Greetings yokai fans!
I’ve been so busy preparing for Comic Con in Baltimore this weekend that I wasn’t able to finish the writeup for August’s last yokai until today! So here it is, just half a day late. Tennyo, the celestial maiden:
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Greetings, yokai fans!
I’m back from Maine, and it was a great vacation (when I wasn’t getting eaten alive by biting flies that is!). I managed to do quite a bit of painting, and finished this one up over the week. I finished the writeup tonight, after getting home, and am ready to post it to share with all of you. If you remember the ashura entry from the Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits, or are interested in Japanese Buddhism, this should be even more interesting. I hope you enjoy it!
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.
Greetings yokai fans!
I wanted to post this on Sunday but I got into a big fight with the background and so it was delayed a couple of days. But here it is, the final of the four shijin!
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.
Greetings, yokai fans!
Today I bring you Byakko, the guardian of the western sky! The castle in the painting is Nijo castle, located in the western part of Kyoto. If you ever visit Kyoto, definitely visit Nijo castle, it’s a very cool place. I went there early in January, after the holiday, and I was one of maybe 50 visitors in the entire place. It felt like I had the entire castle to myself, and I barely saw a soul the entire time I was there.
Anyway, on to the constellation:
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.
Greetings, yokai fans!
Tonight I bring you Suzaku, the red bird of the south. Incidentally, I was just outside admiring the sky and saw red Mars next to the Moon in the southern sky; although Mars has nothing to do with this constellation other than both being quite beautiful and red…
The research for this painting went much like the one for Seiryuu; I modeled a picture of the sky and matched the constellations of the southern sky with an old diagram of the shijin from a Chinese astrological book. The building you see is Suzakumon, the no-longer existent gate on the southern end of the ancient capital cities. This model is based on a reconstruction of what old Nara’s Suzakumon gate probably looked like, though it is not certain.
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.
Greetings yokai fans, and happy 4th of July! Tonight’s yokai has nothing to do with fireworks, but if the sky is clear maybe you can see him in the night sky! Then again, since he is associated with the spring, it may be too late to get a good look?
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.
Greetings yokai fans!
I made a last-minute decision to title this piece Yatagarasu instead of kin’u, as I have been calling in. It’s not a big difference, but mostly this is because the bird is better known as Yatagarasu in Japan. You can still call it kin’u, or sansokuu as you like. 😉
I particularly like this painting, but that’s probably just because I am a bird lover. Enjoy the story below!
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.