Like I don't know why it's "lame" for him to wear the hat in live action? A) it's iconic and a recognizable part of his character regardless of whether you're a fan of Zelda or not, and B) it's a fictional universe fantasy land with magical swords and fairies and shit. Why are we holding Link to our style standards of what's lame/goofy and what's not???

A little sneak peak at my BotW journal project I started in 2023. It’s finally almost done (for now). 😭 This is one of 18 pages — and this is just the first “batch”, I plan to do more at some point. There’s so many cool areas I didn’t get to make pages for!

It’s been a while since I posted a study post. 久しぶりです！✌︎('ω')✌︎

I resumed my Japanese studies this month in preparation for my second year of language school. Right now I’m just going over the grammar points I struggled with most by the end of my first year so I can hopefully wrap my head around them before I jump back into classes. Since I haven’t actively studied much this last year, I’m worried I’ve lost a bit of the progress I made and will be a bit behind my classmates.

｡ﾟ(ﾟ´ω`ﾟ)ﾟ｡

I’m a little anxious about it but I’m doing the best I can with the time I have left to prepare. I’m going to use posting blog updates as motivation to track my progress and actually Do The Thing when my ADHD brain is telling me to nap instead. lol

♡ New Desktop Wallpaper ♡

I haven’t had SC on my desktop in like… 15 years? Or something crazy like that. 😅💕 Thirteen year old Mackenzie would love this so much!

♡ しゅごキャラ！ Volume 2 ♡

The latest volume for Shugo! Chara! Jewel Joker arrived at my doorstep today, the Amazon Japan package completely obliterated after having arrived at the sorting facility in Ontario, Canada (where I live) only to then be sent to Cincinnati, USA (not where I live) and then sent back to Ontario after they realized their mistake (???) and I guess they decided to take that frustration out on my package because I have never before seen such a beat up package in my life.

I should have seen that coming because DHL does this every time I order something from Japan — last time it entered Ontario only to then be sent to Washington (!!!), then up to BC (!!!!), and then back to Ontario… like why do my packages always have to take a extra trip before they finally come home?? They’re in a box, they’re not even getting to see the scenery. 🥲

Anyway… this volume features Ikuto. 💕 I figured they’d do the same as the original series and just have Amu-chan on the cover with a different playing card instead of eggs and maybe a different colour theme like last time. But it seems Peach-Pit are following the same pattern as their other series and having each volume feature a different character, whoever is most important to the plot of that volume. I thought it was interesting that Ikuto’s playing card is a spade this time — so it seems the cards relate to Amu’s character transformation featured in that volume.

I wonder how they’ll do it once they’ve gone past diamond. Will this series only have five volumes, so the 5th will be the joker card and feature her transformation for when all the jewels come together? Her “combined” transformation in the last series was Amulet Fortune, so I wonder what that would look like this time? Five volumes seems short unless they plan on having less filler this time… they’re taking a while to get to the meat of the main plot point though and we’re already two volumes in, so five seems too short unless they start speeding things up from volume 3 onwards. 😅

My Goals for February

♡ Consistent weekly uploads to YT (x5+ video projects currently in progress)

♡ Complete x3 ongoing art projects (I need to get them done so I can move on to all my ideas that are just stuck in Can’t Start Yet hell)

♡ Work on my night routine — sleep schedule and stretching are the two main areas I want to focus on.

♡ First Portrait in a While ♡

The last one I did was almost a year ago, in September 2024. Crazy how time flies. Feels like only a few months ago.

I did this piece today as one of the several examples I’ll be using as product images for my commission page on my shop site. I decided to create new work to use as examples to show the material and size options, as there’ll be multiple to select from.

This is the 5x7, one person, pencil portrait option. ✨

I could have been “lazy” and used old drawings, but the size of the paper wouldn’t be correct (I’ll have my hand in the photos for comparison — in the past I’ve found out the hard way that if you just give number measurements people won’t bother to check what that size actually looks like… and then they’re upset that 5x7 is smaller than they “thought it was” lol) and also I took those photos with older phones or iPods and the photo quality isn’t up to snuff.

So I’ll just make new drawings and paintings to use as examples. But that’s 1 down… *checks notes* … 11 more to go. ✌︎('ω')✌︎

I’d also like to note that when looking for people portraits on Pinterest to use as reference, I couldn’t for the life of me get normal, real human pictures. All AI. It was so frustrating and since I just wanted to get an example drawn out (I won’t be selling these), I caved and used one of the least offensive AI images for reference. I changed the hair (it didn’t make sense lol) and a few other small things about it to make it look a little more natural.