Artwork Details
Medium: Analog ink drawing (custom aluminum pen, flat brush, black ink)
Subject: The curve of a woman’s shoulder in an evening dress
Inspiration: “Comme les animaux” by Rouquine
Theme: The narrative of human connection and the lines of the shoulder
Artist: Visual Story Artist Kazue Shima
The Story
There is a fleeting moment when a delicate line touching the paper and a solid mass of ink perfectly coexist.
When I take my custom-made aluminum pen and let it run freely across the white paper, my hand decides in that instant—which areas sink into ink, and which stay open as the pen’s empty trace.
On this day, my musical partner was “Comme les animaux” by Rouquine. The melody evoked a heart-wrenching yearning for someone just out of reach. Carrying that vivid emotion, my line started from the heavens and naturally formed into an evening dress with voluminous sleeves.
The soft black draped heavily over the shoulder. Feeling as though I was being urged to “create a world within the sleeve,” I switched from the aluminum pen to a flat brush, and suddenly, this silhouette was born.
Materiality & Context
The custom-made aluminum pen, folded by hand from sheet metal, creates a distinct hardness and resistance the moment it touches the paper.
It is not the smooth contact of a brush. Yet, as this piece demanded, the line that later called for the softness of a flat brush was, in that sense, asking me for friction against the paper.
This pressure—the way the pen catches on the paper’s surface—naturally becomes the foundation that determines how much ink the brush will carry afterward.
The flat brush, by contrast, grows heavier at the tip as it absorbs ink, producing bleeds and frictions across the page. This back-and-forth between two distinct physical sensations gives the line its own breath.
The sharp, disciplined line of the aluminum pen restricts me, while the soft, yielding touch of the flat brush pampers me. Feeling that push and pull between the two mediums, a quiet rhythm and balance took shape on the canvas.
It is this tactile, analog process of direct dialogue between the hand and the material that gives the line its own warmth and pulse.
I believe the way an arm flows from the shoulder in an evening dress creates the most beautiful curve of the female form. Yet, here, I chose a style that completely conceals this very line.
I have always believed that what is hidden speaks louder than what is shown directly. The swelling, heavy mass of black ink from the flat brush guides the viewer’s eye toward that fragile, melancholic shoulder line, emphasizing it through contrast.
A woman’s shoulder can narrate an entire history. Men desperately search for the conclusion of that story, but it is never easily attained.
It is only through the friction of deep human connection that we earn the right to understand the narrative existing between two people.
Only at the culmination of that relationship does one finally earn the right to comprehend the true meaning of the shoulder line she presents. That is where everything truly begins.
It is in this moment that I feel the coexistence of the aluminum pen’s resistance against the paper and the soft, overflowing ink of the brush was essential—to express this very starting line.
