In progressssssss. Started this for the Persona 4 contest on Pixiv. Hoping I can finish this in time. ;A; If not, I can finish it in time for AX I guess…

Nothing new if you saw my dA/twitter. A preview of my contribution to the Kingdom Carousel charity art book! All profits made from this book will be donated to St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital for pediatric cancer research. You can pre-order from their site here until May 10th!

Secondly, I’ll be attending Anime Expo’s artists alley this year! I got an email confirmation about table space, I finally bought plane tickets (ugh…), hotel rooms are being worked out with friends right now, so chances are looking better and better! :D Though this might be the last time I’ll be attending a west coast con for a while, mostly due to the expenses… I hear many artists say they sell enough during a con to break even or make a profit, but I’ve never had that experience before yet. And this is a bigger issue for me now than back in 2008 due to the costs of just about everything going up annually, so it’s going to be harder for me to close the gap. :( I don’t want to give up on attending AAs though, so maybe I’ll take this as a sign to look at more local cons (still train rides away, but better than the other side of the country I hope). Undeniably, the best case scenario would be that I’d actually sell enough this time around and I won’t have to give up on west coast cons! But that sounds too good to be true… ehh… let’s see how this works out.

Making slow progress one pen stroke at a time. Poor Link is still a blur on the right there, haha.

One nice thing about not sticking to a weekly update schedule for the manga anymore is that I can CG things for fun like this again. I also noticed that I haven’t finished any SC-related illustrations in… years… so maybe I can do something about that too. I don’t know how all these webcomickers out there manage an update schedule and still churn out gorgeous illustrations. :/ I’ve always been a very inefficient person, but I guess this holds true to my artist side too. orz Hopefully I can find my balance someday…

Work in progress. Skyward Swooooooord! :D
I know I’m not alone when I say that I make faces of the characters I’m trying to draw. So I bet my face had this look this entire weekend. \^o^/

Because all I have to give for Valentine’s Day is a sketch of a creepy old man with sparkles and chest hair trying to seduce you in a red convertible… Happy Valentine’s Day!

Incidentally, you really can see a pink Eynord in a red convertible if you have the Serenian Century Miis I made on your 3DS and play Mario Kart 7 and play the mall stage. He appears as an obstacle you have to dodge in the course! …or, it could be any of the characters I believe, I just had the great fortune to see Eynord on my first run (as well as Nimue, but Eynord was who made me crash laughing).

The codes for the Miis in case anyone interested missed it during the voting week:

So I’ve been tinkering with my cafepress account lately with some of my recent pictures, and I’ve been really curious about my piece with the whale since I used really texture-intense brushes for it. (On that note, I LOOOOOVE the brushes in Painter 12!! Except each brush stroke lags my laptop like crazy. I really need to look into some options since I reaaaally want to make better use of Painter. ;; ) But when I looked at my cafepress options I kinda didn’t want to invest in it since they were kinda pricey considering I just wanted to test print it onto something… (way to market myself haaaahaha OTL) And then I came across ArtsCow, which offered sooooo many options for customized items, were cheaper than cafepress, and offered certain items for free for the first few weeks (shipping not included, so I basically have to pay for the shipping price only) so I decided to give it a try on a pencil case.

It feels really weird seeing my own art on a product, but I’m really pleased with the printing! The grainy texture actually turned out okay. And most of all I’m really happy with the quality of the material used! I was expecting something that didn’t feel so nice to the touch since it was so cheap, but I really LOVE how it feels in my hands! ;A;

And while I was at it, I decided to make use of the free item opportunity and made another pencil case. My mum really loves this photo of Kosuke that I took a little over a month before he passed away, so I decided to make a little present for her.

And the reverse side has a photo of Sakura that I took a few weeks ago when it snowed. My mum loved it yay! :D

So in the end, I still don’t know how this picture looks when printed by cafepress (LMFAOOOO FAIL OTL), but I’m happy with my new pencil case (discomfort over my own art aside)! Really looking forward to making use of this since I use up my pens so fast!

Work in progress for another charity artbook. Will post more about it once I receive more info.
Was strongly inspired by Levias from Skyward Sword! …except this isn’t Skyward Sword fanart and I’ll probably be adding flying jellyfish too…

First two is done by Muki, the mastermind behind this rewrite idea.
Last one is done by Molly.

It just occurred to me that I never shared these before. These were done in late 2008 on the forums (back when the SC site still had one), and I guess I never decided whether the fanarts page would be the appropriate place to share them… so I’m sharing them here! I was having a rather craptastic day today and was having a case of the blues again, but randomly finding these again made me temporarily forget about it and laugh really hard. You guys are awesome.

My mum walked by and saw the mess I was making, and gave me these:

They’re erasers shaped like Japanese candies. As much as I adore food-shaped erasers, I had my doubts about their erasing abilities. Mum told me to use the brown part, so I did.

Lo and behold, these candy erasers actually erase better than my failure of an eraser that’s marketed for it’s “amazing” erasing capabilities.
I love my mum. :3

First off is the manga commission, which is now up on Graphicly for reading for $0.99! Written by Kenny Porter and illustrated by yours truly, crime/noir (my first time illustrating anything in that genre, so this was quite a ride for me)! This is my first time illustrating an indie comic that’s actually being distributed, so this is really exciting for me!

And then I found the Gaia:vim naturae charity artbook in the mail when I came home from my Tokyo trip two days ago! This is the first time I’ve participated in an art book project, so yet another first time accomplishment that I’m very excited about!

At the risk of coming off as a narcissist, a shot of my contribution in the book fffff. It was on page 12! :D You can still order the artbook from Lulu!

And pardon the crude snapshots, I just put the book on my lap haha…

And then a bit about something that just happened that’s not so hot but eventful nonetheless on my end. The server that my site is hosted on was down a few days ago, but got fixed within the day so I wasn’t too worried then. But then yesterday, as I was battling away my jet lag, I noticed it was down again. *insert annoyed moans and groans* A few hours later, it was up but the newest content was from November 18. Turns out it was moved to new hardware and the backups were about a month old, so that wasn’t really fun to deal with… :/ Though I guess I’m still fortunate compared to tons of other sites out there on the same server, I didn’t do any big updates so the fixes were pretty simple. I can’t imagine all the hassle bigger sites and businesses are facing right now. >.>