AV_CatSlider

Here's select slides from a true/false presentation I gave on school rules JP vs US. After giving the rule, I'd have them vote on whether it's true or false in Japan and then in the US. It was funny when they disagreed on what the rules were in Japan, as some seem to think certain rules aren't, thus tacitly admitting to breaking them! Oh dear.

But after tabulating US votes, we hit one of these slides for O true or X false. These were some of my favorites of the slides.

Also The Ring, copyright of its original owner, is not scary. Enough already. Fun Fact: when I first visited Japan, I got to tour Toho Studios, where The Ring (US) was actually shot!

Ok.

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AV_SanjiliciousServing1

Here's the first serving of what Sanji's been cooking. So much food...These are the foods I do eat.

Yeah.

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AV_wkst.Wally

This was an army of characters I drew for a worksheet about present progressive. The jKids have a sheet of these characters but half the names are missing so they have to look around the page for a character whose name they want to know and ask their partner, who has every name the OG lacks and lacks every name the OG has.  Thus the partners must interview each other using the present progressive to describe the character whose name they want to know.

For example, one kid digs j-Rock so he wants to know: Who is the [boy] [sing+ing] a [song]? The [boy] [sing+ing] a [song] is Yojiro (Noda).  Hiloonity ensues.

Many Easter Eggs, including but not limited to TV Reporter, RADWIMPS, Base Ball Bear's female bass player, Maximum the Hormone, the horrifically over-rated Ring, and Kaburagi. Oh, and Where's Waldo, which is called "Where's Wally" in Japan.  So pumped to get some jLaughs since even though the deadline was super tight, I took time to make the names and chars inside-jokey to the jKids!  The best part is when they excitedly chatter about getting a joke before everyone else then they break it to their neighbors and then they all enjoy it together.  So neat! Anyway.

Who is the boy whose art is making me the most happy?  The boy whose art is making me the most happy is Takeshi (Hosomi, sporting Ellegarden and The Hiatus gear, natch).

This was the one doodle I was most happy with.  It came out of nowhere, but I loved how he turned out. 

I'm not really into The Hiatus as much as Ellegarden (Hosomi's previous band which went on indef. hiatus in 2008, just as I became a fan of them soon after landing in Japan for my first visit here).

But I am definitely rooting for Takeshi Hosomi's success. And check out how fluent he is!!

This was also a neat one.

It's a splice of Naruto and Totoro.

Get it?

Got it?

Good.

In conclusion, I wish my Yojiro Noda woulda came out better.

Why is it that the ones you really want are always just beyond your fingertips?

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AV_FoodSanjiUnit

I feel like I make the G-Unit pun a lot. It's gotten to the point that I almost can't even remember where it comes from anymore.

All I remember is just that a lottttta white kids used to say it in middle school. But they'd stutter it, like, G-g-g-g-g-g-GEE-unIT. Soft g.

As in Sanji.

As in Sanji-ji-ji-ji-ji-ji-JI unETCETERA.

None of that has to do with the purpose of this piece.

Which was for a worksheet I made about food.

RIVETING.

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Fun_hws.BatchToTheBeat

Our first batch of Homework Sketches of the new trimester back at school.

We've got a snowman for a kid who's favorite season is winter, a to-scale technical drawing of my Intuos for a kid who I got to talk/write shop with,  and my first Chopper in a while.

The other three are neat cuz  they're based on an activity I made for the jKids.  I gave them some OriChars at random and then they had to practice third-person descriptions by extrapolating and describing those characters' characters! 

It was neat to see what they came up with having just a pin-up and a name to go off of (Chief made a great suggestion that we can even let them change the name--so cool to see their incredible, original names).  The RPG homework sketch was for a kid who wrote an interesting and quite accurate(!!) estimation of what a scrappy little monk-looking warrior named Garry was about. But I also included brand new characters that haven't even hit Removal yet (well, a version of Ko has...), so I was basically doing market research as to what the jKids dig in their characters--I was thrilled to see they really got down with our new female lead, Smile, so I sketched her on one of the jKids' responses.  This was such a cool assignment and I loved seeing the utter creativity of the jKids unleashed! 

But perhaps the coolest thing, though, was after the sessions, the Chief already made suggestions on how to make this assignment rock even harder next year.  Did you catch that delicious subtlety?  That feedback suggests they assume I'll be here next year, but for that to be true, they have to want me back for at least one more year, which the assumption implies is true.

Bum bum bum buhhhm,

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Fun_Ko_Mini

I heard this kid's loaded, man.

He seems to enjoy giving Dan a rough time.

And how come he's such a picky eater?

Oh...Vegan.

Sigh.

Don't forget to smile...

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AV_SumoAGoGo

I came up with a new game. The jKids are split into two teams, a sumo wearing black and a sumo wearing gray. They must create original "Must" sentences in order to pimpslap the opposing students' sumo. Slap em twice and they fall over and lose. But the opposing sumo can respond with a Must sentence based on the attacker's Must sentence to regain balance. Then the defending sumo can give a fresh Must sentence to initiate a counter attack.

Each sentence-speaker can only speak a sentence once and then they must sit down, so it naturally gets harder as weaker or more timid students remain, to the panic, peril, and peregrine of the loudly whispering advice-giving sitting students. All the while I update the board with a print-out of each sumo's status, based on some brainstorming sketches I made in my handy-dandy noto. No one unlocked the super slam, though...

Speaking of unlocking something Japanese, how about an old yoochoob vidja for the peoples? This one used to be our most recent selection until it wasn't. Go figure.

This one was the first in my efforts to branch out towards sharing more of JP culture at large--today's guest spot goes to Radwimps. Who knows what the future holds? Well, I can tell you what the next video will be about, but then I'd have to thrill you.

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AV_PuffnStuff

I did a little illo of Puff the Magic Dragon and Jackie Paper for a little worksheeteeoh. No, I don't approve of the song (nor do I even like it in its suicide-inducing un-ironic folk stylings), regardless of what the (dead) author says it's about--it's quite clearly about drugs, you hippie. And yet here we are seeing it appear in a government-enforced textbook, using it to teach jKids English.

The spot started off as a tiny little sketcheroonie in my noto and then I inked and tweaked it in PSE. Haven't done any straight up digi stuff in while, and this guy got me going.

I feel pushed/pulled in too many directions lately and I never know which way's worth exploring to get me to that next level.

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Fun_LeafSong

I saw a display next to an improvised art corner complete with multi-colored paper leaves and chunky markers at the station's waiting area and thought I'd take part while my catbus chugged its way to me.

You see, there's this holiday in Japan where you write messages on leaves and...well, you know the rest.

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Fun_Guerillayon

I decided to (actually) try crayons for the first time in ever. What better place than the local watering hole?

These crayons were a little classier than your typical Crayolas, devoid of cheap paper labeling, just a logo seared into the wax itself. There were a ton of crayons open for sampling, so I just went with a 2 cent face sketch in black on a pad preoccupied with some Japanese. Then I ultimately Mouse-cookied myself into a full coloring.

I left it on the sample pad to browse the watercolor pencil section down the aisle (SERIOUSLY considering buying a set to test the waters--but the normal or the expanded set to start off with???). To my surprise some non-me-affiliated schoolgirls popped by the crayon section shortly after I left. They cheerily chittered over the (horrific) doodle they discovered and even annexed it for themselves! I didn't expect such a weak piece to get such a positive reaction, so I am happy for the little guy and that we could entertain some jPeeps!

So what did we learn? All I know is crayons are fun to visit, but I can't imagine dealing with such a stacked finicky-to-expression ratio too much in the future, unless I discover some mystery more-potent technique. I found crayons to be not as limited as I remember them from kindergarten--a nice excursion from PS and Copics--but if I want to try a new tradish medium, I'm gonna bank on pencil watercolors.

I've seen even Jim Lee struggle to truly unlock crayons, so it's probably just a dead end to go any further than a freebie sketch at art sample central. I know watercolor, regardless of my interest in the medium, is supposed to be a nigh-essential part of an artist's development, so I do feel it's inevitable I get on that crazy train. I tried watercolors over a decade ago and as I understand it, watercolor pencils are that, but more controllable, which is mouth-watering, if only for the bg or texturing possibilities.

Speaking of which, this concludes today's episode of "Nobody on Earth Could Possibly Benefit From Reading the Preceding."

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Com_RwarSwish

I digi-inked a Japanese artist! This is from a special project I'm working on. It was really fun because it was so raw and loose a base drawing. Aside from changing the queen crown to a king's crown, as per instruction, I only did minor touch-ups, but for the most part I stayed pretty on-mark with the lines.

I also inked the raw calligraphy that went with the above. This one was harder because of all the little trailing bits. It says something like, "Now is the time for winning!!"

Duh.

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Fun_DanWings

An early sketch of Dan that I liked, but we ended up going a slightly different direction with his costuming. The hair and part of the face remain in the final version, but this was a nice starting point that was technically a middle point.

Don't forget to smile...

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ZLM_MatesOfStates

At least now you can add self-pitying to your resume's special skills section.

Zero Like Me #185:
Mates of States

Easter Eggs: "Yale" on menyu, the Magikarp salesman's been working out (still a fishmonger, though). Today's setting is actually the first place I ate at when I arrived here, and I was so relieved the food was actually pretty solid, for a soup! The shoulder puff in panel 2 is Umezawa. I don't believe I've ever heard Mates of State, but I do enjoy their name. The classmates in the states mentioned in this comic are fictional. Some are not.

Fun Facts: This restaurant is actually three fused together--the second panel is a from-memory of the exterior shot's eatery, and the third panel is a combination of an octo-ball-and-ice-cream joint mixed with my favorite pizza shack. I contemplated going back into the exterior shot restaurant for photo/gastronomic research, but decided it wasn't worth the culinary risk. I do see eating (particularly at restaurants) in Japan as a quasi-gambling experience, you know.

Irasshaimase, by the way, is something shopkeeps and clerks of all stripes shout at you to get your business. It's like, "Welcome, please let's do bizniz," so it's supposed to be inviting, but sometimes they say it reeeeeeeally loudly and it freaks you out. And by "you" I mean "me."

Baa: No matter where I am on Earth, I hate eating with people. The squishy sounds they make as their lips and cheeks smack pockets of food, the way they have to push their witty vocal diarrhea from behind globs of undigested food, the way they constantly click-clack at their food with determined chopsticks and jerk the precarious load of food into their saliva-swinging mouths...I imagine the sound of chopsticks must fill many people with fond foody memories, but I only associate them with a hassle-y technology that makes it harder to shovel food down my gullet at my usual lightning pace so I can get back to not having to orally dodge creepy textures and flavors apart from the nescapably sampled fleshy chunks of my own tongue. I feel so primitive eating with chopsticks, like a monkey stabbing sticks into an ant mound hoping to luck out and acquire grub when not losing out to gravity most of the time. But sometimes the food is great. Have you had Japanese stew? That's money. Instantly makes me think of my imaginary childhood growing up in Japan when my mom would make us stew on chilly autumn--or best of all winter--days. And everything felt safe.

Man, I miss being an imaginary Japanese child.

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AV_GhibzTotonari

Dis is da finale, kid, as Lt. Soij famously said. This is last of our Ghibli set Episode Sway's here, A-NoKay's yore, and the Kikz chronicles koko desu. This one's is based on one of the very first anime I ever saw.

It was so confusing...but at my young age, I couldn't put my finger on why it was so different than anything I'd seen before. It was like they were in some world that was like ours (being that the US is/was the world to me back then) but not quite--Why were they boiling themselves?

I don't want to suggest Totoro is hacky at this point, but he was far and away the easiest one for people to guess, but jPoppers really liked it! Particularly since Totoro is so iconic I tried to mask him with the composition, which seemed to add to their joy when they invariably detected him.

In the sketch he was a bit more feline. I didn't want to just redraw the same old Totes everybody knows, but we lost a bit of that scrappiness in the final.

So it goes.

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Fun_Sinisterling

I love Endling's work, style, etc. and recently discovered his guide on how to clean up pencil lines--turns out he in fact never inks!--and fascinated, I tried out his method, even stabbing at his monochrome coloring technique, too. I believe he's the reason why I decided to mainly stick to grayscale comics, although I added a couple key colors out of guilt for having that be possible, and to make the online version feel more exclusive.

Fun Facts: This is an old drawing (inspired by Endling's style), by the way, done about a year ago during a meeting I had to go to. Well, the waiting period before the meeting, since I got there early.

Like your mom.

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AV_GhibzJuss4Kikz

Here's the third of my four and a half part Ghibli series I did (Sway be here and A-Nokay's 'ere.). Today's quarter-A3 poster's from that one with the girl with the ridiculously cool name. You know the one.

I knew a girl in college who went by "Kiki," but I could never bring myself to collar by anything thinner real name, which was also crazily cool (I feel weird calling people by nicknames unless they explicitly invite me to call them by that name). Anyway, something neat, they say she's the granddaughter of a certain famous singer...one whom I always confuse with the original singer of this song.

These are the pencils. You'll notice these are quite different from our sketch. That's because I had forgotten my sketched-on envelope at school, so I had to go offa memory, particularly on this freshest sketch. And since I felt more moved by the early stages of these pencils and time was ticking on the deadline, I just went with this take. I ended up really liking the expression here, but I do miss the mini-stories present in the sketch.

This is the sketch in question. It wasn't even drawn with the original four--it was drawn off on in the distance on the long envelope, away from the cluster of OGs since the original Beatle slotted for this space got cut. I didn't even show this sketch to my AD, I just went with the green-lit pitch from our initial meeting "How about Kiki?," churned this out, and it ended up being one of my favorites. So I guess everything turned out well.

Just one Ghib remains to jab. What could it be????

Whatever.

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AV_HowsEveryLiOlTing

This was one of my original four sketches I pitched for the Ghibli project, but not a single Japanese person could identify the movie! Can you?

Rather than rework the image, we decided to just go for an infinitely more fun Ghib to draw...but more on that Friday.

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AV_JustLeft

I can't quite remember what these illustrations were for, but I'm am pretty sure they were of or relating to either "still" or "just," as in Did you get Ichiro's autograph? No, he has just left, but the big fan is still waiting. or I have just read a scary story.

But that doesn't make any sense...

...like your mom.

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AV_GhibzANoKay

Here's another installment from the Ghibli series I did (Sway's here), this one's from that one movie where everything's A No-Kay.  The final version was on poster board, about a quarter of an A3 sheet and just black and white, but I thought I'd throw on some thematic colors for the digital version here.  What did the "final" look like? Why, like this, you silly goose:

This one was hecka relaxing to ink, all the leaves and moss and stuff. But it sure took a while...!  Fun facts: Yale-drop-out Claire Danes did the English voice for this character.  Isn't that neat?  Don't answer that, you party-pooping jerk.

Here are the lines, which I debuted on youtube, actually, hence the more prominent url.  Although I'm not really into movies, this is one of my favorite "escapism" sort of movies, where you turn it on late at night as you're rebelling against sleep, and then you get taken to a nonsensical world that you couldn't even decipher at full alert.  Maybe you succumb to sleep before the credits roll, maybe you make it to the end.  But either way, you've escaped the real world for a bit and feel oddly inspired to match the movie's beauty in your work and make dang sure to surpass its confusion.

This was our sketch, measuring about four thumbs-end-to-end long by two or three thumbs tall.  I forgot my sheet of sketches at the office the weekend I drew these, so I was going off of memory from the sketches.  Got pretty close, though.  I sketched this off the top of my head, so the forest here was just off of memory, not entirely sure what the in-movie forest looked like, of course did my research for the final.

The jKids and jCrew liked this one.  Gonna be a hoot to show the elemKids this, bet they'll like the kodama. 

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Fun_KappaTales

I drew this a while ago and colored it up in several versions. This pure Zebra marker version's a recent iteration to inspire jKids to do art and tell stories (in English).

It was a fun challenge writing a story that basic English-learners can get, while still striving to make it as interesting a story as possible. I was inspired by the elementary school textbook's telling of the Peach Boy story. It was beautiful and poetic, but everything you needed was there, even if in its most primal, basic state. "I am strong! We are strong!" goes a long way, for instance. So the goal was to approach that kind of code-worded storytelling to fire off imaginations without using a single word that could stumble the jKids.

I had to travel for work last week and we had to write a skit with some older jKids, and it's this whole writing for English-learners angle that really gets you thinking about story essentials. What tale can you communicate when your chief weapon--language--gets dulled at the forge before you ever get to wield it? It's a fun exercise, and we managed to tell a great story AND even work in wordplay (even winning an award for it, but I felt a bit guilty since it was more my idea than the jKids') but I am glad to be out of that damping zone and back writing more language-empowered stories.

In any case, regardless of how many arms I must have tied behind my back, I do love scratching that story-telling itch.

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AV_NewSnowEndys

These are three more intro cards from my intro card set that I gave away.

Today's categories are Club, Season, and Food!
Really cool thing I didn't see coming: once people saw that I was handing out not only cards with non-rudimentary drawings on them, but each of the 10 was custom-made and tailored to whomever I was meeting (i.e. a black card for someone who likes black), I got swarmed with people wanting to meet me for my cards! People even stopped to watch when new people introduced themselves to me, just so they could see me unveil new cards! Golly! It's almost enough to make a cripplingly introverted hermit not shun society!

Almost.

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AV_GhibzSway

I drew a series of Ghiblis for a recently wrapped project. This one's "Spirited Away," a movie I never really got--but that's true for all Ghiblis, except for maybe "Porco Rosso," but I can't even remember that one too well. They're primarily just beautiful and fascinating visual arts to me. I am suspicious of anyone who says they get them though, unless they're Japanese, in which case, I just smile and nod politely.

I do love No-Face, though. I absolutely love the rules involved with mythology and folklore--that's why I have a fascination with Kappa, for instance: what do you do--what must you do--when you encounter this creature? Don't screw up, or you die! I love those strange, secret rules that you either know or you don't, and if you do, then you survive only because for some reason the cold-blooded creature is bound to respect those semi-arbitrary rules governing its interaction with people.

jKids never know what this movie is by its English title; the Japanese title is quite long. Speaking of which, the finals of these Ghibz were on posterboard about a quarter of an A3 sheet big, so if you outstretch your palm the piece is the hand's length from heel to the middle finger's tip, by the length from the origin to your thumb.

I was originally going to have the bath house in shadow and just have the lights in negative space but as I roughed in the details to make the ensuing silhouette accurate, I ended up just keeping the details in. Since I had to get these done at a relatively quick clip, I decided to freehand the house, but had I known I was going to keep the detail, I probably would have wanted to use more ruler, cowbell.

Here's its sketch, which is about the size of two thumbs tip to tip, and one thumb tall. It is so hard to preserve the energy of a sketch through to a final, but this one still got oohs-and-ahhs from the crowd, so that's a victory in my book.

Now that this project is wrapped, I can finally start working on some comics!

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Com_Jasper

An ancient chardesign commission.

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AV_FalLoftLateMilk

These are three more intro cards from my intro card set that I'm giving away.

Today's categories are Season, Place, and Drink!

*SPECIAL LEGAL NOTE: These intro cards and their associates are in no way affiliated with, endorsed by, or pikachu'd hereinto by Loft, Co. Inc. Ltd. LLC. ASCAP. etc.

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AV_anp.PengyPowa_MO

Here is the making of our anchor image for that one ALT Poster. You know the one.
So these are the pengies, inspired by Eiichiro Oda's pengies. Really fun to draw them, but agonizing trying to color them without losing the lines' vivacity.

This is a close up of the anchorgirl we markerpainted. Experimenting with coloring skin. My current color palate only allows for whitish skin colors, but I'm gonna see if we can start getting some darker tones up in this hizzy without it lookin' all...ya know.

Here's a more contextual look at the making of her.
Sky's still a challenge, but I believe we got pretty darn close to nailing it in our next piece...

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AV_Kikz_Preview

What are you looking at, my dear?

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