sessilywatt - Tumblr blog

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13 August 2024: We spent a lot of time these past couple weeks watching the Olympics, especially fencing, cycling, and canoeing, with some football too.

Image description: The photo shows my sketchbook clipped open with a silver binder clip. On the open page is a pen and ink sketch of a room with a TV, shelves, and a keyboard. The text on the page says “Paris Olympics from our TV room.”

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8 August 2024: Not much energy for in-depth sketching, so here are some small sketches while watching the Olympics.

Image description: Photo shows a sketchbook page with small pen and ink sketches of: a paper bag, a person working on crop art, a cat, a chair behind the edge of a keyboard, and a television on a low table.

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25 July 2024: Finished inking my sketch from Saturday of a basswood tree in Como Park. This may be my favorite sketch so far! The whole process felt so satisfying from the first pencil mark to the final dots of ink.

Image description: My sketchbook is propped up on a red shelf against a white wall. A black elastic band on the right holds the page open to a black and white sketch of a tree with two cars parked in front of it.

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20 July 2024: I started this sketch while cars circled the lot in search of an open spot and bugs circled me pleased to have found a stationary source of blood. I got through the pencil and started on ink before the bugs got to be too much. Sketching is an extreme sport.

Image description: The first photo shows a sketchbook on grass with a partially inked sketch of a tree and two parked cars. The second photo shows the same sketch in pencil held up in front of trees and parked cars.

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In which my uncle is the best de facto parent of a queer kid ever

It’s Pride, and also the first anniversary of my uncle’s death, so I want to type up a story about him. (NB: my aunt, his wife, is equally cool, but she’d want this story to be about him too.) So here goes.

I skipped town when I was 16. Nothing interesting about that part; just standard queer kid in a conservative place in the 1990s stuff. I’d just gotten my driver’s license (this took a while; I’m good at other things), it was the beginning of summer break, and my parents had recently bought a new car and were planning to fix up their old one to sell. In the meantime, the old car (whom I’d named Harold Godwinson because one of his headlights kept exploding) was sitting all by himself in a corner of the driveway, and I thought he might be down for a little adventure. So, one night, I threw some stuff in my backpack (documents, journals, a few changes of clothes, my $235 in babysitting cash) and snuck out after everyone else in the house had gone to sleep.

Harold Godwinson and I hit the highway. The thing about him was that he started shaking violently at speeds over 57 mph, but in fairness so did I – I’d driven on the interstate in driver’s ed, but, like, twice, and for 5 minutes at a time instead of several consecutive hours – so we made a good pair. We were lucky enough (seriously: I cannot stress enough how lucky we were in this) to have a destination in mind, and we reached it just as the sun was coming up.

My uncle was in the kitchen making breakfast for my aunt, who’s not a morning person, and he did not look surprised at all to see me coming up the path with my luggage. He met me at the door and said, “Well, hey there babygirl, we were just thinking you might want to come and stay with us for a while, and I’m so glad you read our minds.” I ate my aunt’s breakfast and then faceplanted in the attic bedroom while he called my parents to tell them where I was and that I’d be staying. (I could hear the yelling even through the adrenaline crash; I think that’s the only time I ever heard my uncle yell and, believe me, I did a LOT of dumb shit in front of him over the years.)

The next week my uncle and I went out to run an errand. I’d thought we were just going to the hardware store – we were forever putting up shelves together – but instead we drove 45 minutes to the state’s only “alternative” (plausible-deniability term for “gay and lesbian”) bookstore. He walked me inside, poked his head into every room while I watched, confused, from the entrance hall, and then came back over. “Okay, babygirl. Here’s a twenty, you should, uhhhhhh, buy yourself some, uhhhhhh, alternative books. Back in one hour, I gotta go to the grocery.” At this point he looked around and realized that the cashier (who, I was about to learn, was permanently cosplaying Mo from Dykes to Watch Out For) and a nice middle-aged lesbian couple were trying very hard not to stare at him. He bowed slightly toward them, said “Ladies,” and then backed out the door in what might have been the most awkward little shuffle ever.

“Your dad is really sweet,” said the cashier. I didn’t bother correcting her.

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13 July 2024: The bunnies are too bold this year!

The image shows my sketchbook resting on a red shelf against a white wall. A pencil and pen are lined up in front of the sketchbook. The sketchbook shows a sketch of a garden and a rabbit. Bandit is written across the top of the page and under the rabbit are the words: Caught 3 times in the raised bed.

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30 June 2024: Studies in colored pencil.

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23 June 2024: Little sketches while feeling under the weather.

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had an interaction with a cat at my mother's friend's house (we dropped by to feed her while my mom's friend was out of town) and my mother said "i was surprised how much that cat liked you, she doesn't usually let people pet her but she followed you around and let you pet her a lot"

and in explaining to her my interaction with the cat i put into words a thing i'd never put into words before, having always automatically understood what i was doing. But once i put it into words my mother said she'd never thought of that and it felt like something worth sharing here.

This cat did a typical cat thing where she sniffed my fingers i was holding out, and then acted like she wanted me to pet her, but then when i started to move to pet her, moved her head away slightly to prevent it.

I instinctively understand this interaction, and stopped trying to pet her and moved back to a neutral position and waited to see if she would re-initiate an interaction.

Because this is basically a consent test. This is how a cat can assess "how closely are you paying attention to what i'm telling you" and "how respectful of my boundaries are you".

If i am responsive to her yes/no game, moving to pet her when she indicates i can, stopping immediately when she seems to change her mind, then she knows she can trust me to understand her, and also to respect her choices. That's what i did, so then she knew she could trust me and relax around me and enjoy my company. She was actually a very friendly and social little cat, who clearly wanted to make friends with me.

But if i had insisted on trying to pet her when she seemed to change her mind instead of simply understanding that she didn't want to be pet in that moment, she would have known she couldn't trust me to understand or respect her, and she would have treated me like she has to treat 90% of the people who visit that house, evidently.

I work mostly with dogs these days, but i grew up with cats too, and am generally good with animals. Many shy animals will also do this same "sniff sniff okay touch me nope just kidding" routine, especially if they've had experiences with people that make establishing that kind of communication and trust important to them.

And in fact, a lot of animals will do some version of this kind of consent test in a whole variety of situations. When well socialized dogs do that thing where they are rough housing and then they both stop suddenly for a moment until one of them play bows or makes a little pouncing motion and then they fly back into rough housing mode, that's what they are doing, they are doing a consent check-in, like "whoah this is getting wild, are you still in? are we still playing, is this still a good time for you?"

anyway, that's why this lovely little cat followed me around asking me to pet her the whole time we were visiting that house, because i showed her that i understood her signals and respected her boundaries, which is something i see a lot of both men and women not doing when interacting with cats and dogs.

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7 June 2024: I have been wanting to sketch this stately hackberry beside Como Lake in Saint Paul — and then it was damaged in a storm and given the ominous red ring. I had some time today to try and capture its presence.

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hot artists don't gatekeep

I've been resource gathering for YEARS so now I am going to share my dragons hoard

Floorplanner. Design and furnish a house for you to use for having a consistent background in your comic or anything! Free, you need an account, easy to use, and you can save multiple houses.

Comparing Heights. Input the heights of characters to see what the different is between them. Great for keeping consistency. Free.

Magma. Draw online with friends in real time. Great for practice or hanging out. Free, paid plan available, account preferred.

Smithsonian Open Access. Loads of free images. Free.

SketchDaily. Lots of pose references, massive library, is set on a timer so you can practice quick figure drawing. Free.

SculptGL. A sculpting tool which I am yet to master, but you should be able to make whatever 3d object you like with it. free.

Pexels. Free stock images. And the search engine is actually pretty good at pulling up what you want.

Figurosity. Great pose references, diverse body types, lots of "how to draw" videos directly on the site, the models are 3d and you can rotate the angle, but you can't make custom poses or edit body proportions. Free, account option, paid plans available.

Line of Action. More drawing references, this one also has a focus on expressions, hands/feet, animals, landscapes. Free.

Animal Photo. You pose a 3d skull model and select an animal species, and they give you a bunch of photo references for that animal at that angle. Super handy. Free.

Height Weight Chart. You ever see an OC listed as having a certain weight but then they look Wildly different than the number suggests? Well here's a site to avoid that! It shows real people at different weights and heights to give you a better idea of what these abstract numbers all look like. Free to use.

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Bittern at the grocery store

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Someone at tumblr/automattic asked whether requests to opt out of "AI" data sharing would be honored retroactively (which seems important, seeing as tumblr has apparently compiled the user data they're going to send *before* giving any kind of opt-out option) and Automattic's head of "AI" Andrew Spittle responded:

We will notify existing partners on a regular basis about anyone who's opted out since the last time we provided a list. I want this to be an ongoing process where we regularly advocate for past content to be excluded based on current preferences. We will ask that content be deleted and removed from any future training runs. I believe partners will honor this based on our conversations with them to this point. I don't think they gain much overall by retaining it.

And I do not trust midjourney or openai in the slightest--their business models, by their own admission, depend on scraping art they don't have permission to use--so I do not believe that they will honor any requests to remove data already received when requests are made to remove it. So yeah. take that as you will.

Edit

about 20 minutes after I posted this, @staff put out this:

They do not acknowledge that they are definitely actually in the process of selling your data to third parties, but they have a setting which (they claim) will prevent them from sharing information with third parties, including "AI" training businesses.

I've turned it on, but tumblr has burned so much trust that I really don't have faith that tumblr will actually change the package of information that will be provided to these third parties based on the setting: tumblr/automattic must know that "AI" art theft is tremendously unpopular with a huge portion of tumblr, and that having this setting (even with a "you must know about it to use it" opt out setting) will result in a bunch of users setting theirs to "off" which will diminish the value of the sale.

I don't think tumblr will honor this setting.

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Ivan Pokhitonov (Ukrainian,1851-1924)  

The Cat, c.1878

Oil on board

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16 February 2024: Little snippets of sky. (And wonky lettering.)

I recently finished Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann. From Chapter 5: “It was a tedious process. Sir Ritchfield could count only up to ten, and not always that, so the sheep had to stand in small groups. There were arguments, because some sheep would claim they hadn’t been counted yet, while Richfield said yes, he had counted them already. All the sheep were afraid of being missed out of the count, because then they might disappear. Some of them tried to steal into other groups on the sly so as to be counted twice. Richfield bleated and snorted and finally came to the conclusion that there were thirty-four sheep in the meadow in all.

“They looked at one another, at a loss. Only now did they realize they had no idea how many sheep there really ought to be in the meadow. The figure so laboriously worked out was completely useless to them.

“It was a great disappointment. They’d hoped they would feel safer after the count.”

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IX - The Hermit

Pen and ink on Arches paper

5" x 7"

Completed for a Tarot show opening later this month.