This article was taken from the January 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
Viral hits don't usually stick around for long, but two artists have created blog-bait that will take 18 months to complete in a wood-print studio in Toyko. So what were the origins of this rather familiar-looking scene?
"In April, I decided to do an art project specifically to get a lot of attention," says Jed Henry, an illustrator based in the Rocky mountains. He started reimagining video games in the style of Japanese woodcuts, under the name Ukiyo-e Heroes. Each week, he created a new design and posted it on Facebook. Blogs such as Boing Boing picked up Henry's work -- and it soon "blew up". "I'm not cut out for the fast-paced viral life," Henry says. So last August he teamed up with Bull, a print-maker based in Tokyo, to turn the designs into traditional-looking hand-made woodcut prints, with help from a Kickstarter. "On the internet, things happen so quickly. Kickstarter campaigns happen instantly," Bull says. "But good cooking takes time. There's no scaling involved here. I can't hire more printers.
We were really worried that people wouldn't be willing to wait 18 months for these prints. But they went along with it." To produce 400 prints of one scene takes Bull's workshop two months; Henry and Bull will deliver the last set of their Ukiyo-e Heroes series in August 2013.
Their next project is based on the manga books of Hokusai: "They're full of these little vignettes of things like sumo positions," Henry says. "They mirror what video game manuals look like -- they look like moves in a fighting game."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
