stuff around the house and i was really encouraged to you know if it seemed like something i was interested in my parents were very supportive and i just drew a lot when i was a little kind of for no reason because i liked it i really liked disney movies and really late you know pocahontas monga started becoming a thing in america and so i got really inspired by you know reading longer and wanting to make my own and i guess it kind of spiraled from one thing to another  i always wanted to make my own characters also even when i was pretty young i had you know i think i had this character that his name was summer and she was like a girl with a talking cat which of course must have had no relation at all to me somewhere and what inspires you as an artist like is it another artist or maybe it's just an art style or is this something a little more specific or maybe something where does it hurt i guess stories inspire me and really drawn to you know aren't that looks like it has a story behind it and i guess i get inspiration from random places i listen to a lot of music while i draw  i'm always been really interested in the story aspect of art so when you say the story behind an image you mean turn of phrase this in such a way that doesn't make me sound cool was such a club was so is it like the action or the movement or do you mean just like the whole image of the you know this seems to illustrate a story well i mean for example with  graphic novels each image is a piece of a story and i guess i've always been really interested in telling stories through images and you know what you can convey through text and what you can convey to your pictures and you know the combination or not combination of the two when i was younger i also did a lot of reading writing you know not necessarily comics but just writing stories but i don't do as much anymore i would like to get back into writing so could that be why you sort of move more into manga stuff because of you know the fact that it because of the do what it is as a visual medium there is a lot of sort of story in the images i think as well as the story itself the text i really liked so well when i was younger especially i really wanted to tell stories usually and not that i still don't but my work currently has been more geared towards single illustrations just because of work there's just the way my work has gone and it's  much time to do an entire story for a while i was running a web comic that was sort of for my own satisfaction on i wasn't being paid to make the webcomic so that's on hold for a little while while i do other things that are paying mark unfortunately speaking of work so what do you do would you do like a mixture of saying this besides teaching her right i have i like to say i have like five different part time jobs i do art i do teaching i teach language classes japanese classes and i also teach drawing classes i also do a translation and i do a lot of japanese to english translation some of which is also no longer related i translated several longer books from japanese to english for a publisher called again and i also do translations for like the having to impose stick usually and mostly freelance and so how do people normally find you for of for example for  your translations my translation work is mostly either stuff that i've sought out myself or sort of like a standing freelance agreement so for example for the huffington post i'm just on the mailing list or freelancers so if they have something that they need turned around quickly that's not designated to one of their regular translators and they get sent out to the pool of me and some other people actually don't know how many people are in the pool  and then forget mond i'm just one of getting longer is not good translators but a lot of my work both with our and with translating is sort of things that i either went out and found or somebody happened upon very random commissions and but by random i just mean things that i wouldn't have expected to do if i was just thinking about i wonder what someone will commission me to drive today just kind of unexpected we do a lot of sions and one of the ways that i make money at any of the conventions aside from selling posters is that i do on the spot conditions where somebody will come up to the table and say please draw this for me and then i drive and some of those requests are quite interesting i mean most of them are pretty you know like something that you would think ok like somebody wants you know their favorite characters as a couple or they want themselves and their significant other drawn is no longer characters or something but i think one of the more unusual things someone asked me to draw was in the movie the final fantasy adventure there is a box that contains genetic material from this supernatural being and  supernatural being is female so somebody requested that i draw the box wearing a dress i said sure they never explained why and i didn't ask so it's interesting i've also done a lot of conditions that are not necessarily theory and they conventions that were sort of something i never would have expected through my deviant art i got in contact years ago with this fellow who was making a story about ancient rome and i ended up drawing a lot of pages of his comic he would send these scripts and then i would produce the pages based on the scripts and that's you know i didn't know anything about ancient rome at the time and the style of that he wanted me to draw on was not the style i usually draw and it was a little bit more on there are a little less asian influence to that was a very interesting experience but how do you like different art of art styles specifically with respect to stuff like comics mego which one do you  prefer or which ones plural possibly do you prefer and why well my own style very heavily japanese influenced and i was a ninety's kid so i watched disney movies obsessive read when i was kind of developing my style and i guess i'm influenced by artists online also now that the internet is the internet but it's interesting that is even though i think of myself as having an asian influence style when i showed my work to people in japan they told me that they could tell i was an american the then the from my work and they also they knew i was american as they were sitting there talking to me with this they also said you know your work looks as though it you know was not drawn by japanese for us and i thought that was interesting to explain why your do the time and then they weren't saying that it was a bad thing or anything like that it was just one comment that was made to me by an editor when i was in japan i went on had decided to go on a lot of portfolio reviews in japan because i was interested to see what they would say to me and also because they're free to editors in japan and like with the modern magazines are very  willing to do a walk in reviews of portfolios for artists which i think is really cool of them so i just thought it would be a good idea is you know see what they say and you know line up going through portfolio reviews is a very heart rending experience because you're essentially agreeing to sit down with someone for an hour while they tell you everything you're doing wrong but i mean for that reason it's a very helpful experience and i went on the lake of these while i was in japan so by the end of that i was like oh god everything i do is awful but it was very very educational and i mean so again they weren't saying that it looking american is that necessarily it was that i thought it was an interesting comment i don't remember exactly why they said that i think it was just something about the way i drew because i mean japanese art looks a certain way and i think i think now that i've you know looking back i can kind of see what they need because i'm sure that my style is  necessarily influenced by like superhero comics or like that kind of american comic but it's definitely i'm sure had influence from international artists online so i did spend a lot of time on deviant art especially when i was younger so kind of can't help you can't help your influences you mean your influence is very sort of your influences whether you like her not and i also watch a lot of american movies so i'm sure that had something to do with the way that i draw also because making comics and making movies are very very the you know gives you a push as an artist that you see something you kill men and that's really cool  yeah i guess i get inspired by movies a lot on i get as fired by wanting to be better i can't i can't think of a specific example of the moment that there's been quite a few times or a jew or something that i really liked after watching a show that i felt really and you know passionate about her and really passionate about her after reading something that really was like wow that was so cool i'm going to backtrack a little bit here but when you say to become better how do you mean exactly creatively i guess both there was a period where i spent a lot of time drawing from i have i have like a book of muscles that's like it's like an anatomy for artists book and i spent a lot of time trying to understand like what what is a shoulder or a muscle and i said i felt like i didn't draw backs and shoulders very well so i spent a lot of time drawing shoulders in different positions and trying to copy the muscle structure which my muscle structure drawings the horrible bit it did give me a much better idea of what i was doing drawing people which i think i s anybody who's watching this who's learning to drive think that's very very helpful and something that i've told students a lot is that even if you don't plan on drawing realistically having a basis in realism is very important  because if you're distorting it in that it's a good idea to know what you're distorting from so like for example even with a model like a lot of very realistic looking but a lot of it is distorted intentionally and some specific way like for example really long legs or some hard to structure a large hands with certain demographics of maga and that's intentional you know they're not trying to hands today because they forgot that they wanted them to look big so you know with a lot of things as long as you're working figure intentionally i think that's you know your style and you should go with whatever you think is you know the looks the best for your style that having a basis in realism is also important so i spend a lot of time practicing that i do a lot of our digital ian so that there's like a lot of learning involved in learning to transfer into using photoshop or among the studio and what all the buttons do and how to make it look like it does on paper in effect you want on my the first set of i guess one that when i initially started working with photoshop it was because i wanted to make illustrations to sell an anime conventions and my first batch of illustrations that i made to sell and very upset with at the time i was like pretty happy with how they turned out the looking back they're pretty pretty awful and i found some of them i discovered they were still on the idea of the entire recently i was like oh god i should get rid of parents but i mean it's still a process like i sort of found a style that i'm happy with withdrawing to italy but i'm still learning how stuff works even years and years later so so when it comes to styles you basically try to draw a particular style which is the style that you created for yourself primarily  are drawn a little differently than mine like it was a typical style which is a little more cartoony i mean i guess that's just i i kind of found something that i felt comfortable with and i really liked the way it looked and i kind of just kept developing that instead of branching out as much as maybe i could have and i would like i think to learn more about driving different styles but at and the moment that hasn't happened at the moment my style is what it is i mean i am very interested in trying different styles so somebody commissions me and says you know please drive this way and i'll be like sure but most of the work that i produce either for myself or by myself is a certain way  i mean is there anything is that you i mean is there anything you personally feel like you'd like to be asked of being an artist or you know maybe something that people don't typically ask you if they find out that you're an artist and you tend to draw manga stuff you know what's a question you like to be asked well and that is this isn't really an answer to your question but if somebody would commission me to draw the lord of the rings that's a modest story that would be like a dream come true i've always wished that i had the time to devoted to doing that in terms of like questions like about  do you have any closing thoughts on the whole one of them what it is and what it's like to be an artist and you know some of the things that you can have to keep doing in order to keep yourself motivated and you know keep yourself from coming up with ideas  like i mean it can be tough and you specially in my case i do so many different sort of part time jobs and i different types of work that sometimes it's hard to like keep in with doing art on because that's not you know a lot of it is translating and translating takes a lot of time and it kind of depends we do we have much time different things take and i try to keep up with stories i'm really interested in really interested in the movies and that you know those things are sources of inspiration because one thing that kind of service is like is something that pushes me is that i feel like there is a lack of there's a growing lack of creativity in the world at the moment like i look at a lot of things are being produced now on both t v shows in comics and you know any kind of creative medium and i'm a little disappointed and especially with you know diversification you would think the world would be getting more creative but i think in some ways especially like with popular music i know that a lot of people complain about that but there's a lot of popular media that i feel like is like a leveled out and people don't push to be creative as much as they could inside to be a part of kind of keeping creativity going you know as much as you know my son my small part as much as i can it's something i'm concerned with is i don't want that to die out so that's a perfectly valid answer for you know for that i mean for me personally you know i feel the exact same way you know other than a few movies that i've seen in the past just like why you know you watch the whole thing it was like well i knew what was going to happen at every p movie and it was interesting you know obviously someone paid hundreds and millions of dollars to make this and it wasn't entertaining at all it was completely and original