Five hand drawn feather brushes. You can download them by clicking on the picture or this text. Enjoy!

51 hand drawn sketch brushes. The drawings you see in the picture are the individual brushes you get. You can download them by clicking on the picture or this text. Enjoy!

First of, I just wanted to show this awesome video: “Skype Me Maybe” – sung in 30+ languages by 17 polyglots! Super inspirational!

Now, onto another set of language-related links. Most of them are about – surprise, surprise – Japanese, but there is also some Norwegian, French and general language links mentioned.

1. Smashing Magazine has a great article about Japanese, A Beautifully Complex Writing System.
2. Free FSI language course in French can be found here!
3. The Polyglot Project Podcast – Episode #1 – Moses McCormick can be heard here on David Mansarays site.
4. Not sure if I mentioned this before, but here is the wiki-page about Kyouiku-kanji. If you feel like the 2000 joyo-kanji is too much to grasp at first, mastering the 1006 kyouiku-kanji can really bring you a long way when it comes to reading and understanding Japanese.
5. Japanese idiom dictionary! This is great for figuring out colloquial use of japanese, which can be hard if you don’t have a real japanese person at hand to ask.
6. Japanese proverb dictionary! (You have no idea how impressed Japanese people get when you throw in a proverb or two in your conversation!)
7. A resource site for JLPT N1, N2 and N3. Mostly in Japanese. Not the easiest thing to navigate, but some good resources hidden in there.
8. Kokuji 国字 or Wasei Kanji 和製漢字 are Kanji that were created in Japan. Most of them only have KUN readings, but there are some Kokuji that have ON readings because they were assumed to have them according to phonetic association with similar characters. Here is an extensive list of kokuji.
9. Nice little blog about language learning: www.streetsmartlanguagelearning.com.
10. Verbling is like chatroulette, only in the languages you are studying. Super neat idea, although I am a bit camera shy myself.
11. If you are interested in Norwegian language, you can listen to free podcasts called “Språkteigen” here. It is a program produced by NRK, in Norwegian, about quirky (and not so quirky) aspects of the Norwegian language. For intermediate, advanced and native speakers.

And here is a bonus video: 日本人が知らない日本語. Funny drama in Japanese, about Japanese. The Swedish girl’s Japanese accent cracks me up every time.

Snappeee

Snapeee would have to be my favorite japanese app. is like Instagram on speed and steroids! You have same community feel as on Instagram, but you can decorate your images before uploading them. When you upload images, or “like” other peoples images you will earn points, and you can use these points to download more decorations for your pictures. Snapeee also have special events and contests you can enter your images into, and you can get quite a few likes and followers if your entry is accepted into the different contests. Snapeee is available for both iPhone and Android. Download it here.　Feel free to add me as well, here is my invitation code: 3B3JRW

Decoblend

Decoblend has two great features. One feature is that you can combine your photos into neat collages, and I find that these collages look a lot cleaner and neater than other apps offering the same thing. The other feature is that you can decorate your photos and collages in the same way as snappeee. the stamps are more limited than Snapeee, but it is still a couple of great stamps and frames worth using. You can get Decoblend for both iPhone and Android.

Girls Camera

Girls camera also have quite a few neat frames worth trying out. There is some sort of community where you can share “diary pages”, but personally I prefer snapeee and instagram. Still worth a download! iPhone and Android.

eyeフィット

I just wanted to mention the eyeフィット app really quickly at the end here. It doesn’t have much of an artistic value, it is simply an app to try on different contact lenses. The interface is in Japanese,  and if you like the lenses, there is a link to buy the contact lenses. I found this app for the iPhone, I am not sure if it exist for Android or not.

I made another little resource pack with Japanese stamps, you can download them by clicking here or on the pictures.

I couldn’t find any good resource sets for gemstones, so I made one. 28 transparent .png images, zipped, you can download them here.

Forgot to post this yesterday. Probably because I am not happy with it at all, but I only had a couple of minutes, and the whole point of this project was to produce more stuff and not be so god damn afraid of a perfect end result. Oh well, better luck today… You can download the papers that I have used for this here, I just uploaded them to DA.

45 Vintage Kenner Spirograph Photoshop brushes – drawn, scanned and touched up. Among other things, I made these postcards from this brushset.

Like I mentioned earlier, I am not a big fan of deviantart, but I upload resources there to save some bandwidth. To download the brushes just click the picture above.

The rules for using these brushes are simple:
– The brushes are free for non-commercial use.
– A link back to sushibird.com if you use these brushes is much appreciated.
– You may not redistribute these brushes elsewhere.
– Feel free to post a link to your work if you have used these brushes.

Hope you like them!

Quite a while back I drew these flower patterns, and I made them into a PS brush set, so I thought I would upload for others to download. (I have quite a few brush sets and PS actions, so if people are interested in them I will upload more.) Among other things, I made these postcards quite a while back: Flowered.

I decided to make an account on deviantart just to save a little bit of bandwidth and space here on the blog. I am not a big fan of deviantart (even thought I used to have an account back there from 2001! I will not upload art to this deviantart account, but I thought I would use it to upload resources.) To download the brushes, you can click the picture above.

The rules for using these brushes are simple:
– The brushes are free for non-commercial use.
– A link back to sushibird.com if you use these brushes is much appreciated.
– You may not redistribute these brushes elsewhere.
– Feel free to post a link to your work if you have used these brushes.

Hope you like them!

This is the Big Mean Copyright Post. (Which actually isn’t mean and actually is more about Creative Commons.)

Binka wrote a great post (in Norwegian) a while ago about using other people’s pictures on the internet (is it free promotion or theft?), and I have been brewing on a post about this topic on my own for a little while now. I wrote a long comment to her with my thoughts about this, and even though I do not want this blog to turn into a blog with long and lengthy text entries (I will leave that up to the people who can actually write), here are my thoughts about copyright and pictures on the internet:

When I first checked in on the internet 10 – 15 years ago things were very different than what they are today. A lot of people were stealing my pictures left and right, making fake myspace-profiles (pretending they were me), using my images as background images on livejournal and xanga (and claiming that they took the images themselves), people who made photo manipulations from my pictures on deviantart, etc. There is nothing quite like finding your very own fake myspace profile stating that you are, in fact, a Russian heterosexual woman aged 33 named Olga who likes to dance and also like young guys with big sixpacks on myspace. Gee. I got really angry and asked them to remove my pictures whenever I saw my pictures used without permission.

But – just a couple of years later, something new happened on the internet. Instead of stealing my pictures and claiming them as their own, more people wanted to post my pictures on their websites, but link back to me to give me credit. This made me confused – maybe the people who took my images weren’t all lying, stealing bastards after all?

And then tumblr arrived in the internet world. I started to not give a damn. My pictures were not really mine to control anymore. But people reposted them because they liked them. I started to think «God damn – If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em!». So I made a tumblr-account as well. I found out that I really enjoyed making collections of pretty little treasures I found on the internet – it was like a beautiful scrapbook, without all the messy glue and glitter all over the floor.

And I guess my final thought is – I think I am mostly happy that other people like what I do enough to want to repost it. (This does of course not mean that I think it should be ok when people blatantly steal pictures, when people don’t credit, when people take pictures I explicitly do not want them to take, when people pretend to be me, or when people claim that they took my pictures themselves to get kudos for something they didn’t do.) I wish that people who take pictures and draw would be a little more grateful that other people find our pictures nice enough to show them attention. Isn’t that the reason why we post our pictures on the internet? If we didn’t want to show them off, we could have kept them on our computers.

I have decided to use various licenses on sushibird.com, instead of just saying that “everything is © and you are mean if you take my stuff”. There are a few things which can not be reposted on sushibird.com (specifically: photographs depicting people, please don’t take those), but most of the other content at sushibird.com is licensed under various CC-licenses. You can look at the terms of use page if you want the details on what content you can reuse and for what purposes.

So, this is my little call out to the internet, hoping that people who take pictures, draw or illustrate will loosen up a little, and maybe open up for some sort of re-use of their pictures instead of slapping on a  hardcore © symbol on all of their pictures by default, without giving it any thought.

You can read more about the various CC-licenses on creativecommons.org

/end soapbox.