The One I Refused to Crop

I finished this piece at 12 hours. But I was wrong. It ended up being 28 hours across three and a half days, and that was entirely my fault.

I'm a manga artist, and I poured years of energy into my convention booth while completely neglecting my Instagram. Treated it like a bulletin board. Which is wild, because I never would have walked into a convention with a cropped print. My booth had to feel like walking into something. And once I got back to the studio, I focused on the next piece instead of the grid. That's the part I'm done with.

I caught myself right before I hit post on this one. I saw the crop preview, saw Avery and Haru about to get swallowed by the Instagram grid, and thought about every single time I had let something go out the door like that. Not this one.

This piece is a backlit shrine scene set in Japan, because shrines are woven all the way through Avery and Haru's story in OFFstream. I wanted a small town shrine, well-maintained but not fancy, the kind that doesn't end up on a tourist itinerary. I've been to enough shrines in Japan to know the difference matters. Backlighting was a challenge I was setting for myself on purpose, and I built the whole composition around a triangle between Avery, Haru, and the corpse butterflies in the foreground, with a torii gate deliberately hanging off the edge of the frame.

When I converted the whole thing to an 8x10 to fix the grid crop, the torii had to slide inward. And that revealed the scaffolding. Line art hanging off the side of it, colors that weren't finished because they were never supposed to be visible. I tried putting branches in front of it. About twenty of them.

I did not put the leaves over it this time like we artists tend to do. I finished the torii. It took three hours and I did not want to do it even a little bit. But I had line skills I didn't have in 2009, and I knew this piece needed 2-point lines, smaller than I ever work. Once I stopped fighting that, the torii came together.

The piece ended up with 150+ layers. 28 hours total. Way too long. Worth it.

I want my grid to feel like my booth felt. I want people to scroll past and stop, and I want them to smile when they see it. It takes more effort, but it’s worth it for the smiles.