Yamauba

This piece is called "Yamauba" which refers to a yōkai (demon) in Japanese folklore. What I found interesting about the stories of the Yamauba were the many different ways they were portrayed. Some depicted them as demons that would hunt and eat humans in the mountains whereas others would show them to be an entity that helped people back to good health when they were lost. My visual depiction is drastically different to those in Japanese folklore but my main vision was to portray her in a way that made her look both demonic and beautiful, to illustrate the different tellings of their questionable existence.