Covered in Glitter and Screaming

In 2020, a fairly obscure yokai called  Amabie  started to trend on Japanese Twitter with #AmabieChallenge.  There are variations to the story, but the legend says that a mermaid-like creature with long hair, a beak, scales, and three legs or fins emerged from the sea in the late 1800s to give a warning and advice. It predicted six years of good harvest and then a pandemic. To stave off the disease, Amabie said to draw its picture and show that picture to as many people as possible. Since this whole concept was still relevant in 2021 but not bad enough to cancel Halloween altogether, and Amabie has become near and dear to my heart, that's what I did. Process Beak There are two parts to the beak, the beak itself and the mask to hold it to my face (note: also thematically appropriate). While I was developing the beak from paper and then craft foam, I was also looking for me-colored masks to attach the beak to. Both of these took a few tries and some trial and error, but the...

 My illustration pen pal loaned me another  Griffin and Sabine book , and I returned it with a card holder inspired by modern kokeshi dolls . Process the process almost always starts with a sketch Some math was done to determine how big the finished doll should be then the sketch was traced and I used a grid to enlarge the sketch to the final size using the new drawing, I split out the individual pieces to be cut out The body (red) is cut from craft foam, the other pieces are cut from paper The patterned paper at the bottom is usually used for origami Front and back of assembled doll Front and back of finished doll holding the folded letter

My illustration pen pal loaned me another  Griffin and Sabine book , and I returned it with a letter and a puzzle. I already had a mandala design from a workshop years ago, so I started there. I made some tweaks and printed it out to decide what the colors should be like. Thanks to radial symmetry, I could get four different looks on the same sheet. Top: white background, rainbow shapes on left and metallics on right Bottom: black/white shapes on rainbow background left, metallic background right  Puzzles are made of chipboard (what hardcover books use, a little more hardcore than a cereal box) Let's feed that into the Cricut and see what happens Good news: the Cricut can handle drawing all the lines at this size, and it will successfully cut out all those puzzle shapes Bad news: all those frayed edges are not gonna work for me Second attempt: puzzle re-drawn and re-cut on two sheets of cover stock glued together instead of chipboard. A little less solid, but much smoother! An...