Once upon a time, a poor old bamboo cutter found a especially beautiful piece of bamboo. When cutting it upon, he found a tiny littly baby girl inside. He and his wife believed it to be a sign of the heaves, because they always wanted children, but couldn't have one themselves.
They named her Takenoko (Bamboo child/sapling) and raised her if it she was their own. But when she grew up, heavenly creatures came from the heaves to take her back, because she was actually Kaguya, the moon princess. They dressed her in a rope that erased all her memories of her life on earth and ascended to the heavens. But Kaguya couldn't forget the love and care her adoptive parents gave her. So from time to time, the old bamboo cutter would find little gifts from Kaguya in bammboo stems.
Once upon a time a wandering samurai was on his way to the town of Shimizu. In a swampy area, ge decided it was time to take a break, so he sat down and played on his flute for his amusement.
Suddenly, attracted by his flute play, the ghost of a girl appeared. The ghost asked him to return to her and play for her one more time after visiting the city. The samurai was very afraid but said he would keep his promise – but he was lying.
Instead of returning, he got on a boat that would drive around the swamp.
But soon the boat just stopped and wouldn't move any further as if an invisible force was holding it in place. The other passengers believed they had angered the water spirit of the lake and began to throw offerings, their most precious belongings into the lake but they just sank. Only the samurai's flute didn't sink but floatet above the water. The other passengers forced the samurai to leave the ship because it was him the water spirit wanted.
The samurai left the ship, walking on water and vanished into the swamp, never to be seen again. But until today, you can hear the faint playing of a flute coming from the swamps.
All illustrations were planned, sketched and outlined on paper first. For the outlines I used a japanese kalligraphy brush pen. Since the perspective of the illustrations with the boat was especially tricky, I decided to make a rough 3D model of it with Cinema 4D first.
During the process, I came up with the idea that I could tell more than one part of the story in the same picture. I was already finished with the first few pages of Fukifue numa, though and left them as they were because I wouldn't be able to finish them in time. But that wasn't the only problem I ran into. Due to the extremely wide format, I still had to draw on two split pieces of paper and combine them again in photoshop.
