March Preview
Good evening, everyone!
I hope February has been good to you! For myself, it was a really exhausting month with me being so sick with bronchitis. I'm only now starting to feel normal-ish, though my voice is still really scratchy. But at least I have a voice and I'm not having coughing attacks anymore. I was incredibly diligent to make sure Taka didn't get sick and wore a mask all day, everyday except for when I ate or showered—I even wore it when I slept. >_< I'm not sure if I would have gotten better sooner if I hadn't had events to table every weekend, plus travel in DC and Boston. I wish I could say my trip to Boston was a more happy time, but if some of you may recall, my sister is still struggling with an eating disorder and had to be put back into residential care the day after we arrived. It was an incredibly somber and stressful visit, so other than one fun museum day in DC, most of our trip to the east coast was not very restful, nor vacation-like.
Still, I managed to get all the pin club packages out the door as soon as we got back home on Friday and through the weekend, and I am working on vectors for March's designs the next few days. I'd actually be ahead of schedule if February wasn't such a short month! :/ That said, I'm really excited to not have many events booked for the next couple months. I only have Sakura-con April 7-9th, which I only got into because my dearest friend, Audrey, from Maintaining Mediocrity agreed to split a table with me! She and I have made a pact that if either of us gets into Sakura-con in the future and the other doesn't, we'll split a table together! I'm pretty excited to attend Sakura-con for the first time, especially since it's going to be taking place in Seattle's new convention center! I might also be tabling at Emerald City Comic Con this weekend, but I won't be tabling as Shishido Creative (because we never get accepted into their Artist Alley). >_<
I'm waiting to hear back from my friend Rhodora (Rhododoodle) about details, but basically she is going through some unfortunate health issues and was going to have to forfeit her table, so I offered her that I could table for her this weekend so that she doesn't have to lose money, especially when she probably needs the extra cash for medical bills. So if you happen to be going to Emerald City Comic Con, come swing by artist alley and look for her booth and say hi to me (and maybe bring me a tea!) :p Although I would honestly like to just relax this week, I don't imagine it will be too tiresome to be there since if ECCC is anything like the last couple years, it probably will be a little boring (slow!) as a booth person. So I plan on just getting ahead for as many months as I can on some sticker sheet designs for Moujuu Club, trading cards for all three clubs, backing card designs, and some pin vectoring as well. I'll have to tear down her booth Saturday though because I won't be able to table for her on Sunday since Taka and I have a risograph class I signed us up for months ago!
If you're unfamiliar with Risograph, it's a really unique and vibrant printing style that essentially mimics screen printing using printers instead of by hand. But you only print one color at a time and the colors can be limited, which is where the creativity of printing a color over another color to "mix" the colors comes into play. There's also a lot of times where it overprints if the pages of the printer aren't perfectly straight when putting them back into the printer.
It was developed in Japan in 1980 and is fairly popular with zine makers. It's a style I've wanted to learn for years and finally I am going to learn how to do it. If you've seen our prints from our old pin club in 2020, I basically tried to mimic the risograph style by faking a sort of mis-aligned print / ukiyo e style look:
I'm thinking my first run of prints might be some of my favorite old prints from 2020 club or larger prints of my favorite designs from the hanafuda sets!
Ok, all that noise outta the way, let's get down to the designs for March!
MARCH DESIGNS
First off, we've decided to make an adjustment to the Pretty Winkers: Pretty Soldiers club. I know we said we'd only really be doing villains from here on out, but we know not everyone will want to collect only villains, so Taka and I decided that we will do the senshi once again, but this time around it's going to be wearing some of the iconic casual clothes from the 90s anime! As always, our style will be manga style, but with 90s anime fashion! We hope you'll all enjoy collecting them alongside with the always fashionable baddies!
March will feature Ami in one of my favorite outfits from Stars, as well as Tiger's Eye, my favorite of the Amazon Trio.
Taka has come to terms that Ami is the easiest to draw for him. He didn't have to spend much time sketching her, which is why her lines are so much cleaner in his sketches compared to Tiger's Eye. He also pondered with what to do for Tiger's Eye's background since he really wanted to draw an actual tiger (I think that's just him being a tattoo artist), and finally he settled on doing patterns for each of the trio. So Tiger's Eye will have tiger print sort of background, fish scales for Fish's Eye and feather pattern for Hawk's Eye. I'm looking forward to him finishing up the clean lines for this.
For the SG collection, I'll be finishing up Kiki's Delivery Service characters with Ursula, Kiki's artsy friend. I'll be adding either a crow or maybe a palette type design to the base of the design so it can match with Kiki & Tombo's designs having a sort of centerpiece (just like we do for all the SM designs too). TBH, I'd love to also doing winkers for Osono and her husband, but I'm aware that's probably a little too niche and self-indulgent, when I'm already kinda pushing it to make a pin of Ursula! haha Because Ursula so niche, I will likely only do an LE60-70 of her.
Finally, for the original Moujuu club, our animal for March is the Rat—Taka's personal favorite animal (since that's his year). This one was a breeze for him since he generally enjoys drawing rats. If anything, it was more of a struggle deciding which one to do since we liked so many of them! We opted for the top design since it's cool and unique and we can do a cut-out, but we are also likely going to make the second design just for fun as well!
PRINCESS VENUS
While I finished vectors for her last week, I've just been too busy to prepare the instruction files for my manu and the mockups, so I didn't get that email I meant to get out on Friday for pre-orders for Princess Venus. So I'll be planning to drop the pre-order for Venus on this upcoming Friday, March 2nd, at 2pm PST/5pm EST. She is the biggest of the 4 princesses so far since her hair is flowing on both sides and flowers are popping out farther on the left side. These will be LE75 like Jupiter & Mars.
I hope those of you collecting the princesses really like her. Next up will be the outer princesses and then I'll finish off with the moon princesses towards the end of the year! Since I'm late on getting her dropped for February, I won't change the passwords for March until after the 2nd so that anyone who may have been signed up for February just to get her drop has a chance to snag her.
EXTRAS DROP
And finally, after this week wraps up, I'll be planning a drop tentatively for Tuesday, March 7th 4pm PST. This will be one of the biggest drops we've done in a very long time, including extras of Princess Mercury, Queen Serenity, Queen Beryl, Star Fighter, Star Healer and Star Maker, Jadeite, Nephrite and Zoisite, the kuchinashi (gardenia), both kiku (chrysanthemum), and restocks & new variants of the oni, pokeballs mini pins, konpeito (new brighter colors), koinobori, kaeru (frog & snail), Ume to Suzume (variant of the mejiro).
PRODUCTION UPDATES
Things have been somewhat quiet from our manus lately, but I do know they're plugging away at designs. All the stickers for pin club and our kickstarter are wrapped up and ready to be shipped out. Our manu for the Lunar New Year pins is finished with board fillers and wrapping up on the Year of the Cat design and should be shipping those out soon. And our main manu showed me a complete Princess Mars.
Ok, I think that just about wraps everything up for now. Stay tuned for finished vectors, new passwords, and the drops on March 2nd & March 7th! If you have any questions or concerns, as always, please feel free to email us at shishidocreative@gmail.com :)
- Mandy & Taka