Friday, March 30, 2012

Flower Watching In Spring
Here's a recent piece that I did for "The Washington Post". It's for the 100th anniversary of the Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington D.C. I rarely get calls to do covers, and when I do, it can be sometimes be a bit fickle because (being a cover) there is so much importance placed on it, and so sometimes, things can feel micromanaged. This assignment, on the other hand, was the very opposite of that. Tan Ly who was the art director and my collaborator on this project worked together to create a cover that hopefully captured the beauty of the scene in a more poetic and romantic way. Yes, we still had to show parts of Washington, but we wanted to do it in a way that was hopefully less expected and obvious. The key illustrations along the bottom traces the history of the Cherry being brought over from Japan to Washington D.C. It moves from left to right, as petals from the first panel, and ultimately lands onto a fully bloomed tree in front of Washington's Capitol Building. The title is "Flower Watching In Spring" as noted in the Japanese characters on the left, done by my friend and fellow illustrator Ai Tatebayashi.

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