Songs from the Little Bird

I'm such a goob. There's this piece of fanart I love, even though it's slightly out of character because the character is so serious, normally.

I tracked back to the original artist and found that he/she only speaks Japanese. So I used my Mac widget translator to write a note, as best I could, translating back and forth on the theory that if one babelfishes a phrase into another language, then back again, and the meaning still makes sense, it's probably intelligible. I gushed about the art, explained that I wanted to borrow the picture for my personal webpage, and asked if the artist would mind my borrowing it. I took a screencap of my LJ page, superimposed the graphic in a little bubble, drew a line around it with an arrow pointing to my page, and added a big red question mark and "Permission?" in Japanese characters.

The artist replied "OK"!

I am strangely delighted with technology that allows me to discover artwork I would otherwise never have seen, converse with a person across the ocean i don't know, and carry on a rudimentary conversation when neither of us speaks the same langauge.

So here she is. A silly Lulu with butterflies. Because I need another smiling picture besides my dear beloved Catherine icon, to offset all the grumpy and anxious-looking peeps. What a random collection of icons!

The original painting is this beautiful image from the Ice website.