⛩️February Diary: One month in Japan!

Let’s start this newsletter with a little summary of the International Comic Book Festival in Angoulême. Like every year, it was completely crazy!

Many people came to our signing sessions on Issekinicho publishing booth! We had the chance to meet some of our Patreon subscribers and that’s one of the best thing that happened. We also had an appointment with Camille - our editor - to talk about the cover of Tokyo Mystery Café vol 2. We kind of agreed on something but still have to submit a few sketches. We had time to see 2 exhibitions: a retrospective of French sci-fi Comics (Moebius, Bilal,...) and a solo exhibition of Gou Tanabe's mangas adapted from HP Lovecraft stories.

We also met many amazing comic book artists from all around the world! We are completely exhausted but delighted!

After 2 years, we’re going back to Japan! We invite you to follow our trip on Patreon and through our Instagram stories.

We will mainly stay in Tokyo to explore new districts (for Tokyo Mystery Café documentation) and meet friends. Also, we will spend time at Mokuhankan (the Japanese woodblock print workshop in Asakusa) to learn more about the process since we will be working together for a whole year on our “Dreams of Future Past” Ukiyo-e series.

Then we’ll have a 2 days break in the charming coastal area of Kamakura. In March, we will visit Cecile’s brother in the mountains of Takarazuka, near Osaka, before we return to Niigata, where we lived in 2010, to see again our friends. Finally, we will spend a few days around Narita before taking our plane back to France.

We decided to bring the Canson watercolor sketchbooks we received as gifts during a comic book festival. The pages are 21,6 x 14 cm which is larger than what we used the last time. The 250g paper is thick. The pages have a soft face while the other side is very grainy. We will probably only use the light grain side ‘cause heavyweight papers are very difficult to scan.

As drawing tools, we bring our Winsor & Newton watercolor palettes, a few Raphael SoftAqua brushes of various sizes, mechanical pencils for early sketches and 0.3 Unipin black pens for the line.

“ I’m almost done with Tokyo Mystery Café vol.2, hehe! I finished my part on the pages and only have to work on the book’s cover. Any idea? XD This month, since we will meet Mokuhankan’s team in Tokyo, I’ll focus on this: creating new designs for the woodblock prints!”

“During our travel in Japan, I’ll try to work on TMC colors at least one hours a day. Probably every morning, when I wake up. It’s always challenging to work during a travel but I think it can be an opportunity to relax a bit before starting a crazy day in Tokyo!”

We have several challenging art goals for this month:
1 - Draw enough outdoor watercolor sketches to make a new “Japan travel diary”
2 - Color as much pages as possible for TMC
3 - Learn more about woodblock print process with Mokuhankan team to progress in the Ukiyo-e technique.

When we travel, we enjoy remembering movies or books we like. Ito Ogawa wrote this charming story called “Tsubaki Bunguten” (La papeterie Tsubaki). It tells the everyday life of a young woman living in Kamakura and working as a public writer. The first page of the book is a lovely hand drawn map that we will take with us during our trip. We hope people do the same with our books Onibi and Tokyo Mystery Café which have maps to find places that inspired the story.

If you’re interested in more content from us, you can also subscribe to our Patreon page (https://www.patreon.com/ateliersento) and access exclusive behind-the-scenes articles and digital mini artbooks. This month, we’ll focus on Japan so expect exclusive sketches, photos and stories from our trip:

By the way, if you have any recommendation for our trip in Tokyo, we’d love to know about it! Share your favorite places in the comments!