Week 28: Sarah Lasater
“Studio Ghibli Tribute Commission” (2016)

Find her on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, her art blog, her personal blog, her store, or her website.

I discovered Sarah through a tumblr post that I shared then forgot about until I was looking for artists to feature. She came around, again, and I decided to look at more of her things. This decision was like falling into a bubbly, round-shaped, sweet pastel dream cloud.

Much of her work is fan art of various anime and cartoons, rendered in her trademark style of simple faces, gentle expressions, soft colors, and rounded lines. Many of her pieces are inspired by or fanart of the softer side of Japanese animation (softer meaning rounder here)–Astro Boy creator and Walt Disney of Japanese animation Osamu Tezuka namely, but also the likes of Pokemon, Studio Ghibili, even gentle pastel renditions of Evangelion and mech animes.

In a way, her art reminds me of the art of one of my favorite animes, Kaiba, which I highly recommend. The two styles share the color scheme and gentle roundness.

Perhaps my favorite subjects of her art, however, are her bashful young women sporting adorable outfits of the day (OOTD) and floating gently through city life. These simple portraits evoke a calming emotion to me, a sweetness that I want to identify with even when the young woman in general is scowling like a punk. The aesthetic in her art is the blur of kawaii and sad and wistful that I find myself drawn to more and more as I go through life, pastels and gentler tones that soften life just enough.