Movie Drawings

Movie Drawings is a 2019 series that functions as preparatory material for Manabe's later Mineral Pigments on Intaglio works, occupying the role traditionally assigned in Nihonga to the shitae or underdrawing. The title indicates film stills as source material—a working method common among contemporary figurative artists who use cinematic frames to study composition, gesture, and the cropping of incidental detail. The drawings predate Manabe's departure for Poland on the ERASMUS+ exchange in late 2019 and therefore record the visual research phase from which her hybrid intaglio-and-Nihonga compositions developed. As preparatory works they are typically executed in pencil or charcoal on study paper, with attention to tonal mass rather than line, since the eventual translation into etching requires the artist to think in terms of bitten plate values. The series documents an artist working between media: drawings made for prints made for paintings.