Festival Lanterns, First Series (Shinji andon shohen)
Festival Lanterns, First Series is a Japanese woodblock picture book published in Nagoya by Kōbaien in 1829, made by the artist Ōishi Matora (1792-1833) for a general readership of popular print buyers. Its double-page spreads show small comic scenes of townspeople in bold outline with flat colour washes and short handwritten captions in the margins. A designer could take its economical line, loose colour blocking and caption-and-image layout as a model for spot illustration and sketchy editorial figures.
