art auction

I was super happy to donate a little etching to @artiststakeaction when I was in California, as they are raising money for all sorts of important causes. This week it went online and there was quite a bit of bidding over the print and I really hope the winner will love it! I wonder if they are someone who likes to sew…

I have also donated one of my newer mokuhanga prints to the upcoming auction by Still We Rise, who raise money for alot of women’s causes. It starts on monday, and more information can be found on their website and instagram.

Every little counts, and I hope my artwork can make the world a tiny bit better. M x

a trip to the countryside

After a succession of grey rainy weeks in Tokyo, it was a pleasure to take a few days off and visit the countryside. We stayed in 2 cabins, the first near Karuizawa, the second in Gunma. I sketched a little…

…and spent the rest of the time walking, taking photographs, and eating many, many different kinds of apples.

I already can’t wait to go on another trip…

Illustrator's Fair

I’m extremely happy to be taking part in the online Illustrator’s Fair again this year. It aims to promote the work of over 100 contemporary Illustrators as part of the London Design Festival.

I’ve added lots of lovely new prints to my online shop especially for the Fair, including some of my recently completed Dusk landscape prints, as well as many of my florals.

You can find out more about the Fair here, and I do hope you’ll take a look around, both at my website and shop, and those of all the other great featured illustrators.

COPE Wildfires book

This summer, to coincide with the California Wildfires season, we launched the new COPE picture book.

For the first time, the COPE team visit two different locations to study a natural disaster…

They go to South Africa first, to look at the effects of the large wildfires that happened in Knysna…

…and then move on to California and the Sonoma fires. I was especially pleased and honoured to get the chance to draw a portrait of San Francisco’s Fire Chief, who supported the book.

It’s always hard doing the research for the books, these disasters are getting more common due to increasing climate change, but I hope that they’ll save the lives of children who’ll be more prepared and know what to do in they find themselves in the midst of an emergency situation.

As always, you can read the books for free on the COPE website. Be prepared!

daily constitutional

It’s that funny time of year in Tokyo, as summer ends, when it’s occasionally sunny and hot, and then the next day it’s raining and cool. I’ve been walking every day since I got out of quarantine, taking photos of the local area. I love this mix of urban and green, and there are always so many interesting details to be found…

I love finding the growing things in the nooks and crannies of buildings, and the little pots of plants that line almost every narrow street.

Korean Beauty Secret

Korean beauty products have become all the rage, and my friend Karen in HK has her own store selling them, called Korean Beauty Secret. She started with a tiny, tiny store, and then gradually, as her products became more popular, she upgraded into larger and larger spaces until finally this year she opened two new specially-designed stores inside shopping malls.

The original logo I created for KBS had a lady with a flower on her head, and then I added another lady with a spotty ribbon, who took over as the main logo image. I used the flower lady to create an illustration for KBS postcards and mailers, which has now been used on the store hoarding, and instore, on picture walls.

Here’s a detail of the lady in gold foil stamping on pink, that was used on a large paper shopping bag, and some pink satin ribbons.

This is one of the newly opened stores - you can see my illustration on the wall behind the cashier, and the revamped logo above the door.

Hope the brand continues its success from here!

sustainable editoral

Here’s a pen and ink illustration for the cover of Grocery Business Magazine that I completed recently. It’s about Kroger, a supermarket chain in the US, that is making efforts to be more environmentally sustainable.

It was really interesting to do the research for this piece, and find ways to create icons for all the important elements of this subject. You can read the article here. Every little helps!

I love seeing how art directors and designers use my illustrations in websites too…

afternoon tea week

This week is Afternoon Tea Week in the UK, celebrating this great British tradition. I love making the treats for afternoon tea, especially cucumber sandwiches (no crusts) and lemon drizzle cake.

These photos are from last year, but they show off my ceramic cakestands nicely - both the red and white Hong Kong toile version, and the award-winning green and gold Hong Kong Willow version below.

There are a variety of cakestands with my illustrations available from faux in HK if you’re looking to get one for yourself or a gift.

Edition Basel residency

I’ve just completed a virtual artists residency with Edition Basel in Switzerland. I was in California, and worked on mokuhanga prints, and then we all got together on zoom every evening from all over the world and discussed what we’d been doing.

We collectively chose the theme of ‘Übergang’ for our residency, a German word meaning transition/change/boundary. I made a series of prints of the view from the balcony, looking at the dusk/sunset/twilight skies. And then made them into accordian-fold artists books, that show a different view depending on which angle you view them from.

This weekend a show is being held at the Basler Papiermuhle in Basel, with everyone’s work, either in person, or on screens for those of us participating from abroad. I managed to send in some of my flat prints, but also showed the finished folded pieces on a screen.

It was lovely to meet so many new printmakers, and take part in some lively conversations over the course of the week.

These are some of the experimental prints I made, using 4 blocks and a variety of colours…

I haven’t really tried to use the whole paper like this for a very long time, and I had fun inking up the blocks in random painterly ways, and not worrying about making exact editions!

I set up a low table for the residency and spent the whole week here, carving, designing, printing, cutting and glueing…

I spent the first day of the residency seeing if I could design, carve and print all in one day - turns out I can! I made this small series of bird prints, that can be viewed from any way up.

One day I hope I’ll be able to visit Basel and the amazing Druckwerk printstudio in person…

Tokyo Summer exhibition

I showed three new mokuhanga prints in the Summer Mokuhanga Fair organised by MI-LAB in 3331 Arts Chiyoda, Tokyo last weekend. I wish I could’ve attended!

Everyone who exhibited was invited to try some new washi papers from Ozu Washi, and one of Holbein paints new seasonal paint palettes. I really enjoyed this part if it, trying materials that were new to me.

I’m hoping to make many new works with these materials and continue exploring the theme of gardens, flowers, and how we see them.

Point Reyes

It’s my birthday weekend! As a treat, I managed to go on a little trip (not too far) and spent 2 days in and around Point Reyes, visiting the Point Reyes National Seashore, and even managed to do some sketching…

This is Indian Beach, and it was totally empty, except for jellyfish, floating along happily in the sunshine.

I sketched the sailing boats in Tomales Bay, and then the wetlands and bridge over the mouth of the river where it fed into the bay.

Cow Track Ranch was an incredible, cosy place to stay, and I loved the whole cowboy feeling of the interiors! Also the chickens and swallows…

The hills were all dry and yellow, but still beautiful. I really hope it rains soon, and that the land can become green again.

Can’t wait for another little trip there soon!

new mokuhanga print 2

It’s finished! Here’s my newest print summer blooms all framed up, ready for the Summer Colour Exhibition at 3331 Arts Chiyoda in Tokyo in 2 weeks.

It’s a 4 block print, with a variety of layering and bokashi techniques. I wanted to create more realistic looking flowers than my usual, but still with my feature flatness. I love how the stems came out!

Here’s my printing set-up with sketches to work from, and a detail of one of the buds. Hope you can pop in to the show to take a look!

new mokuhanga print

I’m working on a new mokuhanga print of flowers. I bought some ranunculus blooms and sketched them in a variety of positions, and worked out a design that’s slightly more realistic than my usual work. I’m trying something a little different for this one! I then transferred my sketch to a largish piece of wood and started carving…

I can’t wait to test out some lovely colours for printing!

summer newsletter

Hello and welcome to July! I just sent out my third newsletter, filled with Mariko news and some interesting tidbits from around the internet.

I’m still working out what works in a newsletter (all advice welcome) but one thing I like is to start with a recent topical sketch that I make specially. This is the view from the balcony here in California.

You can sign up for my newsletters here. Thanks!

mokuhanga baren pin

My printmaking collective wood+paper+box commissioned a jeweller to create some beautiful bronze lapel pins for us to sell. The money raised will go towards funding our future projects.

The pins are hand-made by Kansas-based jeweler Sunyoung Cheong. They are adorable 3-dimensional miniature replicas of mokuhanga barens. Each pin is 17mm in diameter (approximately the size of a dime) and we packaged them in kraft paper boxes, with our new “I love mokuhanga” stamps.

We had 15 pins for our soft launch this week, which sold out almost immediately!

DM @woodpaperbox on instagram if you’d like to be added to the waitlist for our official launch later in the summer. They are the perfect accessory for all woodblock printing geeks. I wear mine with pride!

Huntington Library parasol

A few years ago I designed an exclusive toile for the Huntington Library in California. It was used on a variety of products to sell in the Huntington store and their online store. This week they posted this beautiful image of the paper parasol featuring the toile on their instagram. I love it!

I would love to walk in the gardens with the parasol, just like this…

I visited the gardens before I started the design, and featured little vignette scenes of their various garden areas, like the desert gardens and famous Japanese garden. Both the teapot and teacups are available in the store.

walking locally

Yesterday was vaccine day! Out of quarantine at last, walking in the local area was so full of wonderful things to look at…

The day started out cloudy, but soon turned into the perfect summer day…so happy to have had the first shot and can’t wait to be fully vaccinated!

California

I’m currently in quarantine at home in California, visiting for a while to get some things sorted out. Jet lag is tricky, but not being able to go out means I’m just going with the flow. It means I also get to see the sun come up…

Super excited to get vaccinated while I’m here! I can’t wait to be able to go out and about, and not have to worry quite as much as before.

Eric Carle

The wonderful illustrator Eric Carle passed away this week, and I’ve been thinking about all the ways he inspired me. Reading the Very Hungry Caterpillar is one of my earliest memories - I loved the colours, the holes in the paper, and the surprise ending. Along with Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, it was the book that made me want to become an illustrator…

There’s an animated version you can watch here.

When I was looking for a way to use collage as a technique for an illustration project, I watched a video of Eric explaining how he worked. I love his rough textures and bright colours and how he used simple cutting and super advanced glueing in his pictures, and he added colour pencil details.

I experimented with his style, and moved away from the fragile tissue paper he preferred and used thick paper for my collage illustrations for the River Cottage much more veg cookbook. I wanted shadows on my images, to show depth, and so that you could see the physical layers of the paper. I chose an opaque look, over Eric’s transparent layering, but tried to capture some of his movement and texture in the paint and pencil marks.

I will forever be grateful for how Eric Carle changed children’s books, and for how he inspired me personally.

Thank you Mr Carle, for making the world a more beautiful place. RIP.

studio move

I left the calm and peaceful ambience of my shared studio a week ago, and I already miss the little park next door and having a separate place to work with a great studio mate. She runs viridi workshop, so the studio always smelled absolutely wonderful!

I really got to know all the different routes I could take to get to the studio, and my instagram hashtag #walktowork became a great reason to photograph my daily walks.

Hopefully I’ll ease into working from home…