GENERAL:
Q: When did you start making art?
A: I've enjoyed making art for
as long as I can remember. My first memory was
finger-painting at age three. I also remember always
drawing on paper placemats at restaurants (something
I still do), and drawing cars, birds, fish, and
spaceships as far back as pre-school. Art's always
been my #1 love in life. |
Q: Who are some of your influences?
A: I'll first talk about people
who've influenced me in my own life, and then
artists that I don't know personally, but admire. As
for people I know, first off, my parents have always
been very supportive of my interests in art. I've
also had some very inspiring art teachers over the
years, such as
Alan Maciag, Chantele Henry, Kim Navarre, and
George Hughes. As for people I admire but don't
know personally, the two artists who had the biggest
effect on me would have to be Osamu Tezuka and
Alphonse Mucha. I've also been quite inspired over
the years include Hajime Sorayama, MC Escher,
Katsuhiro Otomo, and
Tadanori Yokoo, among others. My
links page has a bunch of artists I like on it,
and I encourage you to check it out. |
ILLUSTRATED-PHOTOGRAPHY:
Q: How do you make your
illustrated-photography art?
A: My old stuff from 2001-2005
was all done with marker over C-prints, as I was
shooting with film at the time. In 2005 I bought my
first Wacom tablet, a tiny little 5" model, used it to the
point of wearing it out, and got another. Now I have
a Cintiq 13HD, but haven't had much of a chance to
use it yet due to being busy with work, but believe me, I'm looking forward to
it! Anyway, for the illustrated-photo work, I
composite together various digital photos I've shot,
then begin the long process of hand-drawing over
them. |
Q: Do you have any making-of / behind-the-scenes guides for your
illustrated-photography process?
Q: What Photoshop filter do you use to make your
illustrated-photography stuff?
/ Do you use Illustrator and vectorize your photos?
A: Neither, actually. I don't use filters to get
the illustrated look. Rather, I hand-draw everything
using a Wacom tablet. |
Q: How long does it take you to make an illustrated-photograph piece?
A: A long time, which is why I don't do them as
often as I'd like to. In my C-41 & marker days, it
was quite quick... I could knock out one in an hour
or two, since I was working small (11"x 17" usually)
and I'm speedy with a marker. Nowadays,
doing everything digital has pluses and minuses
compared to ink. The obvious pluses are that I can
undo, freely arrange and distort things, and generally
have full control over the image. The minus is that
it takes me much longer. On the short side of
things, a piece like "Zipperface",
which is a close-up portrait without a ton of
detail, takes about 8-10 hrs to make. My longest
most labor-intensive so far was "A Love Letter to my 13-Year-Old Self",
which took over 30 hours! The reason it takes so
long is that I do the digital files huge - usually
around 40x30 inches for example. I do this so that I
can print large and detailed prints, but it means a
lot of detail over a big area. Compound that with
the fact that I tend to have to redo a lot of my
lines with working digitally, and it takes a while. |
Q: What software / hardware do you use for these?
A: Well, first off all, I'm
sort of a weirdo with my software... I have various
versions of Adobe Photoshop and subscribe to the
Creative Cloud, but the main program I always go
back to for my artwork is actually Corel Photopaint. Back in high school a copy of
Photopaint came with my first scanner, and since
Photoshop was prohibitively expensive, I learned how
to make computer art using Corel's system. I use
Adobe for photo editing and working with other
people's files, but when it comes to building images
from scratch and doing illustration-heavy stuff, I
still feel most comfy with Corel.
As for hardware, I use a Wacom tablet for illustrating. I started
off with a tiny 5" model, wore that out and got
another one, and just recently finally bought a
Cintiq. I intend to use that more
once my schedule frees up a bit, and still use the
little one once in a while when I need something
more portable that I don't have to worry about as
much. |
Q: Your illustrated-photography stuff looks a little like Waking Life / A Scanner Darkly / Borderlands.
Did you know?
A: Yes I've heard this occasionally over the years. I
started working on this style around 2000, before those movies
/ games existed. Since there are no new ideas left
under the sun, surely others have worked in
similar styles just as early or earlier than I. No
matter what, I've done my best to try to make my
illustrated-photography uniquely me :-) |
PHOTOGRAPHY:
Q: What kind of camera gear do you use?
A: My main photography gear entails:
Canon 70D DSLR & a few lenses (especially fond of my
Sigma 10-2omm wide-angle), a couple of Speedlites,
Profoto 1200 strobe set with lots of accessories. I
also have various other things I play around with,
but this is the core stuff. During my years living
in Japan, I was fart away from my strobe set, so I
was shooting with a couple of synced Speedlites. Now
I'm back in the states, but sadly haven't had any
time to do any real photoshoots. As for my 70D (and
the 30D I used before that) it's been a real workhorse and a
trusty friend. |
Q: How did you get interested in photography?
A: I've had some interest in it
ever since I was a kid, thanks to my mom. She would
show me how to use her Pentax SLR and I was
fascinated by it. I got my first camera, a Kodak
110, when I was 4 or 5 and used to enjoy taking
photos. My interest in photography increased when
I was 20 and took my first photography class. I
totally fell in love with the darkroom
experimentation and learning how SLRs and strobes
worked. I took all the photo classes I could at
university and even went back for a couple semesters
after graduating to take more. Thanks to my mom
fostering my interest and the classes I took at
University of Toledo, I decided that photography was
what I wanted to do with my life. Ultimately, the
Great Recession kind of killed that plan, and I
diverted into manga lettering, but I still love
taking photos. Maybe I'll try to resurrect the
"career" part of that later down the line, who
knows, but in the meantime, it's nice doing
photography without panicking about needing to do
enough of it to keep food on the table. |
ILLUSTRATION:
Q: What kind of art supplies do you use?
A: Well when it comes to
drawing by hand, some of my favorite pens and
markers include Sharpie markers, Sakura Identipen
(aka: "マイネーム"), Sakura Micron, Sakura Microperm...
Hehe, basically Sanford and Sakura should sponsor
me! Sometimes I also just like to use a plain old
black Papermate pen. I also use Copic markers
sometimes, but they're crazy expensive, so I just
use them occasionally... As for colored pencils, I
used to use Berol Prismacolor all the time from jr
high to college. When I was living in Japan, I also
stocked up on Mitsubishi
or Tombo colored pencils, and they are fun to use
too. I prefer kneaded erasers and also use a
Papermate "Tuff Stuff" eraser stick for detailed
erasing. Living in Japan opened my
eyes to plastic erasers again, and I sometimes used
"Mono" if I don't have my kneaded with me. I don't
do much painting, but I'd like to. I occasionally
buy a set of gouache or watercolors, intent on
getting back into it, but sometimes it's hard to
deal with messy art mediums in my tiny apartment...
As for other stuff, I also use my computer a lot...
I remember in high school I swore that computers
wouldn't take over my art, but they sure enough
have! I'm surprised I used to be resistant to it,
because they're just another tool in my collection,
and a handy one at that! |
Q: Do you have any tips for people who want to improve their drawing
skills?
A: There's a lot of good
resources out there with excellent tips for drawing
- and I'd recommend you seek them out - but one tip
I can offer that helped me a lot that I haven't
heard much is... use markers! Let me elaborate...
When I was in college, I challenged myself to draw
straight away in marker for a couple years, trying
not to use pencil / eraser first unless it was for a
serious project. If you practice drawing with
marker, the thicker the better (Sharpie, for
example), you build a greater confidence with your
lines. You can't erase, and if you make mistakes,
you have to find a way to work them into the piece.
It's sort of trial-by-fire, and I like markers for
their bold look. |
DESIGN:
Q: How did you get into design?
A: I pretty much stumbled into it.
I had little formal training in graphic design (my
major was in photography), but I always had found it
kind of fun. In '07, my friend was working at a
start-up in San Francisco and she encouraged me to
apply for their open graphic design position. I
worked there and quickly picked up on some stuff I
hadn't learned previously, and got a bunch more gigs
from there. |
Q: What kind of aesthetics or designers have inspired you?
A: I'm a real sucker for design
from the '70s and '80s, especially movie posters,
album art, and video games from that era. As for
designers, as I mentioned above, I don't have much
of a formal education in graphic design, so I don't
know many designers by name, but I really like stuff
by Herb Lubalin. He designed my two favorite
typefaces (Lubalin Graph and Avant Garde). Milton
Glaser is also pretty rad! |
COMICS:
Q: How did you become a manga letterer?
A: Well, I've had a long
interest in Japanese comics, since 1993, and in high
school met my good friend Ryan Sands. We bonded over
comics and other pop culture, and made lots of
creative things together. In 2005, we started a site
called
Same Hat, devoted to underground manga and
esoteric Japanese pop-culture. In addition to blog
posts about cool/weird stuff, we teamed up on
releasing some horror, gag, and just plain bizarre
manga on our site. Stuff by Yoshida Sensha, Suehiro
Maruo, and Junji Ito, most notably. Ryan handled the
translation and script adaptation, while I handled
the lettering and touch-up. At the time, we'd never
heard the term "scanlation", and didn't realize we
were part of something bigger. We just released
underground stuff that was 99.9% sure not
to be officially released in English due to being
too out there, and built a small but loyal fan base.
Eventually we took down the manga, and shifted Same
Hat primarily to being articles about cultural
events, news, and oddities.
During this time, we got to be friends with people
in the comic industry. We were offered our first
professional manga adaption gig by Last Gasp, for
the release of Yusaku Hanakuma's
Tokyo Zombie. This was a lot of fun to
work on, and it felt great to have the legitimacy of
an official release. A couple years later, we were
able to do another title for Last Gasp, Suehiro
Maruo's
The Strange Tale of Panorama Island.
This was a dream for Ryan and I, since we are both
big fans of Maruo, as well as Edogawa Rampo, whose
work the manga is based off of. It was released as a
beautiful oversized hardcover to great acclaim. One
thing I loved about doing books for Last Gasp is
that I had free reign over design, and was able to
design the cover / spine / back covers as well as
the interior work. It feels really good to hold a
book in your hands and look at the cover and know
you designed it.
Over time, Ryan's focus shifted primarily toward his
burgeoning publishing label
Youth in Decline, so we parted ways as manga
collaborators (but remain friends). In 2012, My
friend
David Murray alerted me to the fact that his friend
Ben Applegate, then an editor at Digital Manga, needed a
letterer on a manga title and we got in touch. That
manga turned out to be none other than an Osamu
Tezuka title!
Barbara, a surreal tale of muses and
writing from the '70s. Tezuka has long been my
biggest artistic inspiration, and it was a joy to
work on the book.
The following year, I took a job teaching English in
Nagasaki Japan, and that was my main gig for three
years. At the same time, after Ben moved to Kodansha
Comics, he offered me freelance work on their manga,
starting with Mitsuru Hattori's
Sankarea. I had to bow out of the first
volume due to being concerned about it interfering
with my international move and starting the teaching
job, and was worried about missing out on working
with Kodansha further due to that decision, but Ben
stuck by me and let me pick the book up from volume
2 until 11, the final volume. This led to many more
books, most notably Hiroaki Samura's
Die Wergelder, Junji Ito's
Cat Diary: Yon & Mu, Haruko Ichikawa's
Land of the Lustrous, and most amazing
of all, Katsuhiro Otomo's
Akira. I have done about half of my Kodansha
books with the editor
Ajani Oloye, who has became a good friend of
mine.
In 2016, after quitting my English teaching job to
focus solely on freelance manga work, I mostly
worked for Kodansha, but did a couple of very
special side projects:
The Osamu Tezuka Story (for Stonebridge
Press), and redesigning the covers / back covers for
Barefoot Gen for Last Gasp. My main client
remains Kodansha, but I also still do projects for
Last Gasp, as well as Vertical (now rolled into
Kodansha),
J-Novel Club, and
Saturday AM. As of typing this (January 2023), I've
done 250 books, and look forward
to many more. Please check out examples of my manga
lettering in the
Comics gallery, and cover design in the
Design gallery. |
Q: How did you get into making your own comics?
A: I'd had an interest in
superhero comics since I was very young, and started
drawing my own comics when I was 11. My first
creation was a superhero named Electron Man.
At age 13, I started reading Japanese comics and
that inspired me greatly. I started a sci-fi space
opera comic called
Project: Orion that I drew for 13
issues, before rebooting it. I intended on drawing
it more, but got too busy with school. I did some
other short comic projects here and there, then
stopped making comics for a few years until 2005 and
2006, when I made the short comic stories you see on
this site. It's now been a pretty long time since I
made them (except for remastering them in 2012), and
I'd like to make more comics when / if I have time
some day. I have a couple plots in my head that have
been waiting to get out on paper, but I've only done
a little bit here on them. Maybe someday you'll see
them on this site, if I ever have free time again... |
MUSIC:
Q: How did you get into making music?
A: I got my first drum set for
Christmas when I was 4. This started my passion for
beats. Got my first keyboard, a Yamaha Portasound
V22 sampling keyboard, when I was 9 or 10 years old.
This started my passion for samples. Spent a few
years just messing around with my keyboard, making
cassette mish-mashes of other people's songs, my
voice, and weird samples. When I was 15 or so, I
named my music "Evil Eye". I made a series of
fourteen 90-minute tapes full of music I made on the
Portasound. When I was 17, I got my computer, and it
totally changed the way I made music. This also,
unfortunately, coincided with my trusty Portasound
dying on me. Armed with Windat, and the basic
Windows sound recorder, I started to make music with
WAV files. Over time, I got the hang of it, and soon
started using Goldwave, which expanded my abilities
greatly. I initially I made albums that were
collages of random sounds, basic music structures,
and a lot of strange humor. As I started toying with
loops, I started to make more "serious" music
(although I try to never take myself too seriously).
I also used a variety of keyboards, (mostly basic
Yamaha keyboards), and investing in drum machines.
Now, after making 13 full-length albums, several
singles, and a couple music videos, I find myself at
a crossroads. I'm finally at a point where I feel
confident enough in my talent that my music has
changed from just a hobby - something to supplement
my love of visual art - to something I wish to get
out into the world and with which to attain a
modicum of success. "Evil Eye" was the name of the
music I made when I was a teenager. "Macro" is the
music I make today. |
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