Hello, everyone! It's been so long since my last entry in this series but I
never forgot about chronicling my 2023 Japan adventure 🎌 I'm going to
continue sharing my travels with you; I've dedicated my writing time for the
next six weeks to this endeavor! I hope you'll enjoy reading until the end of
the journey.
So, on the eighth day of our adventure (I think? It's hard to figure with
crossing the dateline and being awake when we'd normally sleep and such 🤔) we
visited Kanazawa, and with our newfound courage, we not only participated in
the ship-sponsored shore excursion, but did some exploring on our own! Today's
post will focus on the excursion, which included a samurai house, geisha
district, and modern art museum.
Tuesday 21 March 2023 - Kanazawa Shore Excursion
The beautiful sunrise as our ship neared the shores of Kanazawa.
The cruise terminal in Kanazawa.
They actually had a sign with our ship's name on and everything! A
little touch like that made me feel especially welcome 🥰
This awesome suit of armor was just inside the house, as if to greet
you!
A big feature of the house was its small but splendid garden.
Always lovely to spot a koi 🐟
Extra exciting for me was a collaboration with the new anime adaptation
of
My Happy Marriage!
This standee features the character
Tatsuishi Kouji, the main character's childhood friend ❤️
After the samurai neighborhood, we visited
Higashi Chaya, an old geisha district, and did some shopping! This is one of the
gold leaf shops we visited:
HAKUZA hikari-gura. There were many such shops because Kanazawa is famous for its gold
leaf. The "kana" part of Kanazawa even means "gold"!
We bought some tasty treats and souvenirs for people back home at this
matcha shop,
Sawawa.
I was excited to come across this Shinto shrine,
Higashiyama Sugawara Shrine, as it was the first one I got to visit during this trip! I
offered my prayers to the resident god (kamisama) and received a good
fortune in return 😊
The top of the fortune has a waka poem, followed by a general fortune,
and your luck type (I believe mine is the lowest possible good, which is
literally not bad!). The final sections address specific areas, such as
desires, lost items, studies, illness, etc. The back also has a longer
message of wisdom from the kamisama.
Our next stop on the guided tour was the
Kanazawa 21st Century Museum of Art. As you might imagine, this sculpture caught everyone's attention as
the tour bus got parked!
This clever piece changes every moment, as the large square hole makes
the entire room a frame for the sky! It's titled
Blue Planet Sky, designed by James Turrell. There's seating all around the room, so
you can sit and really enjoy the dreamy effect.
So nice to get to see this whimsical sculpture on a cloudy day!
It seemed our cruise was perfectly timed to enjoy the sakura in most of
the places we visited! This is me and my husband, Sean, posing with
one of the museum's trees.
I wanted to enter this installation, but, as you can see, it was very
popular, especially with energetic kids! It's called
Colour Activity House
and was made by Olafur ELIASSON.
This is another piece I would have liked to try, but it's specifically designed
for kids, so I left it to them 😉 It's titled
Wrapping
and was made by Fernando Romero.
One thing I DID do was get a selfie in this awesome sculpture! It took
some digging but I discovered it is a commemorative piece made for the
museum's 10th anniversary in 2016. It's called Spherical Pavilion “MARU”
and was designed by Sejima Kazuyo and Nishizawa Ryue.
After this, we returned to our ship and prepared to explore the city on our
own. I must say, I expected to share our Kanazawa adventures in a single post,
but the research necessary to write knowledgeably about our excursion was a
huge undertaking! I hope you'll check out some of these places if you get the
chance to visit Kanazawa yourself 😊 I'll be back soon with the next entry in
this series. Until then, please stay happy, healthy, and safe!
Spring has truly arrived here in Boise! It's bright, colorful, and fragrant,
but also windy and full of pollen 🥲🌸 My eyes are dry and grainy, but it's
worth it in exchange for gorgeous patio weather every weekend ⛱️🌳🍃 Today is
the last day of April, my birth month! Allow me to share with you all the cool
and fun things I got up to in the first month of my 39th year!
Patreon Rewards
April's rewards
went out
last week. They featured an updated WIP (work in progress) scan of my 2024
Birthday Gryphon greeting card illustration. I sent these rewards with hopes
that their recipients would enjoy comparing the first WIP (from March) to the second! Next month the final piece will go out, completing the trio
💌
Supporting my work through Patreon helps me both financially and mentally,
giving me the funds necessary to run Studio Mikarts and the emotional boost
that comes from knowing you really believe in what I'm doing 🥰 If you're
already a member, thank you so much! If you'd like to become a member,
just click here.
deviantART
I only finished one piece in April, one piece, from One Piece! It was another
chibi caricature, this time of live-action Usopp, in celebration of our shared
birthdate, April First 🥳
Unexpectedly, this chibi helped me realize that a setting had mysteriously
been turned off in Photoshop, so that all of my .PNG images were saving with
sad, dull colors. Looking back, the issue had been happening since the end of
last year 😱 I've resaved most of the affected images, including this chibi
Usopp, and now I know to make sure the "ICC Profile" box remains checked when
saving!!
Livestreaming
I made a slight change to my Twitch schedule in April: still live on
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday for two hours, but starting and ending 30 minutes
earlier. See the new schedule in your time zone
here. I made this change to accommodate the amount of time it has been taking to
do my followup work, including raiding a fellow art streamer, publishing the
stream recording on YouTube, and making a YouTube Short from a previous
recording.
Here's the last livestream from April, part two of my Mika & Sean Astin
chibi caricature, which also features another change I made this month: the
addition of a second, alternate camera view!
I was glad last week, for making the schedule change, because I realized I had
another item to add to my followup checklist! I had never touched Twitch Clips
before (I now know they're basically like YouTube Shorts) and the person I
raided played my channel's featured clip, which was at least a year old and a
complete surprise to me because apparently viewers can clip stuff but you
don't get informed of it 😅 Now I've been making a new Clip after I'm done
streaming, so that my current streams will get featured when I raid!
Charity Fundraising
Our charity of the month for April was
Food Empowerment Project
(F.E.P.). Among the many things they do to help make the world a better place
for animals (including us humans!) my favorite is their amazing offering of
free vegan recipes for well-known foods from around the world, including
Mexican, Chinese, Filipino, and Lao, with a Soul Food project underway! It
turned out they are currently fundraising specifically for their recipes,
making this the perfect time to feature them for a donation 💸
Before I talk about my donation, though, I MUST thank my Twitch subscriber,
Wolfaxe2, for blowing our humble $10 Twitch viewer goal out of the water! He
contributed 1.5 times the entire goal, $15 to F.E.P.! 👏👏👏 Thank you so
much, Wolf!! 💖✨
So what about my donation? While we didn't break the unique viewers record a
third month in a row, we still had 22! My formula is $0.10 USD per viewer,
minimum $10, max $100. That equals another $10 to support F.E.P., for a total
of $25! As always, I opted to cover the processing charge 😉
If you'd like to make your own donation to F.E.P. please
click here! Our
next charity, for May, will be
The Vegan Society,
the OG vegan charity that started it all, including inventing the word
vegan, and is still going strong today! Please
join me on Twitch
throughout May, and bring your friends, to support The Vegan Society's efforts
to make the world a better place for all animals! We just need 30 unique
viewers to break the record set last month 😎
Gryphia Progress
Here's some exciting news hot off the press! Just this morning, I finished the
first draft of the epilogue, which means the entire first draft of my first
ever novel is complete!!! 🥳🎉🎊✨
There's still plenty of work to be done before it's in a readable state
(including rewriting the bits of chapter one that were lost to the aether
after a freak glitch deleted the entire file 😱) but, like I said last month,
I'm going to follow Stephen King's advice and let it rest for six weeks first.
In the meantime, I hope to complete my
Japan Adventure series
here, so you'll be seeing a lot more posts throughout May! I hope you'll look
forward to it 😊
Other News: 38th Birthday Vacation Awesomeness
I took the last week of March and the first week of April off for my birthday.
Here is a little photo log of some of the highlights!
I held a three-day Lord of the Rings 4K Extended Edition marathon and
cooked vegan British Isles food each day! Here's my full English
breakfast with a non-alcoholic snakebite and creamy Earl Grey tea, and
Aoife in the background 🐶
One of the birthday gifts I received was this epic portrait of Samwise
Gamgee, drawn by my sister, Aryssa, and commissioned by my husband, Sean
💖
A gift from me to my pet pigeons was this new aviary! My husband helped
me build it, and I've been filling it with more and more lovely things
for Sora and Kumo to enjoy, including a bale of hay to make nests with,
and soon a whole wall of potted, bird-safe plants 🪴
The most exciting birthday gift I received was a fan package to meet
Sean Astin at Gem State Comic Con! The package included an autograph,
which went on the epic portrait, and this "selfie" which was generously
taken by one of the con staff and is now my current Chibi Friday project
🥰
🌟🌟🌟🌟
That's it for April's roundup! Thank you for reading until the end! I'll be
back again soon with another Japan Adventure post. Until then, may you stay
happy, healthy, and safe ❤️
It's time for another monthly roundup! I'm getting started on this one late
because I took the whole first week of April off for my birthday 🥳🎂 So as
not to delay it any longer, let's get started!
Patreon Rewards
March's physical rewards featured a WIP (work in progress) image of my current
illustration project. It's a birthday gryphon scene, thus far rendered in
graphite and watercolor, that will eventually be an illustrated greeting
card!
Patreon is the best way to support my work. You can choose to receive monthly
postcards, prints, both, or none, and all tiers receive digital rewards like
printable coloring pages 😁 Please
click here
to join and help me build my creative career!
deviantART
In March I finished my chibi live-action Sanji caricature and it's my most
recent upload to dA.
Also new on dA in March are subscription tiers! They share some similarities
with Patreon, such as offering the same printable coloring pages, but the
higher tiers are unique for their chibi caricature rewards! If you enjoy my
chibi drawings,
click here
to become My Jolly Friend or My Best Friend and start getting custom chibi
caricatures every year or quarter! You can also
click here
to read more about the tiers and everything they offer 😄
Livestreaming
Twitch streaming in March was just as fun-filled as ever! I continue to work
on illustration Wednesdays and Thursdays, and Chibi Friday on, you guessed it,
Fridays 😎 Here's the photo and recording from the last stream of March,
during which I started a chibi live-action Usopp caricature!
Twitch is another platform where you can support my work by subscribing 💖
Members there get access to our private Discord server (same with Patreon and
dA members, so we can all hang out together!), custom emotes that can be used
in channels all across Twitch, and more.
Click here
to check my schedule and join me when I go live!
Charity Fundraising
Every month I support a charity that works to improve the world for animals 🥰
I do this by taking my unique viewers count on Twitch and donating $0.10 USD
per viewer, with a minimum of $10 and a maximum of $100. This allows me to add
more meaning to my streaming for both me and my viewers! So what was the
unique viewers count for March?
✨🎊 Twenty-nine!!! Another new record!!! 🎊✨
How AWESOME that we broke the record two months in a row!!! Thank you to
everyone who joined me and made this happen! Our charity for March was
Food For Life Global, an
organization that helps animals by, among other actions, serving healthy vegan
meals to humans in need 💚 This meant a $10 donation to them!
If you'd like to support Food For Life Global's efforts, please
click here to make your
own donation. April's charity is the
Food Empowerment Project, which makes a difference for animals by promoting veganism in various ways,
including by offering vegan recipes from Mexican, Chinese,
Lao, and Filipino cuisine 🤤 Please join me on Twitch this month and bring your
friends! Let's break the record again 🤩
Gryphia Progress
I am so excited about my first draft, it's almost done! At the end of March, I
had nearly 3k words written for chapter twelve, the final chapter.
When I finish the first draft, I'm going to follow the advice I took from
Stephen King's On Writing and set the project aside for six weeks (so
that I can detach from it and start edits with a more objective mind). In the
meantime, I'll be focusing on my Japan Adventure post series here, so when you
start seeing more blog posts, you'll know I finished it!
Other News: JLPT N3 Certificate
In January, I shared that I had passed the JLPT at the N3
level. So I thought I'd also share my official certificates that arrived in
March 🤓✨
N3 is only the middle level among the JLPT tests, so I have plenty left to
learn before I'm done! These certificates make me feel like I'm now standing
on solid ground as I work my way higher!
🌟🌟🌟🌟
That's all for now, thank you so much for reading to the end! I'll be back
again with another roundup post next month, or maybe a Japan Adventure post
even sooner! Until then, please stay happy, healthy, and safe ❤️
Hello everyone, can you believe it's March already? Spring is almost here 🌸 I
know, I say that kind of thing all the time, but it remains surprising! I
guess it's because the weather can't decide what season to present us with
here in Boise. Most of February, it felt like March or even April weather, dry
and warm. But now that March is here, we've been getting snow almost every
day! Indeed, on Tuesday it literally snowed ALL. DAY. It was the best! ☃️
Let's see how the weather changes between now and the point at which I finish
telling you what I got up to in February 😆
Patreon
I finished my Autumn Gryphon greeting card illustration on February 7th. It
went out to
Patreon members
on the 29th 💌 Most members also received January's reward, which was a WIP
version of this piece, so I hope they enjoyed comparing the unfinished version
to the finished!
Patreon is my biggest source of support. At the moment, contributions from
members are being saved up to buy and install a utility sink in my studio ✨
The funds also really help out when I need to buy supplies. For instance, this
week I needed blue lead for my sketching pencil, ink for my art printer, and
postcard paper for future Patreon rewards. Member support helped me get
everything!
Even more than that though, the support I receive is emotionally priceless.
It's a HUGE boost to my morale, knowing there are folks who really believe in
my work! Please consider joining them, helping me both practically and
psychologically, by
subscribing to my Patreon here
🥰
deviantART
Another way folks can support my creative work is through
Buy Me a Coffee
☕✨ One of my wonderful supporters, Wolf, made a substantial donation there
(I put it toward the utility sink!!!) and I wanted to thank him with a chibi
caricature. So I ended up chibifying his beautiful dog, Ahri 💖 It's currently
my most recent post on deviantART:
If you would like to commission me for a chibi caricature like this, they are
available through
deviantART
or through my
Square Shop! It's the same commission on either site, and they both charge about the
same in processing fees, so feel free to choose whichever platform you're most
comfortable with 😊
Another dA announcement I would like to make is that I created subscription
tiers there! There are three tiers and I offer slightly different rewards to
Patreon and Twitch, including annual or quarterly chibi caricatures! Please
click here
and check it out. I'm excited to meet my first supporter there 🤩
Livestreaming
Everything continues to go well for my art streams! Thanks to a suggestion
from one of my subscribers, Exie, we've been raiding a fellow streamer at the
end of each Twitch session. This has really opened up the world of streaming
to me! Not just because new people are finding my channel, but because I
finally have a way to enjoy livestreams as a viewer! I never had time before,
but now I can watch while I do my after-stream followup work 😄
And for YouTube, Wolf (same as above ❤️), suggested I start making YouTube
Shorts. This has helped grow my channel! Again, since I don't have any extra
time, little things like this are the BEST because they help Studio Mikarts
without hurting me, ha ha. Here's one of the final stream recordings from
February:
Something I changed about my livestream schedule, starting in February, is to
give myself a week off every month. This year has been really intense and my
mental health has started to suffer. I've written about it in
more detail on Patreon, so I won't repeat myself here. I'll always turn on vacation mode when I'm
taking a recovery week, so you can continue to rely on my
Twitch schedule
to verify when I'll be live!
Charity Fundraising
Our charity of the month for February was
Vegan Outreach! They
help animals by helping humans transition to a vegan lifestyle, including a
one-on-one coaching program. I am signed up to be a coach for my area 😊✨
My donation formula takes the number of unique Twitch viewers I had that month
and multiplies it by $0.10 USD, with a minimum of $10 and a max of $100. So
how many unique viewers did we have in February?
🥁🥁🥁🥁
✨🎊 TWENTY-EIGHT!!! 🎊✨
That's a new record!!! Two more than the record set back in June 2022! Thank
you so much everyone who joined me and took us to the next level 😄✨ This
tallied up to a $10 donation to Vegan Outreach.
As always, I opted to cover the processing fees as well 💛 March's charity is
Food for Life Global, an
organization whose main effort helps feed the hungry with healthy, sustainable
plant-based food. They also promote peaceful, non-violent living, advocating
for the right of ALL animals, including us humans, to enjoy such a world. Please
help me help them by
watching my livestreams
this month and bringing your friends! You can also make a donation directly,
here.
Gryphia Progress
My first draft continues to develop steadily! In February, I reached 2,900
words for chapter eleven. This is set up to be a twelve chapter novel, with
around 3,000 - 4,000 words per chapter. That means I'm VERY close to done with
the first draft!
At the rate I'm going, it's possible I may finish this month 🤩 I've been reading
Stephen King's On Writing, which suggests putting the manuscript away
for six weeks before starting edits. This is to allow your mind to gain some
distance and objectivity before diving into revision. I think I will follow
that advice, and use the time to catch up on my
Japan Adventure posts
in the meantime.
🌟🌟🌟🌟
That's all for this roundup, I hope you enjoyed it! Thank you for reading to
the end 🥰 How's the weather now? Temps are below freezing but the sun is
shining (bring back the snow if it's gonna be so cold!) 😆 I'll be back again
with another roundup next month. Until then, may you stay happy, healthy, and
safe!
