Interview

IMAI ATSUSHI katanashimugyou.art

Japan has a rich heritage when it comes to art. This can be traced back to the Jōmon people who were its first inhabitants. They decorated everyday objects like pottery, adding character to a utilitarian object and also built clay figurines and jewellery. This creativity continued through the Heian, Fujiwara and Edo period which featured religious themes due to prominence of Buddhism around the country. Artist Imai Atsushi uses coloured pencils. His subject material ranges from Manga to photography. In our interview with Imai, he talks about his current projects, his steps into the world of art and the popularity of Manga.

We believe you paint exclusively with coloured pencils, when did that start? It is autumn of my second year of middle school that I started drawing with coloured pencils. Until that time I was drawing manga aiming for serialisation of Japanese comic magazines. The encounter of colour pencil drawing is a lecture art book of American colour pencil society sold at a bookstore in the shopping area of ​​the city. I learned the colour pencil drawing with only that book. At that time in Japan, the colour pencil drawing book had only a range of hobbies, and there was no professional painter, so I have not forgotten the surprises when I saw a picture of a level that does not differ from oil painting. In autumn two years later I was the first colour pencil artist until 1995 to continue

my primary activity. In the twentieth year since the beginning in 2014, as a professional again I restarted as an illustrator at first, and after a year I began my second activity as a colour pencil painter at an exhibition in the UK coloured pencil society. Talk us through your sources of inspiration? The automatic flash is different at that time but what I emphasise is “How can you fascinate?” I like drawing a woman. For example, how cute you are in your teens, how complicated it is in your 20s, how gracefully in your 30s emphasises “drawing more attractively” not “drawing just like” by the age group of the model.

64