smothered in s t a r l i g h t

🌷🌼🦄 Happy New Year! ✨ 🌹

Hello hello hello and Happy New Year, everyone! I hope this post finds you well. For years and years, I have been wanting to send out nengajo (Japanese new year greeting cards) or even design my own, so I made up my mind that 2026 is the year! I know this post didn't go up on New Years Day, but I'm a big believer in the phrase "Better late than never." 💕

For this design, I decided to try to make a unicorn to celebrate Year of the Horse! It was a fun opportunity to try harnessing my love for medieval tapestries and the beautiful ways they depict nature and creatures. It was so fun to paint and fill the background with all sorts of different flowers!

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(I'm going to start doing a section of the caption of my pieces called VLMR: Very Long, Maybe Read. Sometimes I have a lot to say, so this is an optional section for those who are interested bahaha 😆)

Anyways! VLMR: Happy New Year! Do you have any New Years goals or wishes for 2026?

Some of mine are to create more (no matter the result lol) and to continue to share regularly online. To be honest, I've been struggling a bit with art and the idea of art the last couple of years. I love, love, love the process of making art, sharing it with others, and the art community ! But the last couple of years, I've been having a hard time with a mixture of art block, shyness, busyness, and discouragement related to the proliferation of generative AI. For a long time I wasn't sure how to move forward with my own art journey.

After a lot of consideration and conversations with friends, I've been thinking more and more about how important it is to CONTINUE to create and share artwork from the heart. I am so thankful for all of the artists, actors, directors, musicians, etc. around the world who hone and share their craft, so I would like to gladly continue to participate as well. I want to live in a world filled with expressions of the heart, so I want to contribute too! 💕

Long story short, from now on I want to challenge myself to share art instead of keeping it to myself lol. After years of inactivity, here is what you can expect from Seahorsespaghetti moving forward:

✨ Posting about once a week

✨ Art of all different types including:

✨ Doodles

✨ Sketchbook spreads

✨ Small creatures

✨ Character design

✨ Fanart of various series

use overdrive, libby, hoopla, cloudlibrary, and kanopy instead of amazon and audible.

use firefox instead of chrome or opera (both are made with chromium, which blocks functionality for ad-blockers. firefox isn't based on chromium).

use mega or proton drive instead of google drive.

get rid of bloatware

use libreoffice instead of microsoft office suite

use vetted sites on r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH for free movies, books, games, etc.

use trakt or letterboxd instead of imdb.

use storygraph instead of goodreads.

use darkpatterns to find mobile game with no ads or microtransactions

use ground news to read unbiased news and find blind spots in news stories.

use mediahuman or cobalt to download music, or support your favorite artists directly through bandcamp

make youtube bearable by using mtube, newpipe, or the unhook extension on chrome, firefox, or microsoft edge

use search for a cause or ecosia to support the environment instead of google

use thriftbooks to buy new or used books (they also have manga, textbooks, home goods, CDs, DVDs, and blurays)

use flashpoint to play archived online flash games

find books, movies, games, etc. on the internet archive! for starters, here's a bunch of David Attenborough documentaries and all of the Animorphs books

burn your music onto cds

use pdf24 (available online or as a desktop app) instead of adobe

use unroll.me to clean your email inboxes

use thunderbird, mailfence, countermail, edison mail, tuta, or proton mail instead of gmail

remove bloatware on windows PC, macOS, and iOS X

remove bloatware on samsung X

use pixelfed instead of instagram or meta

use NCH suite for free software like a file converter, image editor, video editors, pdf editor, etc.

feel free to add more alternatives, resources or advice in the reblogs or replies, and i'll add them to the main post <3