Hello everyone (anyone?)
Just wanted to let you know that the store/shop/emporium is in a little state of flux for a while. I decided to strip all but ten of my works from Society6 (will likely be closing that eventually), and plan on migrating things to a different / more artist-friendly storefront in the future. Stay tuned for that later on! Also in the meantime, there will be links on certain gallery pages to for-sale stuff that is no longer for sale. I’ll update that when I am less tired. (Heck of an anticlimactic post here, huh? I’m posting about taking away stuff, rather than adding it!)
Anyway, be good to each other and I’ll see you later on, when I have more updates.
Category: site news
VERSION 4.0 (finally!)
Hello everyone, it’s been way too long. Good news incoming on two fronts, but first a quick bit of a life rant / explanation for my frequent absence from my own site… As I mentioned in my last post, almost two years ago, work dominates my life and leaves precious little free time. Having a toddler at home and parents in their 80s who need a lot of help (I am “sandwich generation” defined!), and also having to work twice as much to make it as I did living in Japan… Well, all that eats up said free time and doesn’t leave me really any chance to make my own art. All my creative energies are pushed into publication design work, and after the kind of long hours I have to put in sometimes (I did several 70-80 hr weeks last year in a row) the last thing I want to do is look at a screen more when I’m finished. (often I’m sick from too much screen time.) On top of that, my horrendous attention span (getting worse all the time!) kind of further puts a wrench in my gears across the board in life. ANYWAYZ… Enough negativity, this is supposed to be a fun and exciting announcement!
I started the new version of my site two years ago, and it was supposed to be a small refresh of things (a “version 3.5” if you will) but it turned into a giant project. I dumped about a week into it – adding tons of new stuff, mostly manga lettering work – and redesigned all the pages, but then I decided I was feeling lukewarm on said redesigns, and started redesigning it again. Then I got buried in work for a couple years. 2023 has started with a little less work than normal (troubling for my bank account, obviously, but it’s nice to have a break) so I decided to finally finish this damn redesign! That’s the first point of good news I was referring to. Version 4.0 looks on the surface like a refresh of the last version, but there’s a lot changed under the hood, coding-wise, and I also added a lot of stuff, consolidated a lot of stuff, moved a lot of stuff to the archive, and deleted a lot of stuff. Also there’s more video now, scattered throughout the site. I’m hoping to add more and more video stuff in the future. As far as new work I’ve added, since there’s too much to mention here without making this blog post unreasonably long and self-indulgent, I’ll try to make some posts soon to showcase some of it. In the meantime, just go look around! There’s a lot that has changed.
There are a few incomplete areas, which I’ll get to when I have time. Despite doubling the amount of books shown in the manga lettering gallery, (and adding a ton more content to the existing pages), there are still some newer books, from 2022, that I haven’t uploaded yet. Just not enough time. That will come soon.
Oh, about the blog… I’ve never known how to really make my site mobile-friendly, and had for a long time been keeping that blog as seamlessly integrated with the rest of the site design as possible. I eventually put in some code I found to make the mobile version of said blog switch over to a more stripped-down smartphone friendly design. Problem is, that broke somewhere along the line, and the blog looked all kinds of messed up on a phone. (As in – the right side of the page going off the screen and unreadable!) Then, after updating WordPress, the desktop version of the blog broke too. I decided to just throw in the towel and not even try to match up the design of the blog with the rest of the site. It’s good enough for now, looks decent, and most importantly, works well on mobile! (finally!)
Anyway, the other good news I mentioned, and the reason I “ran out of time” to add 100% of what I planned on – I’m speaking at a couple panels this upcoming Saturday (1/21/2023) at Ohayocon in Columbus OH! That coming up made me decide to hurry up and finally finish (to a “good enough for now” state) this perpetually in-progress beast. I also made new business cards for the first time in ages, hehe. I don’t traditionally get a ton of traffic on this site (nowhere near as much as I wish I did), but I imagine there will be some influx of new visitors soon (hi!) and I didn’t want the site to be too out-of-date. I’ll post more about the Ohayocon thing in my next post. I’m really excited about it, because I’ve never paneled at a convention before! Kinda nervous too, but I imagine it’ll go just fine. I’m looking forward to meeting some of Ohio’s fellow manga maniacs there.
Ok talk to you soon! I hope sooner than two years this time. Best believe I haven’t abandoned the site. Life just keeps getting in the way of art.
BUSY BOY
Hello everyone! (anyone?) Just wanted to drop a quick message here to say that I haven’t forgotten about my art site. I’ve just been super bogged down with work deadlines for a long time, and haven’t had time to make any non-work art, or even to update the manga work section of my site. (I’ve done a bunch of new titles and want to show them off!)
Lots of major life events too! In the – uhhh – two and a half years since I posted here, I:
★ Moved back to the USA (and helped my wife Miwa immigrate too, of course!) I miss Japan dearly, but I had to move back to the midwest for a while since my parents have been having major health problems and needed help. Nice to be living with my cats again though!
★ Bought a house! I live in Toledo OH. Despite missing Japan, I do love my little house and my wife and I have been having fun making it a home.
★ Became a dad! Miwa and I welcomed our son Felix into this world on January 31st 2020, you know, shortly before the world as we knew it fell apart. He made 2020 and onward much better for us than it would have been otherwise. Love the little dude.
Anyway, things may be getting slightly more relaxed this summer, so stay tuned for a big update. I post semi-regularly on Twitter, if you wanna check out my little missives around manga lettering, politics, and 90s-GIF-retweeting. I started a total overhaul of my website at the start of the year, and that got put on hold and it’s about half done. I hope to get it done this summer. In the meantime, be good to yourself, and to others, and I’ll see you soon.
Flock Together
Hey folks! I’ve been dreadfully busy, as usual, but I made a little time when I was visiting Michigan recently (where most of my art supplies are) and made some new art. This piece, “Flock Together”, is the fourth in my series of pretty women with cute animals that I’ve been doing each of the last four autumns. I was planning on ending the series with this fourth one. If I get in the mood, I might make a couple more in the future, but for now, four seems like a nice even number to end it on. Click the above picture, or here, to see bonus stuff!
In other news, I went through the site over the last couple days and fine-tuned it a lot. All of the image thumbnails are bigger now, fonts are tweaked, and each main gallery page has a more colorful header. I also moved some more stuff to the Archive page, and took a few really old stuff off said page. I have a few new things I’ve been meaning to add, but will do that soon when I have a little more spare time.
I’ve added (some) Japanese! 日本語!
みなさん、こんにちは。 ちょっと日本語の翻訳があります!
Hello everyone! As promised, I’ve added some Japanese to the site, to help the viewers in my current country of residence to better enjoy my site. Now, I didn’t go through and add translations to every page, as there are a couple hundred, all told, and that’s crazy amounts of work, but I did at least add translations to the main gallery pages. I originally planned to launch this with the new site last week, but I decided to have my friend check my translations to see if they made sense. I’m glad I did. Thank you very much to Ajani Oloye and his wife Junko for correcting my Japanese and rewriting a lot of it to make it more clear. My Japanese level is sort of rough, but it gets me by in daily communication, but reading & writing is my weak point, and Ajani really helped out.
VERSION 3.0
Hello world!
It’s finally done… After five years I finally gave my art site a complete overhaul and it’s now online. This is my biggest site redesign yet, and I started over from scratch. Here are some of the changes I made:
- New aesthetic design. The theme could best be described as “rainbow”. Each gallery section now has its own unique color scheme, for example purple for Illustrated-photography, blue for Photography, and so on. If you’ve been visiting my site for a long time, the background may seem familiar. I always liked the random jaggy thin-line pattern background of the old pre-evanhaydenart.com days, so I brought it back, but in this case, it’s a different color in each gallery. Also making a return is one of my favorite typefaces, Herb Lubalin’s “Avant-Garde”, making up the navigation section lettering. It’s a more sedate usage of the typeface than he did, but I think it works fairly elegantly for the nav boxes. Speaking of typefaces, I stopped using Lubalin Graph (Another Lubalin classic. He was an amazing designer!) since I used it to death on version 2.0’s design. I’ll still use it on blog post promo images, because it is my favorite typeface, but for the main site, I went with something a little more familiar… Georgia! Yep, everyone has this font, and maybe it could seem boring, but I like it a lot, so hey… In other news related to the new design, all the thumbnail images and text is a little bigger now, to account for larger monitor sizes and resolutions, and to make for easier viewing on mobile devices. Also, the page headers still show a different image upon each page load, but now they’re color-matched to the rest of the page. So many different files were made for that…
- Flashier index page(s). Speaking of rotating images, the new index splash page is definitely splashy! A new background loads upon each visit to the page, and fills the screen. I’m sort of picky about the new trend of GIANT leader images for articles and whatnot, but I think for a gallery front page it’s fine. I also tried to make this page work a little better on mobile devices.
- New, wider layout. I ditched the two-column design for a single-column design, allowing me to use bigger images (seems fitting for an art gallery site, right?) The navigation is now at the top of the page, under the header.
- Big big big! About those big images, I apologize for anyone on slow internet connections, but I decided to go all-out this time… Each gallery page has big 1000px wide images for the artwork, and in the case of some pages where the art is a series of pictures, several of those big images. I feel that for an art portfolio site, big splashy images is good, and enough people have high-speed internet these days that I feel pretty comfortable designing for that now. It might be a headache on mobile networks if you’re at 3G or below, and I know that’s where a lot of people view the internet these days, but I firmly believe an art site is best viewed on a decent sized monitor.
- Mobile-ish. On the topic of mobile-internet, I haven’t yet figured out how to make a totally mobile-friendly site yet (I’m not a programmer, I just struggle my way through each redesign when I absolutely have to), but even though some of the images are pretty big now (which load just fine on 4G), the layout this time around is at least a bit better for mobile. There’s some text you need to expand to see better, but the site doesn’t totally fall apart when viewed on a cell phone like my old site did. If I had the time, I would make a separate version of the site just for mobile, and have the code redirect you there when you view it on a phone, but I’m way too busy with work right now to do that, so please hang in there until I can 🙂 This site took long enough as is to redesign (a couple hundred hours, easily) so I may have to wait until I can afford to hire a designer to make a more mobile-friendly version for me.
Other changes… I reorganized the site. After seven years apart, the fashion / portrait photography and automotive photography pages have been consolidated back into a Photography page. Since I haven’t been doing many proper shoots of cars lately, that page seems a little flimsy to warrant its own separate gallery. Also, all the separate gallery archive pages have been consolidated into one Archive page. Another change now involves the bio, links, and store pages being consolidated into an About page. I added some stuff to that about page. The resume / biography is still there, as are links. I added a FAQ page, a Contact page, and a proper Store. The FAQ exists to try to handle some of the questions I get repeatedly over the years… the Contact page is pretty self-explanatory, and now doesn’t involve me having to divulge an email address (thanks Foxyform!)- Store! Finally! The store is the big addition… After, oh, seven years of promising I’d add a store to my site to make it easier to buy prints, I finally did, with Society6. Part of what caused the delay for so long was my 2008 hard drive failure, which caused me to lose a lot of original art. Once I rebuilt my portfolio and had some good stuff to sell, it was a combination of being busy and being honestly a bit intimidated by the whole thing. Society6 should be a good solution because I don’t have the time right now to print and send orders myself, and doing so from Japan is its own kind of headache. Society6 fulfills the orders for me, and they have a good quality to their work. So yeah, finally, if you want to order prints of my work, or other stuff (pillows, cell phone / ipad cases, laptop skins, leggings, duvet covers, shower curtains, etc!), please check out my store!
- NSFW-avoidance, if you want it. I separated the NSFW / 18+ only artwork a bit more from the rest of the content. I don’t want to censor myself, but given the nature of my day job, teaching kids, I wanted to make it a little harder to stumble across stuff that might not be suitable for the office or for younger eyes. Now, when you go to certain galleries, such as Illustrated-photography, the subsection with nudity or violent images is clearly labeled as such, in English and Japanese, and separated from the other content. If you’re using the back / forward buttons to navigate from page to page, it will stop when it gets to the NSFW content, sending you back to the main gallery, and you’ll have to click the thumbnail of the NSFW stuff to see it. No passwords or any stupid stuff like that. I just wanted to keep things accessible to those who want to see it, but stuff harder to have an “oopsie” moment and see it when you weren’t expecting it.
- I mentioned Japanese… One thing I was planning to add to the launch, but decided to wait on a little bit longer, is Japanese translations for a lot of the major content. I already did them, in my mangled Japanese, but I have a friend who’s helping to smooth them out, so I’ll add said translations soon. The site is still prominently English-language, but at least for the main gallery indexes, there will be Japanese as well. For the individual artwork pages, there will be just English, but those are more about the imagery anyway, and I type too much sometimes, so maybe I’m actually sparing my Japanese viewers a bit!
- New blog. As mentioned in the last blog post, the Blog has been 100% redone. After I bungled things and lost my blog archive, I took the time to redo all the old entries based off of salvaged data from the Internet Archive (but lost the comments, sadly). I also added some “from the future!” content to some of those old entries, ie: photos from events that happened. The new blog works much better on mobile devices. Well, to be honest, I used some WordPress trickery to make the site load a separate version for viewing the blog on a cell phone, and it’s not super pretty, but at least it’s not broken. It’ll do for now, until I can figure out how to customize it to make it have a bit more in common, design-wise, with the desktop site.
- What else? I added a TON of new artwork to the site… The Illustration gallery now has a section dedicated to educational art, of which I’ve been making a lot at my day job. This section includes an in-depth look at the “Hello English Picture Dictionary”, which is a publication I designed, edited, and illustrated. Also featured are worksheets I’ve made art for, and the “Word-of-the-Week” whiteboard that I draw each week for my students. Go check all that out! The Photography gallery has a new “Etcetera” section now, with photos of cats, birds, urban wreckage, night photography, and other things! Also added to the Photography page is some of the photos I’ve shot over the years of mangled and neglected vehicles and more robot photos! Growing up in the rust belt made for many such opportunities. I added new art to the Illustrated-photography gallery – an ink one, my first such piece like that in eight years. It’s of my lovely girlfriend Miwa. Finally, I added some new stuff to the Design gallery, including more mix CDs with custom packaging, more flyers, and a more depth look at my manga lettering.
- B-B-B-BONUS. One thing you’ll notice on many of the artwork pages, is a lot more bonus content. More details, more behind-the-scenes, more more more! Also for each artwork that is available to buy on Society6, it’s linked within the page, and for manga and zines, there are links to buy the books from their respective publishers.
Okay, I think that about sums it up! Jeez, sorry to type a novel here, but this is the biggest update ever to my art site and there was a lot to cover! I’ll have more art coming soon, so stay tuned!
OK, everybody online and looking good…
Hello everyone!
If you by any chance read my art blog, then you may have noticed it’s been down for the past month. Now the blog’s back online, but it’s in a state of flux, with some shifting page design, and missing blog posts. Well, you can thank yours-truly, Evan, for that. See, programming stuff has never really been my forte, and I slog through it whenever I redesign this art portfolio site, but I’m by no means a wizard with such things… even less when we’re talking about databases, SQL, and all that. Blahblahblah… long story short: I didn’t properly back-up my blog posts when I updated from my ancient version of WordPress to the modern one and lost all the blog posts since 2008! Luckily, I was able to snag the code for all of them up until a year ago off of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine (it’s saved me more than once now!) *whew!* Also, special thanks to Ken at Doteasy for being super helpful in getting my database stuff straightened out! Anyway, I’m in the process of reposting those old blog posts for posterity, correcting dead links and typos I missed the first time around, and just generally tweaking the old before I get to… the NEW!
This all sort of leads into something exciting. For the past month, whenever my busy schedule has allowed, I’ve been working on a total redo / redesign of the site, and will be posting that soon! It’s been a ton of work, and everything is different, bigger, and better! I’m not 100% how soon I’ll be posting it. It’s about 90% done, but the remaining couple sections are a little tricky. Also, this blog is going to look a weird sometimes and will have some broken links (fixed later) while I tweak it, so hang in there! See you soooooooon!
MACRO is back!
Oh yes, and another thing… I finally redesigned, revamped, and REVIVED the Macro site! (Macro is my music). Click the above image or here to go visit the site. There are about 30 mp3s on there for you to download (including a whole album!), a few videos to watch, and lots of pictures! Also, I’ve been messing around with new music, of course. Here’s a new track, “Novo”, my first new song in six years!
I’m excited to come out of my music hiatus…
A new chapter
As I type this, big changes are afoot in my life. Good changes! I’m mentioning them here because they will have an appreciable effect on my art and my workflow – I’d imagine for the better. So what’s happening?
On January 22nd, I’m moving to Japan!! A month ago, only a brief time after moving to Los Angeles, I got a surprise phone call from the JET Program, asking me if I could come to Nagasaki to fill in for one of their Assistant Language Teachers (ALT) who would be leaving the program early. Of course I said yes. I’d actually applied for JET a year prior, had interviewed back in February ‘12, and hadn’t gotten picked for the initial wave of hiring. I had thus moved on to “Plan B”. I was finally starting to get some traction going in LA with more contract work in the photography business, but the truth of the matter is, things weren’t going smoothly enough with regular enough pay for me to pass up a rare opportunity such as this. I’ve been wanting a steady paycheck, structure, health insurance, and something new for a while now, and this will fit the bill. I’m crossing my fingers that the US economy will have rebounded a bit more by the time I get back to the states, but this new English teaching job will give me financial security for the near-future, and I’ll be living in a beautiful area of Japan!
The whole experience so far has been like what I would imagine it would feel if you spend all of your teens and early twenties trying to be an actor, but it never really happens, so you move on. Then, at the age of 32, a big movie studio calls you up to offer a leading role in a summer blockbuster. Well, that metaphor might be a bit hyperbolic, but it seems somewhat apt. I studied the Japanese language from age 13-23, at first on my own, then in after-school classes in junior high & high school, then in college. I’ve been to Japan five times thus far, in 1998, 1999, 2000, 2003, and 2007. Despite my love of Japanese culture and the language, I’ve become a little distanced from it in my day-to-day. I’m 32 now, and it’s been almost ten years since my last Japanese class. I stopped studying the language due to having taken all the classes my university offered, as well as a lingering question of how the skill was really going to help me in life, especially since art was my main focus in life. I got pretty cynical about Japan, and didn’t see how I could fit into that world in a way that would also nurture my creativity. My interest in pop-culture & traditional culture used to be very Japan-centric, and in the intervening years it has become about 10%-20% of my cultural intake, with an expanded interest in the rest of the world. I no longer have the otaku tunnel-vision of my youth, and you know what? I think that makes the 32-year-old me a much better fit for living and working in Japan, than the 20-year-old wearing the rose-tinted glasses.
A few years in the workforce, having to handle the full brunt of the recession and its underemployment and insecurity, have strengthened me greatly as a person, and taught me some valuable lessons. If the overly-idealistic 20-year-old me had to deal with the ups and downs of working in a foreign country, I think I would have cracked under the pressure. For so long Japan was just a vacation / study-program destination for me, and I didn’t have to deal with the negative aspects, as I was just “sampling” the country for a while, each visit. As I’ve grown up, experience has taught me that every job sucks in some ways, even the ones you most enjoy. The trick is to use the knowledge of that occasional suckiness to help you better appreciate the good times. Also, when you live in one of your dream places, as I did in San Francisco for several years, not every day is going to be paradise. Even dream cities contain exhaustion, heartbreak, parking tickets, noisy neighbors, and worrying about paying the rent. As an adult, I can view Japan as what it is: a country with good and bad traits like any other, and not as the everything-is-perfect “nerd’s paradise” I once might have. Plus, I’m planning on using this opportunity as a way to turn around and enhance my life. I’ll finally be able to put money into savings each month, as I’ll have enough money to live on and then some. I won’t have my car with me, and with a ton of cycling, walking, and eating better, I intend to get in great shape again. I also intend on getting my Japanese ability better than ever. I used to be pretty good, and nowadays I can speak on the level of a Japanese 4 year old on a good day. Good enough to get by, but I can’t discuss deep things. When I visited in ‘07, my language ability came back quite a bit, and I imagine with living there, it’ll rebound and become much better!
So what does all of this have to do with my art, and why am I posting this blog entry on my art site, and not on a seemingly-requisite “American in Japan” blog? Well, it means a few things….
I’m not sure what my workflow / productivity will be on new art while I’m there. It’s hard to say because I don’t know yet if I’m going to be one of those ALTs who is very busy all the time, and has a lot of extra-curricular things going on outside of work, or if there’s going to be a a lot of free time to make art. That said, my productivity this past 3 or so years has been a pale shadow of the pre-recession days, and maybe now that I won’t have the malaise of unemployment / money stress weighing down on me, maybe I can embrace my creativity again. Also, I traditionally get super inspired in Japan, and tend to at make art a lot when I’m there. I think that may well balance out with the potential lack of free time.
The kind of techniques I will have at my disposal for photography will change while I’m there. I can’t bring very much at all with me, and will only be shipping a small amount, so much of my usual supplies will be back home. For example, I won’t have my strobes with me, so that’s going to put a limit on the lighting I can do in my photography. I’m thinking at some point I’ll buy a second Speedlite, and a remote transmitter, and have sort of a lower-power, more portable strobe solution, but that’ll have to wait until I have paychecks coming in. I’ll be relying more on available light that I have been with my more recent shots, and continuing to use my Speedlite to make things “pop” a bit. I also don’t know what the situation will be with models over there, so it’ll be interesting to see how much of my photography & illustrated-photography even includes people. It would be a nice challenge to get back into more abstract work again, or at least non-people subjects supplementing my portfolio.
I intend to return to some neglected kinds of art that I can make on my own, in my apartment… music, comic books, and illustration. I’ve been planning out some new comic ideas, and have been waiting for a time where things stabilize so I can dive deep into a graphic novel, or at least some short-form stuff. My illustration – my first artistic skill, sort of neglected due to my focus on photography – needs to make a more prominent return in my life. As for my music, I’ve been itching to make a new album. After making a noise album a year ago to get back into practice, I’ve been spending a lot of time, building parts of new songs. Having some new toys at my disposal, and feeding off of the inspiration I feel in Japan, I intend to return to music in a major way soon!
Okay, I’ve rattled on long enough. I’m not sure exactly yet how long I’ll be in Japan, but at least through JET, it’ll be a minimum of six months, and as long as four and a half years. I’m hoping to put in at least a solid 2-3 years, to save up a good nest-egg of money, and I don’t see myself as a “lifer”, but who knows? The future is hard to predict, and who knows who I’ll become? Anyway, thanks for reading this. Unless I manage to make some new art in the busy next couple weeks, my next update will most likely be from Japan. I don’t know exactly how long it’ll be until my next content update, but I’ll try not to let it be too long. See you soon!
Odds & Ends – November 2011 edition
Okay, in less naked news, I added a bunch of… well, odds & ends to the site, mostly to the Design page, but one to Illustration as well. Mostly stuff from the past year that I for some reason forgot to upload, but also a few brand new things.
- “Sugar Brain 3″ LP packaging The full layout design for my newest album. All collage goodness with rainbows, tigers, and unsettling people with glowing eyes. What more could you want? Don’t forget, you can download the album for free if you so desire!
- “Cradle 2 the Grave” mix-CD packaging A morbidly-titled mix that I passed out at my birthday party earlier this year.
- “3 for Marie” mix-CD packaging The packaging design for a three-disc mix I made for one of my best buddies, Marie.
- “Testarossa” mix-CD packaging An epic five-disc mix-CD set I made for my last girlfriend when we were still dating. Might be strange of me to post it here, but I was always proud of that cover design.
- “Wedding Road Trip” page headers Headers I made for a blog following two young newlyweds on a cross country marriagepalooza.
- Honey Badger: A Thug in His Own Right A t-shirt design I made that Ryan and I were going to put out, inspired by motorcycle club jackets and vicious mammals, but then the Honey Badger meme got stale and we lost interest. Pretty funny image though, so check it out.
In other news, I made a bunch of subtle tweaks all over the site. Now all the copyright dates are correct. Well, let’s rephrase that. I get lazy about going through the whole site each year and changing all the dates, and I’m not enough of a coding wizard to install a site-wide auto-updating line of date code. Thus, now it just says “© Evan Hayden” instead of “© YEAR Evan Hayden”. It’s my copyrighted work, regardless of the year anyway. I can see you falling asleep from here, so I’ll get onto the other site tweaks… I also redid some of the thumbnails on the Design page to better reflect their content, mostly notably in the album packaging (square thumbnails now to give a quick preview of the whole album cover), and in the logos (thin borders on the thumbnail boxes now to make everything more cohesive). The other change I made was in taking most of the text on the screen and bumping it up a size. In my opinion, this isn’t as pretty as delicate small text on the page, but it’s more readable in general, and I was getting tired of leaning so close to my monitor to read my own dang site! (and others mentioned to me that the old font was too small as well). So in general these tweaks mean better accessibility for others, and less updating headaches for me!