ARTIST ILLUSTRATES JAPANESE STOREFRONTS WITH WHIMSICAL COZY DECORATIONS

Some small shops might lack size and space, but some definitely make up for it with their charm and personality. 

Artist Angela Hao recently showed the impressive and yet cute styles of some small shops in Japan. With her colourful drawings, she captures the diversity of quaint Japanese storefronts. 

However, the U.S. based artist is not able to see it with her own eyes. Fortunately, Angela can digitally travel across the streets of Tokyo and Osaka using Google Street View. With Google View, Angela found numerous stores and buildings that fit her creative inspiration.

Angela creates the structures on her iPad and embellishes the exterior with cute mesmerising touches, like luscious plants, expressive signage, and adorable cats. 

With her sketches, she merges nature with the urban landscape, which creates a Studio Ghibli-like aesthetic that is visually appealing.

"My art is mostly focusing on architectural illustration. I especially love to paint the front view of shops, restaurants, and houses. The most fun part of creating art (for me) is to add imagined elements to the relatively plain reality. Adding vines, foliages, animals, hanging store plaques, flower pots, etc, really brings life to a drawing." 

She continued to explain that, "I also enjoy changing the storefront structures or combining parts from different stores together to create a new look. Sometimes, when I look at a reference photo, I would imagine what if this Raman store was actually a bookstore. I would then start to 'remodel' the store on my canvas". 

As a result of her adorable illustrations of small structures and the detail she puts into each piece, she creates an extremely vivid drawing. Thus, each building looks loved and visited by many.