2/16 Birthday Request

Requested by my friend for one of his friend's birthday.

I haven't inked in forever! I'm glad it worked out well for the most part. If you're wondering why it looks dirty compared to my previous inks, not only was it because it's been a long time since I last did so, but also because I kinda fucked up with it by being a little too enthusiastic to ink instead of waiting for the outlined version to dry before erasing the lead... And so I ended up smudging it in some places. Truth be told, I had to use a whiteout to cover my mistakes...

Thank god for shooping and editing apps.

Plush Tobi-Kadachi

Recently got into Monster Hunter: World, and I love it! It's the kind of game with a dynamic, open-world environment that changes in real-time, and the fighting aspect of this game, while simplistic as compared to Dissidia: Final Fantasy, is also engaging and enjoyable. I think what helps is that the behavior of each monster is different, as well as their strengths and weaknesses, so when you fight them you really have to think about all these factors; you can even use the environment to your advantage and if two monsters meet, chances are they'll also try to kill each other. But just describing the gameplay by itself isn't doing it justice—go watch streams and videos of it on Twitch and YouTube and you'll see exactly what I mean. I really do recommend it to people who love open-world games with a lot of action! 😁

I will say I've known of the existence of MH for a long time now. I've been seeing plushes of them a lot in the Kotobukiya store in Akihabara (they have their own space full of purely MH merch too), as well as the Yamashiroya store in Ueno. About a couple of years ago I bought a plush of Inferno Blade Dinovalde and Astalos, but I wasn't into the game at the time. It wasn't until MH:W that I properly got into the series, and good lord what I said back then was right: one day I'm going to get reaaaaally into the MH series and would want to collect plushies of the monsters in-game. 😂 Lo and behold, the power of words:

Tobi-Kadachi was the first monster in a story mission that gave me a lot of trouble and annoyed me for a time (but eventually I realized half the time I was being very reckless about it rather than actually coming up with a strategy or reading up some tips online 😅). Looking back it's actually fairly easy to deal with now, and upon seeing this plush my heart just melted for it.

Here's a little story for you guys: I'm currently enrolled in a Teacher Training class in my Japanese language school, as some of you know. When I received this plush in the mail, I was so excited that I placed it in my bag and brought it to school the next day. Childish as it was, it was a joy to just see it and pet it in my backpack. Then some time later that day we were told that we were eventually going to do teaching exercises and we had to come up with creative ways to introduce lesson topics to the class. Looking at the plush again gave me such an awesome idea: I'm planning to use this plush as my teaching partner when the time comes, and it excites me to just think about it. I really look forward to teaching in the future with it. 😄

Laksa

The types of Laksa vary per region in Malaysia. They have more coconut milk in the north, less in the central, and about half in the south.

---

More old photos from my inkbook in 2015.

This was a doodle of ingredients found in Laksa, a spicy, Malaysian noodle stew with bok choy, peppers, bean sprouts, cilantro and seafood. Drawing this made it easy to remember when we had the lecture related to it back in college.

This old photo was in sepia filter if I remember correctly. Like the last photo of Thai cuisine, this one also discolored over time and became like this:

#nofilter

Doesn't seem to have changed much compared to the last one but I prefer this new one nonetheless.