I am not sure how I got to the video, but I was randomly surfing on Youtube and eventually got to watch this one video which a person feeds his pet hedgehog with an infant mouse. Until then I didn’t imagine that hedgehog eats an infant mouse just by looking at how they look similar, even though hedgehogs and mice are two different kinds of animal. In the video, the hedgehog devours the infant mouse greedily then paint her back with the leftovers, which makes her back partially covered by blood her food. I learned that this is called self-anointing, an action to disguise their smell to prevent attack from predators. They chew their food well and mix it with saliva first, then throw it out on their back in order to change the way they smell like. During the process, the hedgehog shows almost satanic look with bubbles and blood on her mouth, which was somehow very appealing to me. I found it interesting that there was a huge gap between my understanding of hedgehog as a ‘cute’ pet animal, and how they actually look like when fed. I created a digital illustration using CLIP STUDIO PAINT trying to extract the distorted aesthetic of the video I watched by humanizing a hedgehog eating an infant mouse.
This was an image that I found when I was swiping the screen of my phone on Twitter. It is simply a photo of Japanese cicada larva casting its shell off to be an adult insect. This image captures a very limited moment of the process of casting-off, when cicada just came out of its shell and doesn’t hold a solid external shell but has very soft body. I was generally attracted to not only its beautifulness in colors, but the freshness of it. I lived in Japan for 14 years and there were so many cicadas during summer seasons, but I’d never gotten to even know that cicada larva can express such pale, gently beautiful color when they cast its shell off. The image almost gave me an impression that the larva itself is formed by a high temperature flame with its color combination of white and blue. The image also reminded me of a memory from last summer I spent in Japan. I was walking by a neighborhood river and found a cicada larva slowly crawling on the road. It was so slow that I could tell it would be crushed by a motorcycle soon, so I picked it up and put it on a tree so that it could finish shedding safely. This sense of nostalgia and the image bonded strongly so that I created this digital illustration of a boy holding a cicada larva shedding on his hand.
