View from the Zoo

That’s right! Now you can buy over 80 products with my animal characters on the Ginza, Tokyo’s fashionable shopping district. Since last September I have been very busy working with MacStyle on a large collection of small items, ranging from chocolates to keychains, from cards to charms, from pens to pencil cases and much more. Some of the more unusual items are golf markers inlaid with Swarovski crystals (top) and cute boxes of amino acid powder (a hangover remedy) by Ajinomoto (below). Personally, I’ll take the chocolates (above). All these items are available at the YrStyle Ginza shop,  4-4-13 Ginza Chuo-ku Tokyo.

Here’s a selection of the samples I received from Tokyo in the last few weeks. I am especially pleased with the wooden products. The silkscreening and the color finish are impeccable. I also enjoyed how the designers combined my animals to create new patterns like the fish and the octopus. Shown: blackboards and mini photo albums by You Power, Japan.

3×3 has just announced their winners for this year’s edition of the Children’s Show, a juried collection of illustrations and books for children. Just to get in, the majority of the eight judges have to vote for the piece. I’m very happy to announce that three of my entries were selected – one for a newspaper illustration about relaxing activities for kids during Spring Break, a second for a poster showing the handmade Bambino sled and, the third, for the ADzif line of blackboard wall decals «Memo». Congratulations to La Presse, goslide.ca and ADzif! 

All the winners will be published in the upcoming annual No.7. 3×3 is a magazine of international contemporary illustration, published in New York. In addition to the magazine, 3×3 organizes three juried shows each year and publishes an invitation-only directory.

My «Lovebutton» cards and stickers that I ordered from moo.com are here and ready for distribution. The minicards are very versatile – I use them as business cards, as gift tags, as bookmarks or simply as portfolio samples. The jellybeans were delicious too. White ones were coconut  flavored, the red ones, sour apples and the pink ones tasted, well, pink (bubblegum or rootbeer or…).

And here you can see how the stickers turned out.