XMACX Monthly | July 2025
Finally! After a billion years!!! (6 months…) XMACX Monthly resumes! Also, before we go on, a correction to the cover art above! I drew the cover illustration back in May, not June! Sorry… Time got all whack for me LOL.
Ari! What have you been up to?
My friends. I GOT MARRIED!!! WOOHOO!! Last month to my best friend and boyfriend of 15 years! We’d been planning the wedding over the last year and a half, and I took the first six months of this year off (sorta) to better focus my creative powers and socializing energies on wedding stuff, lol. But now, I’M FREEEEEE!!!
I wanted to share some of the stuff I designed and illustrated for our wedding! Since I’ll be mentioning some of the vendors and businesses I worked with, I have to be clear: I’m not sponsored! I’m just blown away by their amazing service!
Wedding Stationary
I didn’t design all the stationary for the wedding. Our event planners at Lilikoi Lane did an amazing job and Alex and I were really happy with how everything turned out! I did, however, design our Save the Dates and the magnets that went out with them!
The Save the Date and magnet was the first thing I designed for our wedding. I was told that since the Save the Date would be the first thing our guests see and receive regarding the Wedding, it had to convey the mood, vibes, and themes of our wedding. From research, I saw that Save the Dates went out with engagement photos of the couple, so Alex and I needed some photos ASAP. My cousins helped us take them and we looked good LOL and had a lot of fun! Alex and I had decided on a tropical theme for our Big Day, so the concept for the photoshoot was a picnic date! It needed a little bit of “us” in it, so we brought some manga and food and had a lil picnic at the beach! It’s easy to see in the photo that Alex was reading a Dragon Ball Z manga (my fave anime hahaha), and I was reading Wotakoi (one of Alex’s fave mangas)!
After settling on a date and venue, I slapped the Save the Date together! Our color palette was yellow, green, and hot pink (which is my favorite shade of pink as opposed to baby pink). Since our photos already had green grass and a yellow picnic mat, I needed to add the hot pink! I framed us and made us kind of pop out of the borders. It looks super fun!
I remember sharing several drafts with my cousins and moms because we had to get the verbiage on the card right so our guests in the older generations understood that this wasn’t the final invitation. We learned that “save the dates” weren’t a thing in our grandparents’ time, so we had to be clear.
When that was all set in stone, I sent the files off to print with a printer I trusted—CatPrint! I’d used them many times in the past for the Art Prints I sell on my shop, so I know that they make great quality prints!
After the print was settled, I got to work on designing the magnet! I wanted to send the printed card with one so friends and family could slap it on their fridge LOL. I chose a star shape because I thought a heart would be too on-the-nose and wouldn’t be as fun as a star. I mean, look at how we laid out the print and magnet! It looks fun and bright which is what Alex and I are about!
I wasn’t sure exactly what drawing should go in the star-shape. I just knew it needed information about the event—who, what, when, where. I didn’t think a chibi drawing would look good against the print and it would’ve been hard to read the info on the magnet. So I decided on something derpy and cute, which also speaks to Alex and I as a couple. The magnet depicts me and Alex squishing our faces together with some tropical foliage casting shadows over our faces. I also tried to include the pinks and greens into the design of the yellow star.
Acrylic Cake Topper
Pictured in the BlueSky post I embedded is the cake topper I drew! I designed it to be printed front and back. The front shows Alex and I smiling and looking into each others’ eyes. The back was designed with the window piece in mind, so you can peer through the window to see us laughing together! There’s huge monstera plants at either ends of the huge arched window to go with the tropical florals we had on our wedding day, and the window is huge and arched like the windows at our wedding venue!
After I’d finished drawing the chibis, I sent the PSD file off to ZapCreatives! I’d never printed anything with them before, but at the time the printer I usually used—Vograce—wasn’t an option due to tariffs and time constraints. I needed a quick turn-around time and someone who could FOR SURE ship to Hawaii and ZapCreatives fit the bill. Working with them was super easy! Their design team was patient and awesome, and they helped make a super cute and lovely piece for our wedding cake! The final product is beautiful and well-made! And even though I had only ordered one, they gave us three!
To keep the designs I made for the Save the Date cohesive with the rest of the wedding stuff, I included the star-shape of the magnets with the base of the acrylic stand.
Thousand Cranes
“Senbazuru” is the Japanese tradition of folding one-thousand cranes to wish for good health, good fortune, and happiness. Usually the cranes are arranged into the Japanese Family’s crest or mon, but it was difficult to trace Alex’s family’s origin and therefore hard to find his family crest… So we decided that I’d design the arrangement!
At first, I wanted to keep the “star” theme going with concentric stars. It would’ve given like… PowerPuff Girl heart vibes (if you know what I mean), except stars. But Alex didn’t like that idea, so I scrapped it.
Before I continue, I confess I only folded like 300 cranes and recruited my mom and some other family members to help with the other 700… LET IT BE KNOWN THAT MY MOTHER FOLDED MOST OF THE CRANES. SHE LOVES HER NEW SON-IN-LAW VERY MUCH! Real talk though, that means a lot to me because I’m happy that she accepts him as her son and as my husband. Thank you, Mama!
So the design we went with for no particular reason other than we thought it’d look super sick and cool was a wave! Thinking back on it now, I guess we could say the wave is a representation of our Wedding Venue because we got married on the beach and you could hear the waves crashing and smell the salt water in the air~! How romantic LOL! But between you and me, that’s not the real story.
Anyway, I tried to be sneaky and include a heart shape where the wave starts to curl in! I shared the design I made with my cousin and she arranged the gold-foil cranes for us! It turned out absolutely beautiful!
Depicted in the final framed senbazuru is 1001 gold-foil cranes. The last crane standing alone and folded out like a standard origami crane is the one Alex folded!
There were other traditional things Alex and I had at our wedding to pay homage to our respective heritages like banzai and mabuhay toasts and a money dance. All in all, the day was awesome and a beautiful marrying of our respective cultures that showcased our fun nature in everything from food, colors, florals, and designs!
Okay! Enough about the wedding! It was awesome and beautiful—we get it! I’m excited to start working on other projects again!
What’s Happening in July?
In July, not much is happening other than releasing Froot Basket White’s first chapter. More on that below. What I’d really like to do is play catch up! There’s a lot of projects some friends published and released that I’d love love love to spend some time enjoying! I’ve been considering becoming a PNGtuber to share my adventures with these projects, but I’m not sure my dumb laptop can handle doing that… But I’ll give it a try! I don’t think I’ll stream, though. I’ll probably record and edit videos lol. There’s also a collab project I wanted to pick up again. Hopefully we’ll be able to finish it for Yaoi Jam, but if not, that’s okay! I’d just like to get back into my groove.
VN Dev | Froot Basket White
After working on Froot Basket White Chapter 1 for the last two years, I’m excited to announce the release date! July 11! Below is a trailer put together by Byutaki! Featured are the voices of Monica Piskor as Azrael and Jesse Hawford as Sutoro!
July 11 is this week! So I hope you all are excited for FBW’s release as well! My editor Kristi and I have been working on Episode 2 already and I’m really eager to start drawing assets for it!
Cover Story | Kai’s Birthday
I wanted to try catching up on all the illustrations I missed since 2025 began. I really enjoyed the monthly drawings we made together last year and I missed spending time drawing my OCs in unique and fun ways!
So first off, January! If I were to draw something for January 2025, it’d be none other than my big beefy boy, Kaimana! So TADA! Behold! Kai on the beach celebrating his birthday!
Kai was born and raised in Hawaii—like me—so I wanted to depict him as the local boy that he is, celebrating his birthday the way I’d celebrate my own and eating cake I would eat on my birthday.
Leis
I drew Kai wearing a few different leis to show he is loved and that we are celebrating him! I tried to draw some recognizable leis—a ti leaf maile lei with tube rose weaved in and a kukui nut lei!
I’m not well-versed in Hawaiian culture nor do I have Native Hawaiian ancestry, so I won’t claim to know the meaning behind these specific types of lei. All I have are memories of growing up in Hawaii and receiving leis during celebrations like birthdays and graduation. But I also have the understanding that receiving a lei is meaningful and meant to show great care and love.
Rainbow Cake
I posted about this on BlueSky and Tumblr when I shared this illustration back in May, but I learned that what I grew up calling “rainbow cake” is different from what people outside of Hawaii consider “rainbow cake”. Whenever I searched “rainbow cake” on Google, I got pictures of cake with rainbow layers. That’s not what I was looking for…To me, “Rainbow Cake” is a three-layer cake with each layer being a different flavor—guava, lilikoi, and lime. Outside of Hawaii this type of cake is called “Paradise Cake”.
Anyway, when I was drawing this I was thinking about drawing my favorite type of cake—Chantilly. I needed reference photos, so I googled “chantilly” but got something completely different. This is when I learned that “chantilly” is different outside of Hawaii too!!! The chantilly cake I grew up with is known outside of Hawaii as “Hawaiian Chantilly Cake”. Wild. Absolutely wild. My mind was blown and my whole childhood felt unreal LOL.
In any case, I went with “Paradise Cake” because it looks more interesting than “Hawaiian Chantilly Cake”. It’s colorful! It’s unique and fun!
Other News
I reopened my Etsy shop because it had been closed for like over a year I think. I also have a summer sale going on there for the month of July because I’m planning on closing that storefront. I’m probably going to extend the sale into August too. I’d like to clean out my inventory to make room for some new stuff! And I’d like to have only one storefront here on my website to make things more manageable for me.
Next Month?
No real plan for August yet. Just gonna continue chugging along. Alex and I did plan to visit Disney Aulani since we’ve never been there before despite living next to it, so I’m excited for that LOL.
Much Love,
xxAri
