We’re so glad to announce that our upcoming game The Doll Shop has reached more than 7000 wishlists on Steam recently! Next step 8000 ^_^ Thank you everyone for your support!

We also had a great article inside Jeux Vidéo Magazine.

We recently added Japanese language to the demo that was already available in French and English on Steam >> https://store.steampowered.com/app/3851680/The_Doll_Shop/

If you want to support us, you can still add the game to your wishlist or spread the word among your friends and family. \^_^/

We’re back from a 2 weeks trip in Iceland, it was incredible! As NPCs inside Death Stranding 2, we had to discover the stunning landscapes that inspired Hideo Kojima for this game!

We brought back many watercolors and silver photographs. We really felt like inside a movie or a Sigur Rós video clip ^^. It was so inspiring! In the coming weeks, we will scan all the drawings to make a digital mini artbook for our Patreon Souvenir Shop guests, as summer gift.

This month, August 20 to 23, we will be signing our books at the huge music festival Cabaret Vert. For the event, Dupuis printed a special edition of Spirou magazine that will be offered to visitors during the weekend. You will find our two characters drawn by our friend Gorobei inside, and a chapter of Tokyo Mystery Café with an exclusive interview.

Among the musicians, we will be able to see Nick Cave and Sébastien Tellier! It will be so much fun! \^_^/

Also, for the release of The Doll Shop, we’re thinking of making an event at the Yôkai Café in Lyon, before Halloween, around October 24th . We’ll tell you more about it soon, so stay tuned!

Recently, we’ve been playing a lot to Death Stranding 2. The photo mode is incredible and we had lot of fun taking crazy pictures with our NPCs characters (Peter Gates and The Dowser). We’re making our own photo album, haha! XD

We received many supporting and encouraging messages these last days. Thank you so much for that. It’s really helpful to keep motivation. The Doll Shop’s release is in less thank 2 months and we still have much work to do!

Take care! ^^

Cecile and Olivier

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The other day, we met a friend who asked us: “What exactly is The Doll Shop?” She’s been following us for many years now on Instagram but cannot clearly say what are our current projects. And we can understand that! Recently, we’ve been working on so many different things: illustration for a tramway, ukiyoe series for a Japanese traditional workshop, comic books, video games… It’s not easy to communicate clearly about all of them and it’s probably confusing for some of you.

In this newsletter, we’d like to clarify this problem and focus on our 2 main current projects: The Doll Shop and Tokyo Mystery Café.

The Doll Shop is an independent horror/romance video game set in the Japanese countryside. It’s coming on next October, right in time for Halloween!

We’re doing everything by ourselves. Olivier is in charge of the story, programming, sounds, art directing and part of the backgrounds. I am in charge of the music, characters, items and the other part of the backgrounds. The game is almost finished as you can see on the graphics below:

What remains is: communication and translations.

We’re doing our best to communicate on the game by contacting press and journalists but the game industry is very competitive and it’s hard to catch people’s attention on a small project like that. The game will be available on the Steam store, it means we need enough players to add the game to their wishlist if we want to appear on the store. People say we need to obtain at least 7000 wishlist before the game release, otherwise the game’s page won’t be visible. We currently a little more than 40000 wishlists, that’s a beginning!

By the way, if you want to support us, the best way to help is to add the game to your wishlist ! \^_^/

>> WISHLIST ON STEAM

About translations, since we are creating this game in our free time with absolutely no money (only our Patreon funds), we cannot afford to translate it in many languages. We have selected 4 languages: English, Japanese, Chinese and French. The Doll Shop is a game based on narration so we decided to work only with friends who have true writing skills. Let us introduce them briefly.

* Josh Tierney will be in charge of the English version. He is a Canadian comic book writer (Spera, Warm Blood). We’ve been friends for almost 20 years now and collaborated on several projects (comic books, short movie...). Our writing styles are very close and both are focused on the characters feelings.

* Mizuka Yagi will work on the Japanese translation. We met in Niigata university in 2009 and since then, she was our referent for each of our projects set in Japan, sending us documentation, answering all our questions… She still lives in Niigata, where the game takes place, so she knows very well about the winter atmosphere we tried to picture in this project.

* Jay Wong will take care of the Chinese version. We met him in Hong Kong in 2024. He is a comic book artist and writer and an animated movie director and storyboarder (Monsoon Blue). He focuses on very touching intimate stories with sensitive characters. This will be our first collaboration together and we feel very excited about it!

Our second project, Tokyo Mystery Café is a detective comic book series set in Tokyo. The first two volumes are already available in France at Dupuis publishing (volume 1 is digitally available in English too) and we are now working on the third and last volume to be released in Spring 2027.

Here again, we’re doing everything by ourselves: Olivier writes the story and we work together on the art. Working on a series requires a lot of endurance. We started working on it in 2023 at it will be finished next year. But it’s also a very special experience to be able to spend several years with our beloved characters.

Here is our progress graphic on volume 3.

We had a meeting with our editor Camille Grenier in Paris last month and she checked the first 27 pages of the story board so we can go on the pencils and inking of these pages.

Talking about events, we’ll be part of the following events to sign copies of our books. If you want to meet us and chat, we would be happy to see you there:

4/5 July : Haltya BD in Ustaritz. It’s a cominc book event taking place inside a beautiful castle in the Basque Country.

20/23 August: Cabaret Vert in Charleville-Mézière. It’s a huge music and comic book event. There will be amazing musicians like Nick Cave and Sebastien Tellier and around 70 comic book artists. This is going to be crazy!

We hope we managed to clarify a bit about our current projects. We’re often working on various things in the same time but maybe we should communicate only about one thing after another… We’d love to know your thoughts about it. Having feedback could help us to make improvements! ^_^

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This month, we had the pleasure to illustrate the cover of the new issue of ZOOM Japon. It is a newspaper dedicated to Japanese society, distributed for free in France, Switzerland and Belgium. The theme of this new issue is “dagashiya”. Dagashiya are small neighborhood candy shops that used to be found everywhere in Japan. Their number has decreased considerably in recent years, but their retro charm makes us feel a touch of nostalgia when we come across one.

Recently, we’ve been working a lot on the marketing of our upcoming game The Doll Shop. VeuillezPLP and Factornews published 2 great articles about the game, Indie Games Hub on YouTube featured the trailer and we’ve been selected by the BIG Festival in Brazil, in the BIG Highlight category! Yay! We’re so happy about it! But what does it really mean? Let’s talk about our goals concerning the communication.

Because the game will be launched on Steam store, we mainly focus on our Steam page. People who are interested in the game can add it to their whishlist. The more wishlists we have, the more likely we are to sell the game when it is released. Even if the percentage of real buyers will be lower, of course. But also, the more engagements on the wishlists, the more Steam will highlight the game on the site and give us visibility. So our goal is to get as many wishlists as possible before the game is released.

We go from time to time to visit our friends from the indie game studio Nova-Box. The other day, Antonio, their communication manager, told us that we had to reach at least 7000 wishlists for our game to be considered a “real game” by the Steam platform. As you can see on the picture below, 4099 people have already wishlisted The Doll Shop, 286 people have removed it, making us a total of 3813. We are still far from 7000! XD

The Steam platform allows us to analyze the sources of wishlists. The biggest peak in graphics was our participation in NextFest on Steam, a demo festival that took place last October. Since then, we have had very few new players. The last 2 small peaks correspond to our selection at the BIG Festival where our game was presented for a whole weekend (in Brazil), and to the broadcast of our trailer on the YouTube channel Indie Games Hub. We’ll soon release the demo. Let’s hope it will help to increase the wishlists number!

Above, we talked about the French indie studio Nova-Box. They help us a lot with the communication. We’ve been following their work since many years and have always been huge fans of their games. They are currently developing After the Wane, a beautiful interactive graphic novel with breathtaking hand-drawn danse sceneries. We invite you to head over to their page and add the game to your wishlist:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2742720/After_the_Wane/

We will be at BD Pyrénées, a comic book festival on June 13th and 14th at Billère, next to Pau to sign our books. We will bring our new merch (washi tape, pin’s, papercut, stickers…).

Talking about merch, our washi tape is now available at Tanuki no Mori, shop in Bordeaux, with other goodies like pin’s and postcards. It’s the only place in the world where you can find our merch, haha! That’s because we can easily bring it to the shop when we go to see our family in Bordeaux.

Thanks for reading and see you soon! ♥

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We’re back in the Alps for a month. It’s been a while since we haven’t seen the mountains during spring! Being surrounded by nature is always inspiring.

First of all, the tramway we decorated for the city of Lyon is on circulation! You can travel inside Atelier Sento’s tramway… Sounds cool, right? We’ll go there tomorrow to take some photos. Meanwhile, here are 2 pics from the application of the illustrations on the tramway.

At the end of the month, we will be at Sevrier BD comic book event (next to Annecy) on March 28 & 29.

Here is our schedule for the signing sessions:

Now, let’s talk about our 2 main projects of 2026: our video game The Doll Shop and our comic book Tokyo Mystery Café vol.3. We’ve made these charts so we can regularly share our progress.

Concerning The Doll Shop:
- The graphics are almost 100% done (only 1 or 2 items left to draw).
- The script was completely written but there can be some small changes here and there when dialogues are encoded.
- Almost all the musics are done but after finishing the programming, it might be possible that we will need 1 or 2 more melodies for specific scenes.
- Sounds are added progressively while programming. It’s hard to predict what sounds we will need before creating the scenes.
- The programming is the big part left on this project. Olivier is making good progress but since we added many scenes, new endings, new characters and all, it’s going to take more time than expected.
- The other huge part is to communicate on the game before the release. Communication will require to create a press kit, contact journalists…
Let’s hope we can make it before Halloween!

Concerning Tokyo Mystery Café vol.3: After the story was validated by our editor, Olivier is now moving on the script while I’m working on the storyboard. The release is planned for beginning of 2027. Still have a lot of work on this!

Now, let’s have a first preview of what is upcoming in Spring for our dear guests on Patreon who have access to the Souvenir Shop ⭐️⭐️⭐️! The first gift will be a 🌸WASHI TAPE!🌸 Yay!
Below are two early sketches and a coloring test:

It will be the first time we create a design for a washi tape.
The yellow line is supposed to be golden foil. Let’s hope it will work as intended! We just ordered it and we will show you pictures as soon as we receive it. We hope you’ll like it. See you soon!

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As we thought about it, an idea started to emerge: what if the Atelier Sentô was a real place? Wouldn’t it be cool to design a map where you unlock different spaces, like a mini RPG game? So we opened our watercolor box and started painting…

People who join our Patreon will have their own room at our traditional ryokan and access to the different spaces according to their pledge.

All the information is on this page: https://www.patreon.com/c/ateliersento/about
We hope you will enjoy your stay. ☺️

The opening event for our exhibition at BOMA public library (near Bordeaux) was a success!

We didn’t expect so many visitors to come! Even the mayor was there and asked for a sign, haha! The library team did a very professional job on the display. And the bookseller Bulles et Brioche (who was there to sell our books) offered a warm atmosphere with her generous buns. We had so much fun!
You can visit the exhibition until March 21.

Our next event is Bulles-en-Val, near Orléans ( yes, the famous city liberated by Joan of Arc!). We’ll be signing there all day long on February 28th and March 1st.

These days, I’m working on something completely new for us: the city of Lyon (where I was born by the way! ) asked us to decorate a 7-cars tramway! It sound crazy and we only have a few days to work on it, but it’s also really exciting! I already sent a rough sketch that was accepted and now, I have to work on the final design, car by car. Can’t wait to see the printed result driving through Lyon’s streets!

Last week, we received a package from our mangaka friend Yukio Tamai.

He and his wife Fumi Sonoyama both appear in Tokyo Mystery Café vol.2 as characters since they welcomed us in their studio for our documentation. We met twice in Japan in 2023 and 2025, spending whole days together with family, hiking, sightseeing... These are cheerful moments to us. Anyway, we received this package full of beautiful presents and among them, a CD album from Eiichi Ohtaki called A Long Vacation.

We share with Yukio Tamai a taste for Japanese rock music from the 70s and 80s. Eiichi Ohtaki has a beautiful soft voice and the music is both upbeat and relaxing. This album will accompany us in the coming months and nourish our projects!

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The new year has begun with exciting projects at the Atelier Sentô!

First, we’re glad to announce that there will be an exhibition of our original watercolor paintings and comic book pages at the Boma public library (Saint Denis de Pile, near Bordeaux, France) from February 7 to March 21. We’ll be there for the opening on February 7th from 11h30 and it will be possible to purchase our books and get a sign from us :) It’s free and open to everyone! We hope we’ll meet you there!

A new formula for the Explorer level on Patreon!
After 4 years of monthly digital mini artbooks, we’ve reached 46 pdfs, each one containing around 15 pages for a total of more than 500 pages packed with exclusive sketches and watercolors. But we thought it would be fun to give a new breath to this community… so we’re happy to reveal our new formula for 2026! \^^/

Starting from now, Explorer patrons will receive a special gift for each season.
As you can see, we keep our traditional New Year card in winter and also one digital mini artbook in summer. On top of that, you will receive 2 other exclusive goodies directly at your home, one in spring, the other in autumn. These goodies may be stickers, enamel pins, … there are plenty of possibilities and we’ll share our ideas and designs with you in coming posts, right here on Patreon.

On top of that, it is now possible to subscribe to an annual membership on our Patreon page and benefit from a 10% discount.
Here is the guide: >> ANNUAL MEMBERSHIP

We’ve made some good progress on our visual novel video game The Doll Shop. The story is completely written, the soundtrack is composed, only a few items remain to be drawn, and we’ve started to send the demo to game festivals. Now I’m working on programming all day long!
Remember you can always add the game to your wishlist on Steam if you want to support us, it’s very helpful for being noticed by the algorithm >> STEAM PAGE

I began to work on the storyboards of Tokyo Mystery Café vol.3! Yay! And these last 2 weeks, I had the pleasure to welcome an intern at home. Tejata is a very talented student and he helped us finding new ideas for Patreon, the game icons design and many other things. It’s always nice to have an outside perspective on our work. It helps to progress and move on. Thank you Tejata!

Recently we’ve played Creaks, an independant adventure game created by Amanita design, one of our favourite studios. You play a character exploring a labyrinthine underground citadel populated by strange creatures. The scribbled aesthetic creates an eerie atmosphere reminiscent of Czech animation. It’s dark, fun, teeming with hand-drawn details, and features mysterious music!

You can send us your questions and fanarts for our next newsletter in the comments or on Instagram!

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Our New Year Card is finished! It will be an exclusive watercolor illustration. We’ll send it to all our Exporer Patrons in January. You can still subscribe to the Explorer level until the end of December if you want to receive it in your mailbox. Below is a detail from the illustration.

Back in October, I submitted a first version of the synopsis of our comic book series Tokyo Mystery Café vol.3 to our editor Camille, from Dupuis publishing and, following her feedback, I’m now writing a new version. It’s so complicated to write mysteries… if only one detail doesn’t fit, you have to change so many other elements to make the puzzle work again!

I’m still creating small items missing for our narrative game The Doll Shop. The main difference between comic books and video games is that you never know when the work is finished on a game… you can endlessly add more and more items and interactions… But we’re still hoping to release it in 2026, stay tuned! Meanwhile, remember you can add the game to your whishlist on Steam to support us. ☺️❤️

We’re always looking for ideas to create more exchanges with you, so we created this new category in our newsletter. Today, we answer to a few questions we received from you:

We’ve been using Winsor&Newton watercolor since our beginning, 15 years ago! We tried the Sennelier watercolors created with honey once but even if we like vibrant colors, these one are too much flashy for us.

Cecile loves drawing character’s faces and work on their expressions. Sometimes, when she draws someone crying, Cecile’s face also becomes sad and somehow scary… she hates drawing bikes! Olivier enjoys a complex perspective of Tokyo Buildings. He feels stressed when you ask him to draw something cute!

Recently, we’ve been working a lot on iPad. It’s very convenient because we travel a lot and it allows us to work in the transportation. But it doesn’t fit to all the projects. Our next graphic novel will be done with watercolors. We don’t have much different tools. On IPad, we only use 2 or 3 brushes. On paper, we use our watercolor box and Hanemuhle Harmony paper.

We’re fine, thanks! Always looking for a balance between making progress on work and taking time enjoying life! We try to spend as much time as possible with friends, it helps to keep a distance to work and also motivation!

Bellow, we received this lovely watercolor fanart of The Doll Shop from Zou ❤️

Feel free to send us your questions, here in the comments or DM us on Instagram and send us your fanarts for our coming newsletters!

Happy Christmas holidays everyone! ❄️🎄🎉

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The end of the year is fast approaching! I don’t know about you, but we’re already looking for Christmas gifts for our family ^^”. We like to take time to choose carefully. Christmas is often considered a huge commercial frenzy. We see it more as an opportunity to support artists we appreciate. And I admit that this year, since the book industry is facing a crisis, we especially want to offer books and support independent artists. That’s why at the end of this newsletter, we’re sharing with you a few recommendations for great Christmas shopping! Yay!

⭐ THE DOLL SHOP
Many of you played the demo of The Doll Shop during Steam Neo Fest event. Thank you so much for your feedback on the game (and all your kind words )♥️. We’re currently fixing a lot of things, and the demo will be unavailable for a while. But stay tuned, it will be back soon, even better! Meanwhile you can add the game to your wishlist on Steam if you want to support us:
>> THE DOLL SHOP on STEAM

⭐ NEW YEAR CARD 2026
Also we started to think about the New Year card design that will be mailed to our Patreon Explorer *** subscribers in January. Here are some early sketches:

It will be a watercolor illustration printed in postcard format by the English printer Moo with whom we have been working for many years. The print is of high quality and printed on soft touch 330g paper.

“Since the release of the volume 2 of Tokyo Mystery Café, we’ve had so many nice feedback and it makes us very happy to see that most people like it as much as, or even more than, volume 1! Thanks to this enthusiasm, I can start working on volume 3 peacefully... or almost! Because imagining investigations is a real puzzle!” >_<

“Lately, I’ve been indulging in cooking... no, wait, that’s not it! I’m working on the last few missing pieces for The Doll Shop! XD I have two backgrounds left to color and a few objects to draw. It’s almost finished! Then I can go back and cook some good things for Christmas! By the way, do you have any good recipe for this season to share?”

Here are two recommendations for nice Christmas shopping! Let’s support our favorite independent artists! ^^

❄️ MARIE-ALICE HAREL >> https://maharelillo.etsy.com/
We’ve been following Marie-Alice Harel’s work for many years. Not only does she create superb, captivating illustrations, but she also showcases them with beautiful objects: hand-bound books, embossed postcards, enamel pins, holographic bookmarks, and art prints. Everything is beautiful, delicate, and magical!

❄️ ISSEKINICHO >> https://www.issekinicho.fr/editions/

For French readers, we recommend the books from Issekinicho, the publisher of our graphic novels Onibi and Festival of Shadows. Alexandre and Delphine have a genuine knowledge of Japan in addition to being excellent artists. They are only two people running the publishing house, but they do a fabulous job: each book is a little gem. From travel guides to graphic novels, including children’s illustrated books, language learning methods, and photography books, you’re sure to find something to delight you, for yourself, your loved ones, adults and children alike.

Thanks a lot for reading this November diary! If you’re interested in more content from us, you can also subscribe to our Patreon page (https://www.patreon.com/ateliersento) and access exclusive behind-the-scenes articles and digital mini artbooks.

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October has finally arrived! Best month of the year for pumpkin soups and a horror movies marathon, don’t you think so?

To celebrate Halloween, we are glad to announce that the free demo of our visual novel game The Doll Shop is now available on Steam!

We’ve finished it right in time to participate to the Steam Neo Fest that will begin on October 13th. That’s a big achievement for us and we hope you’ll enjoy it!

>> PLAY THE DEMO

If you meet any bug while playing or if you have any feedback, we would be very grateful if you could share it with us so we can improve the game. 🙏 And if you want to support us, you can add The Doll Shop to your wishlist on Steam ❤️

The demo is something like 15-20 minutes long but we hope it will give you shivers, hehe!

We are still being inspired by Hideo Kojima’s wonderful videogame Death Stranding. You may remember that we were scanned by Kojima’s staff and we’re now characters in this game!!!

Recently, we’ve been in touch with Peow, a very cool indie publisher, to be part of their Death Stranding Zine, along with a team of incredible artists! We created a mini game featuring our characters Peter Gates and The Dowser. We hope you’ll enjoy this extra adventure!

You can pre-order the Zine right here: https://wrenmcdonald.com/shop

Many thanks to all the people who came to meet us during our Paris-Bruxelles-Bayonne signing tour for the release of Tokyo Mystery Café vol.2! We had such great time and received touching presents.

The next signing session will be at QUAI DES BULLES festival in Saint Malo at the end of the month. Here is our planning:
- 24/10: 12:00-13:30
- 25/10: 13:30-15:30
- 26/10: 15:30-19:00

We will bring some exclusive goodies (pin’s, stickers, papertoy). Please note that we have no card reader, we can only accept cash.

Happy Halloween month everyone! 🎃

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We're so glad to announce that Tokyo Mystery Café vol.2 is now available in French bookstores! Yay! 🎉

In this new adventure, Nahel, Soba and the owner of the Mystery Café will have to solve a strange case in the manga industry! The plot is set in the old-fashioned district of Jimbōchō and is inspired by our visit of the most famous publishing houses ( Shogakukan, Shueisha, Kodansha, Kadokawa... ), back in 2023. Our 3 detectives will bring you inside mangaka’s workshops, offices of big manga companies and printer’s factories… Are you ready to follow us into the secret world of manga publishing?

To celebrate the release of this second volume, we will do a signing tour in Paris, Bruxelles and Bayonne. Can’t wait to see you there!

Take note of the dates:
17/09: Millepage Jeunesse et BD, Paris Vincennes (16:30-18:30)
19/09: Bederama, Reims ( 15:00-18:00)
20/09: Le Renard Doré, Paris Jussieu ( 14:00-17:00)
25/09: Comptoir de la BD, Versailles (17:30-19:30)

26/09: Fête de la BD, Bruxelles, Tour & Taxi ( 16:00-18:00)
27/09: Fête de la BD, Bruxelles, Tour & Taxi ( 10:00-12:00)(14:00-16:00)
28/09: Fête de la BD, Bruxelles, Tour & Taxi ( 13:00-14:00)
Rencontre (11:00-12:00)

04/10: Le Banc Dessiné, Bayonne

Also, 2 new goodies will be available at the signing sessions: our new summer enamel pin and the Mystery Café’s papertoy! (Please note that we have no credit card reader and can only accept cash during the signing session).

We will spend 9 days in Paris this month for our signing tour and will have time to visit the city. If you have any recommendation for places you enjoy, like lovely cafés or square, mysterious places, charming bookstores… we’d love to hear from you about it! And as always, we’ll do our best to share the tour in our Instagram stories. 😉

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How are you doing?
Today, we have a few announcements to celebrate summer season with you!

First of all, we have created a Steam page for our coming visual novel game The Doll Shop! 🎉🎊Yay! 🤗
After many years of making free amateur games, this will be our very first serious professional project. You can already discover the poster illustration and add it to your wishlist if you want to be informed when the game will be released. You can also follow the project to know about our progress on it.

Discover our teaser video on the Steam page:
>> THE DOLL SHOP on Steam

We have completed something like 50 % and would love to launch The Doll Shop for Halloween. But we know that we still have a lot of work to do, not only on the game itself, but also the sound effects, the translations and all. We’ll do our best!
And of course, we’ll continue sharing the making of on Patreon. ☺️

Meanwhile, if you want to help us, please consider adding the game to your wishlist. This is the best way to make the game more popular on Steam. ❤️

The second news is something we had to keep secret until recently:
Death Stranding 2 was released these days and our characters are somewhere inside the game! 😆

Remember when we visited Kojima Productions in 2023? Well, we’ve been there twice and, the 2nd time, they scanned our face to create our 3D versions! It still seems completely crazy to us. That day, we were in "travel" mode, our hair disheveled by the freezing February wind in Tokyo, huge dark circles under our eyes due to jet lag and stress... haha! But the staff was really kind and warm and explained us everything carefully.

We were surrounded by dozens of cameras, and a crew member was explaining to us how to make facial expressions. The hardest part for us was expressing happiness! 😅

We were not sure if they would use the scans but two years later, last January, in the train going to Angoulême comic festival, we received an email from Kojima Productions asking us to validate our 3D models. We couldn’t believe it! 😱

We’ve been huge fans of Kojima’s game since our childhood. We’ve been inspired by his narration style and the unique atmospheres he creates. And now, we're inside his game, aside actors we admire like Lea Seydoux and famous filmmakers like George Miller and Nicolas Winding Refn! I guess we can rest in peace now.

We hope you’ll enjoy playing DS2 and try to find us! Feel free to send us screenshots if you do ☺️

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Hello everyone!
We’re glad to announce that the 2nd volume of Tokyo Mystery Café (our new comic book series) will be pre-published in Spirou magazine starting April 30th.
Spirou is a famous Belgian magazine that was created in the 1930s. We grew up reading it so we’re very proud to be part of this adventure!

Below is the cover illustration we made for the release of the first chapter. We hope you'll like it!

Looking at this image, can you guess where this new volume will take place?
Feel free to answer in the comments ;)

So the pages are almost done but we still have a few things to work on before we really finish the book: create a variation on the back cover illustration (it will be slightly different on each volume), create a small illustration to put under the title on the title page and of course, create all the content for the documentary pages at the end of the book (with texts and pictures from our travels in Japan in 2023 and last February).

And what after TMC?

During the coming months, we will work on the Japanese woodblock prints collaboration with Mokuhankan and return to our visual novel game remake, The Doll Shop.

Then we will be at the comic book event BD Fest (La Roche-sur-Yon, France ) on May 17th and 18th to sign our books and to perform L’Heure Bleue, our live drawing concert with Cecile Corbel (singer and composer of Ghibli’s Arrietty original soundtrack).

Our current favorite reading is Dai Dark, a manga by Q Hayashida. You may know Dorohedoro, her previous series, which had a lot of success. Dai Dark can be unsettling at first glance: imagine the cosmic horror of HR Giger mixed with the cosiness of slice-of-life manga! This space opera is drawn with a gory style and yet it offers us a warm and pleasant moment. We appreciate the vibrant line far from the current standards of manga and the characters have a kind of innocence reminiscent of the mangas from the 90s.

PS: the French translation by Sylvain Chollet is absolutely amazing!

If you’re interested in more content from us, you can also subscribe to our Patreon page (https://www.patreon.com/ateliersento) and access exclusive behind-the-scenes articles and digital mini artbooks (currently, a collection of watercolor sketches from our last trip in Japan).

Many thanks for supporting us during all the creation of TMC vol.2! Wish us good luck for this final stretch!

Let’s start this newsletter with a little summary of the International Comic Book Festival in Angoulême. Like every year, it was completely crazy!

Many people came to our signing sessions on Issekinicho publishing booth! We had the chance to meet some of our Patreon subscribers and that’s one of the best thing that happened. We also had an appointment with Camille - our editor - to talk about the cover of Tokyo Mystery Café vol 2. We kind of agreed on something but still have to submit a few sketches. We had time to see 2 exhibitions: a retrospective of French sci-fi Comics (Moebius, Bilal,...) and a solo exhibition of Gou Tanabe's mangas adapted from HP Lovecraft stories.

We also met many amazing comic book artists from all around the world! We are completely exhausted but delighted!

After 2 years, we’re going back to Japan! We invite you to follow our trip on Patreon and through our Instagram stories.

We will mainly stay in Tokyo to explore new districts (for Tokyo Mystery Café documentation) and meet friends. Also, we will spend time at Mokuhankan (the Japanese woodblock print workshop in Asakusa) to learn more about the process since we will be working together for a whole year on our “Dreams of Future Past” Ukiyo-e series.

Then we’ll have a 2 days break in the charming coastal area of Kamakura. In March, we will visit Cecile’s brother in the mountains of Takarazuka, near Osaka, before we return to Niigata, where we lived in 2010, to see again our friends. Finally, we will spend a few days around Narita before taking our plane back to France.

We decided to bring the Canson watercolor sketchbooks we received as gifts during a comic book festival. The pages are 21,6 x 14 cm which is larger than what we used the last time. The 250g paper is thick. The pages have a soft face while the other side is very grainy. We will probably only use the light grain side ‘cause heavyweight papers are very difficult to scan.

As drawing tools, we bring our Winsor & Newton watercolor palettes, a few Raphael SoftAqua brushes of various sizes, mechanical pencils for early sketches and 0.3 Unipin black pens for the line.

“ I’m almost done with Tokyo Mystery Café vol.2, hehe! I finished my part on the pages and only have to work on the book’s cover. Any idea? XD This month, since we will meet Mokuhankan’s team in Tokyo, I’ll focus on this: creating new designs for the woodblock prints!”

“During our travel in Japan, I’ll try to work on TMC colors at least one hours a day. Probably every morning, when I wake up. It’s always challenging to work during a travel but I think it can be an opportunity to relax a bit before starting a crazy day in Tokyo!”

We have several challenging art goals for this month:
1 - Draw enough outdoor watercolor sketches to make a new “Japan travel diary”
2 - Color as much pages as possible for TMC
3 - Learn more about woodblock print process with Mokuhankan team to progress in the Ukiyo-e technique.

When we travel, we enjoy remembering movies or books we like. Ito Ogawa wrote this charming story called “Tsubaki Bunguten” (La papeterie Tsubaki). It tells the everyday life of a young woman living in Kamakura and working as a public writer. The first page of the book is a lovely hand drawn map that we will take with us during our trip. We hope people do the same with our books Onibi and Tokyo Mystery Café which have maps to find places that inspired the story.

If you’re interested in more content from us, you can also subscribe to our Patreon page (https://www.patreon.com/ateliersento) and access exclusive behind-the-scenes articles and digital mini artbooks. This month, we’ll focus on Japan so expect exclusive sketches, photos and stories from our trip:

By the way, if you have any recommendation for our trip in Tokyo, we’d love to know about it! Share your favorite places in the comments!

We created it using a technique we love: linocut! It was carved and printed by hand.
And now, here is everything you need to know about our current projects:

"I only have one page left to draw for Tokyo Mystery Café vol.2 !
I only draw the backgrounds but this one is pretty challenging: it’s a double page with a huge landscape of Tokyo with buildings seen from above and a distortion of the perspective! I’m sure you understand why I left this one for the very end! After that, I’ll have to move on the designs for our woodblock print series with Mokuhankan."

"As expected, I didn’t work as much as I wanted during the holidays. (╥‸╥)
The new year cards linocut prints were really fun to do but it took several days to print. I also spent lot of time cooking desserts for my family. I still have 15 pages of TMC to draw and I really hope I can finish before the end of the month!"

Recently, Homebear studio released the second part of “Nairi”, a lovely adventure game created by 2 people. Just like us! ( ˃ᴗ˂ )
It is the cutest game ever with very cozy detailed backgrounds and beautiful characters. The interactions are fun and the puzzle design very clever. It inspires us for our remake of our own game The Doll Shop!

We will be at Angoulême comic book festival at the end of the month to sign our books. You will find us on Issekinicho booth (manga area). Her is our signing schedule :
* Friday: 4 pm - 7 pm
* Saturday: 10 am - 12 pm / 4 pm - 7 pm
* Sunday: 10 am - 12 pm / 3 pm - 6 pm

In 2025, we have 3 big projects:

• Finish the inked pages of Tokyo Mystery Café vol.2 before the end of January since we travel to Japan for one month in February. (Yay!) Then finish the colors before summer.

• Draw the 9 remaining designs for our retro futuristic series of ukiyoe in collaboration with Mokuhankan (a traditional woodblock workshop located in Asakusa, Tokyo). All designs must be done by summer.

• Complete The Doll Shop, our current video game project, and hopefully release it for Halloween.

This should keep us busy until October, when Tokyo Mystery Café vol.2 is released and then we go back on signing tours all around France.

If you’re interested in more content from us, you can also subscribe to our Patreon page (https://www.patreon.com/ateliersento) and access exclusive behind-the-scenes articles and digital mini artbooks. Here is a taste of what to expect this month:

We wish you the best for this new year. May 2025 brings you some moments of joy and peace. Thank you for reading and for your support! ٩(๑❛ᴗ❛๑)۶