2019 Summer Posts Archive
Originally Posted in 2019, here is a culmination of content we posted throughout the year, just for your reference in case you'd like to check out old sketches or references, etc... Outdated posts like expired discount codes, etc have not been included.
May 8, 2019: Bubble Baby
Thanks for being our first patrons! We look forward to sharing what we have going on behind the scenes. We don’t share everything we are up to on Instagram, partly because we worry about art theft, partly because we are simply dipping our hands into so many projects at once! We hope you love these designs as much as we do!
A little bit about these designs: the artwork for each design took Taka about 20hrs to make. Taka specializes in tebori tattoo which makes him more of a craftsmen than an artist by his own definition. When he makes art, he spends hours researching references and studying how the artist used their strokes to understand the style. To design these, he hunkered down with Mandy’s manga, SM art books, to grasp Naoko’s style. He claims he could figure it out because they share the same birthday (March 15) 🤣
May 10, 2019: Hope your Friday is on Fire!!
It's Mandy’s favorite senshi, so Taka took great care in designing her. She’s one of the only designs that will have screenprinted lips to match many of the paintings of her in the manga. Her lips were the hardest to capture and took a lot of references to figure out. Ultimately the decision for her to have kissy lips 😘 was because so much of the manga artwork had her giving a sassy kiss face. ♥️
Our main reference books. Can you believe they only retailer for ¥1900 ($18) when they first came out. Now you’re lucky to find them around $40-50 😭
As you can see, kissy lips are kinda a pain to capture without being too big and pin up looking.
I think Rei is caught winking and giving kissy faces more than any other senshi.
May 12, 2019: Avengers Spoilers
We have a few hours left for preorders on this design. Even if you don’t want to get this one, I thought I’d share with you some of the concept behind this design. If you’re an Avengers fan, but haven’t seen the film yet, save this post to read about later. If you’ve already seen it or aren’t a fan of Avengers, then read ahead.
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Last Sunday, we went and saw Avengers: End Game. As soon as Mandy saw the end scene, she knew she had to pin this! By now, there are a handful of other pins like this starting to go up for preorder, but here’s a little insight into this design from Mandy’s perspective.
First off, Tony Stark, an arrogant genius, reminded Mandy of her father. Mandy’s father was a brilliantly smart man, and he knew it. 🤣
The Marvel films started coming out in 2008. Around this same time, Mandy began collecting Marvel comics and was spending something like $60 a week in comic subscriptions at her local shop. In 2009, her dad was diagnosed at age 41 with terminal melanoma (skin cancer). At the end of 2010, Mandy decided to sell the comic collection she amassed at a fraction of the cost so she could afford to move back home to take care of her dad and help her stepmom out with her siblings who were then only 3 & 5. She got to spend about 6 months caring for him before he passed.
Mandy’s father died in her arms shortly after she turned 22 and while she didn’t realize the significance of it then, she realized how beautiful that he was the first to hold her in life while she was the last to hold him in his life.
His death happened on July 5th and she felt it fitting he passed after the 4th of July. Although too weak to speak or even react at that point, she felt he chose that day to pass so the family wouldn’t have to mourn on a day that everyone else celebrates.
The reason the end was so powerful for Mandy was seeing Tony’s daughter. While everyone who knew Tony was sad and surprised by his final sacrifice, the daughter was still somewhat cheerful because she didn’t understand the weight of this. The funeral for Mandy’s father was similar in this same way where her siblings were too young to really understand the gravity of the situation. Of course they knew to be sad, but it’s only the viewers who know the hardships the child will bear growing up without their father.
Tony’s sacrifice was incredible because it showed how he transformed from a billionaire hotshot, to a man willing to sacrifice his own happy life, even his family’s perfect life, for the fate of humanity (and perhaps all the lives of others that Thanos destroyed.)
Finally, as a hidden feature in this design, Mandy looked up the flower for the birth month of May which are Lily of the Valley and Hawthorn. She decided to use Hawthorn for some of the flowers in the design because she believes that birth and death are always tied together, and therefore should be celebrated together. No one likes death, yet from the moment we are born, we are fated to die, so all we can do ultimately to honor those we love is to celebrate their life and the lasting effect they had on those who had the honor to know them.
May 17, 2019: Fire Miko in Progress
This week we finished up Bubble Baby's vector art (will share later) and are in the process of working on Fire Miko! Using Taka’s lineart from the finished pieces, Mandy goes over every line, adjusting if necessary for pin production. Because pins are quite a different beast from traditional art, often changes have to be made considering the capabilities of the manufacturers who will be mass producing the designs. Some considerations Mandy has to make are:
- Colors: we can’t do gradients or shading, so deciding what colors to choose is essential. Sometimes the metal can be used to make a shading effect too.
- Cutouts: Since we are using a strong art Nouveau influence in the decorations and hair, we have to consider the thickness of the cutouts. For example, the manufacturer can’t do super small cutouts, so sometimes Mandy must take a few liberties with cutout widths, making slight changes to Taka’s original artwork.
- Line Thickness: to give it both the art Nouveau and manga feel, line thickness is so essential. Some lines can be thicker, but some things like the full outline must be considered. The lines on the inside of the person’s face or hands or outfit can be thinner, but the main outlines should always be thicker. We also leave broken lines in when we can to give it the same feeling as Naoko’s style in the manga. When sending the artwork to our manufacturers we are always very insistent that the lines remain as we designed them.
Here is without the lines just so you can see it. While it seems very easy to redraw the original linework, it actually takes Mandy about 15-20 hrs to design the vector files. That doesn’t even include time for making mockups or promotional images. 😰
May 20, 2019 : Finished Bubble Baby Vector
Look who’s finished! Although Bubble isn’t the first choice of Mandy’s favorite character, this design is one of her favorites in the collection as Taka managed to capture her sweet personality perfectly! Wouldn’t you say so?
For those of you with the Cutie Moon & Baby Love pins, here’s a side by side of the Bubble Baby and Baby Love vector so you can get an idea of how much bigger the new designs are. The Cutie Moon & Baby Love designs are 1.75” whereas the new designs are 2” at minimum, bigger when the design calls for it.
Mandy designs the vectors with the Baby Love vector as a reference for how thick the lines should be, how small the spaces for the enamel fill can be, and how small the cutouts can be. We were astounded by how even the tiniest details like Diana’s bell were doable for the manufacturers. They have a hard job making so many pin designs, so we try to make their job a little easier by designing with their capabilities in mind. This also ensures a higher possibility of a happy outcome for us and them, and ultimately you! ☺️
May 23, 2019 : Fire Miko almost done!
We are almost finished making the vector of Fire Miko. But!!!!! I need your help! The original artwork she has red lips, but we think the pin would look better without the red lips. Also, sometimes screen print registration isn’t perfect so we are worried there’s a chance they could be slightly off if we have the manufacturers screen print the lips. What do you think? We’d love your thoughts.
Besides that, we are super happy with her and her flames will make use of the gold plated metal, just like our Kokeshi version of her.
We wanted to share a new design we decided to add as a stretch goal for the upcoming Kickstarter. Our plan is that this design will be free exclusively for Patrons who pledge. ♥️ Non-patrons will have the option to pledge for it, but it won’t be free for them.
This following kitty design we hope will be a freebie for all pledges as a stretch goal. Taka decided to have some fun by putting “fam” in Olde English style tattoo letters as a joke. Obviously it won’t be in the final design. 🤣
June 5, 2019 : Jupiter Comes Thundering In!
Who else remembers Mako-Chan’s debut? She’s one of Mandy’s favorite senshi. The lightning is influenced primarily by ukiyo e lightning prints. In ukiyo e, the lightning isn’t as jagged like we show in the West, but often has a squared off swirling pattern and connected lines.
These prints by Kunisada.
This print by Kuniyoshi, Taka’s personal favorite ukiyo e master.
In ukiyo e, lightning was usually represented with the color red. While the artwork we created is showing the lightning as green, the pin will feature gold instead, similar to our Kokeshi doll’s lightning features. Jupiter is also our feature in our Purikura Print Club for May. Will be sending those prints out this week and begin working on June’s prints this week.
Our goal is still to get the rest of these winking girls’ vectors done and the Kickstarter launched by Mandy’s *gasp* 30th Birthday (June 23) so stay tuned for our launch. We will be opening up the early bird slots for you before we share the link with the public. Also, Patrons will receive freebies that non-patrons will only receive if they pledge more $$ for. We are trying to come up with as many exclusive things for you as possible. ♥️
June 15, 2019 : Jupiter Vector Finished
Wanted to give y’all a look at the vector for Jupiter! Just finished her up and about to start Venus. Aiming to have one done every two days so we can have the KS up ASAP! It’s hard in between our client graphic design work and exclusive designs we are also working on this month for y’all. ♥️
Planning to do a video for Venus so y’all can see how it’s done. Will provide link to video when that’s done too!
Here’s Jupiter is yellow ochre linework so you can envision how it will look with the gold plating, too! The Pantones haven’t been chosen yet, so the colors may change a tiny bit when we get the files finalized, but should be pretty close to this. ☺️
Here’s our finished Venus design! We recorded a time lapse video and will be sure to put that together for you all soon since we’ll have to splice together a few videos to show it in full. It’s crazy how like 12 hours of work is only minutes in timelapse form. 😭
I’ll be slowing the timelapse a little to show you a little about the choices in changes to the design are made as well.
Here is the design with black lines too so you can visualize it a little better. ☺️
EDIT: You can see the timelapse video HERE!
June 21, 2019 : Dreamboat!
We realized we haven’t even showed you the full version of this dreamy Mamo-Chan design! Can you blame Usagi for falling for this tall, dark and handsome prince?!
Also, not sure if we’ve told you, but all these illustrations are done with copic markers. While Mandy has been using them for years, Taka has only been using them for about 1 year. Mandy barely showed him how they work and he has become a blending master!
June 25, 2019 : Hello, Handsome!
This design seemed so simple but would you believe the roses took like a zillion years to do?! 😭
The background will definitely be glittering and the details on his pocket watch design will have recessed metal. Will upload full mockups of all the designs when finished. ♥️
June 26, 2019: The Prettiest Time Keeper
We figured we’d show you this one which has Taka’s notes on what Copic Sketch markers Taka uses to create. There’s a lot of time spent figuring out which colors will blend. We have over 100 Copic markers to choose from, but even that doesn’t capture the full spectrum of colors, so we have to spend a lot of time figuring out which colors we can blend successfully.
Pluto is one of Mandy’s favorite so once again, Taka took special care in her design. Pluto rarely is portrayed as sexy or cute, but always elegant. The first design he did she totally had mom vibes, so we had to adjust a little bit to give her a slightly more youthful feel.
Finished most her hair last night and about to get started on the rest tonight. Hoping to finish her up tonight! We wanted to have this KS finished by last weekend but realistically it will be early July! Thanks for being so patient. We know this series will be worth it and you can bet there will also be prints of the original art available too!
July 2, 2019 : Well, if that wasn’t TIME consuming!!
This beauty took way longer than we thought, but considering her design is more complicated than the rest of the outers, I think it’s safe to say that the others should be done by the weekend and we can get going on the KS next week! 🤞🏼
Behind the scenes we’ll be prepping the files for our manu to get a final quote.
Regarding this design, this design will likely have more screenprinting than all the other designs because the dreamy clouds are too pretty not to do like this. We also picked colors that can pair well with the Chibiusa design, which is currently sold out of the shop. Don’t worry if you don’t have her already, we will be making sure to restock when we order all the new designs too! ♥️
July 5, 2019 : The Best Couple
We are getting so close to finishing all the designs! Almost done with Haruka! ♥️ aiming to be done with all designs by this weekend and hopefully launch next week!
Here’s a rare look at the two with all the color checks. What a mess! 🤣
Haruka’s space sword is going to have a lot of recessed metal details and the length of her sword will extend past the 2” design.
We designed them to be a pair because really can these two ever be apart?
July 6, 2019 : She’ll steal ya girl!
Here’s our finished Haruka design! The colors are a bit more vibrant but it’s a screenshot of the work on our tablet. It will feature glitter in the sword and the orange area. Taka had a hard time deciding what to do in the background for the design but ultimately decided to do a theme based around her power, World Shaking. (Funny fact, when we were watching the show together, Taka thought she was saying “World Chicken!”)
The sword will also featured recessed metal for a more 3D look.
July 10, 2019 : Queen of the Sea
Next up is our Michiru design! Ugh, it’s 7:30am and just finished this. I thought for sure I’d be done by 2am, but here I am. 😭
The good news is there’s only one more design to finish so we can finally get this KS launched.
We are going to add some screenprinting to the planet like we did with Haruka and Setsuna, so this one will have a couple small changes, but I’m sleepy and have a doctor’s appointment at 2pm, so “bedtime”!
Besides that, we are really happy with this piece. Taka truly captured Michiru’s confident and elegant beauty.
July 12, 2019 : Destroy!
Could a destroyer of worlds be any cuter?!
Mandy had a small mole/benign cyst removed yesterday and Taka had some tattoo work, but we were still able to make some progress on this final design. Hopefully be showing you this by tomorrow morning!
When Taka designed this he put some extra love into it because he thinks Hotaru looks like Mandy. He also designed it to pair well with Chibiusa (facing each other and a little more youthful).
July 13, 2019 : Silent Sweetheart!
Our final Sailor is finished and we are so excited that she will be a perfect match for her bestie, Chibiusa. ♥️
We also just sent all the designs to our manufacturer for a final quote for producing all the 9 initial designs. We got a quote from them previously, but we didn’t have all the designs finished, so for a more accurate quote we have to wait. They’re usually pretty quick, so we expect to have prices within a few hours so we can update our KS page and submit for approval. Pending approval, we are aiming to have the KS launched by Sunday evening.
Besides the pins themselves, we are planning some stretch goals to be acrylic keychains, stickers, and prints. For the other options we will likely use the original manga style art Taka designed since we won’t be limited to flat colors.
July 13, 2019 : Quotes
We already heard back from our manu and we are pleased to say that the pricing for these detailed beauties isn’t too much more than our other pins, so that means we’ll be able to reach our goals of getting these all unlocked faster. 💪🏼
We thought it might be fun for you to see how we submit the file for their quote. Since we never use the official character names, we have a few fun knockoff names. We are also planning to make backing cards unique to each character, just like we’ve done with our initial cutie moon and baby love designs.
Also, rest assured, while we sold out of Baby Love pins, we just placed a reorder of those and Cutie Moon so that people who don’t have those yet can also get those pins in their collection. ☺️
Now we just have to do some mathing to get our numbers ready for KS, but everything is running smoothly!
PS: do y’all have any better names for these characters? We try to be more playful with them, but were kinda unsure of a fitting name for Setsuna and Michiru. I (Mandy) wanted to name Setsuna “Lonely Playmate” but Taka said it sounds like a playboy bunny. I also wanted to name Mamo “Useless Supporter” but he just rolled his eyes and said no. Maybe “Helpless Hunk?!” I try to keep the names sorta 90s ish too! 🤣🤣🤣
July 17, 2019 : Freebie Pin Changes
Remember the freebie pin we showed you a little while ago? It’s had a couple changes. Here you can see Taka’s second and third iteration on the left. The third (bottom left) has the eyes changed to be more similar to the manga. I also insisted on the paws being less limp (which Taka was resistant on changing 🙄). But we are both much happier with the adjustments. On the right you can see a quick photocopied version that Taka wanted to test out colors on.
Here is the original design again for comparison fun!
July 23, 2019 : Final Design Reveal
Ok! Taka finally showed me his sketch for the final design! Since we did Neo Queen Serenity and had been talking about an updated Usagi and Chibiusa without totally redoing the current ones because we still love those ones, we decided on Princess Chibiusa!
I guess you’d say the first design was Chibiusa as in R and this one is in Super S. It will feature Pegasus and the Stallion Reve at the base. Since he used the shape from the base of the Reve to create the art Nouveau curved shapes at the base. Her hands are delicate and girly but also a tip to the way she’d make prayer hands when calling for Helios’ help in battle.
He plans to refine it a bit more, so we don’t plan to announce it til he has at least line work, but what do you all think? 😊
July 29, 2019 : Testing Colors
Hey all! Sorry it’s been kinda quiet this last week! We headed to Oregon on Tuesday to help housesit our family’s pets while they’re on vacay for 10 days. We’ve been busy hustling on the new Kickstarter stretch goal as well as vectoring the designs and working on prints for Print Club and Postcard tiers. We are gonna be late this month for postcard tier since so much prep time went into this KS, but we know you’re gonna love this month and next month’s designs! ♥️
Anyway, this is by no means the final painted version of these, but Taka’s “quick” colored pencil art to test if those are the colors he’d like to use at the end. Of course the final versions will be much more vibrant. ☺️
Taka is finishing the colored version of Princess Chibiusa as I write this up so expect an update of that tomorrow. He changed up the design on her quite a bit in the hair and it’s even lovelier than ever! ☺️ I was never a huge Chibiusa fan before but I have to say his Chibiusa designs may be my favorites!
July 30, 2019 : Precious Princess
Here she is in color, still on sketch paper! Isn’t she so darling?! As you can see the hair has been changed and now has better flow! I think this might be another favorite of ours from this set!
And I can’t make any promises, but Taka is considering one final final final design. 🙈 but like I also told him to stop taking everyone’s money! 🤣
What do you think about this Princess Chibiusa?
August 3, 2019 : Cosmic Kitties
Hi everyone!
We are planning to post this today for Caturday, but wanted to share with you the finished piece first, as well as share a little about the design.
This is how it was before finalizing. I finished it last night, but we decided to tweak it further. We took a little fluffiness from Luna. Taka wanted Artemis to be fluffy since he’s more like a tomcat personality. If you’re wondering why we chose to make them fluffy, here’s the main artwork Taka referenced from the 4th Volume of SM artbooks.
Although they’re always smooth in the manga and anime, Taka really liked the way Naoko drew them here. I think it’s just because he loves fluffy cats. His precious kitty was a Maine Coone and he dreams of getting another. He also spends a lot of time with my family’s fluffy white cat whenever we visit them. Truth be told, she’s enamored with him too. 🤣
Anyway, the final notes about this design are the inclusion of the galactic background looking like a quasar. We initially wanted the separation around the outside to be like lace with white, but that looked strange and took away from the kitties. We then tried to make the border all metal, but it just looked like a chain. 🤣 we finally settled on this. As for colors, we chose the same eye color as Chibiusa for Luna and Diana, and Artemis has Minako’s eye color. The bow, ears and noses are the same color as chibiusa’s hair in Baby Love. As always, we try to tie all the pieces together.
In case you’re wondering, yes! We will make this design into keychains and stickers too! ☺️ and any of you who backed will get this and Moon Queen Supreme for free!
Aug 8, 2019 : New New Queen
Hehe sorry we’ve been quiet on here, but we wanted to let you know that we are working hard on the final versions of the Moon Queen Supreme & Princess Lady designs. ☺️
Since Taka is painting the final illustrated version of Neo Queen Serenity, we thought you might wanna see what that’s looking like. I teased him before that his original sketch has her neck looking too long like a giraffe, and after much hemming and hawing and excuses that Naoko always makes their necks long (which to be fair, she kinda does) he agreed. 🤣 here you can see the changes include a more proportional neck, the head has been tilted slightly more straight and he’s ever so slightly changed the flow of her winged bow and hair so that there’s more of a sense of movement.
I’ve also been working nonstop all since around 9:30pm on the vector artwork. I’ve gone ahead and put a pause on finishing it since I wanna wait for him to scan the linework of the newest version, but you can take a peek at what about 8hrs of vectoring looks like. 😭
Part of me thinks “oh gee, not that much left to do, and then I remember the flowing part of her hair with all the cutouts is gonna be a nightmare, but I’m pretty sure I can get it done by tomorrow night. 😤
Also, all Patreon tiers with physical rewards will be getting extra goodies since we’ve been behind on getting you your prints. So thank you so much for your patience! 😭 it means the world to us that you’ve stuck with us through this busy campaign!
For real for real this time! 🤣
This one is super simple, but we decided to make one freebie pin that ALL backers would get for free. This one is only 1” and features a star bunny which is a tip of the hat to our original Cutie Moon pin.
They will have screenprinted cheeks, ears and eyes and there will be four variants: white, white with glitter, pink, and pink with glitter. All backers will receive the variant at random.
We had to change it so it could be a solid pin design where as the original has streaks from the shooting star detached. We also changed the bunny to be more like Naoko’s style of drawing bunnies. Here you can see our references:
ours is a little pudgier and with a fluffy tail, but similar to these bunnies. Though their little eyes and skinny bodies kinda remind me of the creepycute spirits in Princess Mononoke. Their round little eyes also remind me of Kyubey from Madoka Magica. I wanted them to be longer, like below, but Taka insisted he liked them round. 😑
Taka also decided to make it smiling like the third bunny on the top. Funny enough, this pin is probably the simplest design we’ve ever made and out of the whole Winking collection, the only one NOT Winking! 😂
I also wanted to make the pink variant as a nod to chibiusa’s little bunny backpack from the SM R season when Us@gi makes her a gift backpack.
Though I guess in Crystal they made her bunny white.
Anyway, thought you’d all enjoy learning about this design before we share it as a stretch goal!! ♥️
August 11, 2019 : Good Morning, Good Night!
For us it’s bedtime because we are terrible humans who don’t know how to call it quits. 🙈 on one hand we are like a perfect match because we both love staying up late and become so driven by our art that we work and work til we are satisfied. On the other hand, we are terrible vampires who don’t often wake up til 2pm. 😭
That said, I present to you the linework for NQ S3r3nity! I would finish the colors, but I realize I ought to be reasonable and go to bed already. Since we are in crunch time for the end of the campaign, we will likely be posting the final art for this on Kickstarter as soon as it’s done later today. But we’ll share you the sneak peeks and changes to the Chibiusa design later today! ☺️
Without further ado, good night! ♥️
August 13, 2019 : In the name of the Zoo!
As Taka scrambles to finish the paintings in the last few days of the Kickstarter, he’s having to do all 3 designs color by color! 🤣 Taka and I are notoriously slow at doing our art because we sit back and stare at our designs often to make sure the designs have proper flow (aka movement and lines match up) as well as any other glaring issues.
We often bicker when critiquing each other’s work because of course no one likes to make changes after they worked so hard on a design. For example, I teased him for the last couple weeks about needing to redo NQS because he made her neck too long, like a giraffe.
He’d sigh and say it’s ok and try to show me a bunch of references from Naoko’s art books and say they all have long necks (which they often are unproportional) but ultimately no matter how much either of us tries to defend the design choices, we usually come to realize how the other one is right. 🙈
I present to you the queen you never knew you needed. 🤣 Sorry, not sorry! I was going to revise it in the vectoring process anyway, but halfway through Taka finished a refined version which is now the new version available.
Speaking of S@ilor Giraffe, I am already brainstorming a new series of designs that may or may not involve a sort of crossover which I’ll be sharing initial sketches for after the KS ends this Friday. ☺️
August 19, 2019 : Ohayou!
Good morning! We’re up late again 😅 and ready to show y’all the finished illustrations of NQS and Princess Lady!
Taka made their background colors match so that they can work as a set! ♥️
I’m finishing the vector art for this today, (almost done!) but we are trying to decide if we want the Princess Lady design to be gold or silver. We originally planned silver since the original Baby Love design looks so beautiful with silver, but now we are considering gold so that we can make the Stallion Reve in gold metal with recessed metal, as well as H3lios’ horn. At the same time, we’re torn because if we do it in silver it will be more like a set with the queen.
What do you all think? Would love your thoughts as I move on to those last details today with the linework. ☺️
August 19, 2019: Sketching From Life
Now that the KS is all finished up and we’ve had the weekend to relax (and mostly just sleep) and begin tallying up numbers, I also wanted to share with y’all a few sketches I’ve been working on for Patreon and other future ideas.
Some of these ideas have been in the works for the last year, but I never had the time to execute til now.
One idea is to illustrate the senshi as normal Tokyo girls who enjoy doing the same things that teenage girls do in modern Tokyo. Riding the subway, going to karaoke, modern arcade gaming, etc. I also really love the idea of them eating at a ramen shop because back in the 90s ramen was considered an “unladylike” food, but now there’s even a festival outside of Tokyo that specifically is for women, trying to tear down any falsehoods that women shouldn’t eat ramen because it’s not “pretty.”
Suuuuuuper rough sketches! 🙈
We appreciate you all for being so patient on rewards the last two months as we dealt with all the prep for and during the campaign.
Here are some sketches I’ve sat on for a while on the left. Thinking of doing these ideas in time for Halloween season.
On the right is a new PuriKura design I sketched up on Saturday night for PuriKura tier. Do you know why it’s called PuriKura? PuriKura プリクラ means “Purinto Kurabu” or Print Club! This series of designs also features senshi posing like normal teenage girls (or me and Taka 🤣) would in these popular photo booths. Eventually I also want to do some other fandoms in the booth such as Harry Potter, Animal Crossing, Madoka, etc...
Fun fact: I thought PuriKura was so lame before Taka had me do it with him. He genuinely enjoys doing it (thought a lot of PuriKura shops don’t allow males unless they’re accompanying a female). It became somewhat of a tradition for us to take PuriKura before heading home on a day out while we were living in Tokyo. I never saw the appeal of making my eyes look bigger since I already have big eyes, but after the sticker decorating part after the photos I was sold! The after part with decorating is by far the funnest part!
August 21, 2019 : New Ideas
We got any M@dok@ fans in the house? Or Clamp (see Mokon@)? Here’s a sketch Taka whipped up the other day of Madok@. This is one of my favorite anime. I was super against watching it because it looked too cutesy and typical, but it got dark real fast and it’s now in the top 5 favorite anime.
We are planning to do more Winking Magical Girls down the line, including favorites series of Mandy such as Uten@, Fush!g! Yuug!, M@doka Magic@, Legend of Z3lda, and maybe even Chun L! from Street Fighter.
What characters would you just love to see in our art nouveau and manga style?
PS: there will be more SM characters too including W!cked Lady, M!str3ss 9, Ayakashi Sisters, Starlights, N3h3l3nia, Human Lun!, Artemis and Diana. Heck, I’d even love to do Naru and Motoki—they’re some of my favorite supporting characters!
August 26, 2019 : New Designs Coming Soon
Dearest Patrons (particularly those with physical rewards): I’ll be shipping out your postcard and prints tomorrow. Thank you for being so patient the last couple months as we prepared and then maintained the Kickstarter. It was a hefty project, but I think the result will be worth it. In the meantime, I’ve been spending all my free time finishing a bunch of prints I started for y’all and getting started on the coming months so we can me more timely getting them out to you. ♥️
On another note, who’s ready for the weather to cool down and the fall season to begin? It’s my favorite season and we are so looking forward making some new non-fan art pins! Wanna see some of our sassy and cute pins?! The top photo posted is a ghost lady inspired by a cute little ceramic figurine I saw in a kid’s indoor theme park in Tokyo called NamjaTown. The theme park had all kinds of fun things to do from a gyoza food court with all types of gyoza, a scavenger hunt for ghosts, a VR monster hunt, small rides, etc. my favorite area was this area that was old world Japan themed with gurokawaii (creepy cute) yokai.
How cute is that little ghost cat?! ^^^
Here are a couple more of our new designs I’ll be refining this week:
I’m not sure how popular the alien and cyclops design will be, but these are kind of snarky interpretations of commonly used lifestyle hashtags. 🤣 The “Living My Truth” design was inspired by the ironic use of that phrase in American Horror Story: Cult.
Finally, one last sketch of a creepy cool pin is our rokurokubi design. Still trying to work out the best shape to convey a woman with a long neck in a pin that isn’t too big.
