Takeru Toyokura creates trippy, sinister children's scenes from coloured paper and felt

Date
25 June 2014

Takeru Toyokura’s work contains something of a sentimental hark back to the days of yore, when we spent hours happily sticking felt shapes to fuzzy boards and coming up with nothing that can really be labelled an actual composition. He’s ever so slightly more skilled, however, and by ever so slightly we mean his paper and felt recreations are nothing short of miraculous.

Executing details so tiny that they might almost go unnoticed, Takeru sticks mainly to images of children play, tweaking elements to change the scene deftly from sickly to sinister. In the Children’s Play series the tweak is more obvious; usually regimented architectural backgrounds are transformed into triply swirling Alice in Wonderland-esque landscapes to create a fictional world in which nothing is quite as it seems, while in Children Wonder sweetly dressed kids tie each other to lampposts and play idly with knives.

Astonishingly, Takeru has also posted showing every detail of his creative process when it comes to making one of these images, from the initial sketches to the final execution, which you can see here.

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Takeru Toyokura: Children’s Play

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Takeru Toyokura: Children Wonder

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Takeru Toyokura: Children’s Play

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Takeru Toyokura: Children Wonder

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Takeru Toyokura: Children’s Play

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Takeru Toyokura: Children Wonder

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Takeru Toyokura: Children’s Play

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Takeru Toyokura: Children Wonder

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About the Author

Maisie Skidmore

Maisie joined It’s Nice That fresh out of university in the summer of 2013 as an intern before joining full time as an Assistant Editor. Maisie left It’s Nice That in July 2015.

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