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Mikeru-Archpro

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Hi all, been a long time since I touched the Journal space. Have been busy IRL over the past 2 quarters and I have a light breather now before the next 2 kick in swing.

Just wanted to write some less serious journals here and there, like short ones compared to our longer and more official-sounding ones. Main focus is still on our deviations yeah?

So yeah, recently I had this meeting at the town area in Singapore; chilled at the Japanese bookstore Kinokuniya afterwards and saw volumes 1 and 2 of Cardfight!! Vanguard manga – in Traditional Chinese.

Vanguard Manga in Chinese by Mikeru-Archpro

My second language is Chinese, but I speak Mandarin, which uses the Simplified variant, not Traditional that the Taiwanese use.

Not sure how the CfV fanbase in those territories are, thus the surprise.

It has been a long while since I played, though the only real deck that I use is a troll build of Shadow Paladin that generates free advantage. I felt my interest in the game and interaction with other players waning, and I couldn’t keep up with the constant introduction of new staples in each season of the game after Strides – namely the G-Guardians and their corresponding Heals, as well as the GB8 units. The card prices tend to be cheaper in the Japanese version compared to the English, however, but still…haha.

    -       Mikeru

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Hi all

After some discussion with one of my IRL friends in Singapore, we will now have a third artist on this account, Utari, in addition to the dominant users, Marie and myself.

Cover Photo for Album (2) by Mikeru-Archpro

Utari's Icon

This was decided after some discussions over meals, as she is generally very busy IRL and is only able to tend to her schoolwork and utaite/song cover commitments, much as she wants to set up a portfolio and share the artwork that she has been drawing for a few years and stored softcopy.

Starting tomorrow (Singapore time), we will start carrying 2 albums of her work for showcase, Utari’s Doodles and Utari’s Digital Paintings. Both were quite recent, drawn in 2015 and 2016 and should accurately gist what to expect when she draws for you at her current levels.

Her portfolio comprises many OCs; since she is an utaite, she draws still-image OCs to accompany the various song covers she does, as well as some fanart of her favorite bishonen series such as Soramafu and Owari no Seraph.

MikaYuu from SoraMafu Eating Together by Mikeru-Archpro

SoraMafu Artwork

We are showing her traditional art for good measure and to let you gist from her line technique, and some additional OCs that she has drawn. However, we are only accepting requests for digital paintings.

She is an aspiring utaite too, so if you are an anisong or VOCALOID fan, do check other songs on her YouTube!

If you would like to communicate with her or engage her for any gigs, (illustration or singing related), you can contact her through her SNS on FB, YouTube and twitter, or (less recommended) through me as a POC. Either way I will CC it to her, though this is still slower compared to you contacting her directly.

    -          Mikeru

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More or less just a random part two to the first post. I covered most of the modus operandi Marie and I go by formally, so this one is more loose and about our interests.

 

Marie and I are both idol and anisong fans and we got to know each other better through seiyuu-singer Yui Ogura, and from there, we started to talk more.

 

She’s mostly into Momoiro Clover and has tried to drag me into it – yes, they do sing about, and for, Sailor Moon and Super Sentai (which is the Japanese equivalent of Power Rangers) and I do like both. But somehow…I can’t really seem to bring myself to like them as they are perhaps a bit too cutesy for my tastebuds. They aren’t overtly sexual in their outfits or skin-baring, I mean, they don’t have swimsuit or lingerie gravure, but they seem to play with fecchi fanservice with moe stereotype characters and tied gagging in Ikuze! Kaitou Shoujo, and lots of food-eating close-ups in a few other PVs. The last thing I want to get judged over is having a suspected superhero fetish because I sorta came close when there was talk of the Sailor Moon x Peach John lingerie series back then.

 

I do like Nogizaka46 and select members of the AKB48 fandom but again, I don’t want any judging. I do know, or most of us would have most likely encountered if English media is the first source that you heard of the group, one or more of the points of flak that the groups get – excess of gravure, fanservice, money-churn gimmicks, scandals, overt strictness and the overboard fans. The only thing that I am perhaps weary of, mostly, is the overly sexual image that most laymen get, and perhaps taint, of their fans.

 

For the same reasons, I used to be weary of the main AKB groups until I tried a few albums and felt that a few songs weren’t that bad after all, and in some cases, the group is quite all-rounded. I still prefer to support Nogizaka as I prefer to be associated less with the fanservice, and I think some female fans also lean this way, preferring to go for a more “pure” image.

 

Other than them, the other idols that I follow are STYLIPS but they have not been producing much to follow since their fourth member, Maho Matsunaga, graduated and there are associated in-between hassles when a small group like this holds a graduation. DANCEROID was also a thing for me when they were still active, but not so much when they are Q’ulle.

 

If any of you here are into idols too, you can chat us up.

 

IRL I do play a number of Trading Card Games (TCGs) like Cardfight!! Vanguard and Weiss Schwarz, which are currently hot-trending in Singapore now, and Yu-Gi-Oh! as well. I haven’t had the time to sit down for a long playthrough, even if segmented, of a video game, but someone recently gave me a hand-me-down Diablo code which I might try soon.

 

We are both Sailor Moon and magical girl fans and you will soon learn that I am a nostalgiaphile (me spazzing so much about a 90s series), though not so much in a good way.

 

Sports-wise, both of us like swimming but I’m the one who goes more often, admittedly I’m not that good at the sport or competitive but just do it to keep fit, and did take part in a marathon swim before, and may want to do more. Marie’s too busy with school and club to visit a public pool.

 

Academics are fine for both of us; goes without saying that there is associated stress (Japanese high school students don’t do much projects though) and exam fevers, but we still keep it chill. I do have some complicated thoughts about the act of studying, some of them bleak and all-unorthodox, and I will most probably touch on these in my upcoming journals.

 

You might be pleasantly surprised to learn that Marie is actually very enthusiastic about learning English compared to most other native speakers. English is taught as a foreign language there, and I emphasize a lot on the qualifier “foreign”, because their English standards are admittedly quite frail among Asian territories due to various article-length reasons. When we converse in English, her sentences are short and look grammatically right, although she gets some of her verbs and particles off, as common with many Japanese natives. I did praise her for her enthusiasm before, and it is one of the things that I like about her, especially when we put it in the context that opportunities to speak English organically in Japan are virtually non-existent.

 

Of course, a personal introduction can only go so far until we actually start writing, and therefore I prefer to keep this introduction short. To me, as a writer, I think it takes around 10 posts to create an overall impression of someone’s work and portfolio in general, so I will write with the flow till we meet the magic number, I guess.

 

In an upcoming post, I will start on a topic closer to heart as the blogger of the duo, of what I do - elaborate on the blogging trends in my country.

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Hi all, Mikeru here.

Welcome to my first post as a deviant. Since this is a joint account and we are each doing rather different things here, I will take this opportunity to introduce our modus operandi.

The TLDR of it all is that for a start, we will mainly share Marie’s pencil/pen illustrations and I am the blogger and the copywriter of all other text here (including the post you are currently reading), and my artwork will come later.

I will get her to share a bit based on what we discuss in our conversations. She is quite confident of her English as a foreign language, but as with many learners, it is admittedly limited by native standards, so I will extend her points.


HOW TO INTERACT WITH MY ACCOUNT

 

For Marie’s side, we are quite free and easy with regards to the artwork we share here.

Previously, most of Marie’s artwork was posted on her own Instagram and in integrity of such, they will be watermarked with her handle here, but each deviation description will contain the link to the original un-watermarked post on Instagram.
Flowy Hair by Mikeru-Archpro

All of her work with minimal editing will have a watermark; the original image is on her Insta

Contact

For my side, as the dominant English speaker of the two, I am the point-of-contact (POC) on this account.

You talk to me via Notes, although the process is quite un-real-timey a la emails, or, if you are comfortable with sharing your personal FaceBook account, private messaging (pm). You don’t have to Add me as a Friend, all you need to do is to send me a pm to that account and we can talk from there. Currently, it’s an empty page only meant for pm-ing.

www.facebook.com/mikerumikei/

 

Blogging and Requesting

IRL, my skill sets lean more towards non-fiction writing/copywriting, so from time to time I will also talk about the writing projects that I am in, and plan to blog quite frequently on this journal, on a scale comparable to a personal blog you see on another medium like WordPress, Blogger and Ameburo. I don’t feel like setting up a standalone blog on another host for now, because I only intend to do so if I have an in-depth pet topic to write about and I currently don’t.

For the blog-esque parts, I will be using the Journal itself and one album – MikeiRamble: basically just treat this as Instagram for deviantart where the focus of the deviations here are the texts itself and less of the artwork, serving more as a diary for my more visual-intensive textual posts.

I am currently also self-studying how to do art marketing and would appreciate information or opportunities to promote gigs, such as promoting indies games, other amateur artists, fashion models, movements etc. All these can be discussed through pm.

Art-wise, my medium for now will be sprite work, besides viewing them, I can take small requests for spriting for Pokemon games.

 

P.S. Clarification on the account’s name and Marie’s name

Marie is also an English name, but in her case, it is a Japanese native name, so it is written using hiragana in Japanese as まりえ. It is thus pronounced as ma-ri-ei in English.

Sometimes I refer to ourselves by our stylized collective, MikeiMarie, which quite obviously comes from the first 2 alphabets in our Japanese names, ミケ mike and まりmari, I added the “i” and “e” at the back for easy pronounciation for English speakers that I coin it for.

If any of you would have asked why is the account is only named after me and does not her name in it (the latter which I considered earlier on), she personally prefers that I name it after myself. Regardless of collective, do credit us evenly as equals.

 

    -          Mikeru

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