I received a copy of my most recent meishi commission: The Jaded Robot. Or at least that’s what I liked calling it. This is my friend Emry’s concept and I created the design for it. It’s a matte finish, double-sided card.

The front design is a robot with gears. He asked for a gear design initially, similar to how mine has the snowflake on one corner of the card. But I’ve already created a similar design for Hallucinogenic Java so I wanted to do something different instead. He also said he wanted his interest in robots to be present in the design of the card. So I figured I’d do a robot design with gears visible inside. The initial design was a single sided design which I showed to him. Eventually we agreed that it was better to put the contact details at the back and have the robot be the only thing in front. The facial expression of the robot was something Emrys liked so we kept that.

The contact information could be found at the back. Initially, the robot did not have arms but since we were doing a back to back design, I wanted the front to interact with the back. So I added arms to the robot that reached out to the back to flank the contact details.

Emrys was kind enough to insist that I put my I <3 Japanese Toys brand on the card since he also shared the same interest and at the same time, he wanted to spread the word on my works. So I included that and the contact email for frosted card designs.

I’m quite happy with how this one turned out. The shade of blue-green turned out quite well on CMYK printing. The matte finish card looked really crisp and neat.

About the Author:  Mark is a simple Japanese toy collector who started seriously collecting and blogging about Japanese toys back in 2005.