Lecture4

We went to city campus in our licture class today. After having a short lesson about how to use the library's searching system we went to Elam Library.

This library is a fantastic place. It has multitudes of artistic information and located at a very nice and quiet place serrounding by the trees. The assignment for this week is to write about an item from Elam library. The book i had selected it called ''One Thousand Years of Manga''.

(picture from http://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Years-Manga-Brigitte-Koyama-Richard/dp/2080300296)
Publisher- Paris:Flammarion
distributed in North America by Rizzoli International Publications, 2007.

This book is written by Brigitte Koyama-Richard. She is a professor of comparative literature and art history at Musashi University in Tokyo. She has publishied several books in Japan in hur native French on subjects ranging from Edmond de Concourt and art dealer Hayashi Tadamasa to Japanese prints and Tolstoy in Japan. This book had been translated into English, Italian and German.

When I was selecting a book from the shelf, I saw this red covered book which was one of my favourite colours and there was an Astro Boy thumbnail image on the side! Astro Boy was also one of my favourite cartoon characters. I coundn't keep my hands away from it so I picked up this big thick book and brought it to my seat.

In the book cover, there was a brilliant red background and some images of manga and of course had an Astro Boy on the book cover. The red colour was dazzling and also caught people's attention. I opened the book, the first and second pages were the Japanese style flower pattens in black and like gray colour. Then I turned over the page, there was the contents. She used a bright yellow as background colour and the black texts. There was a very big colour contrast between this page and the previous page- the dark colours, black and gray, and the bright colour, yellow. This was a very interesting way to construct a book. I think I will apply this way into my studio work.

This book introduced many manga from different century. There were tranditional Japanese art, mordern art and cartoon. Mostly they used Chinese ink and illustrated paper hand scroll for their work. This book also introduced so many cartoon which I loved to watch when I was a little and even now such as :Death Note, Naruto, Conan, Dr.Slump etc.

After reading this book, I had learnt alot about the manga's history. The manga about the heros drawn during the postwar reconstruction period at another, showing how manga had been created to reflect changes in society and people's mood and interests and how they made the illuminated scrolls in the late 11th century.