About a week ago I came across this really cool site. Basically, you can go there to look at art by various artists -but there's a catch: they have to put up some old and terrible work side by side with their more recent successful works. The purpose is to be a resource for inspiration and improvement for all artists, right down to the earliest beginners. So as I am today's featured artist, I have decided to put up some really cruddy old junk along side some secret future pages of a bunch of projects I'm working on including this comic.
Need I say more? It's GREAT fun to browse around, and it updates frequently so I highly recommend checking it out. The artist for the webcomic The Meek (which I highly recommend by the way) is also on there.
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( 3 / 132 )This past week I had the pleasure of spending time with my two good friends from Osaka. I was introduced to them through their nephew who I met when he was an exchange student at UNO about 8 years ago. He trained with me in my very first dojo and still trains in New Orleans with me under Mikami Sensei. During my studies in Osaka I spent several weekends with his aunt and uncle hanging out and shooting the breeze. In fact, it was they who brought me to their summer getaway in Shirahama which, as many of you may know, is the setting for this comic. Truly, without their contributions this comic would not be the same, and without their relentless understanding for my situation I would not have nearly as firm (albeit, novice) a grasp on Japanese as I do today. Even though I was just some college student from halfway around the world they opened up their home to me. It really was nice to have the opportunity to do the same for them in return.
Though it's hard to explain, up until now my feeling of traveling back and fourth in Japan and the US has been bitter-sweet. I love the people and places I know in both countries of course, but none of my friends or family from here would ever want to come to Japan with me, and conversely, I never saw (and seldom converse at length with) anyone I met in Japan while in the US. I guess they all just figure it's a matter of time before I come back to see them again. Still, whenever I want to see one side, I have to abandon the other. For a long time, I felt kind of like when I sit at a gate in an airport waiting to leave. Even though I can see where I am clearly through the floor to ceiling windows it seems like I'm neither here nor there: 7,118 miles away from one and emotionally departed from the other. I'd been this way for so long that I began to believe that this is just the way things have to be for someone like me... but it's amazing how fast that can change.
Over the course of a few days I found myself suddenly overwhelmed with the beauty of my acquaintances and my situation both here and in Japan. For the first time this weekend I introduced my exclusively English speaking family to some of my dearest friends that don't speak English, and in doing so closed a large gap in my life. For an all too brief few days we all sat and shared our conversations, culture and even food with one another. I know my being an unquenchable optimist sometimes leads to my exaggerating certain events, but it's not an understatement to say that I have never been more content.
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