Figured it was about time I create a masterpost to pin on my blog.
Name: Kogarashi, Amanda, "hey you"
Editor, (fandom) writer, freelance artist
Multifandom geek and generally crafty jack-of-all-trades (master of none)
~ I Draw ~ I Write ~ I Craft ~
Outside links here, but the most relevant is probably my Archive of our Own page.
You can buy me a cocoa (Ko-fi) if you want to throw a tip my way, and you can buy things with my art on Redbubble (slowly adding to inventory).
I also have a side blog for reblogging art I like, and now a side blog for reblogging other people's fiction.
I have a tag list for things like tag games. Want on (or off) the list? Just leave a comment on the linked post.
Fandoms, collected posts, commission info, etc. below the cut to keep this shorter on my page.
Quick links to my OCs:
Castelin Cousland | Aelinn Hawke | Tyria Lavellan | Saadrah Mercar
There are a lot of fandoms I'm in (or at least consider myself a part of, even if mostly on the sidelines). The biggest three would probably be:
Sonic the Hedgehog
Dragon Age
Mass Effect
But you'll find me posting things from other fandoms from time to time. If you followed me for one specific fandom but it seems like my hyperfixation has shifted, if you stick around long enough I'm sure it'll shift back.
I've got some sets of posts where I've put together a masterpost to link them all in one place, or have a collective tag for useful things. You can find them here:
Writing Tips (mine specifically; you can find more under the tag "writing advice")
Art Resources (I may not have every resource post properly tagged for this one, but I did my best)
My fandom headcanons
Yes, I do take commissions for both art and writing. If you don't see a type of commission listed below that you're interested in, you can always send me a message to ask.
OCs or canon characters (or both)
No NSFW
I find mechs difficult but I'm willing to give it a fair go
Digital delivery
Payment will be handled through Ko-fi (if you don't see an option on Ko-fi, message me), or you can send me a DM to discuss alternate payment methods.
What you Get:
High-res digital copy of your commission
Limited personal-use print rights (no re-selling, but you can get it printed on media/merchandise of your choice for your own use)
https://archiveofourown.org/works/85831431/chapters/226871981
Hi everyone! We're back with our fortieth piece for the Dragon Age Big Bang 2026!
Let's give it up for author hartbreaker and artist Kogarashi; they did incredible work! Go check out their efforts over on Archive of Our Own, and we hope y'all enjoy!
The first fic I worked on for the Dragon Age Big Bang (@dragonagebigbang) is up now, and that means I can show off this art!
For "Show Me Who I Am and Who I Could Be" by hartbreaker on AO3, aka @roguespeedster here on Tumblr. I couldn't pass up an opportunity to draw Lucanis, and her Rook was a delight to draw and color too.
My favorite parts of this piece? Their hands nearly touching, and the way the ripples in the eluvian right around Rook's arm and leg turned out. I keep staring at those. Watch me not remember how to do that again next time I need that effect. 😅
And speaking of their hands, the banner I made to go with the work, as seen on the DABB blog:
Now. Go check out the fic, and then the rest in the collection so far!
Because of AI I have even more respect for people consciously deciding to pick up a pencil and learning to draw or write from scratch. It’s already hard to compete with that stuff as someone who has been drawing and writing for years, but it must be even harder if you’re just starting out right now.
But please, don’t let it deter you. Write that fic. Draw that art. Do it badly! And know there are people who will love everything you make, because you made it and that makes it already better than all that creepily perfect looking slop that AI churns out.
It's about dang time I share another craft project on here (and per my usual, this isn't recent). Say hello to "Dududunsparce," as my kids and I affectionately call this one. (Details and description behind the cut.)
My oldest is a bit tricky to gift shop for. Finding stuff she likes that isn't also just expensive is...a challenge. But I love giving gifts (and the buzz from getting it just right), which is why between my husband and I, I'm the one in charge of Christmas shopping for our children.
And, well, my oldest does love Pokemon, but tends to like ones that aren't commonly sold as plushies. And I happen to know how to sew (amateur or intermediate at best, 50% self-taught, but whatever).
So I had this idea of making her a plush of one of her current (as of 2023, when I did this project) favorite Pokemon, Dudunsparce. Only I couldn't just do Dudunsparce because she told me about the rare three-segment variant that she really likes and has been hoping to find in Pokemon Violet (with no luck).
Of course, nobody has a Dudunsparce pattern.
But, it just so happens that as I was looking for ideas, I came across a Deviantart user who has made a Dunsparce pattern (link to the pattern). And unlike a lot of other Pokemon, Dunsparce and Dudunsparce don't look all that different from each other. I figured I could extrapolate the Dunsparce pattern into Dudunsparce.
So I did.
I added two ovoid segments, made a second drill bit in a smaller size, added to the chin spikes, and added to the wings. I had reference images of the Pokemon to help me get the colors right, and then went ham.
The yellow and sky blue are both a soft minky (no bumps, which was annoying to find in yellow in my local stores). The dark blue is flannel, while the white is polar fleece. All visible surface stitching is embroidery thread (it's shinier than all-purpose). I used stabilizer anywhere I would need to do topstitching or otherwise need things stiffened (eyes, belly swirl, back patches, drill cones), and picked up inexpensive pillows at Walmart for the stuffing. I may have overstuffed this boy (he looks lumpy), but it's fine. He's still cuddly.
And while I can't show you her smile because I'm protecting her identity (this is the internet after all), she loved it. His name is Noko (after tsuchinoko, the Japanese snake cryptid Dudunsparce is probably based on).
And I'm reblogging this one, because I still love it, and have more mutuals to see it this time. 😉
And while I'm at it, I want to share how I presented it to her, because I was pretty proud of that too.
So, for Christmas, we generally follow a pattern for our kids. I saw this once online, and liked it, but it was a gift mantra of "Something you want, something you need, something to wear, and something to read." Generally, if my kids have something they need, though, I just get it whenever, not as a gift. So I leave that one out, and joke that it's the "Three W's" of gifts: Want, Wear, and Wread. And sometimes (relatively often but not always), I'll get two "want" gifts for each of them.
Well, the year I worked on this, it was a Big Gift for her, and even though the other kids were going to get two "wants," this was the only one for Kid#1. But I still wanted her to have a second gift to open.
So I made a tiny Dunsparce out of felt:
A little hot glue goes a long way for parts of this. 😁
(More below the cut.)
My husband picked up one of the Mega Pokemon toys (the rival version of LEGO that's had the Pokemon license for a while now) so we could have its Pokeball, and we put this guy inside it. Then we put the actual bricks for that Pokemon (still in their plastic bag) in a gift box, tissue paper over that, and the Pokeball with Dunsparce on top of that, closed the box, and wrapped it.
So that was the first gift Kid#1 opened when all the kids were opening a "want" gift on Christmas. She loved the little Dunsparce, and that she'd also have some bricks to assemble into another Pokemon.
We then opened a few other things—gifts from them to each other, gifts for my husband and me, the "read" gift—before we got around to "want" gift number two. We handed out the gifts to each of the girls. Kid#1's was a small box that, she discovered, contained two blue-wrapped Lindor truffles (sea salt milk chocolate, I think?) meant to look like...Rare Candy, I think? I had to look this stuff up online because I don't play Pokemon...and a card that said "What? Dunsparce is evolving!"
And then I went into the other room for a large box I'd recently set in there with a few other things, under the pretense of moving stuff around. No giftwrap, because it was so large. She started out confused, but I think she was catching on by the time she pulled tissue paper out and unveiled her Dudunsparce plush I made, the one on the original post. And she just started grinning and gushing.
Because like I said in the original post, this isn't something you can just buy from the Pokemon Company, because they don't make every Pokemon. And it wasn't just any plush, it was the specific rare version she liked.
Still one of my favorite gifting moments.
Using my tag list this time because I want to show off what I made, and to also spread the idea of "Self-Reblog Sunday."
Something interesting my husband found and sent my way, thanks to hearing about their D&D version through Ginny D's channel. I haven't sat down to read these yet myself, but after skimming the table of contents and the intro, I thought I'd share it here.
The Psychegeist of Pop Culture - Dragon Age
It's a series of essays about Dragon Age and social scientific theory. Probably worth a read, if you like that sort of thing.
a psa to everyone that tumblr will never contact users by mentioning or tagging their urls like this. they will contact you only via email, from their official email address. and the only official blogs that are associated with tumblr are: @tumblr @support @staff @changes (they each have their official tumblr badges). any other blog claiming to be tumblr and tagging you, or replying to your comment, saying “your account is xyz and you have to do xyz to fix the issues” is a bot/scam.
Do you mostly read fiction or non-fiction? While I do read both, the bulk of my reading tends to be fiction. I want to read more nonfiction, but picking it up is still very much a conscious decision on my part.
Is reading for pleasure part of your daily routine? If so, how much time a day do you spend on reading? Yes, I make it a point to read for pleasure every day. Sometimes (weekends, holidays) it might be as little as five minutes, but usually I'll get an hour or two of reading in.
Do you often binge books? Define binge. ^_^; I have been known to spend hours reading, and to stay up far later than I should when I am engrossed in a story. But I can and do put down my book to do other things, though I do try to get to the end of a chapter first.
Describe your average reading session 😁(Do you have a special spot where you get comfortable/is it a hard copy or an e-book/is it day or night etc.) I read a mix of physical books and ebooks (and I listen to audiobooks too). On weekdays I will read during lunch, and I regularly listen to an audiobook on my commute from work. I'll usually read before bed as well, so time of day is less of a driver. I also don't have a particular special spot where I go to read, but I do like to curl up on the couch or in a comfortable chair when I'm reading a physical book or an ebook.
Do you have a schedule or do you read when you feel like reading? It's really a bit of both. I have chunks of time that I typically devote to reading (and/or listening to audiobooks), like during my lunch break at work or my commute, so you could call that a reading schedule. But I also will pick up a book at other times, just whenever I feel like it. It just...happens to be a daily thing.
Have you ever struggled with reading (e.g. issues with concentration/retaining information, learning disabilities etc.) and how did you manage to overcome it? I cannot recall any particular struggles with reading. I have found that some classics are easier to comprehend if I listen to them while reading a physical or ebook copy.
Can you read multiple books at once? Yes. Last year I did make a rule for myself that I can't have more than ten active reads at once, and I have been keeping to that. Things were getting a bit out of hand before then. ^_^;
If you're multilingual, do you intentionally choose to regularly read books in your target language(s) to maintain language proficiency? Is it a habit too, or is it a matter of the book's original language? The only language I really feel comfortable reading in at this time is English. I would like to get to a level of proficiency in one of the other languages I am familiar with (French, Japanese, German, Spanish) to be comfortable with reading in it, and probably the best way to do that would be to actually try reading a book in one of them, but at the same time it is a daunting prospect. Especially given the number of unread books in English that I own.
How do you usually choose books for your to-read list? This is going to depend on how one is defining a TBR. I have a constantly growing, ever shifting list of books I may want to read someday, and stuff gets added to it with reckless abandon. It just has to look/sound interesting to get a place there. I also have a list of books (yes, in a spreadsheet) that I own that I have not read yet; one could argue that this is a TBR. If, however, one is defining a TBR as a list of books to read in the next month/year...well, I don't actually keep a formal list like that because I'm almost always going to pick my next reads based on mood. I think. It's complicated.
Do you keep track of the books you've read/plan to read? Yes. I have spreadsheets going back to 2007 tracking all the books I've read. Yes, plural. I also have the spreadsheet of books that I own and haven't read yet (a truly daunting number), and accounts on multiple bookish platforms that hold my more general "books I thought looked interesting and may want to read someday" list as well as the books I have read. And daily reading logs (which things I read, when). Tracking my reading is as much of a hobby as the actual reading is.
Do you consider reading manga/comics "reading"? Yes, but I differentiate them on my tracking spreadsheets because it's a different sort of reading. I can get through a 200 page volume of manga or graphic novel in under an hour; a work of prose with the same page count will take considerably longer to read (general minimum of three hours).
Do you often find yourself in a reading slump? How long did your ultimate slump take? Not really? Or...probably not in the way the question is intended. I have burnt out on a particular series or author's works, and if that happens it might be months or even years before I go back to them. Ditto with subgenres. Typically that happens if I read too many back to back, so I do my best to vary my reading and pay attention to my reading appetite, as it were. There are also the "slumps" where I'm reading, but I'm not necessarily super captivated by what I currently have going. Those tend to resolve themselves within a few books, or by adding something wildly different to the mix of my current reading. It's been nearly six years since I last had a day when I didn't read something (and even on that day I had some amount of devotional reading, just not pleasure reading).
And there you have it, probably far more about my quirky reading life than was expected. Thanks for sharing the questionnaire, @kogarashi-art!
