Hi!
I really wanted to draw a Spotted Gar in a ukiyo-e style!!!
Isn’t it amazing that this fish has remained unchanged for 400 million years?
It’s practically a dinosaur’s grandpa.

By the way, Kaido-maru refers to Kintarō, meaning it’s the childhood name of Sakata Kintoki.
I struggled with this part quite a bit—given today’s chaotic times, I wondered if Kintarō’s signature outfit would be acceptable from a compliance perspective. If I were to turn it into merchandise, would someone flag it?

Anti-Amazon Knockoff Measures
Starting this time, I’ve begun experimenting with embedding unauthorized-use warning text directly into the artwork to counteract bootleg products on Amazon.
For any actual merchandise I create in the future, I’ll replace this section with different text.




Making of Timelapse
The hardest part of every project—same as always!
For this artwork, I had to manually review and cut a total of three files:

– Kintarō & Gar
– Wave & Nameplate design
– Edo-style lettering

That amounted to nearly 45 minutes of footage (about 80,000 frames) being reviewed frame-by-frame.And of course, my YouTube channel isn’t even remotely eligible for monetization, so this was a zero-yen job.

It was tough, but I think the final video turned out pretty easy to follow—so please check it out!