It’s been a little while since I’ve posted — sorry, I’ve been busy painting chickens. However, I’ve gotten final approval on a painting I did a while back for our friends who are getting married soon. They liked the wedding picture I did of John and Kaori a while back, so I did the wedding board for their upcoming wedding. (Do we have wedding boards in the US? I don’t think so… It’s basically a picture of the couple displayed outside the reception hall. Unfortunately they often look really cheesey, like boardwalk caricatures.) Anyway, here it is:

Yoshiaki and Sachiko

The sad thing is that Hitomi and I saw some people doing *really* awful wedding boards online for upwards of $200 a pop… I guess you only have to live here to see how lucrative a business weddings are in Japan. After all, even in our corner-of-nowhere neighborhood, there are more than 3 enormous, gaudy wedding chapels, and more being constructed it seems every month.

Echizen has a small expo called the Chrysanthemum Earth Festival. It’s a local eco-festival, with 4 themes: Ajimano, man’yo, ecology, and chrysanthemums. It was started last year by a volunteer organization that my wife’s brother is part of, and this year I was asked to do the promo poster for it. I thought it would be a great chance to do a Japanese painting. So I started out by painting a few Chrysanthemums (which are the official flower of Echizen city):

Chrysanthemums

And then tweaked it around a bit to make it more like a poster, adding the event information, and changing the center flower into the Earth:

菊地球博

Today Nevermet Press was updated with Heroes of the Vale, new game content with some characters related to this month’s content. Here are the three pieces I did for the article, but you should head on over to NMP and look at the article for yourself.

Forgegrider's Apprentice

The Merchant

The Shepherd

Ono is a tiny city in northeastern Fukui, surrounded by mountains on all sides, which I read is a rare thing in Japan. It’s a very old castle town which claims to be famously known as “The Kyoto of Hokuriku,” just like Takefu did, and just about every other city in this region. Anyway, the city is holding a postcard contest with the theme “stars,” so I’ll be entering this piece.

Stars over Ono

I have to brag about my nerdiness a little bit on this one. I didn’t want to just slap an artificial starry night together for the background, but it’s also difficult to do a digital image outside in another city at night. In order to get a fairly accurate star image, I used a space-browsing program called Celestia, located Ono city on Earth, rotated the camera to the sky, coordinating with google maps and flickr images to find the proper viewing angle from the base of the main donjon of Ono castle, and then time-warped Celestia’s star navigation to August 31st, 2009, roughly 11:30 pm, when the Moon and the Milky Way would both be visible above the castle (as well as a couple of comets and an additional galaxy, which I didn’t paint). So while the stars are certainly brighter than you’d see on a night like this, and the spaces between them are not perfectly to scale, you’re looking at a fairly accurate version of the night sky above Echizen Ono Castle.