April Designs
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I hope you’re all doing well and enjoying the spring so far, though from what I can tell the weather has been wild everywhere, here included. This March flew by so quickly and I cannot believe I’ll be in Japan in just two weeks! March was so busy even though I didn’t have too many events except the beginning and end, but I was also busy celebrating Taka’s 40th birthday, our 5 year anniversary, and just trying to wrap up some stuff for y’all before heading to Japan.
As always, I wanted to get you some previews for April, and we are already underway on some May designs since I won’t have time to work much (and also don’t wanna work) when in Japan. |
Pretty Winkers: SG |
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With March being Sophie for Ghibli Pretty Winkers, it of course only fits that we have Blonde Howl next. Howl usually has his classic checker cape, but I really like his white cape so I wanted to feature it. Here Howl is about to burn the cursed paper that the Witch of the Waste placed on Sophie. The background features the main living area that they eat meals in. |
Yokai Club |
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For Yōkai club, we have the Tsuchigumo which I am working on vectoring this weekend. I still haven’t decided fully how I’ll deal with the spider webbing, but I’m really excited for it because I think this design blends cool with a little bit cute. For the spider webbing, because the cutouts would be kinda small, I’d either go for a sort of stained glass effect and screen print some of the webbing, or I may go like a solid metal vibe. Still figuring that out.
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Pretty Winkers: SM |
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For Pretty Winkers SM characters, we have Super Sailor Chibi Moon to pair with Super Sailor Moon from February, as well as the sisters Cyprine and Ptitol. We debated on doing a two in one pin, or one each. Taka didn’t feel like he could fit the two into our heart shape well so he wanted to separate them. Like we did with the month we did An & Ail, or Yubaba and Zeniba, you can add on the second sister of choice via add-ons. Also, if you’re in the Pretty Winkers double tier and would rather get the sister set instead of one sister and one Chibimoon design, you can also opt for just the two sisters since I know it would be hard to choose just one or the other when they really do belong together! |
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Super Sailor Chibi Moon is summoning Helios in this design and it will pair really well against the Super Sailor Moon design. |
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Production Updates |
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I know I showed y’all Mimette pics last time and while no one mentioned it as feedback, I wasn’t totally happy with how the colors of her hair looked when baked. Our manu wasn’t able to remake the pins from scratch, nor would I wish them to since Mimette is not a main character. But the solution our manu and I came up with was to pick a screen print of the lighter color of Mimette’s hair so that it was what I originally envisioned. This does mean the pin will be very screen print heavy unlike most pins, but this is the compromise I found best to avoid completely wasting materials to remake as well as delaying the pin being complete for months longer. I think the new print looks really nice and the pins are on their way to me.
Monday, I got a bunch of pins in and have been working to unbag them while at Sakuracon this weekend. The latest batch of pins to come in are:
Unfortunately, it seems the rep I had for my secondary factory and who I’ve been working with second longest has left due to her husband getting in an accident so it seems I now have a new rep. The pins turned out totally fine, but I think in the chaos of dealing with her husband’s accident, my rep messed up the instructions for Usagi and rather than make me the large number of Daytime Sakura Usagi designs, she made my limited night variant the main variant and only sent me 40 of the daytime variant. Because I have to have more of the daytime variant made to ship those out to y’all, it means I no longer have an LE variant for the Sakura City Usagi. Thankfully, the new rep has given me no issues and understands what happened and has already begun production for the Daytime Usagi variants. Because I only have 40 daytime Usagi designs I’ll be unable to get those shipped out before I head to Japan. However, if you would prefer the night time variant instead of the daytime one, please feel free to email me. Besides the manu getting the quantities wrong, the quality for all the pins still looks really good! ☺️♥️
I’m still planning to get club pins for Setsuna, Kaorinite, Momonga and Tiger out this week, so highly likely I won’t get the latest batch of pins that just arrived out before I head to Japan since I’d like to prioritize vectoring all of April and May in advance and that takes me about 40 hours to do each month. I will try to grade as many of the pins that arrived since I believe if I don’t do that it’ll be a mess of work to do when I get back, plus I’ll likely have even more pins in when I get back.
Finally, before I leave, I will plan on a small drop on the website as well as aim to have a belated Birthday sale for Taka. As most of you know, we only have sales for Taka’s bday, my bday and Black Friday and with how busy March was I simply had no time to prep a sale. So we’ll be doing a small one most likely next weekend so I have time to ship them out to y’all before I leave for Japan. That’s about it for now! I hope y’all are doing well and if you have any questions or would like to switch from day Usagi to night Usagi, please let me know! ☺️ I hope you are all well and I look forward to sharing the vector files this upcoming week! If you all celebrate Easter, I hope you all have a wonderful Easter Sunday. For me I’ll be toiling away in the Artist’s Alley at Sakuracon and vectoring when I get home! 🐰 Thank you all! |