Night of Foxes
My first book, Night of Foxes, was developed and created during a 5 month period that I spent as an exchange student in Tokyo, attending Tokyo Zokei University. I used the visual inspiration I got from the city to create the backgrounds in my scenes, using my own photographs from walks around Tokyo as references. The story is loosely based around the mythology of the kitsune, the fox spirits. It's a story about being shy but brave, about longing to fit in and finding friends but daring to do so on your own terms.
The book is painted in gouache paints and ink. It was printed on single sheets in Japan and then bound by hand by me, using a traditional Japanese book binding technique.
A visit to the Toyokawa Inari Tokyo Betsuin Temple (also called the temple of a thousand foxes) gave me a lot of ideas and inspirations for important scenes of the book. I spent a rainy afternoon there, taking reference pictures of the shrines and making sure to offer a coin as an offering and token of respect to each group of foxes I photographed.
