A journey in ink and watercolor from crowded Tokyo to the Kamakura coast.

In Scenes from Japan: Tokyo, Kyoto, and Kamakura, the first of three volumes in the series, artist Kendric Tonn documents a painting trip through Japan. Inspired by 20th-century Japanese printmakers like Kawase Hasui and Yoshida Hiroshi, Tonn set out on a ten-week journey through three cities to engage directly with Japan as a subject by drawing and painting on-location.

The result is a collection of over two dozen mixed-media watercolor paintings accompanied by short essays. The pieces cover a range of subjects, from the tranquil shrines and dramatic coasts to mundane apartment buildings and out-of-the-way parks.

With a preface by the artist and an introduction by novelist Max Gladstone, as well as a section on materials and process, Scenes from Japan is a record of travel and artistic practice. It will appear to those with an interest in Japanese aesthetics, plein air painters, and anyone interested in how place becomes image.

BORN IN 1982, Kendric showed no early signs of particular artistic talent: his work in grade-school ceramics classes at the local arts center could, perhaps, be described as enthusiastic, and the editorial cartoon he contributed to his high school paper was, in fact, de- scribed as consisting of "bloated stick figures." The usual things that, since time immemorial, have encourage the buds of a visual art- ist furled within the sensitive adolescent to blossom—Sailor Moon, Yoshitaka Amano, and his friends' OCs—certainly stirred his own aesthetic feelings, but, by college, he had turned his ambitions to other, likelier-seeming, things.

Thus, Kendric received a BA in English from Sewanee: The University of the South in 2004, by which time he had thought about writing over five novels. He then spent a year as an ESL teacher in Japan before returning to school to study oil painting at SCAD and the Florence Academy of Art, from which he graduated in 2011. He now lives in Columbus, Ohio and works as a freelance fine artist, painting portraits, figures, and still-lifes.

Hugo-, Nebula-, and Locus Award winning author Max Gladstone has been thrown from a horse in Mongolia and once wrecked a bicycle in Angkor Wat. He is the author of many books, including Empress of Forever, the Craft Sequence of fantasy novels, and, with Amal El-Mohtar, the internationally bestselling This is How You Lose the Time War. His dreams are much nicer than you'd expect.