Sunday, 3 July 2022

Hitoshi Yoneda

 This post is the answer to the question:
Who is your favourite Artist?

   I'm always out of sorts when asked about "my favourite" anything. I have so much love for all things that I love that this type of question makes me feel like a Parent whose kids asked who is the favorite one... you know well enough that there is enough love to go around, but that's not an compelling answer.

So if you ask me who is my favourite artist, I could certainly geek out on several people I admire. But for many special reasons I'm going to say Hitoshi Yoneda [米田仁士].

In 2017 (I think) two friends who knew that retro games are a minor hobby of mine gave me an original copy of the Japanese version of Phantasy Star 3 for Mega Drive. Which made me the owner of the First and Third games of the series. So I googled about Phantasy Star 2 and that was when the art of Hitoshi Yoneda struck me for the first time!



And I quickly became fascinated with his art style!♥

Being that my main media is watercolour I felt (for a while) a bit distraught because most modern Fantasy illustrators that I liked seemed to either work in oil or digital. So when I found a fantasy artist that had watercolour as his main media and made an exquisite use of it I was thrilled! It vindicated my own path as a fantasy artist.  

However at that time the information and images of his work were scarce on the internet. But my search led me to discover that he had published two Art Books in the 90s. One named Qvinta Essentia and another named E-nu-ma e-lish So I set out to buy them both because I just needed to scrutinize his technique. :P

In my search for more of his works I also found out that he currently (at the time) was illustrating the covers of a Japanese RPG magazine called Warlock Magazine (ウォーロックマガジン, formerly TtT Magazine). Which in turn led me to discover the amazing  website EntropicDreams that talks about everything TRPG and Board-Game related from Japan.

I found Hitoshi Yoneda's blog (last updated in 2017 as of this post). And a Twitter account @Brise_Marine where he posts fairly regularly with new and old work. He also posts plenty of nice pictures of the Nara Park and urban Japan by him. So I followed.

Then in 2020 when he posted his artwork cover for the book E-nu-ma e-lish I replied with a photo of my copy of the book. He did reply it in 2020. But he once again replied to me this year:

So we had a nice exchange and I told him how much I admire his work and that I wish to be a great illustrator like him. He responded me with nice words of encouragement:

And now I have a nice Motivational Poster in my Studio!

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