YUKITO's ROOMThe era of monster drawings -- Discovery Of Shading -- around 1972
I think it was the time I went to a kindergarten, so it was 1971 or 1972.
The Ultra Monsters* boomed hugely in those days and I, a kindergartener, was drawing those monsters with the crayon all the time. However, I didn't draw legitimate Ultra Monsters but designed original ones.
* Those monsters appeared in special effects fantasy TV program Ultraman series (1966-).
In order to draw Ultra Monsters that have already appeared correctly, you need to refer to some photographs etc. But you can't always have copybooks at hand and referring to them is troublesome. Then draw them freely! That's why I did so.
And there was a notable tendency that I didn't draw heroes such as Ultraman at all. I just drew only monsters with reptile-like features.
I think it had simply reflected my preference of reptiles and amphibians, but I might have felt more sympathy with the monsters representing the chaos of nature than Ultraman representing the order of human society.
Indeed, I had imagined that I was closer to a frog than man those days. I will tell you this story in another time.
Maybe because their subject matters were unique, my monster drawings were popular with those around and a kid who sit next to me in the kindergarten had called me "master" -- I wondered where he had learned the word. Neighbors and my aunt wanted them, so I gave them away one after another and as a result, now I have almost nothing.
As for the composition of those drawings, I had drawn a single body monster from its front or side widely over a drawing paper. I never drew any background or counter objects.
They were close to design drawings, out of perspective like blueprints.
The drawings were in the stage where I managed to express the forms of subjects and had no idea of depicting them three dimensionally.
My father is not to be made light of because sometimes he says something insightful.
One day, he looked at my drawing of a monster that faced sideways on the wall and said,
"What about the other side of this monster's hand?"
I must have explained, "Its hand of the other side is hidden by the front hand and is not visible," but now that he mentioned it, I have a strange feeling with it.
However, how to draw for expressing three dimensional naturally was vague to me that time.
And the most unsatisfactory thing for me was how to draw toenails of the monsters.
Though the shapes of the nails were circular cones, if I drew them from the front, they would become just circles and never looked like nails at all. How could I draw nails from the front that looked like cones?
The toenails of a monster #1
(Left) A monster's leg given a sidelong glance.
(Right) If you draw from the front, ...they never look like nails.
Even now, I remember the moment vividly.
I was playing alone in a room floored with tatami mats on that day. I was startled when I saw the toy of the bullet train Shinkansen from the front. The light from a shoji (paper sliding door) illuminated the nose of the train from a side, which made a triangular shadow on the opposite side.
The first generation Shinkansen had a cone-shaped nose with round tip.
I added triangular shadows on the toenails of the front-facing monster immediately.
Wow!
They were just drawn on paper, but they do look like three dimensional objects!! It was a huge discovery.
The toenails of a monster #2
Put a triangular shadow in each circle, they look like three dimensional objects!
