Who is Yoshitaka Amano?

Yoshitaka Amano was born on March 26, 1952, in Shizuoka City, Japan, the youngest of four children. In 1967, at fifteen, he took his paintings to Tatsunoko Production in Tokyo and was hired, moving into a company dormitory. The studio that made Speed Racer trained him, and within a few years he was designing characters for some of the most watched cartoons in Japan.

He left the studio in 1982, at thirty, and rebuilt himself as a freelance illustrator. That second career put his paintings on the covers of the fantasy novels Japan was reading: Vampire Hunter D, the Guin Saga, the Arslan novels, and the Japanese editions of Michael Moorcock's Elric books. In 1987 a small game company called Square hired him to design the characters for a role-playing game called Final Fantasy.

The third career is the one still running. Since the late 1990s Amano has worked as a fine artist, painting his own characters at room size on aluminium panels in automotive paint, and exhibiting in New York, Paris and Rome. The same hand stands behind a bird-suited hero team from 1972, the most famous logos in Japanese games, and a gallery wall in Manhattan, which is why this hub exists: on this shelf, the artist is the thread.