Book Illustration: One Hundred Ghost Stories (Studio 1 - Week 10)

By Helen Kwok

Taking inspiration from the Poems on One Hundred Ghost Stories (Kyōka hyaku monogatari 狂歌百物語), I wanted to recreate a book that felt old and historic to suit the ancient Japanese experience I'm going for in my One Hundred Ghost Stories book installation.

This was the process I went through on creating this book prop:

1. I purchased a blank Chinese kungfu manual from eBay that was reminiscient of the old Japanese mangas.
2. Using the Poems on One Hundred Ghost Stories book as a reference, I traced the title and also used the pages within as reference images (main illustrations set inside a black border, each illustration labelled vertically in smaller boxes).
3. I used Photoshop to trace stills from my animations to come up with an illustrated layout of my three ghosts.
4. I needed a method to transfer this illustration into the book itself. As the pages were brown, I couldn't just trace the illustration normally. So I made my own "carbon paper" by using a 9B pencil, filling a white A4 paper with graphite, then used that to transfer my drawing across as I drew on top of my printed illustration.
5. Once I had the pencil outlines, I used a Japanese brush pen to ink my illustration.