Caoimhe

Picmixen

Caoimhe ⬥

Picmix is a website for making GIF collages. If you’ve seen square GIFs of anime characters drowning in glitter and surrounded by rapidly animating icons and text it was probably made with Picmix. The typical aesthetic leans extremely girly and overloaded; the digital equivalent of a scrapbook page covered in magazine cutouts, glitter and stickers. It is very charming (though sadly the current front page of the site seems to be flooded with AI art).

Last year on Cohost (R.I.P.) Freja asked me what my favourite planet was and my reply was “♃”. This is mostly just vibes and associations with fictional characters that I have great fondness for: Lita Kino from Sailor Moon1, Jupiter from We Know the Devil, and it would be nice to round this out with a third example but actually it’s only those two2. But also the planet is cool and I like the astrological symbol.

But thinking on those vibes, that loose collection of associations that still resulted in an immediately clear preference it made me want to make something to tie together these Jupiters: The planet, the Sailor and the Devil-knower. And even though I had never actually used Picmix before that type of silly, sparkly, collage seemed like just the thing.

A collage of sparkly GIFs of Sailor Jupiter, Jupiter from We Know the Devil, the planet Jupiter and the astrological symbol for Jupiter.

The Sailor Jupiter, rotating planet and glow around the edges were pulled from Picmix but I actually put it together using Aseprite. These is an artisanal GIF collage. The central Jupiter picture (that I also use as an avatar now) was made by putting the cover art for We Know the Devil through Luna Pic’s glitteriser. The little tin sample cube is because tin is the planetary metal associated with Jupiter in alchemy. I actually have a similar cube of copper in my house next to a replica Ea-nāṣir complaint tablet that I have on my wall. Perhaps I should get a tin one as well.

A little while later I decided to make a similar collage for Blaze the Cat, my favourite Sonic the Hedgehog character.

A collage of GIFs of Blaze the Cat.
There are also a more minimalist and maximalist versions.

This one pulls from Picmix, The Spriters’ Resource and a GIF of Blaze running that I do not know the original source of that I cut the background out of frame-by-frame.

I never returned to making these but it was a lot of fun and perhaps the urge will strike me again at some point.

And let me know if there’s any other Jovian women that I should check out.

  1. I have no idea what original names of any of the characters are outside of Usagi/Serena. The part of Sailor Moon that matters to me is the English dub that I watched growing up. ↩

  2. Apparently there is a female villain in Pokémon Diamond and Pearl named Commander Jupiter and maybe I could get obsessed with her and add her to the list but also I don’t particularly want to play those games. ↩