In Which I Illustrate a Pouch and a Shawl for a Major Japanese Pop Star

A few blog posts ago, I promised that when the shawl and pouch I illustrated for Sony artist Yuki’s 2010 tour were available for viewing on line, I would share them with you. So I am happy to say, here they are!

This is the artist herself holding on her head a pouch shaped like one of my birds, printed with part of the illustration I made for the shawl that she described and I drew. It’s lined with lavender satin, and embroidered with metallic gold thread.

Here she is, wrapped in her own poetry and the images she suggested to me, in a long and lovely natural gauze shawl. The images on the shawl are from the poem (actually a song lyric) which she wrote in English, and which I wrote in my handwriting into the images on the shawl.  As of today, October 26, 2010, the shawl has completely sold out.

I took these snapshots of the upper and lower halves of the paper layout of the fabric print that would appear on the shawl, before numbering and then separating all of the sheets, scanning each one, and sending the scans, along with a numbered chart, to the manufacturer in Japan to be reassembled and then printed on huge pieces of white gauzy cotton:

I realized tonight that this is the second time I’ve seen my drawings adorn a Japanese pop star.  The first time was in 2007, when the duo Puffy Amiyumi was photographed for the teen fashion magazine Cutie, one of them wearing a Living on the Earth print dress by designed by Aya Noguchi for her Tokyo fashion company, Balcony & Bed.

Here’s a close-up of the Living on the Earth wool jersey fabric print.  There were three color variations, one with a black background (below), one with a brown background (above), and one with a yellow background.

Here I am, modeling the black background print dress with a matching scarf at Aya Noguchi’s house near Hayama, Kanagawa, on May 24, 2007, as part of a fashion shoot by Switch Magazine.  I am holding my Traveler Pro Series Guitar.