Shunpei Kamiya turns everyday Tokyo life into moments that make you do a double-take. He’ll show salarymen slurping ramen or commuters packed into a train, then insert white rabbits bursting from a 3D screen or two schoolkids firing red lasers at one another. He works in flat gouache colors, blending manga’s crisp lines with fine-art restraint. The results feel frozen in time—he avoids photographic motion to keep everything anchored in drawing, not video frames. His ideas spring from ordinary observations. He starts with words, sometimes too many, and then trims back to let viewers fill the gaps. He sees modern Tokyo as a flood of information—one painting even strands a lone figure amid giant app icons displaying hundreds of unread messages. Early influences include Doraemon, Kinnikuman and Dragon Ball; as he matured, he added artists like Makoto Wada and Edward Hopper to his list. By mixing memories, everyday scenes and other artists’ images, he waits until a clear picture forms in his mind before picking up a brush. Kamiya worries about the future of illustration in Japan. Fewer publishers commission covers, and no new field has taken its place. He takes almost every gig he can get, rarely turning down work, and urges fellow illustrators to showcase what makes drawing unique. On AI, he sees current tools as no match for a human’s quirks, but he fears a future where success hinges on prompt-writing skills. For him, the slow grind of painting by hand—and the constant gap between idea and outcome—is what keeps the work rewarding.