SHINBAN! Meiji Toy Prints for

SHINBAN! Meiji Toy Prints for the Smartphone Age

In Tokyo Gakugei University Library's public-domain archive I found omocha-e, the "toy pictures" that Tokyo print shops sold to children between the 1880s and 1910s as paper dolls, board games and zukushi sheets cataloguing "everything" of one subject. Few survived because kids cut them up, and their loud early-aniline palette of hot magenta, acid green and chrome yellow looks nothing like the ukiyo-e we usually see. I built two Recraft V4 Styles from five sheets, including two signed by Utagawa Yoshifuji, the "father of omocha-e", and kept each sheet's original format. SHINBAN! ("Newly Published!") imagines that print shop still open today: the caricature grid becomes a video-call gallery, the paper dress-up doll becomes a food delivery rider, and the hour-by-hour sheet becomes a remote worker's day. Eight sheets make up a toy catalog for modern life, printed as if the shop never closed.

Second Style (cut-out sheets), SHINBAN Kisekae: https://www.recraft.ai/styles/3e071d05-094c-4341-a162-a1592efc622f