Hi, David!

It's Jed Henry "“ I'm that illustrator guy who was supposed to visit your studio last summer. But things didn't work out. I apologize for that.

Anyway, I had a crazy idea for a creative side project.

First of all, have you heard of Kickstarter.com? It's a creative entrepreneurial site, where people pitch projects and request funds. If a project's funding goal gets met, then and only then does the site withdraw the donators' pledges. If the required fund amount isn't met, nobody pays, and the project doesn't happen.

Most commonly, people use the site to make advanced orders on unique projects. So if a project gets funded, the artist gets paid up front. If the project doesn't get funded, the artist is off the hook, and hasn't lost any money.

SO!

I had an idea to team up with you, and sell a woodblock print on there. We would only have to actually make the print if we received the required funds. If the funding doesn't come, then you're off the hook. I would need to paint the design up front, so that customers would know what they're getting.

Here's my idea: a print featuring a pitched battle between samurai and demons. Kind of a gothic thing, like Kuniyoshi or Yoshitoshi. Upon closer inspection, the viewer would realize that each character bears an uncanny resemblance to a classic Japanese video game character. However, the style is still VERY Kuniyoshi. (I'm attaching a quick sketch to show you what I mean.)

Jed went on to outline the type of print he was thinking of (dimensions, etc.) and asked me to think about what such a project would cost, so that he could work out a budget for the Kickstarter.

So was this 'the start of something big'?

No. At least, not directly. Because I turned him down.

I really didn't see much potential in this. The image he sent wasn't something I found particularly interesting, and at that time we were coming to the point where I was running out of money to pay the staff, and taking on yet another pie in the sky project just seemed completely impossible.

So I replied to Jed that although we couldn't help him with his potential project, I would introduce him to a place here in Tokyo where he might be able to get such work commissioned, and over the next few weeks, I helped him establish contact with them, so that he could get a quote on the work.

So what happened to change my mind? How did we come to get involved? It was a combination of circumstances: 1) the quote Jed received from that workshop - for full-size o-ban prints - was pretty high, and it seemed that the resulting prints would be simply too expensive for his prospective Kickstarter backers to afford. 2) Jed continued to refine the image concepts, and began to produce some very interesting work:

3) over the course of the next few weeks, Jed continued to upload more of these prospective images to his Facebook page, and they began to attract wide internet attention. He began to go viral ...

Looking back over those old emails now, I see that it was May 31st, more than a month after our original contact, that I wrote to him offering to get involved. I proposed that our workshop could produce prints in a smaller size than the large o-ban that he had been considering, and that these might be a more realistic goal for his Kickstarter project.

And then I took the plunge; given that we were then at the point of running out of money completely, and pretty much at the end of our rope, I told Jed that we wouldn't (couldn't!) wait for a Kickstarter campaign to run its course - we would begin the production of one of the prints immediately. Hopefully, the videos/photos that we would produce along the way would help make the campaign successful, and we would thus (eventually) get paid for the work.

Jed of course jumped at this opportunity, and away we went. The rest - as they say - is history. Or perhaps will be one day, when they come to write the history of the Japanese woodblock print in the early 21st century!

The Kickstarter campaign was wildly successful, raising over $300,000 for our work (both woodblock prints and ink-jet versions that Jed publishes himself). As I write this, we are just completing the fourth of the seven prints that were commissioned during the campaign, our work is laid out until at least the end of this year, and it seems pretty certain that the Ukiyoe Heroes project will continue into the future indefinitely, presumably evolving as it goes along. There are now eight people working here as printers or printer trainees, and I have had to hire two 'outside' professional printers as well.

We have spun off the Chibi Heroes series - also hugely successful - and are presently working on plans for yet other related projects to be introduced in the coming months/years.

Things are looking very very good for us here these days ... and of course this is to a huge extent because so many people are attracted to the combination of Jed's interesting designs and our beautiful traditional craftsmanship.

But to think that I said 'no'! Obviously I'm a man with a very quick grasp of the situation ... Not!