Oswaldo Kato

Oswaldo Kato (加藤オズワルド) is a concept artist, illustrator and animation filmmaker based in Tokyo. Born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, he drew from early childhood and took up oil painting in high school before moving to Japan, where he studied visual media at Tokyo Polytechnic University and stayed on for a year as a research student. He then spent some fifteen years in moving image, including four years as an assistant professor at a university in Nagoya and more than a decade in video production in Tokyo, before illustration became his main occupation.

Kato's pictures are fantasy landscapes that suggest a much larger world beyond the frame. He thinks of each image as a single still from a film, and his brushwork, built up in opaque, painterly strokes, retains the habits of oil painting. Since 2021 he has been an illustrator for the Pokémon Trading Card Game, beginning with Venipede in the Chilling Reign expansion, and has gone on to draw dozens of cards for the TCG and Pokémon TCG Pocket as well as the artwork for the board game Pokémon Whoosh!. He works freelance on concept art and animation for film, games and anime, and also illustrates textbooks.

Alongside commissioned work he self-publishes manga and original illustrations at Comitia and Comic Market, and in 2023 Shoeisha published his instructional book on lighting, colour, texture and composition, Anata no E ni Monogatarisei o Ataeru Houhou (How to Give Your Pictures a Sense of Story). Oswaldo Kato's work is presented in Europe by Tokiol.

Publications

Anata no E ni Monogatarisei o Ataeru Houhou (Illustration Master Class), Shoeisha, 2023