ilooovejirachi

A book I helped illustrate won an award! It's a Chinese children's poem anthology called 《月亮河·天空城》

I honestly feel so humbled to have worked on it with so many amazing artists. The author herself is a very talented writer. The book aims to vividly depict the beauty of the Chinese landscape.

Here is the article about the award

more about the book here

(all websites are in Chinese)

I was commissioned to make art for this blog!

https://curiosityand.me/

Check it out to delve into the whimsical mind of a PhD Psychology student :)

I have been working on a PV for a while and just finished the short version!

It's a Kagamine Len cover of Calc. The Miku original by Jimmythumb-P is a really powerful song so I was very impressed by kimikeiki's Len cover!

Please give it a watch here (it is LenxRin so be aware if you're not into that): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suKChNCqtaQ&t=2s

Also I post illustration progress updates on twitter! https://twitter.com/Jira_chii

It's been my dream for a long time to do a Vocaloid PV, so this is super exciting for me. It's my first time so please give me any feedback you can (so I can incorporate them into the full ver)!

Wow what a year 2020 has been. To say this year had its ups and downs would be the biggest understatement of the century. 2020 has been the type of year where within turmoil one finds a silver lining, only to have that pulled away too. This was the year I experienced the biggest personal tragedy in my life, but it was also a year of creative milestones.

At the start of 2020 I made a to-do list of art projects. This would be the year I finish unfinished business. There were projects from as far back as the early 2010s on that list and it was exciting to both see them come to fruition and see how much I had improved. Some of them were insanely trivial, like an art request where I no longer remembered the requester nor the actual character requested. Others were huge projects I had been planning for years.

2020 was my year of nostalgia. My 300 day doodle challenge remake was a project I had been excited about for a long time. My exchange to Japan was and always will be a special time for me. Reliving those memories while improving my digital art skills at the same time was like a dream come true. Until I gave myself the dumb challenge of remaking every picture from October 2015. I'll get there eventually...

Another long time unfinished project was the AUNSW banner. It was something I had started way back when I was the art director of anime club at university. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the club, we were going to design a huge banner to show off at events. But banners are expensive and so the project was scrapped :') the draft was filed away in the depths of my wip folder, never to be seen again, until now, more than five years later.

Things were going well. I was slowly but surely picking up all the loose threads of my life. With these projects out of the way, I was finally freed from constantly thinking of them at 3am. My heart could finally be at rest.

Then in July 2020, the unthinkable happened.

I lost my dad in an accident. It was surreal, it was sudden, it was devastating. I took a break from everything for about a month. I owe a lot to my friends and family for helping me through that period and I feel so lucky to know such caring people. But there were things inside me that I couldn't express using words, feelings I didn't even want to share with my family.

Art then became an important outlet for me. Drawing was cathartic and, in combination with a bunch of other things, I eventually got the closure I needed. I still think about dad a lot, but these days he pops into my dreams less often, and I tear up only just a little bit...

Once I was ready to go back to work, things seemed to almost return to normal. Covid turned out to be a blessing in disguise because 1. I didn't need the whole office to see me crying whenever I thought of dad, and 2. working from home meant I had more time than ever to draw. The difference in output between the first and second half of 2020 is actually kind of crazy.

This was also when I decided I needed to get a move on and start on the last big project on my to-do list: the Seme Uke collection.

Seme Uke is probable the most ridiculous thing on my list. It's embarrassing, and cringey, but also something that constantly plagues my 3am thoughts.

Way back in like 2009, my chuunibyou self found a site called semeuke.com. It is like a nsfw personality quiz. Having just wandered into the world of BL, this was basically the most exciting thing to me at the time. The descriptions stimulated my imagination, and in an offhand facebook message, I said I wanted to draw characters based on all the descriptions.

Nobody remembers this conversation except me. But it has continued to haunt me all these years. So, I decided to just get it over and done with.

It...turned out to be surprisingly fun. The site gave me symbolic details like colour and animal motif which made the process much more interesting compared to designing a new character from scratch. I feel like my digital skills also seriously leveled up through the process...

Before I wrap up the year I want to mention one last thing that happened to me: I got published!

A family friend who I will call H is an author, and for her latest poem anthology she asked me to do some of the illustrations! Due to the pandemic, publication was delayed, but it's finally out! (website is in Chinese).

I was not aware at the time but there are several other illustrators, and all of them are award-winning artists so it is a little embarrassing. That said this is my first official commission and I will proudly take it!

This is a scrapped draft of one of the illustrations, and this is how the final illustration looks in the book (sorry for my awful camera quality)

The truth is, H lost her husband in the same accident I lost my dad. I like to think of this as a sign that the two of them watching over us.

2020 has been a weird year. I planned for it to be a year of looking back, but it ended up being a year of (forced) new experiences for the whole world. Due to the nature of this year, I am just going to consider 2021 an extension of 2020 and keep going with the same to do list. My original intention of settling old projects still stands. I want to eventually be able to put everything that's been troubling me behind me, and start over with a brand new slate. And it doesn't matter if that takes another month, or a year, or even a decade. I'll just keep moving forward like I've always done.

PM me a page view screenshot! Closest page view number to 10,000 gets a free drawing!