30 September 2025

2025 August Charity Fundraising Results

Better late than never! It's time to share our August charity fundraising results! 💰✨

Every month, I choose an animal rights or vegan charity to support. For August, I chose Tower Hill Stables Animal Sanctuary, because August 1st is the birthday of its inspiring founder—and one of my vegan heroes—Fiona Oakes 🥳 For every unique Twitch viewer, I donate $0.10 USD, with a minimum of $10 and a maximum of $100.

In August 2025, we had a total of 21 unique viewers, which means $10 to our charity of the month! Tower Hill Stables Animal Sanctuary is located in England, so I made things simpler by donating £10, which is a bit more than $10, but all the better for the animals 🐖💕

If you can, please make your own donation! There's also a shop and other fun fundraising campaigns you can participate in, so enjoy taking a look around the website. You can also join me as a member of Fiona's Patreon 😄

If you can't donate, you can still help me help the animals by joining me on Twitch for some live artmaking and occasional gaming streams! Check out the video below to see the recording of my last stream in August 📺

Greater viewership helps my channel reach more people, while converting that viewership into monthly donations helps make my creative work more meaningful. By spending some time with me there (it's free!), you'll be helping two birds with one stone, as it were 🥰

That's all for August's charity update, but September is almost over, so there will be another charity update very soon! Until then, thank you for reading and may you stay happy, healthy, and safe 💖

26 August 2025

New Illustration: ブンBuzz

I finally finished it! After 42 (yes, 42!) livestreamed work sessions, amounting to at least 85 total hours of work, I've brought my onomatopoeia bees to life 💪😎

Purchase prints and print-to-order goods here!

This is the eighth entry in this series, which will eventually be published as an artbook. My goal is to use beautiful illustrations of rainbow animals to teach onomatopoeia in both Japanese and English. The other animals so far are cats, frogs, crows, mice, owls, dogs, and cows. All of them are created using the same tools and methods, starting with sketches, then a final ink drawing on manga paper (AquaBee brand, so apt for this particular piece!) which is digitized and finished in Photoshop and Clip Studio Paint.

First batch of quarterly (versus monthly) Patreon rewards!

Last week, I produced and sent Patreon rewards featuring this piece! It was the first time I got to make full-size prints, in addition to the usual postcards, so it was a special milestone for Studio Mikarts 💌✨ I also added the piece to Fine Art America, where you can order prints on every surface from canvas to metal, and on a variety of goods like iPhone cases, towels, and ornaments! Please join my Patreon or make a purchase from my FAA shop to help support my work 💖

That's all for now, thank you for reading. Until next time, may you stay happy, healthy, and safe!

30 July 2025

2025 May, June, July Charity Fundraising Results

I'm taking a new approach to blogging! Instead of monthly roundups, which haven't always been easy to stay on top of (evidenced clearly by my current three-month backlog 😅), I'm going to start posting in the moment and each post will focus on a single topic. I've been changing a lot about my workflow recently, which also changes what I have to share here, anyway. In other words, no more monthly roundups! Instead, I plan to share things like finished artwork reveals and Patreon reward announcements whenever they're ready. The only regular monthly post I plan to make is this one: my charity fundraising report 💸

Just yesterday, I finished making my donations to our June and July charities. Each month, I choose a pro-animal charity to feature on Twitch. I run a fundraising campaign on my channel to which viewers can donate, and I also make my own donation based on my unique viewers count for that month, which means you can help make a difference for animals without spending a dime 👌

First I'd like to share the donations made by Studio Mikarts viewers. Once again, the amazing Wolfaxe2 came through with a $15 donation to our May charity, Food Empowerment Project 🥳🎉 This is the second year Wolfaxe2 has donated, too! Absolutely epic, thank you so much!!

The rest of Studio Mikarts fundraising for this period comes from my unique viewers count. Here are the viewership numbers from May, June, and July:

We had 32 unique viewers in May.

22 unique viewers in June.

And 11 unique viewers in July.

It makes sense that the number was so low in July, since I had hardly any time to livestream 😬 The short of the story is, I had to serve as a witness in a criminal trial, which took time away for preparation—and to keep my stress levels down—and then I got sick afterwards! (I tried to keep the stress in check but it obviously wasn't enough...at least it's all over now 😮‍💨) But regardless of the low number, I always donate at least $10 (or equivalent currency) so I made those donations to all three of our charities!


Food Empowerment Project had their annual school supply drive for children of farm workers going when I donated, so our funds helped a very specific group of people this time!

Click here for more information about Food Yoga International.

Click to learn more about The Vegan Society.

My donation formula is $0.10 USD per unique viewer, so once we finally top 100 in a single month, I'll be able to donate more than the $10 minimum (not including covering processing fees 🤑) so I hope you'll help me out! Just watch one of my Twitch streams and encourage your friends and family to join! Click here to check my schedule and to follow me for notifications whenever I go live.

Here's a recording of the last stream of July, during which I started coloring my Hallowed Sun chibi using Copic markers:

Our charity of the month for August will be Tower Hill Stables Animal Sanctuary, founded and run by my vegan athlete hero, Fiona Oakes! I hope you'll join me during my artstreams, help bump up my viewers count, and make a donation of your own to help the animals 💚 Thank you for reading and see you soon!!

07 May 2025

2025 April Roundup

It's hard to believe my birthmonth has already passed again! In April, I completed my 39th year of life and started working on my 40th 🥳🎉✨ The month was full of exciting developments for Studio Mikarts, as well, so I hope you'll enjoy reading about them in this roundup post!

Patreon

I sent two batches of rewards to Studio Mikarts Patreon members in April. March's rewards were delayed until I finished the ink lines for my onomatopoeia bees illustration, so they got sent at the same time as April's, which featured the first Pets Out of Context drawing I've done in over four years! You can read more about these rewards—and sign up to become a member!—here.

A big development for Patreon in April was deciding to shift from monthly rewards to quarterly. I am grateful to my patrons for agreeing to this change, since it comes with lots of benefits for all of us, including:

  • More time to create my best illustration work, which means more interesting rewards for my patrons and more satisfaction for me!
  • Patrons still get a reward equivalent to their contribution, so one-postcard members now get three postcards, and three-postcard members get prints!
  • Even with upping everyone's rewards, the change ultimately saves time and money, which will go towards making more artwork instead!

This change has also led to the creation of a new membership tier and the reduction in the monthly contribution for all of the higher tiers 😄 To learn more about these updates, and to support my work by becoming a patron, click here!

deviantART

The piece I uploaded to dA in April was this chibi caricature of Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock Holmes 🔎 It was a thank-you gift to my very first Twitch subscriber, Exie, who has now been supporting me for over two years!

View, fave, and comment on dA.

You can commission me for a chibi caricature like this at any time! You can order via deviantART or on my Square shop.

Artstreaming

We had another fun month of artstreaming in April, though it was only two weeks long due to my birthday and preparing for the Spring Vegan Market. Here's the recording of the last illustration stream of the month, wherein I started and finished my Pets Out of Context Sora drawing:

Twitch is another opportunity to support my creative work. When you subscribe to my channel, you get ad-free viewing, cute chibi emotes, and more!

Charity Fundraising

Our charity of the month for April was Rowdy Girl Sanctuary. This was our first year supporting them so I was ecstatic when Studio Mikarts member, Wolfaxe2, donated 1.5 times the goal to our Twitch fundraiser! Wolf, you're the best!! 🎉✨

On top of the Twitch fundraiser, I always make a separate donation based on my unique viewers count for the month. The formula is $0.10 per viewer, minimum $10, maximum $100.

We had 13 unique viewers in April which meant a $10 donation (plus processing fees) for a total of $25 raised for Rowdy Girl Sanctuary!

Thank you to everyone who supports my fundraising efforts by joining my livestreams and donating to my fundraisers on Twitch 🥹💕 Together we're having fun while making a real difference for the animals of the world!

Gryphia Progress

I made steady progress on my manuscript again this month! I spent most of the days working out new details that were absolutely essential. Without those details, I wasn't going to be able to create a cohesive and immersive experience for the reader. Now I have a wealth of new information to draw from not only for this novel, but for future ones, as well!

Creating an illustrated novel is a long and difficult process. If you believe in my work as a storyteller and enjoy seeing my monthly progress updates, please become a patron, subscribe on Twitch, or even buy me a magical coffee! Every bit of support helps keep me writing 💖

Other News: Spring Vegan Market

The biggest professional event for me in April was the Spring Vegan Market! I joined twenty other vendors offering a huge variety of goods and enjoyed a beautiful, warm, sunny day meeting market-goers and potential new audience members.

Sales weren't too good at this market, I have to be honest. But I got to meet one of my long-time patrons face-to-face for the first time, which made it all worth it 🥰 I also spent the following week considering what I could improve for next time and I'm excited to test out my ideas! I hope I'm selected to vend at the Summer Vegan Market so that I can do so 😁

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That's all for April's roundup, I hope you enjoyed it! Thank you for reading until the end. Until next time, may you remain happy, healthy, and safe ❤️

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