Been a few months since my last update. I’ve been a busy boy. Anyway, click above (or here) to check out a photoshoot I did in Tokyo last November with my buddies Bob and Teshi, of the band ELLEH.
Category: friends
catching up with the Deathscape Navigator
Added some recent album packaging designs, one from this past summer and one from last year (belatedly). Above, you’ll see the cover and back cover of my album “Deathscape Navigator”. Click above, or here, to see the rest of the packaging art! Below, you’ll see the cover and back cover for the mix CD set I made for Ryan last summer. Click below, or here, to see the rest of that compilation’s art!
Party on!
“Silence is Golden” – revisited
Recently, I made a box set of my music for my friend Ethan, before he moved to Tokyo. For each of the six included albums, I redesigned the packaging and added some new art.I’ll make a post about more of that later, but to start, I wanted to share with you the two new illustrated photography pieces I made this summer for “Silence is Golden”, my 2006 LP. In addition to the original cover and back cover, I used two more photos from my shoot with Dawon to make an inner sleeve to hold the disc, one of which is a track listing. It was fun to revisit this photo shoot and make something new from it. Check out bigger views of this art in the Illustrated Photography section and see the packaging design in the Design section!
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.
Her Best Buddy
Another fun image made with fancy Japanese washi paper on a big shikishi board. I made this last October, to show at the culture festival day at one of the junior high schools I teach at in Nagasaki, and am getting it posted now. The kitty is none other than my kitty, Magnus! Sadly, a couple months after I made this, my beloved kitty passed on from a kidney problem, so this illustration has taken on extra significance for me. Rest in peace, my little buddy…
Anyway, if you’d like to see a bigger view of the image, as well as details & the making-of, click here! Also, you can download a big wallpaper for your monitor there 🙂
Clair
So the good news is that since moving to Japan, I’ve been super inspired and in a great mood most of the time (which is conducive to making art for me). The bad news is that I’ve been so dang busy that I haven’t been able to make as much art as I’d like. Also, my model network here is basically nonexistent, and despite the large amount of pretty girls and handsome dudes in Nagasaki, it’s hard to find people who want to pose for fashion-type photos. That said, I’ve done a couple shoots for my friend Mai, who runs “Clair”, a dress and accessory shop!
Recently, Mai’s friend Ren posed with a bunch of different dresses. It was her first time modeling, and I think she was stunning! There are a lot more on the gallery page for it, so click here, or on the Ren pics to see more than what I’ve posted here. Here’s a sample…
Next up, a few shots of Mai herself, rocking some fabulous dresses and jewelry. As with before, click here, or below, s to see more! Mai looks quite good here too, I think 🙂
Despite having to leave my big Profoto strobe set back in the states, due to size / weight / cost restrictions, I’ve not been without strobes as you see here. I bought an extra Speedlite, a wireless trigger, and some various accessories. I don’t have quite the power and consistency of light quality that I have with my Acute 1200s set, but the tradeoff is that my Speedlite setup is battery powered and super compact, so I can shoot anywhere without being tethered by a power cord. Also, if things break, it’s a lot cheaper to replace a Speedlite than a strobe head…. Stay tuned! As I get to know more people around Kyushu, as well as planning ahead for shooting when I visit other places, I’ll be posting more fashion and portraits once again!
I should add, as a post-script, that I’m still taking tons of photos. I shoot about 8-10 Gigs per week here, just in snapshots, and I’ve been doing more event photography for the schools I work for. Pretty fun!
Panorama Island – out now!
In other news, “Panorama Island”, a manga that Ryan Sands and I adapted into English is now available! It’s being put out by Last Gasp, and is now available to purchase in lots of different places, such as directly from Last Gasp, or via Amazon, for example. It was a dream project to work on, since it’s a Maruo comic, based off of an Edogawa Ranpo story. The book came out beautifully, and is a nice big hardcover. Here’s what Amazon has to say about the story.
On a remote and mysterious island, one man builds a playground of hedonistic excess – replete with waterfalls, grand palaces, and gardens – a backdrop for his decadent feasts, orgies, and dark secrets. Set in 1920s Japan, The Strange Tale of Panorama Island follows the twisted path of failed novelist Hitomi, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the son of a rich industrialist family. Hitomi learns of the rich man’s sudden passing and creates a desperate plan. He fakes his own death, digs up and hides the other man’s body, and then washes himself up starving on a beach near the home of the dead man’s family. After successfully impersonating the now-dead son, Hitomi takes over all aspects of the industrialist’s life, including his company, his fortune, and eventually his wife. The failed author soon redirects the family’s wealth to his own perverse aims. A graphic novel based on the revered novella by Edogawa Rampo. Rampo was the godfather of Japanese pulp mysteries. Stunning artwork by master manga artist Suehiro Maruo deftly illustrates this Japanese pulp classic in fine detail. * 13th Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize for New Artist
I handled the lettering, touch-up, and book design, while Ryan handled the editing. Ryan and Kyoko Nitta did translation. Pick up a copy and enjoy it 🙂
Alicia & my Fiat
Right before I left for LA, I got a chance to do a proper shoot with Alicia Echevarria. (I’d previously posted a quick one-off shot I took of her back in August, btw.) It’s too bad that I didn’t meet her earlier in my time back in Michigan, as I would have loved to shot more, but I’m happy we managed to fit this shoot into that last week of packing and scrambling. Anyway, she’s super photogenic, so I think you’ll dig these photos! I’d been meaning to do a shoot with my beloved project car, a 1975 Fiat Spider that I’ve been working on since I got it in 2010, so I figure I’d let the green machine guest-star in this shoot.
I tried to go for a ’70s vibe for the photos, to match the car and wardrobe (especially the green dress, which was my mom’s in the late ’60s), and opted for a slightly hazy look, with selectively muted colors and sun flares. I’ve always loved the way 35mm photos from the ’60s-’80s looks, and I’ve been chasing an elusive goal to try to achieve that look via digital tricks. (I guess I could just use Instagram like everyone else, hur hurrr). Oh! Here’s a little behind-the-scenes shot:
Anyway, thanks again to Alicia for posing for the shoot, to my mom for supplying the wardrobe for the second half of the shoot (she had some killer style back in the day), and extra-special thanks to my friend Peter Stylianou, owner of Cozy Corner Coney Island, for letting me use the yard behind his super-delicious restaurant!
Click here or any of the shots in this post to see the rest of the photos!
PROBE + more new art!
Hello everyone! I’ve just posted a bunch of photos from an extremely enjoyable photo shoot I did in Detroit last month. I’ve been Flickr buddies for a long time now with Tyler Linner, a transportation design student at CCS. Recently he purchased a winter beater car, a first-gen Ford Probe, and has been customizing it into a hyper-miling aero art car (complete with dazzle camouflage!) I knew, once I saw it, that I would have to photograph it!
We found a suitably angular backdrop, and were joined by the lovely Amanda Faye Cain for some avant-garde photo fun-time. She did an amazing job, and I’m hoping to work with her again very soon. Special thanks to the folks across the street at Threat Management Center, for providing me with power for my lights.
Anyway, click on one of the above images, or here, to see more photos. If you want to see even more photos from the shoot after that (27 total!), check out this Flickr set.
In other news, I snuck some other new work on the site recently… Some new photography and some new illustrations. Let’s stay on the photography topic for now.
A friend of mine posed for some pin-up photography a few months back, and she approved of me posting a couple of our more interesting & abstract shots, on the condition that she remain anonymous. Click here, or above, to check out both of them. Perhaps you’ll see more from the shoot further on, if she gives of the OK, but for now, enjoy these steamy (literally in this case) photos. (sort of nsfw)
I also did some illustration. We’ll stay on the topic of nsfw for this one, although it is also quite tasteful…
Recently Electric Ant posted a collaboration between a good bunch of indie comics artists, many of which are buddies of mine, in honor of the recently departed Jean Giraud, aka Moebius. I loved his art, growing up, and was saddened to hear of his passing. For this tribute, we all picked an image from a collector’s card set that Moebius made, and did a “cover” of the image. Click above, or here, to see my interpretation of “Loona”. Also, be sure to check out the post on Electric Ant, to see a ton of AMAZING art by other Moebius-lovers!
One last piece to update here… A collage / illustration that I made out of shipping labels:
Just something fun I whipped up in 20 min in my journal. Click above, or here to see the whole image (it’s not NSFW, but I sort of like this sneak preview format!)
Anyway, I hope you cats and kittens enjoy the new stuff! I’ve been absolutely swamped lately with two big freelance book design / typersetting gigs this year so far, so it’s cut down my workflow on other things, but hopefully I’ll post some more fun stuff here again soon, before the next century!
coloring pages!
I’ve been a busy boy since moving back to Michigan. Three big freelance gigs at the same time. Two publishing projects, which I’ll go into more detail about later, and a series of coloring pages and craft/project photography for Education.com. You can see the coloring pages (seriously, how fun is this freelance gig!) on the Illustration page. Click above, or here to see the series I did for the upcoming Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month, and here to download the PDFs! The series features IM Pei, Michelle Kwan, Ichiro Suzuki, Kristi Yamaguchi, Larry Shinoda, Apollo Anton Ohno, Maya Lin,Duke Kahanamoku, Jeremy Lin, and Dan Inouye.
I also posted a few shots I look of Katie while I was visiting LA in December. Check them out here! Here’s one of them:
More stuff coming soon… I’ve been back in MI for a couple months, and have been alternating between crazy busy and crazy chillaxing. I have an exciting and avant-garde shoot scheduled for this coming Sunday, and I hope to be having a mini-renaissance of art-making this spring and summer!