Resized to 70% of original (view original)
Artist's commentary
You wander, you die! You search, you die! You cry, you die!
Chopstick etiquette, AKA kiraibashi¹. Wandering chopsticks (wandering above the plate), searching chopsticks (probing through a dish to pick out only the ingredients you like), crying chopsticks (to drip juices) etc. The idea came to me one quiet and peaceful morning as the sun's rays started to shine. I was listening to hardcore rock while eating breakfast when the word "hashi" in my head suddenly turned to "wa shi"².
Partly because of the song I was listening to, my first idea was to draw a model striking poses and looking spiteful, but that didn't seem to convey the idea of their legs representing chopsticks too well so I had her sitting down and added a chopstick rest. I went through that effort to make it easier to understand, but even taking that into account even I found myself thinking "what the hell is this drawing?". I don't think the likening of legs to chopsticks is too difficult to understand (there is even such a thing as personified tableware apparently), so I don't know how it ended up like this.
■ The magic of "what the hell is this drawing?"
Even though I'm the one doing it, I occasionally find myself thinking to myself "what the hell is this drawing?" while drawing it, and that's happened with others beside this one. After I upload drawings like those the responses I get are sometimes many, sometimes few, but at the very least I personally think they carry some significance.
As for why I draw images like this, it usually comes from a concept, or a message or just some visual image that suddenly comes to me. I start to wonder how I could put it into a drawing, and then I just start trying it out. And so, maybe because my expressiveness is lacking or maybe because the idea itself was flawed to begin with, once it starts to take some semblance of shape it creates that "what the hell is this drawing?" feeling. Saying it like that makes it sound like they're bad drawings, but they still come from a place of love, and even if all they do is leave the viewer with an impression I personally think that's not a bad thing.
But I don't think this is something that should be intentionally aimed for. Even if you purposefully try to draw weird images, I think it's better to have something fun even if it's amateurish instead of something merely nonsensical.³ It's easy to make something that doesn't make any sense, but making something funny is very hard... I want to be more careful from now on.
¹ Literally translates to "hate/dislike chopsticks". Encompasses all impolite and improper use of chopsticks.
² "Hashi" means chopsticks. "wa shi" is written with the kana "ha" (read as "wa" when used as a subject particle, as it is here) and the kanji for death, leading to a meaning of "_ is death". When written in kana, both look the same.
³ Not sure if the translation here is correct.