Shiki - designs [ new samples - Oct. 4th, 2006]

[Joao Lemos]

to those two or three among you who actually have
been waiting for more, here are my sincere apologies
for a somewhat long absence

the following are the first samples from the project's designs
[ more soon ]

[philip tan]

Seems like you going to do a lot of architecture designs Joao, are you going to have them influenced by certain kinds? Or everything from scratch?

Philip

[Joao Lemos]

It took a full month for me to answer you, Philip. Hardly worth this wait ( if any ) but here it is.
From very early on, alongside with comics and novels, I have been a passionate reader of a bit of everything geographical, anthropological and historical. So, having a project like Shiki landing on my hands is a rare thing of an opportunity. Not only it allows, but it actually invites me to bring to the medium my background's cultural luggage ( bigger or smaller, of higher or lower brow, that not being the point ). This said, I can tell you that, although my main care in designing Shiki is to make things feel natural to what surrounds them and to themselves, I have, with different degrees of consciousness, poured a long series of influences into this. Architecture has proved to be, to this moment, my greatest challenge. When C.B. sent me the original pitch, I felt, from that very first moment, that the main character's village should stand on stilts. At the same time I wanted to give it a bee-hive feel like in a southwestern pueblo. So, the main problem, stupid as it may seem / be, has been marrying this tropical, bambooish vertical structures with the very earthy, even voluptuous feel of adobe construction. To make it even more colorful I covered it all with a structure inspired in Amazonian community huts and Northern American native "long-houses".
All this to tell you that I am using an ocean of references & influences from places like the South Seas, British Columbia, Central Africa, Southeast Asia, and so forth, whenever it feels right, even when they're so present on my mind that you can't actually call it research. Pheww!... And now you think I actually took the whole month to write the answer. Thanks for your witty question, Philip. I will try to get the time to post more often from now on.

[Joao Lemos]

[waki]

this reminds me so much of the cool european comics. reminds me in style of wake.
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