Katsushika Hokusai is the Japanese artist who produced the iconic "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" in 1831.
In more recent years, it came to light that Hokusai had been working on a book of images, from roughly 1820 to 1840, that was never finished. It was called "The Great Picture Book of Everything," and no one knows why the book was shelved; however, in 2019 the forgotten book's 103 completed illustrations were discovered in a private collection in France. The British Museum subsequently acquired them, allowing the public to see the images. This first one is startling:
The style looks straight out of 20th-century Japanese manga!
Other drawings range from more conventional to trippy:
Interestingly, woodblock printmaker David Bull and his team are creating new woodblocks based on the drawings.
If you're curious as to how this works, Bull has a 36-minute video demonstrating the process below:
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via kottke
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Hokusai produced 15 volumes of manga, not modern comic books but collections of miscellaneous drawings also called "manga." They are as remarkable as the rest of his work.
How exciting that new blocks are being crafted! Some of those compositions are wonderful.