Cocoon Tower Tour

There are a lot of awesome package designs out right now.



brunch/lunch with Ai at the Crayon House in omotesando. its a great children's book store but it has this famous all you can eat lunch for 1200 yen and its all organic food. was good and its recommended by me if you can stand to eat with a lot of moms and kids and people that like to have nice civilized organic meals.



shi shi mai at oriental bazaar in omotesando. its on the second floor so that means its really expensive.



omotesando illumination. everyone was and will be taking pics this whole month.



seriously you guys i'm in love with toast. i don't think i've had access to a toaster since I graduated from highschool. I sure as hell didn't have one in beijing either. So now that my roomate has one i have fallen in love with toast and butter. I mean i eat it like once a day seriously. Is this the path to becoming a grandma? Now if only i could have an oven again someday.....



Look at how nice the garbage trucks are here. they even have whatever Ku's cool symbol on it too. and its super clean and some radical color of blue purple



hashimoto sensei with one of the forgetting the year party decorations that we have all been forced to make.



we made this. i gave him a fundoshi (those daiper things that sumo wrestlers wear), a gold tooth, and a gold TCJ chain and his speech bubble says Yoroshiku (please remember me; please treat me favorably). Later i added sunglasses, an AK-47 assault rifle, and pound of weed to him.



this year's holiday/new year's card. It's my take on a Japanese new year's card. Here is the process. first i made a color comp on the computer.



a couple of layers of gesso on coldpress watercolor paper.



had to paint the back with some color i have a lot of so it doesn't curl and evens out the paper.



printing out and transferring the sketch to the painting



stars made by flicking a toothbrush



sponges and brushes were used to paint this. everything except for the rabbit is done at this stage. I'll show you the final product when i do my happy holidays post.





One of my old classmate's boyfriend goes to this design school in the Cocoon Tower in Shinjuku. It's one of the coolest buildings in tokyo so i said i want go there and take a look around. It's the 2nd tallest educational building in the world (russia has the tallest). It's a 50 floor educational building housing 3 schools. Tokyo Mode Gakuen (fashion vocational school), HAL Tokyo (special technology and design college), and Shuto Ikō (medical college). Its 204-metres (669 ft). It would seem that its so cool to go to school in this super tall building in shinjuku that is 50 floors of creative students.



The size of the area around the elevator is the size of our whole japanese school, it's so sad. They even have their own 7-11 on the first floor.



one of the many computer labs. they have the latest 27" imacs, a ton of other kinds of computers, a bunch of 11x17 flatbed scanners and more. This place kills FIT, although tuition for a year is something like 1,500,000 yen ($17,500). But what you get is the coolest state of the art building and facilities and the education is probably awesome too. Her boyfriend said that everyone is pretty serious, which sounds good to me, who is bitter about his education.



we went to the 48th floor and you get basically the same awesome view that you get from the 50 something floor of the metropolitan building. lucky bastards. We also went to the motion capture room, you know, that technology they used to make avatar where they wear those black suits with white balls on them. Its just a building of awesome gadgets and technology and learning. jealous.



We went into one of his classes and they were working with Maya. I asked one of his classmates how long it took for him to recreated this piece of hardware machinery sitting on the desk in front of him and he said 1 month. They said the cheapest good computer you need for Maya is $6,000.





this is the view they get from one of the many lounges. imagine being able to look out over shinjuku from your school.



so it turns out that maybe 50% of bands that you see wrapping around the cocoon tower in the daytime are actually these screen printed dots!





izakaya time in kabuki cho. a bunch of beers later and we were playing some game where we drank shots of watever was on the table which meant mixes of soysauce, vinegar, and spicy oil. What a delicious time.



my old classmate is from shanghai. she rarely talks so it was nice that she actually hung out with us.



her boyfriend, they went to highschool together in Shanghai. He goes to the HAL design school in the tower. He studies special effects and uses Maya all the time for 3D modeling. He won some contest at school so his Alice in Wonderland Monopoly boardgame redesign will be put into production made made available in Japan. He's a pretty funny guy and his dream is to do special effects on an American movie someday.