Me and my various art friends have been making ‘Year of the Fire Horse’ birthday cards for each other, and you would think, what with me becoming an artist solely to draw horses when I was three, and still very much drawing these beautiful animals, that a card celebrating the Year of the Fire Horse—for some reason the Fire aspect has been unusually emphasized this year, probably just because both horses and fires run so beautifully—would feature a horse drawing.

paper, ink, watercolour, adhesive; 01may2026, sony A7c 90mm sony macro, f/2.8, ev 0, 1/1000s, ISO 100, WB: cloudy; unified transform (to square up), crop, slightly lightened in gimp

But no.

I just wasn't feeling it, or rather I couldn't figure out how to incorporate one, excepting the little post office logo in the lower right, carefully saved from on of my ‘year of the...’ stamps (that I didn't even buy any this year—never saw them—so I s'pose I'd better go remedy that...)

I did at least start with the greeting: 火馬の年にお誕生日おめでとう,^[1] and was quite proud of myself that the only kanji I really^[2] had to look up the stroke order/construction was the birth one, 誕. When I remember how badly I used to struggle writing ‘O tanjoubi o meditou’ —even the relatively easy hiragana—I couldn't help being pleased. I've really been focusing on practicing shodo/ しょどう/ 書道 while doing duolingo, which is definitely the part of language study I enjoy the most, it's also really helping to see how the various kanji appear in quite-different (or similar) meaning words: photography helps with learning the intricacies of flowers, but drawing them really sets understanding.

So too with language learning, which is why they tell you to write down as many phrases as you can remember after a lesson. I don't have the chops (or patience) to do that, but I really like spending the first 15 minutes learning new stuff on the path-track (to achieve daily goals/more 3x points),^[3] and the rest of my triple points time practicing kanji & writing stuff down, which is too slow otherwise to achieve duolingo's little rewards.

Anyway. Other pleasures include the opportunity to incorporate 3D stuff like the seal and letter, the pretty, elegant Adafruit tissue paper (that I save to use only for special occasions), and finding a sticker of a Japanese (to go with the calligraphy) Hokusai Utagawa Hiroshige^[4] print of a turtle (the recipient has a pet turtle:) and that incredibly saturated and beautiful red ink, Jacques Herbin 1670. Yummy!

Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.