New art “Smooch”, and big news for next year!

Smooch

After a long time of being too busy to work on personal art (still sort of am), I made a sequel to last year’s “Her Best Friend“, and this one features a pretty lady with a cute shiba inu! Like the last one, this was done on a big shikishi board, with Copic markers and metallic washi paper (the hair). The red is a really vivid washi paper with lovely texture that looks great IRL. I may do another one or two illustrations in this series.

 

In other news, I apologize for the long time since last post. I’ve been super duper busy with the day job + manga lettering, and now…. getting ready to move home! Yep, after three years in Nagasaki, I’m leaving Japan to go back to the states. Couple reasons… the reason that’s been pressing at me for a long while is that I need to help my parents clean up and move out of the house I grew up in so they can get their finances in order and so we can all sort through our respective collections of stuff. I was going to hang in there with my current teaching job in Japan until August ’16 and then move home to help out, but a very nice opportunity came up that I couldn’t pass up. As you may know,  I’ve been lettering manga for Kodansha Comics / Penguin Random House this past three years, and have built up a nice relationship with them and have worked on a bunch of fun books for them. For next year I had the opportunity to either take one one new books series (in addition to the ones I’ve been doing), and keep trying to balance that with the demands of my day job, or quit the day job and take four new series. Truthfully, it’s been exhausting this past year, doing a book per month in addition to day job, in addition to spending time with my girlfriend and pals, and getting sleep, and I enjoy doing the publishing work more these days than teaching, so it was time for a change. As of January, I’ll be back in Southeast Michigan, focusing on my manga lettering work (and cleaning the house, and going on Fallout 4 binges). The pay will be better and the workload lighter, on average. This is great as it’ll allow me more time to work on my own art in my spare time. I’m not 100% sure how long I’ll be back in Michigan, but it depends on how long the house takes to get ready, and how long I want to enjoy socking away extra money from living cheaply before I run myself through the ringer of living in a “hip” place again. Also, the plan is my girlfriend will stay with me there for three months in the spring (the longest she can stay in the states as a tourist), and we’ll decide what we want to do from there, in terms of staying together and where we might live. Anyway, I’ll be busy for the rest of the year and most of January, so I probably won’t be updating this blog for a while, but once I have my current two books done, have moved out of my apartment, and have tied up loose ends in Japan, I’ll be resettling back in my old home and will have many more updates for you. Exciting times!

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