(Roughly) Daily

From the art and design blog Colossal:

Artist Sagaki Keita was born in 1984 and lives and works in Tokyo. His densely composited pen and ink illustrations contain thousands of whimsical characters that are drawn almost completely improvised. I am dumbstruck looking at these and love the wacky juxtaposition of fine art and notebook doodles. See more of his work here, and be sure to click the images above for more detail.

Indeed…

More, at Keita’s site…

As we search for ever-finer nibs, we might recall that it was on this date in 1945 that Britain observed its first British Empire Day, celebrating the colonial reach achieved from the first Irish “plantations” in the 16th century through the 19th century– a reach that, by the outbreak of World War II, encompassed a quarter of the world’s population and almost a quarter of the world’s land mass.

But of course World War II, and the new global regime that it spawned, spelled the end of empire.  While 14 “overseas territories” remain under British dominion, colonization effectively ended with the hand-over of Hong Kong to China in 1997.  Indeed the process of decolonization was sufficiently advanced by 1958 that– on this date that year– the name of the holiday was changed to “British Commonwealth Day.”

The British Empire, with British Overseas Territories underlined in red (source and larger version)