
Yaruo
Yes, the biggest illustrator news of the day is that
Yoshitaka Amano, famed artist exhibiting in the New People center, character designer for some of Final Fantasy's best work, illustrator of the Vampire Hunter D novels, and phenomenal artist in general, logged on to Japan's Nico Nico Douga and...
recorded himself rendering a doodle of an AsCII art character.
The character is named Yaruo, and he developed-- as so many things do --in the bowels of Japan's 2ch text message board. He's frequently used as an explicator general, to explain all manner of topics.
You can
watch the video at Nico Nico yourself (if you have an account there), or you can hit up Gigazine for more pictures than the couple I've posted here, though they'll give you the general sense of what was going on.
It's not Amano's first live drawing webcast, but his past exploits included, like, a moogle and stuff. This is a little...weird.