Halloween Etegami: Horror Postcards

I've recently taken up a new hobby, which is etegami, or painted postcards. A Japanese art form, etegami is a wonderful painting craft wherein you hand paint your postcards with gasenshi ink, holding your brush by the farthest end and drawing with your whole arm. Mistakes are welcome in the art, and shaky linework is part of the charm. "Its fine to be clumsy".

Today I thought I'd post some of my survival horror themed cards and a few straight paintings. Click for full size.

This is my second stab at this one, using a low bleed card. If you're familiar with the song kagome kagome, you're probably thinking of the first Fatal Frame/Zero game. This card references one of the puzzles as well as one of the arcs.

Roughly, Miku must track down a stolen piece of Holy Mirror by playing hide and seek, or a hiding version of the children's game onigokko. In this game, its called Demon Tag, a rather ominous name for a children's game. Using dolls in the Doll Stand Room, Miku finds that despite being dead, the children still continue to play.

The romanji of the phrase "ushiro no shoumen dare?" means roughly "who the one behind you?" This game is more akin to "Ring Around the Rosie" with the blindfolded person being "It" having to guess who is behind them based on their voice as they sang and danced around them. A brief article relating to the Fatal Frame usage can be found here.

A card that relates to Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly, this card symbolizes the twins Mayu and Mio's promise to be together forever.

I used Mayu's magatama charm with a butterfly painted in the back, using red as the primary color. Because it was a high bleed card, my kanji rendering of the zero kanji was distorted so I went back over the lines with a brush pen for a cleaner look.

This card actually went to an etsy customer of mine as a freebee. Hopefully she liked it!

This card is more related to Fatal Frame 5: Maiden of the Black Water. The quote is from Barbara De Angelis. Since the theme of the game also touches on the inability to show your true emotions or the inability to cry, I wanted to use the quote to symbolizeboth Yuuri and Miu's states of trying to embrace people as well as embrace life. They both walk a thin line between death and life, and I wanted a card that spoke about the need for human connection.

I used a coffee cup with coffee--to symbolize Hisoka's coffeeshop and her connection with Yuuri over a cup of warm coffee--and Miu's flower hair clip to symbolize her.

I've painted this card more than once, but the first time I liked the best.

This card is one of my few Animal Crossing ones, but this one was Halloween themed, with Jack the Czar of Halloween holding a piece of candy. The bleeding of the blended colors was a nice surprise.

I used a quote from Shakespeare's The Tempest, from the opening scenes where Prospero is asking his spirit Ariel how well he did in stranding the king's son and his ship. I loved the thought of pairing the quote with the chaos that is the Halloween event in the game.

The following are mini-paintings for the Fatal Frame/Zero series. Each image has a few things that relate to the game in symbols or significant images as well as the game's image color. The first game, Zero-Zero has ropes, Miku's hair clip and sakura blossoms; Zero-Akai Cho has crimson butterflies and a red rope with the twins' butterfly ribbon attached; Zero-Shisei no Koe has the snake and holly pattern as well as a tattooed stake; Zero-Tsukihami no Kamen has the titular Mask of the Lunar Eclipse blooming, with a full moon and hazy cloud patterns; Zero-Nuregarasu no Miko has Mt. Hikami dripping into black water, a Hitsugi Kago and hair patterns; finally Shinrei Camera-Murasaki no Nikki is framed with clematis flowers and vines, and has blotted ink in the corner, which appears on the titular diary's first page.

Zero--zero

Zero--Akai Chou

Zero--Shisei no Koe

Zero--Tsukihami no Kamen

Zero--Nuregarasu no Miko

Zero--Murasaki no Nikki

Hope it inspires you to take up etegami!

--Dio (10/8/15)

All art by me, etegami sources from DosankoDebbie's etegami blog and Nihon Sun's site)

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