Daily Posts Intro

This week I had a realization. I’ve been in Japan since March and I only have a couple of quick sketches to show for it. I looked at my number of blog posts for this year and found it was only a fraction of last year’s total count. Sure I have excuses like having little time to draw after work, feeling burnt out after teaching children all day, adjusting to living in another country, etc., but really the only excuse was my own lack of motivation.

With that being said, I just finished working on the hardest and most time consuming painting I’ve done (the Mega Gods painting). Feeling motivated from the praises and recognition from the Mega64 crew and wanting to paint and commemorate my time in Japan, I’m attempting to do daily art from Nov. 12 th -Dec. 12 th . These will be posted daily starting Dec. 1 st .

As of right now, the idea is to portray objects I encounter and places I see or visit frequently that I feel are unique and specific to my life in Japan. I will be starting this tomorrow and I think these will all be in watercolor/ pen and ink due to time, portability and supplies I have available.

I hope this will adequately capture a month of my time here.

Mega64: Mega Gods

After a month of painting on weekends and in what little free time I had (October was busy!) I managed to finish a painting request for the one and only Mega64. I can honestly say I've never spent as much time on a painting as I did on this one. This was ridiculously complicated. For more information on this painting, I've linked 2 youtube videos from the Mega64 podcast (edited by Royce Kokami).

New Textile Designs!

I'm really excited about these new designs. Let me just first preface this by saying that living in Japan has really inspired me to create new prints. I wanted to create prints that I could the kids I teach wanting on the things they use every day. Things like tote bags, pencil cases, draw string bags for bento (lunch boxes), and of course backpacks. What do kids in Japan like most? Anime! I decided to use classic, highly inspirational anime series that practically every person in Japan knows of to create prints. These are series that I also love and have found to be almost ahead of their time when they were made and aired. I created my own interpretation of characters from: Astro Boy (鉄腕アトム), Rose of Versailles (ベルサイユのばら), Sailor Moon (美少女戦士セーラームーン), Galaxy Express 999 (銀河鉄道999), and Neon Genesis Evangelion (新世紀エヴァンゲリオン).

First, I vectored the characters and objects in Adobe Illustrator. Then, I brought the images into InDesign and laid out the prints. Next I combined the prints onto the objects in Photoshop and arranged the objects next to images of the prints for my website. With that being said, I hope you enjoy these prints as much as I enjoyed making them.

Mega64 Portraits

Finished portraits of the guys over at Mega64. Love their work and wanted to do some fan art.

Portrait Sketches

I'm finally starting to work on the Mega64 portraits again. I decided not to do them traditionally and to just go ahead and do them in Photoshop and Painter like I did my last self- portrait and the Jhonen Vasquez portrait. Below are the finalized sketches. I still haven't flushed out the backgrounds yet, but I have some ideas.

Sketches!

Another sketch from Japan. I think I may start refining some of my sketches in the future into nice watercolor pieces. It may or may not happen. :P

Japan!

As you all know, I'm back in Japan. I'm here to stay until at least around April of 2012. Art has been on the back burner since I've been here as my job is an assistant language teacher. However, in my free time, I have been drawing. I don't own a scanner, but I finally had access to one today. Here are some of the things I've sketching. My brain is normally in a million places in one day so forgive the randomness of the subjects drawn. These were all drawn over the course of the past 3 weeks or so too. It's pretty much whenever I have my sketch book and have time to draw, I'm doing it. I'm hoping I can post here more frequently, but it really depends on how hectic things are. My job keeps me pretty busy and simple things like buying groceries takes me longer since I'm having to translate things from Japanese into English.