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 🥳
|
|
Click here to view, fave, and comment on dA! |
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 ❤️
