Josh Budich’s “Samurai with a Magic Sword” now available! Nakatomi, Inc

Nakatomi is VERY proud to release Josh Budich’s EPIC new screenprint tribute to one of the greatest cartoons of all time with his new print, “Samurai With a Magic Sword.”

This 12×24 screenprint had an insane 10 color hand-printed process that we’re going to detail in our next blog entry- but right now, we want to just give you the rundown on this little bit of awesomeness.

Josh came to us several months ago with the idea of doing a traditional Japanese style print in honor of Samurai Jack. After shooting back and forth sketches and ideas for a while, we finally settled on this composition, and Josh came back to us with this beauty.

We’ve worked with Josh on several pieces now, and his dedication to his craft and getting things ‘just right’ is really impressive. Not only that, but you really can’t nail the guy down to just one style. He’s constantly changing and adapting his talents to the demands of the task at hand.

Originally, Josh came to me with this rough sketch-

It’s really nice and dynamic, but I was thinking it would be nicer to see Jack on TOP of the dragon, in a more triumphant pose- AND, as a personal aside, I always feel weird looking up the hero’s nose. Instead of Josh telling me to jump in a lake, he came back with his next sketch along with some inks, as he’s a much nicer person than I am. (Seriously, I’ve worked with just about everyone who’s someone in this industry, and Josh is one of the friendliest.)

Josh started dialing in the colors and working with the push-and-pull of creating a print.

And from there, we ended up with the amazing print you see up at the very top of this post! Next came the crazy challenge of hand-printing a 10 color print with an edition of 100. Not only did Josh set this up with 2 Split Fountains, but 2 transparent blacks as well- a Nakatomi first! We put our crack team of printer’s on it though, and the result is one of the better prints I’ve ever seen come out of the shop here. Check out the detail shot below!

We added a gloss to the black lineart layer to give it some ‘pop’ against the matte ink colors in the rest of the piece (you can see it in the flash from the photo here.)

AAANND- because we had some of the paper here at the shop, we printed a special edition of just 20 (we’ll only have 15 for sale) on Curious Metallic brand ‘Ice Silver’ paper. It’s a really beautiful HEAVY (110 lb) metallic paper that is almost impossible to take a photograph of. Once you have it in your hands, you’ll see what I’m talking about- it looks like just white paper in photos, but in person the paper has a real LUSH pearlescent feel and look. Very nice. Anyone who gets one and isn’t sufficiently transformed into a puddle of appreciative goo is free to send it back for a full refund- THAT’S HOW MUCH WE BELIEVE IN IT!!!

Here’s a ph0to of the actual variant print!