19th century Japanese flip-over drawings

Pink Tentacle has a nice gallery of old Japanese drawings of heads that look like faces right-side-up or up-side-down.

Joge-e, or “two-way pictures,” are a type of woodblock print that can be viewed either rightside-up or upside-down. Large numbers of these playful prints were produced for mass consumption in the 19th century, and they commonly featured bizarre faces of deities, monsters or historical figures (including some from China). Only a few examples of original joge-e survive today.

Link

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

MORE: Art and Design

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator

Avram, I’ve sent Buddy a note about it.
buddy66

“Only a few examples survive…”

Good.
buddy66

Note duly noted. I guess I drew too many of these things during an obsessive phase in 5th grade. Fortunately my hormones kicked in and I switched to sketching multitudes of scantily clad pneumatic young women.

The snarky one-worder was uncalled for, and I apologize.
Takuan

scan them and send them in (any left?)
butfirst

The two heads in the bottom left corner remind me of Kashira, the three bouncing green heads in Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. As a side note, I’ve always thought that they’d be an awesome idea for a set of three upholstered footstools/pouffes for someone with mad craft skillz. Anyone up for the challenge?
Avram

Aw, Buddy, don’t be like that!
tikal2k

Oh cool, these are nice and twisted!
scottfree

Man, I’m freaking out.
cha0tic

There’s some serious elbow tattoo fodder there.