Hello Moon Series (4 volumes in total)

Description

Text/Illustration: Akiko Hayashi

Akiko Hayashi is an artist who creates a calm, deep resonance and emotion by very delicately depicting trivial scenes that are easily encountered in everyday life. She is praised for portraying children in the most childlike way. She is said to have accurately grasped the psychology of infants and that her stories and realistic depictions come from her deep observation skills. She also organizes her picture books with the right stories and elements in the right places to effectively stimulate children's interest. She is also an author who broke the prejudice in the world of children's books that young children would not be able to follow the story, and led picture books to a world with rich stories. Akiko, who loved looking at pictures from a young age, attended an artist's studio and learned drawing. . The pleasure and joy she felt while looking at pictures when she was young remained vivid even after she became an adult, and she started drawing picture books in the hope of passing that joy on to her children. She took countless photos of the children, making sure not to miss their little actions or to get the necessary poses. There is a drawer in her studio where she keeps her children's photos, and it still serves as the starting point and magic drawer for her picture books.
After working at the Manahe Hiroshi Design Office, he studied drawing in earnest at the Department of Art, Faculty of Education, Yokohama National University, and developed his dream of becoming an illustrator. He started drawing illustrations during his college days when he began working as an illustrator by drawing illustrations for magazines such as ´Mom's Friend´ and ´Fukugangan Shoten Publishing´. He published his first picture book in 1973, and has since become one of Japan's leading artists. As a Strater, he was selected as a participating author in Mitsumasa Anno's international collaborative work for world peace, 《All in a Day》. The main characters in his works are his nephews, who are always supportive friends and great readers. The familiarity of his paintings brings a sense of reality to children, and is appropriately expressed through subject matter such as the first time he saw his younger sibling, the first day he went to kindergarten, the day he moved, taking a bath, and the day he ran errands. In order to increase the dramatic fun for children by depicting these ordinary stories, Akiko used techniques such as enlarging or boldly deleting objects in the child's field of vision, as if filming a movie.
There are a total of 13 picture books translated from Korea, and despite the Oriental-style pictures, they are also familiar to Western children. Akiko's works Paper Airplane (published in 1973) and Iseul's First Errand (published in 1976) gave readers the impression of the emergence of a new picture book artist who could create stories with pictures. Akiko Hayashi's paintings, which are loved in many countries around the world, including Asia, are full of humanism and the innocence of the world of children. She currently lives near the Wild Bird Forest in Karuizawa and works at a leisurely pace.