Blue Period, by Tsubasa Yamagushi is a real introduction to painting: its techniques, its practice and its resonance on everyone. Yatora is a studious high school student, who has succeeded in everything, but who has no particular passion. For him, the plastic arts option is above all a breath of fresh air in his mentally charged days. Intrigued by a canvas painted by a student in upper class, Yatora sees his relationship to art change completely.
Yatora: You know, drawing is a much stronger and more effective vector than words. It opens your eyes to the many interesting things and ideas out there. By observing, you learn, and by drawing, you understand.
It’s a real revelation for Yatora who decides to try the competition of the most popular art school in Japan, the Geidai of Tokyo. To succeed, he can count on the support of his teacher.
His teacher: To say that our passions should remain a hobby, for me, is an adult concept.
Pencil strokes, paintings, sketches, as Yatora progresses on the canvas, the horizon of his future emerges from the framework of bland perspectives in which he found himself a prisoner.
Yatora: Sometimes I think back to who I was before drawing. If he met the me of today, he would not understand it. At the same time, he would envy her a little.
His teacher: Art is very interesting, you know… The most talented are those who are true to themselves. Because art is not expressed with words.
The author Tsubasa Yamaguchi, herself from the Tokyo University of the Arts, won the 2020 edition of the Manga Taishô Prize (Manga Grand Prize) and the Kodansha Prize for the best manga of the same year in the general category. His work, a mine of information on artistic techniques and the art world in Japan, invites the reader to express his artistic side. Art is universal, everyone experiences it and expresses it in their own way.
Blue Periodby Tsubasa Yamaguchi, is a series being published by Pika
In collaboration with Valentin Paquot
