The City Reporter

I thought some of you would like to know the process I follow to make the drawings. I carry all my drawing materials with me while on the road, still when it’s cold or I have too little time (very often) I’d just snap photos of what I see and later trun them into a drawing. Sometimes my photos are just not what I need so I’d just Google spots and chose the best as a basis for drawings. I shoot all the photos with my iPhone, sharing them almost inmediately in Instagram and also because they get tagged with GPRS coordinates, which makes things easy for me when tryin to locate some of the spots.

This one here will be the opening for the Tokyo GreenSpace Walk (with Jared Braiterman and Chris Berthelsen). I snapped this picture of fashionminded Omotesando girls walking by a wonderfully old wooden house with it’s owner reading the paper at the door. This contrast is characteristic for the whole walk, where high end fashion collides with greenery and tradition.

And this is what I made of it:

Yesterday I arrived home after the two frenetic weeks collecting material for the Tokyo Walks app. Haven’t have the time to look at everything yet but one thing is sure, there is a lot to do:

· Draw the portraits of all the hosts (almost done).
· Draw the 6 opening illustrations (half way there).
· Draw the 60 61 (!) spots.
· Write all texts.
· Edit and clean all the sounds.
· Ask all hosts to double check all the spots.
· Have everything readproof by Angela.
· Code everything into the app with XML.

For now, I am busy getting rid of the jetlag.

Normally, a trip to Japan means me buying loads of stuff; mostly books and drawing materials. Sometimes, very rarely, one or two of these things will change something in my life, in a minor or mayor way. The discovery of Yasuhiko Kobayashi’s work and that of Kappa Senoh on my first trip were two of them. Fortunately I was able to find other 3 pieces of art I would like to share with you.
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Images are important in the Japanese culture, as in any oriental culture. I am not an expert on the why, but you can see we in the west use more text only to communicate, while as oriental cultures will reccur to images instead. In Japan, they master this as no other country. I can even recall the time a Japanese wrote draw for me a shopping list: an eggplant, two eggs…

While waiting for my friend Patrick coming from Narita, I drew these people on a billboard. I love the over the top personality they add to film characters in Japan. I guess a little from kabuki theatre and manga, this exaggeration is something omnipresent in japanese visual culture.

Although (or maybe because) I did the Tokyo Walks in August 2011, by the end of the year the information didn’t feel accurate so I decided to revisit everything or at least the most keen to change places. Also, the need to record sounds for the app makes redoing everything unavoidable.

These hand drawn maps are common view in Tokyo streets (I guess in the rest of Japan as well). They show the neighbourhood and often the names of the people living in the houses and the names of the businesses are in it. They are often beautiful and pretty useful, as streets have no names in Japan, when you are trying to find something.

Tokyo being probably the last place you will expect to find a mosque, there is of course up to sixteen but this one is noteworthy. Beautifully made, it’s an incredible place. Only by its openness (you can just walk from the streets, the door is open) and situation (heart of the residential Yoyogi Uehara), this building is a surprise.
See more of the inside in this video.

I am back in the town where all the City Reports started. This time to collect more material for the upcoming TOKYO WALKS iPad app.

Having been here for a couple of times already doesn’t erase the magic of the place. Visibly  touched by the Big Tohoku earthquake of 2011, the city remains a vibrant, beautiful lady always smiling with to her visitors. I will be posting a little everyday.

In the last months, we have been working hard on the upcoming City Reporter App for iPad.

It will be a WALKS app, which means it’s not strictly going to be 100% a city report but more a collection of walks through the city. The app is going to be mainly inspirational but also useful if you’d take the iPad with you to the walks: you can read it all when at home before visiting Tokyo and get dreaming about being there but the map view will guide you easily through the place. To help with the inspiration part, each walk has its own soundtrack with sounds from the places described.

The app design and development is in the hands of Cathy Shive and I have done the interface and the contents. I will be posting here more about the making of it.