it’s going to be a busy week catching up on painting. But don’t worry, you will have two more kitsune before New Year’s!

This post was made possible by the generous support from my Patreon backers. If you like yokai and want to learn more, please consider pledging $1 per month to support my work.

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Greetings patrons!

Tonight I bring you November’s last yokai, and like the others this month, he is pretty silly!

Your cards will be charged some time this week, and I will be sending out the postcards and other rewards after that. Being December, international backers will be getting their quarterly packages as well!

To those of you receiving prints, if you have any preference of what print(s) you want to receive, send me a message and I will make them for you. Otherwise, I will surprise you! 🙂

Nigawarai

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Greetings backers!

Today I bring to you a two-for-one deal. That is to say, one painting, two yokai!

The reason is that these yokai are pretty sparse in information, so I combined them into one illustration so that when they eventually appear in a book, they won’t have a ton of blank space.

Also, they naturally go together, as the first (and practically the only) illustration of either of them is a scroll painted in 1666, in which they appear together.

I am posting them to yokai.com as I write this, so you can read about them here:

http://yokai.com/takonyuudou/
http://yokai.com/unagihime/

I hope you enjoy them! 🙂

Unagi hime & Tako nyuudou

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Greetings Patrons!

It’s been a long two weeks since the last yokai, but today I bring you sunekosuri, one of the sweetest and cutest yokai there are! I’m sharing it here with you first, and it will go live on yokai.com later this evening.

This post was made possible by the generous support from my Patreon backers. If you like yokai and want to learn more, please consider pledging $1 per month to support my work.

Become a Patron!