Japan Day

Last Friday was our year's Japan day. In the end, I was in charge of doing a lot of the art-related stuff (not that I minded).

Last year, I believe that we were just given paper and some drawing supplies and told to make a poster. This year, it was made into a contest. I teamed up with my friend and was supposed to get it done over winter break, but didn't. It's okay, though, because we finished it in a day or two anyways.

Japan Day poster

My friend did the line art, but unfortunately I don't have it. I was going to add colour on it, too, but she brought up a good point about it being black and white anyways!

In the end, there was like one other entry, and it wasn't really one meant to be printed out in bulk with its 3D elements and all that. So my friend, the other competitor, and I ultimately won the contest.

I'm glad people liked it, even though the poster is pretty much the title.


Also, check out the backdrop I (and by that, I really mean my art teacher - he should get all the credit for it, haha) did for kimono pictures.

Kimono pictures backdrop

Pretty much, I found some pictures in a book, my teacher put it on acetate, and we traced it on a huge sheet of paper made up of smaller sheets of paper, and it got painted and all that good stuff.
It's pretty big, man. Probably a little over my height. When I passed the idea to him, initially, I was thinking of something that would be 1/4th the size of what it turned out to be. The backdrops of the past were tiny compared to this. It's a shame, though, because though old, I thought one of them could've seen another year.

As for this year, since they were reusing my backdrop, I was given another project to do. And that was making a banner which included the club name.

"Japan Club: Japan Day"

Friend snapped a WIP version of the banner when it was still drying in the hallway. No credits go to me.

Frankly, I had really little to do with the banner. Once again, I did the same "transfer to acetate and trace" gimmick again. We actually were in the staff room, stealing some paper when my teacher noticed how the staff room wall was perfect for tracing. I think I got a couple of stares from teachers passing by, but anyways, back on topic. My dad did the calligraphy for the kanji and katakana (though he doesn't know anything about Japanese, his katakana still looked better than mine), and it's pretty obvious where the bottom words came from. I just traced it and painted it black.

And I mentioned this is the WIP version of it, right? Though not very significant, my art teacher used some red spray paint to make a gradient on the bottom. Yup, that's all you guys missed out on.


As for the actual day itself, it was as hectic as ever, though the cafe is crowded with people regardless. I was in charge of kimono pictures, like last year. And like last year, we were short on people (or at least, people who were supposed to be helping us) and kimono tying isn't something you can mass produce in a sense. I'm surprised that many of our customers turned out to be staff.