I drew the character before I knew what it was. A small, glowing shape with two dark eyes, sitting in the middle of a blank page in a sketchbook I kept by the sofa in our home. It did not look like anything I had drawn before. It looked like something that had been waiting for me to find it. That was several years ago.
I kept drawing it. Every few days, sometimes every day, the same figure appearing in different settings: floating above a forest, standing beside a flower, surrounded by tiny creatures in the dark. I did not plan these scenes. They arrived, fully formed, the way certain dreams do. My partner would ask me what the character was, what it wanted, where it came from. I could not answer in words. I could only show him the next drawing.
The stories took shape slowly, across notebooks and loose sheets and conversations that stretched over years. Four stories. Each one following this being of light as it encounters a different part of the natural world and reveals the kokoro within it. Kokoro (心) is the Japanese word for what English divides into heart, mind, soul, and spirit. In Japanese, these are not separate things. Kokoro is holistic: emotion, thought, and essence held together as one. It lives in the chest, not the head. It is felt before it is understood.
The character came from a dream. A being of light, arriving from somewhere far away, landing in a dark forest on Earth. The image was so vivid it stayed with me for days. I could see the glow against the trees, the stillness of the forest floor, this small figure standing in the middle of it all. I did not know what it meant yet. But I knew I had to follow it.
The meaning arrived later, through a question I could not stop asking. In Japanese culture there is a concept called Yaoyorozu no Kami: the understanding that a god, a spirit, exists in all things. Not only in people and animals, but in rivers, stones, an old wooden gate, the wind moving through bamboo at dusk. This is where the idea took root. If a spirit lives in all things, what if we could actually see it?
That is what AUWA does. It arrives from the stars carrying a gentle light, and when that light reaches something, the kokoro within it becomes visible. A flower. A forest. A handful of soil. Things we walk past every day without noticing. AUWA notices. And in noticing, changes how you see them too.
“You would not throw something away if you could see its kokoro.”
If we lived in that kind of world, where the soul in all things was visible, I think it would be a much kinder place. You would not throw something away if you could see its kokoro. You would not ignore a person, or a river, or a forest, if you could see what lived inside it. The stories are not really about a character with magical powers. They are about paying attention. About the awareness that everything around us is alive, and connected, and worth caring for. That is what we want to bring into the world with this book.
The illustration style is simple on purpose. Soft palette, gentle compositions, a character with no mouth and two dark eyes. I drew the first sketch nearly ten years ago, and the simplicity has never changed because it was never a constraint. It is the method. It looks like a children’s book. That is the point. Adults build defences around ideas about the soul. They want evidence, argument, logic. A picture book walks straight past all of that. Charlie Mackesy understood this. Miyazaki has understood it for decades. Simplicity is not a limitation. It is the way in.
The sketches came first, always in pencil. Then I moved to Procreate on the iPad, drawing every scene with the Apple Pencil, building up the colour and light layer by layer the way I would with paint. Some of my original iterations of AUWA were on canvas. I wanted to paint, so that I would not forget, while working on client projects, to properly start this. Procreate let me carry that warmth into the digital illustrations while working at the scale and detail the book needed.
The first book is complete and will be released later this year. I am currently working on the remaining stories. There are four so far, each taking AUWA somewhere new: the ocean, the city, the stars where AUWA is from. How many there will be in the end, I do not know yet. The character has a way of deciding that for me.
AUWA: The Beginning will be published later this year. If you’d like to know when it arrives, sign up below and we’ll write to you once it’s released.
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