Hunting the Elusive

Stay by my side as we wander into the niche world of letters. Ah, how quaint, you mutter as you alt-tab from window to window, your fingers finding all the correct keys in that assured manner of typing I always imagined you had. Letters. That old method of textual communication involving wood pulp, ink and nib. Leave the stamp-licking to the little grannies on their rocking chair, you exclaim, and join us in the world where words no longer come into being and seconds later die a wretched death, fixed, dried and depthless upon a piece of parchment. After all, words are the carriers of truth, the avatars of meaning. They should be free to soar in this four-dimensional space we partake in, transforming, transfiguring, transcending...

[Download: Directory] [Download: RAR]

Alright, enough with the prose. I just wrote that entire paragraph on whim, my creative being struggling within me to burst out into a cascade of words. Anyhow, here's the deal. We're looking into the oft-overlooked area of letter papers. Not just any letter paper though, but specifically what they call in Japan "doujin binsen". Letter papers endowed with doujin art. And the artist in our scope today is Tsukiji Nao. That's one of the names this artist goes under. Other known pen names include Zatsuno Yonrou and Enji Kusawara. The main circle name is GREEN GLASS, but also Tenshikan, Zoukayashiki, and Akai Shoujo no Sabita Kutsu.

Understandably, you would be pretty confused if you were starting to look out for stuff by this artist, since you have around 6 names to keep track of. Just when you though some piece of paper wasn't Tsukiji Nao's, you find inscribed on its back one of the obscure pen names for the same artist, and then you are beset by doubts.

A word to the hunter. If you want to get started down this path, searching for Enji Kusawara will yield a narrow set of results on Google (2 pages), and some of those sites are quite informative (and in English). But within this piece of advice comes a warning. Although what I have scanned here represent the best of Tsukiji Nao's work, do not be surprised if you find hints of darker materials going down this path. You'll find it first in blood-stained bandages, bondage, then limbs which are half-mechanical, then crazy piercings, big scars, and traces of dismemberment. Nothing explicitly guro-tastic in nature, but enough to prompt dark thoughts.

Maybe that was too scary. Maybe half the people who were reading this page have clicked away. But the point of this blog was never to sweeten the deal or sugarcoat anything. I just thought it would be a good idea to mention at the outset that there are thorns in the rose-bush. But then there's the rose-bush itself.

Now, admittedly, Tsukiji Nao's art is strange, and it could very well be a strange thing that I find myself drawn to it. It seems to be so detached from the moe art we know and love, so serious, so close to high-art. In fact, the style is distinctly European-like, recalling stuff from the British Empire, of fairy tales long forgotten. In fact, "fairy tale-like" would be a good way to describe the art, because when I leaf through the colourful sheaf of paper, I find myself drawn into a world, a strange and different world of magic and ladies and gentlemen, brooks and meadows and secret gardens, a fantasy world from my childhood, before I became acquainted with the turmoil of life and the joys of Japan.

And on a more technical side of things, no one can fault the skills of the artist. We find indications that the artist not only used CG, but also possesses immense skill in the wielding of the brush, ink and paint. The level of work and detail put into each illustration is simply astounding -- it must be seen to be believed. The effect of such an overwhelming dedication to detail is that the eye is threatened with drowning. Some pictures might even be said to be overwhelming at first glance, and one could easily spend 10 minutes inspecting all the intricate work in each picture.

How this release is structured:

The naming of the files is fairly simple: numbered in accordance to my scanning order, which was random. When everything was done, I sorted out the pictures according to main categories: Busts, Color (a series of drawings on various colours), Death Note, Fairy Tales (mostly Alice, but other tales also feature), Final Fantasy and other work-based art, Howl's Moving Castle series, Japanesque (a departure from the frills of European art into a distinctly retro Japanese style), Jewel series, Landscape (pieces which should be rotated for viewing), Pair (letter papers which are meant to be a pair, and when put together form a bigger picture), and Plain and Print (letter papers which are printed with offset printing, or have some kind of distinct print-like quality to them). Of course, if you don't like how I've organised these pictures, they retain their unique numbering, so you can always just dump them all back into one folder and sort it yourself.

Previews:

Main directory

Busts

Colors

Death Note

Fairy Tales

FF and Doujins

Howl's Moving Castle

Japanesque

Jewel

Landscape

Pair

Plain and Print

New scanning workflow:

I found that with bulk scanning releases like this one, scan times become rather more important. I like the results of using the consumer HP drivers (of course, using my own profile to ensure colour reproduction), but the drivers tended to take twice as long to import the file into Photoshop (one pass to scan the sheet, then wait for a long time for the data to be imported). The ISIS-type drivers on the other hand got the stuff over with quickly, plus there wasn't a need to re-launch the software to do the next sheet: you just had to load up the next page and click a button and it goes. So now I'm using IrfanView's bulk import function with the commercial driver and pumping out those scans directly onto my hard disk as TIFF's. Since the commercial driver is useless with colour correction, I've taken to setting both brightness and contrast (the only two colour controls on the driver) to zero, and then using levels and saturation in Photoshop (batch mode of course) to bring back the original colours. This seems to be a much more efficient way of going about doing massive amounts of scanning.