Category: art

April Fish Day!

Posted on by NieA_78

Time to bring back a blog tradition I did for years and years, though I skipped it last year for some reason. And with everything going on in the world right now, some lightheartedness is welcome.

Poisson d’Avril!

Going way back to my high school French class memories, today is my favorite French holiday: Poisson d’Avril! Or as I like to call it, April Fish Day. The old postcard above is something I found in my web travels as I looked for a good image to celebrate. It seems to predate the modern tradition of slapping paper fish onto an unsuspecting friend’s back, though the randomness of it seems to foreshadow the silliness to come.

Here is a translation of the prose on the card:

It is a polite custom
To send in the month of April
Lovely wishes and flowers …
Will you like this fish?

Secure!

Posted on by NieA_78
official series art

I’m just over halfway through watching the Clear Card arc of Cardcaptor Sakura, and it’s just as good as the original series, despite the sudden time shift of “present day” being the late 1990s originally, and now it’s suddenly the late 2010s with all of the technology advances that go along with it, even though only one year of series time has passed. Clearly, one of Sakura’s cards must have created a wormhole for them to suddenly advance more than fifteen years. But I digress.

It’s been a while since I watched a CLAMP series, and doing so has reminded me that if I am looking for inspiration for cute, frilly outfits for my own artistic experiments, I need look no further than the works of CLAMP. Often, their stories seem more like vehicles for their clothing designs. And I am totally okay with that.

“Mako Ami-chan summarized ※ GL attention” / Illustration by “Kobeya” [pixiv]

Posted on by NieA_78

As I was searching for Sailor Moon images – something which is still fun even after all these years – I stumbled upon this super adorable fanart by “Kobeya” of Sailors Mercury and Jupiter swapping uniforms.

Source: “まこ亜美ちゃんまとめ※ＧＬ注意” / Illustration by “小部屋” [pixiv]

If you enjoy this drawing, please visit Kobeya’s pixiv profile!

Chihiro

Posted on by NieA_78

A little bit of cross-promotion… I draw as a hobby, and I just finished something I’m really proud of. This is a screenshot redraw of one of my favorite scenes in Spirited Away. Yes, I omitted the car.

When Chihiro gets creeped out by the statue in front of the abandoned theme park entrance, the look on her face is priceless, so I decided I needed to try and capture it in my own way.

Tank Otaku

Posted on by NieA_78
fanart by shamakho on pixiv

Now that Anime A to Z is over, I can share one of my favorite pieces of Yukari Akiyama fanart. (She began that list, of course, so I wanted to avoid repeating while that feature was still running.)

This scene is completely in character, and the added touch of one of her reconnaissance videos playing in the background gives it that extra bit of realism. Yukari probably spends most of her free time building tank kits. Or reading about tanks. Or watching historical films with tanks in them. You get the idea.