Put on your party hats! This fangirl is celebrating the birthday of her Japanese actor & singer of choice – KIMERU!

I’ve been a Kimeru fan Since I was a teen. My way of showing my friendly admiration is to occasionally ambush him with bizarre fanarts.
For his 40th birthday I made a pixel art illustration of Kimeru’s life the way it would look like if it was a retro style 8-bit video game:

All of the items in this game are details from Kimeru’s stories, as he shared on posts and in interviews.

The mailbox is there because kimeru used to be a mailman in his birth place, Kumamoto. The black bear is Kumamon, the mascot of Kumamoto (in Japan, each prefecture has a mascot).
There is a tennis racket from kimeru’s most famous musical, Prince of Tennis, and the blue uniform from the musical Youth Railway.
Game-Kimeru must gain strength by collecting Starbucks coffee cups (which he claims to be not big enough), and avoid dangers which are represented by the tiger that bit him in Thailand.

Did you spot the Mickey Mouse shaped balloon? That’s because Kimeru is obsessed with Disney and spends remarkable amount of time in Disneyland with his annual pass.
I even included Kimeru’s famous carrot cake, which apparently he sometimes bakes to share with the cast backstage.

Kimeru once held a youtube live where he answered questions of viewers. I asked if he could speak English, and he said no. So here is a Happy Birthday Message to Kimeru in broken Japanese:

KIMERUさん、お誕生日おめでとうございます！
今度はピクセルアートの絵を描きました。KIMERUさんの人生をレトロゲームとして描きました。

絵に入れた物を分かるかな？みんなKIMERUさんの話からとった詳細です。

ゲームで力を得られるのはスターバックスコーヒー、危ないところを象るのはタイでかんだトラです。
ヂスニーが好きのでミッキーの風船がある。キメルさんの人参ケーキも入れようと思いました。
知らないこともあるから「？」の箱を入れた。

熊本を出たから東京で成功したキャリアをできたまで色んな事がありました。
KIMERUさんのツイッターとブログの話を読むのが楽しいです！

右側で矢印はどこへむかいますでしょう？KIMERUさんの行きたい場所へ向かう事を祈っています！

これからもKIMERUさんにめでたく事ばっかりを望んでいます。

There! Thank god for google translate and 20 years of watching anime.

Usually I print the fanarts and send them to Kimeru’s fan mail address as gifts. With the items I made so far I can open my own Kimeru merchandise store! But I won’t, because this little booty doesn’t want to get sued.

I know Kimeru liked some of my fanarts, because he posted them on his blog.

But why do I like Kimeru?
Why not someone else of the gerbiliion Japanese artists out there?

Because Kimeru lives his life in a way that I both admire and want for myself.

Sometimes I think of him as a shape shifter. On stage he can play every possible role. Young or old, good or evil, male or female. Just drop a costume on him and he will turn into it.
Outside of the stage he shows similar fluidity. He is a mix of adulthood and childhood. At 40 he is still an anime otaku who bounces around in Disneyland taking pictures with the characters. At the same time he is an insightful person and a smart professional who other people come to for advice.

From his posts I learnt that aside from singing and acting he is also very good at drawing and amazingly good at cooking. Pick a task and he will rock it.
He is noisy, bubbly and brings a party everywhere he goes. But he also speaks openly about darker times and losses.

19 years after Kimeru’s debut he is still very active and stays relevant. He managed to keep the generation of the first fans while gathering younger fans during the years. 

Some of the things that Kimeru does make me uncomfortable. I don’t know how to respond when I see a grown man talking in a cutesie voice of a teenage girl or dancing sleazily with straight face in a weird MV. But that’s on me. I admire people who just do what they want without apologizing. And I love how these quirks don’t turn Kimeru into a ridiculed figure.

Honestly, I’m jealous of how comfortably he maneuvers between all of his different sides. Sometimes I find myself keeping my alter egos out of my business platforms. Even though all of my facets fuel my creation, I’m worried that people will criticize my quirks, misinterpret them or simply won’t be interested in them.

So that’s a little bit about how I got inspired by Kimeru.
To sum up: I want to turn 40 and hold on to my juvenile spark! I will keep crushing on anime boys and love trampolines until I’m dead! ♥

Now that we established my aspirations in life we can talk a bit about pixel art 😀

Pixel art – quick talk

I’m not really a gamer but I like the pixel art trend. My first pixel art illustration was this seamless 8-bit game background, which I created as a stock illustration and was sold more than 1,500 times:

If you want to try out your own pixel art, here is how I did it (using Adobe Illustrator):

I set the grid to the size I wanted each “pixel” to be. It’s not really the size of an actual pixel, but just a square. I thought I might want to print the illustration on something, so I chose the pixel size according to how it would look like on the printed product.
To set your grid size: Edit → preferences → guides & grid

I enabled snap to grid (view → snap to grid) and snap to point (view → snap to point).

At some points I wanted smaller “pixels” for the finer details. Of course, in a real pixel game you won’t see such variety in the pixel sizes. but for my drawing it’s allowed.
When you want to draw a smaller square, you should disable the “snap to grid” option.

with everything set up, i just started placing squares according to my sketch. simple!

I hope you found some of the things in today’s post interesting. I would love to know if you could relate to the many-facets-under-one-hat concept and if you are facing similar dilemmas. 
Thanks for reading and best wishes to our birthday boy!