Yuko Shimizu

The highlight of past week: interviewing musician MOBY to write an article in イラストレーション,a well respected illustration magazine published in Japan. I have been a regular contributing writer for more than a year now.I normally interview illustrators (you can read about past interviews on my blog here), but after my studio mate and Moby’s former art collective member Sara Varonand I saw him speak at WNYC last month and learned about his passion for art, comics and illustrations, we came up with an idea of interviewing him from a visual art point of view.I have a huge respect in him. All I could think of while I was there was to not do or say anything stupid. He was VERY nice and had some great stories to tell. The article, along with features of three of his former artist collective members (Sara Varon, James Kochalka and Alex Eben Meyer) will come out as a big feature in イラストレーション at the end of July. I am currently working on editing the story.

Photo by David Neff.

DC Vertigo monthly series The Unwrittenissue #14 came out last week.

I am hoping to blog about it at DRAWGER soon. This is probably the most time-consuming cover I have done so far (and I am about to finish up #18 as I write this).

The team (my editor, writer and interior artist) wanted “Where is Waldo” for this. Yap, Where is Waldo. When they came to me with the idea I said “Ummmm…..Let me think about this… I am not an artist who does great drawing small people everywhere on the page, so I have to come up with my own style of Where is Waldo”. And this was my answer. My images don’t work well unless there is depth and interesting camera view. So, the result is the main character: Tom in the middle and fill up the rest of the space with pretty much almost every single characters who’s ever appeared in the series. I personally don’t love “busy”. I think I pulled it off by limiting the color palette.

If you are a loyal Unwritten reader, enjoy the game of guessing every single one of them, including some obscure side characters I threw in. Oh, and there is one character who is NOT from the series but from the team’s former iconic series from Vertigo. Can you guess? Even Mike and Peter took a while to figure everyone out. 🙂

In April, I had closely collaborated with Point Five Design to work on the cover and double page spread (with 15 portraits!) for a new magazine called LISTEN. Unless you are a hardcore classical music fan, you may not have seen or heard about this magazine. It was, until this issue, only send directly to the subscribers. From this recent issue, they are officially available at Barns & Noble near you!Point Five Design is a wonderful design studio located here in New York City, and they have been giving me projects since very early years of my career. But it was the first time we actually had the real face-to-face meeting and came up with concept and ideas from scratch. We are all quite happy with the results. Hope you can take a look at LISTEN too.

I am planning on making a blog post about it soon.

Hallo Freunde in Deutschland, schräge Magazin mit meinen Illustrationen veröffentlicht habe!Well, OK… I actually don’t speak German… But all my German friends tell me that I am ‘German at heart’, so… I am excited to be in this new and beautiful SLANTED, design magazine from Berlin. It is a blacktype and heavy metal issue, and endpapers I created for Alphabet Project made it into the issue. You can purchase this beautiful magazine online.

And, last but not least… but just for the fun of it. An illustration for ESPN the Magazine (US version) made it into ESPN Braziledition. As far as I can remember, I think this is the first time my work got published in Brazil, which is, for me, very cool and exciting. So, just sharing the photo. I have only been to Brazil for about 2 hours, when I went to see Iguazu Falls. I am hoping to go visit the cities, one day, some day…. (By the way, you have to see Iguazu Falls at least once. It is mind-blowing. Niagara is like a joke once you see Iguazu.)Esta revista tem um monte de artigos sobre futebol!

The second collected graphic novel (issue No.6~12) is getting edited now for the summer release.The great news is that The Unwritten is doing so well, we are doing a brand new wrap around cover for this!

Hopefully it gets finalized soon (especially because I have been constantly sleep deprived for about a month or so already).

In the meantime, I have just started working on the ideas for No. 17 cover.

The Unwrittenissue 13 is coming out today. And congratulations to the team for 3 Eisner Awards nominations!I am very excited, as a person taking a small part in this fantastic ongoing project.

DC Vertigo series The Unwritten is at its’ 11th issue now (issue #11 comes out tomorrow), but Vertigo cover artists actually work a lot ahead, even more ahead than interior art, and sometimes on script that is not even finalized yet.So, even the day before #11 is out, I am actually currently working on #15 cover. Yes, that’s how ahead we work.

#14 cover just got the approval bit more than a week ago. Usually they don’t reveal the cover for another month or so, but this time, Vertigo editing team decided to go ahead and post it on their blog way early.

This is a special cover. Creators Mike and Peter, as well as editor Pornsak had been discussing for a while about how they wanted me to create “Where is Waldo” cover. I have been putting it off, off and off…. till I had no more reasons to put it off anymore! Ha. So, I decided to finally dive into it in the idea.

All the loyal Unwritten readers, you may not be able to spot all the characters because a few of them are future characters who will not appear until issue #12. Also, there is one character thrown in there who is not from this series but from another series by Mike and Peter. Mike and Peter took the quiz too, and of course, they were able to spot everyone. Now, can you?