Rui Mota's Faves

This piece is called Zen. Sometimes I just need the meditative process of repetitive patterns. There are a couple of little doodles incorporated in it just for fun.

A teapot design features colorful flowers inside. The vibrant hues of pink, yellow, and green stand out, creating a striking contrast with the blue teapot.

Illustration for my comic project's main character. More details here: https://www.tumblr.com/above-the-mount/790733367143464960/lord-of-the-western-sea

Oh well, oh well...

Who truly deserves the Black Pearl?

I never understood the power of dots and lines until I did this art! A simple change in the line from straight to curved shows projection of a hand. What a beauty!

Konishi Mansho (1600 - 1644), the last ordained priest to serve in Japan during the prohibition era of the Tokugawa Shogunate (think of the Shusaku Endo novel, "Silence", which was adapted to film by Martin Scorsese in 2016). Exiled from his homeland in 1614, he eventually made his way to Rome and enter a convent to be ordained as a priest. He would later to his home country to minister to the persecuted Christians there, only to be arrested and martyred in 1644. I tried to mimic a traditional ink painting style to invoke the melancholic feel of this homecoming journey.

Julia Ota, a Korean girl who was brought back to Japan during the Imjin Wars (1592-1598). She was adopted by one of the Japanese commanders, Konishi Yukinaga, and was baptized as a Christian in 1596. She eventually became a lady-in-waiting to Tokugawa Ieyasu, but was later exiled to Izu Islands for refusing to recant her faith. Wherever she went, she became admired for her charity and evangelism, and she was revered as divinity on the islands up after her death up to the 20th century.