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Fujichika-sensei drew tons of great signage and packaging in this series, none of it looking too uniform. It was a lot of fun trying to replicate that style and figure out how to arrange the text.

Layering of text into the image is so much fun. Same with doing block letters that overlap with each other. And when we need to use more characters in English, there's a bit of a puzzle for how to situate each character. Gotta keep the overall balance the same and fit in the margins.

The standout difficult pages in volume 2 were these festival shots with singing. Lots of retouch to be safe. The English text has more characters and needs to read horiziontally. The music notes were left in place, so text had to go around them. I drew guides and then traced in the original style.

you said lettering vol 2 was a huge challenge. was it the sfx placement or the dialogue-heavy pages that fought you more than vol 1?

Always the sound effects. I think volume 1 might have been a little harder on its own merits since it had a few more instances of very tricky retouch and effects that were difficult to mimic, but volume 2 overlapped with some other books in my schedule which made finishing it comparatively harder.