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.

New artwork posted today at Nevermet Press: Items of the Sleepless Drift. These are some fantasy magical items related to the site’s current publishing cycle, Neirave. I’m going for the DaVinci-esque traveler’s sketchbook theme for these 3 illustrations.

There’s some new content at Nevermet Press with another one of my sketches. This time it’s a dragon. Here’s the picture:

Artwork for "Enemy of my Enemy"

He looks like he’s up to something, right? He’s doing the little finger-twiddling thing. I don’t really know why, but that’s the mood I was in when I sketched him.

Speaking of dragons, I saw an awesome song on TV a while back, on the most famous Japanese kid’s show. I haven’t been able to get it out of my head for days. Here’s the song:

Probably it’s because I want a dragon suit like that…

New fantasy art today: The Scion of Spring. This is the King of Spring with his young apprentice. The full story is on Nevermet Press, but basically this concept is about a forest overrun with cold, and the only way to end the winter is with the help of these two.

The Scion of Spring

I’ve been continuing the artwork for Nevermet Press this past week and then some, but I haven’t had a chance to post anything until now. These went live on the website a few days ago, but anyway here they are. (I decided to do color for these this time, though on the site they ended up monochrome. Oh well.)

The first one is called The Bastion of the Hidden Kingdom. It’s basically a haunted manor in the city-state of Corwyn (from my previous post). You can read more of it’s description on its website.

Bastion of the Hidden Kingdom

Next is a character named Scar, a kind of undead guy with a revenge thing going. Again, it probably makes more sense attached to the story.

Soul’s End

I’m working on 3 more pictures for Nevermet Press at the moment, so I’ll be able to post them as soon as I finish. It’s a pretty cool project, and it’s starting to pick up in popularity. Hopefully I’m doing my part well enough.