Almost every day for the past five years, the Kanagawa-born artist Lito has drawn an image on to a leaf – usually a jaunty scene from the animal world involving, say, a biker-dude rabbit or a frog in a phone box – and carved it out with a scalpel before posting a photograph to social media. A painstaking process, it nonetheless suits Lito’s “propensity to devote long hours to detailed work” – a diagnosis of ADHD aged 30 was what prompted him to quit his corporate job and start carving leaves for a living. And a living it is: he’s sold 300,000 copies of his leaf-art books to date and exhibits his work throughout Japan. The combination of playful Studio Ghibli-esque imagination and exhaustive attention to detail is central to the appeal.
