Rakuten
NY x Tokyo Event Art

Rakuten Header Rakuten Header

The Client

Rakuten is Japan's giant e-commerce platform, offering a wide range of services from online shopping to digital content and communications.

The Challenge

I was asked by Rakuten's New York team to come up with a fun illustration for their upcoming 'New York meets Tokyo' open house event. This art would be used for merchandise, signage, and other event materials.

My Role

  • Character Design
  • Graphic Design
  • Merchandise

My Tools

  • Hand Drawing
  • Hand Inking
  • Adobe Illustrator
Rakuten Initial Sketch

Feeling that Kaiju Vibe

What I started off with is what they chose with a friendly fist bump between each city's own lovable kaiju.

Rakuten Final Pencils

Fleshing out The Feel

They liked everything except for the fist bump and asked for a 'high five' instead. With that, I went right to work on the final pencils.

I had to dive pretty deep into figuring out how a gorrilla would eat sushi with chopsicks with his feet!

Rakuten Inked Art

Getting Some Ink

Lately, I've steered towards inking digitally. The fear of messing up ink of paper can be nail-biting.

But what the heck? I like the imperfections of inking on paper, so I brought out the pens and went to work.

Rakuten Final Artwork

Finally, Color!

Seeing as this was an event shirt/posters and they wanted to keep Rakuten's colors (Red, white and black), I went for a simple graphical approach and colored in Adobe Illustrator.

I wanted to keep strict to the simple pallette, so I used halftones to shade the art, giving it a pretty cool feel I think!