#I'm also going to name some of mine

[zetsubobu]

What's a character that is unpopular in the fandom that you're in but you actually like them?

[lazylittledragon]

so uhhhhhhhh. not to be cryptic and bitchy on main but congratulations to everyone in my messages for like 5 months on being right i guess

[keeps-ache]

oo midnight beauty [opening the container] how romantic (stealing grapes)

[doubleedgemode]

I wanted to go on a drawing spree yesterday, but I could only muster these two before dozing off.

First one, even if I'm not that sure about how I drew her face shape in this angle (and most importantly I forgot her neck and torso bandages OOPS) I do really like how most of the drawing came out. And at least it isn't a bland bust this time, though I'm pretty sure I've already drawn a pose like this before. (Oh no the next drawing is a 3/4 bust again..)

Second, yesterday I saw an artist draw some of the coolest redesigns ever for a different media piece, and thought about the many awesome gg redesigns I often see so I wanted to give A.B.A a spin... Except I was out of ideas so most of this drawing is her regular design haha. I got too tired to even try to attempt to draw the rest of the body and half-assed the key but I like the vibes and pose (even if I.. think I made her neck a bit too long? Old habits die hard... Necks are my enemies when drawing!)

I like the idea of her having a key take on the classic frankenstein bolts (though wait, her head key is referred to as a screw. Would this also be a screw or key shaped bolts??-)

[look-at-the-stars-tonight]

been thinking about inheritance and legacy and how I'm never gonna really know half of my family

[bigandsoft]

Been in a little bit of an art slump recently, being sick this week has not helped that productivity at all. On top of that I've been having a bit of a gender crisis recently (still nonbinary, just, now leaning a lot more androgynous) so I've really just been wanting to lean more into drawing more bodies/characters than just feminine-to-androgynous

I might start posting sketches? Unfinished things that aren't expected to be finished. I need to experiment with stuff too like brushes, colors, etc. All this braindump to say, expect more unfinished stuff and more body types. Just really in a body appreciation mood rn

[gentlenotes-moved]

i remember quite a long time ago when i was like 8 and i was at my grandma's house crying about something small and i was so confused why i was so upset about it. my grandma said "well, you might be angry about a lot of things right now, and it's all building up" and i sat there thinking that that was the most idiotic thing i've ever heard. but like. 10 years later and i'm in the exact situation she was describing.

[annieisyourfavourite]

i performed a Thornton Wilder play last night and his nephew was in the audience. the playwright's nephew. who helps run the estate. saw me play the show

[keeps-ache]

m back on mobile :D

[chiefmauskateer]

<3

Sometimes I say self loathing things to my therapist and he looks at me dead in the eyes before saying “You fucking moron.” and tbh same

[am-ace-stelaire]

hmmmm

OC ask meme: drawing studies

Tag the post with the names of your Original Characters when you reblog it, so that people can request a specific one, if they want to.

🖐️ - draw your OC’s hand or hands. What’s distinctive about them?

🥾- draw your OC’s boots. Not shoes - boots. In what circumstances do they wear them?

💃 - character in their dance, party or wedding outfit.

🐝 - character with their daemon (or animal familiar.)

🌈 - represent the colour palettes used in your OC’s clothing.

🎨 - represent the colours you use to draw your OC - hey, this might be a useful reference…

👶 - OC in their youth; or, if they didn’t have one, at the beginning of their journey; this may be shown as background.

👵 - character shown older, or if they do not age, at the end of their journey; this may be shown as background.

🗝️ - character depicted with something revealing of their personality, secrets or motivations.

👜 - Personal items carried by or associated with your OC, in an arrangement, labelled.

🦺 - character’s work uniform or work outfit. If they don’t work, reinterpret or take 🎭

🎭 - character study (happy) and character study (sad), presented together.

🪞- draw character with a mask or mirror used to represent an aspect of themselves.

🤟 - drawing representing the culture, native language, national origin, or other formative influence of the character.

🏇 - drawing based on most recent emoji + your character.

[unproduciblesmackdown]

also, with all that knowledge now about 7th through 9th xmas shows vis-à-vis the hicks & the krampuses, seeing 12th annual xmas's flashback joe iconis afresh like Aha

on the basis of overalls alone maybe i'd think nothing of it but with the white tank top also & knowing "yeah, this wouldn't be a coincidence that nobody thought about & yeah, they would do an homage thusly" exactly as i did when i saw the bloodsong role being named Hick In Overalls & went wait a minute, photo recollection of "who's this xmas role in overalls i wonder? especially memorable in this case b/c [standing, saluting] when they seemingly crop up again going extra hard as a virgin mary dancer" like if that happened to also be jeremy morse then that wouldn't be a coincidence that nobody thought about & yeah they would do an homage thusly....definite twelfth annual it's like i can still hear his voice stop telling people i'm dead Reference there / plausibly kinda role mashup with flashback joe lol

while i'm here, also just enjoyed these twelfth annual sweet baby jesus pics b/c it's heartwarming when people are just going i am looking directly at it & great when there's people clearly cracking the fuck up at any point in the show

[mx-pastelwriting]

Saving My Fanfiction Work

First. Side note: This post was only intended to give resources to fanfiction writers and enjoyers. My talk on recent political events was a context/reasoning on why I made this post. Also I’ve had to add more information to this post over time due to people’s confusion in my comments. Explaining it was to make sure that this post didn’t come off as out of the blue for my followers and this community. Which is fanfiction.

Also, why I made this post was from people asking if they could download my fanfiction because of the recent political events in America hence why I named it “saving my fanfiction work” and added my context. So this was also a post to tell people that liked my fanfiction they could download it as long as it was for their personal collection. I merely just wanted to list resources to people who wanted to download fanfiction and don’t know where to start or don’t have the immediate resources. I’m not here to fear-monger. I am just giving resources and the reasoning on why I’m giving them along with urging people to look into those information/recent events as staying aware is important. I respect everybody who’s given their opinion and yes, some of my grammar in this post is not adequate as this post was merely made for giving/stating resources.

Lastly, I will no longer update this post with comments as I’ve said my peace, nor will I pay attention to the notifications as they are muted. As my page is for fanfiction not politics. Thank you for the people in this community who share this post for the resources see you around the tags! Stay safe friends!!✨ Remember I love you! And you are loved!💛

-

Due to the recent events in the United States. To clarify the recent events being Trump becoming president of the United States, Project 2025 more than likely going to be integrated. If you are not familiar with Project 2025 I urge you to look it up.

Along with the KOSA bill that has many problems and it has passed the senate now needing the finally vote in the house, which both are majority red. Go here to learn more on why it needs to be stopped and how you can. This is another component that will harm our communities. Go to: stopkosa.com

With all of its harmful plans some of the plans are to take down/restrict internet sites that have LGBTQ+ communities that means communities like the fan-fiction communities/sites in the United States.

I am only giving resources to those inside and out of the US in case they banned sites that hold fan-fiction. Better safe than sorry.

Being that I live in the US the possibly of mine and many others Fanfiction has the possibly of being in danger. Therefore I'm giving you recourses. (I'm not leaving or stopping my writing, I'm here for the fight!)

For those wanting to save my fanfiction, I give you permission to download them off of AO3 and to be used for your personal collection. Meaning, your eyes only. To clarify I’m saying this as others have asked if they could download my fanfic so for those who would like to you can.

If you do not know how to download them many others on online have tutorials on how to download them and add them to our phone libraries.

Here are some links to tutorials:

Downloading Fanfic

Adding to Iphone & Android Library

Adding to Kindle Library - Video on How (On TikTok)

Adding Book Covers (At the bottom) - Good EPUB Cover Changer (I use this)

Types of Files and What they mean

Please stay safe out there! Remember to follow the rules below.

DO NOT share the downloaded file anywhere online.

DO NOT repost the downloaded file under your name.

Fanfiction is protected under copyright law when plagiarism is involved. If you plagiarize my work, either a piece or whole in any language, I will take legal action. Inspiration or the same idea does NOT apply to this, only word-for-word plagiarism in any language.

♥ mx-pastelwriting does not consent to their fanfiction being copied, copied & credited, translated, used in videos and/or audios, screenshotted, used in AI, or reposted on any other platform without permission.

♥ mx-pastelwriting does give consent to "reblog," sharing links to direct work, and being in recommend lists.

Please stay safe out there friends! I love you so much! Know that there will always people that love you and in for the fight to make sure you are loved!

And here are some resources in case you don’t feel okay! Resources here

[dilfosaur]

well i haven't spilled my guts on tumblr since i was in college but it's the platform that's felt The Most Mine thru the years, so

let's talk!

i've had a huge chip on my shoulder that i wanted off before the year ends. very bad professional experience to follow

so firstly to get ahead of the speculating, i'm not naming names or anything. some of you will puzzle out who i'm talking about, but please don't bother anyone especially not on my behalf. i've worked hard to distance myself from them the past few months. shit happens, especially when you're a dumb bitch (that's me!)

but also this person was someone i considered a close friend and it makes me uneasy to possibly direct backlash at them. "then why post about it" bc i did intermittent work for them for over a year. this is just about that. so hear me out

basically it started off fine. i initially did some commission work for good pay, then was invited to become more involved with their team. unfortunately as i became more involved with their operation it became more disorganized over time. projects started then forgotten, constantly shifting schedules, lapsing communication between roles, confusing financials, and often inconsistent if not late payments. during mid 2023 i was doing colorist work, sometimes on a one day turnaround (all while also preparing drawfee's summer merch launch). the payroll wasn't set up correctly so i wasn't paid for that work for over a year (more on that later), tho to be fair that was largely my own fault at first as i just didnt realize the payments didn't go thru lol

i always consider myself decently capable of separating friendship and coworker-ship; i run a company with 4 wonderful friends, going strong for almost 5 years. that didn't really work out in this case. by early this year our friendship was on the rocks; work issues fed into personal issues and vice versa. so as the rest of this shit plays out, we had just had our first "big fight" which i felt very bad about and added to all the upcoming tension

a huge point of friction was the fact that i really wanted to work with them to make a music video for one of their songs. i've always wanted a chance to make a music video, was confident in a concept i came up with, and even did some concept art for the idea. everyone insisted they loved the concept and that we should do it, but we kept pushing it back for various reasons. it ended up becoming a huge sticking point for my frustrations, which i tried to express productively. TLDR, we eventually got around to discussing it seriously around april.

i planned to ask for $4000 with negotiable add-on for the whole project, which was my Friend Discount price. i was offered a contract for $1000 flat rate, as they insisted that was the only budget they had for it.

don't ask me why i signed it lol. i didn't even counter offer

there was some girlmath to it: i wanted an extra 1k for a student scholarship i provide every spring and well, there it was. but if i had to guess, i saw it as something i just couldn't back down from any more. i caused these folks- my friends- a lot of problems bc i dug my heels in so deep to chase this project, so fuck it we ball

i had about 4 months to solo a 3 minute music video. they wanted it done in august so they could release it before summer ended, bc "it was a summer song". to be fair i was asked if i needed them to pay for anything extra like assistants (which i would have to find and manage) but i was so immediately overwhelmed that i didn't wanna slow down to wait on that process lol. there was very minimal communication other than brief progress check-ins every few weeks. i did everything for that project myself: the original concept, character designs, storyboards, layouts, backgrounds. i even did the editing/compositing for the final cut of the MV. the only favor i did myself was limiting the amount of it that was actually animated to simple loops and motions. hardly my best work but it was work still done

i did it all in between my full time job. i ended up having to take nearly a month away from most of my drawfee duties (with the support of the others) to make the august deadline. i only ever asked for a 3 day extension (notice given about a week in advance, around the same time i was given the final song file lol). i finished the music video at 6am on the final deadline and recorded drawfee the next day on 2 hours of sleep

but it was done, coolies. the team was very happy with the final product. honestly, without getting into it, those were a very emotionally taxing 4 months. on the professional side, i regretted agreeing to the project and especially for the dogshit rate they offered. i felt like a hypocrite- as someone who always wanted to advocate for younger artists demanding their worth in a world that's getting increasingly hostile toward creatives, i failed myself

so when i met with the manager to discuss the release plan, i told them to do whatever worked best for them as i only had one request: i wanted my credit removed from the project

tbh... like... lmao this dramatic bitch right!! but really, i decided that bad practices only breed worse business. friends or not, it was unprofessional of me to accept such a low paying job so i just didn't want my name used in association. everything felt so muddled to me and i was just really tired at this point

the manager was very understanding and then offered that i could be paid more. they said that their team "was surprised" i accepted their low rate and they would be happy to up the amount. this confused me as the initial budget seemed pretty set and at no point between april and august was i offered a better rate. i knew these guys weren't made of money. so, i declined. i didn't want to put anyone out of their means over work that was already done and agreed upon. but more importantly, i was over the whole thing and didn't want to prolong the project with a contract renegotiation. i just insisted my name be removed

they decided to use a pseudonym (which i was fine with) so they could create a story about a character who made the MV (this sounds really convoluted but i don't know how better to put it without getting specific, sorry). that way if people asked about the credit, they could speak comfortably about it without signaling that something went wrong behind the scenes. ok, kind of a silly narrative imo but whatevs. and maybe this is where i finally went truly wrong but. yolo i guess

i gave the name "D. Smithee", D as in dilfosaur and Smithee as in Alan Smithee. look it up for fun film trivia ig! was it passive aggressive of me to reference that in this context? yeah, honestly. but i thought it was kinda funny and really not that deep. if it was a problem, i have other real, non-cheeky pseudonyms i regularly use. the manager accepted it and all i had to do was wait for them to post the video and i could leave the whole experience behind me

a week later i received a message from the manager that my pseudonym had been denied by the rest of the team bc one of them got the reference. fair enough lol. however, they decided that rather than ask for a different name, the were going to make one up for me that they liked and would "fit the [story]", without asking me

and that! is when i finally snapped!

i was so tired of giving them concessions at this point and having a credit made up for me without any input from me felt genuinely violating and unethical. i started to Panic bc of how stressed i was, and asked for my overdue payments (aka the $500 still owed on the MV, and the colorist rate from a year prior that was never paid even tho i reported it in january) to be scheduled ASAP as i was leaving the work discord immediately

i finally told them off for exploiting me throughout the months while i kept trying to just be nice and finish my contact cleanly. in return i was told that it was unfair to say that as i agreed to everything- i accepted their cheap rate and denied further payment so that was all settled, and it was ok to change my credit without my consent bc i "said they could do whatever with the release". i called bullshit, ended the convo as kindly as i could, and cried lol. they agreed to ditch the pseudonym and just give no credit. that night was the last i heard from anyone on that team

and the real kicker?

august came and went. then september, october... and they never released the music video

and i don't know why, because i was never contacted about it. i've been removed from the picture entirely i guess. 4 months and boatloads of stress. just. up in smoke. i don't know what i expected honestly

it's hard to not take everything that happened personally and as done in bad faith. i really do, honestly. i've had plenty of shitty deals in my almost 10 year art career, but it hits different from people you saw as friends. but to the point of "why not keep it private", i have never felt so disrespected as a professional as i did this past year. i can toy with money and credits and other formalities all i want, but my work- my ideas, my labor, my effort- is still so important to me. i felt like the biggest idiot for doing so much work, pouring so much of myself into a piece for someone's use, for what has amounted to nothing

but more importantly i hated myself for undervaluing my work, even if initially i thought this person was a trusted friend. money is not really an issue for me- drawfee is my main job and i am fine and comfortable. it's so important to pay artists appropriately but i often undersell my own work bc i value the collaboration and passion between creatives more than the reward. i think a lot of artists tend to feel the same, and it often makes us easy to take advantage of. it's so difficult to find the balance between passion and making a fair living, and i think there's some shame within ourselves when artists choose to prioritize that passion

i wanted to finally get all this off my chest bc i was ashamed of every choice i made. things like this happen all the time i'm sure and hiding these mistakes only make it easier for it to happen to other people

tldr always value your work and protect your passion from people who just see it as a product. and don't give cheeky pseudonyms i guess lol

(and again pls don't bother anyone involved about this. a lot of chaos has left my life as i moved past all this, and this is me closing a door without opening new ones hopefully lol)

this shit was truly

so ass.

but i'm moving past it now

but on a nicer note. outside of all of this nonsense, i made lots of good memories this year. i'm truly so grateful to the many wonderful people in my life who keep me going even when i fuck up big time!

and thank you to all of you strangers who, despite everything, give me the time of day. especially if you read this whole thing. you're a real one :')

happy new year!

[mikimeiko]

I was watching LadyNightTheBrave's video on Twelfth Night (good video, I really enjoyed it) and there was one version of Viola that I found particularly compelling so I went to check who the actor was and IT WAS FUCKING JOHNNY FLYNN why does this man keep appearing unexpectedly in my life, why does he hold such power on my psyche

[hedgehog-moss]

I have been procrastinating on everything this spring so far, including very important things like picking dandelions to make honey. I ran into the owner of the pasture next to mine in town the other day and he said he was going to bring out his cows soon, and asked if everything was OK with the water trough, and I was like ... 😨 the dandelions!!!

I had to get there before the cows. It might sound heartless of me, especially with regard to that one cow named Pissenlit who, as her name suggests, loves eating dandelions, but I have responsibilities. I mean, giving my mums and friends dandelion honey used to be a surprising gift that drew admiring comments, but now it's my job. Now it's "I'm thinking of visiting in mid-April, will the dandelions be out? so I can pick up My Jar, the one I Expect To Receive." I enjoy giving people homemade stuff to be clear, I'm just trying to explain why I couldn't make room in my heart for Pissenlit as I raided the neighbour's pasture the day before she & the other cows arrived.

Also I was listening to a good audiobook while harvesting and it made picking 1000+ dandelions feel quicker than usual—I gathered enough for 15 jars 😊

I added oranges this year rather than grapefruits, and used a bit more sugar, because I'd received some feedback that last year's vintage tasted too bitter. I hadn't realised "too bitter" was a thing, I personally find solace in arugula and adore quinine and chocolate that tastes medicinal. So after straining the dandelion mixture I separated it into two saucepans, a large one and a small one, and I made Cheerful Jelly for people who don't like the taste of their own regrets and a couple of jars of Bitter Jelly for me personally. It goes great with bedtime herbal tea! A couple of spoons added to your mug make your chamomile tea feel somewhat disappointed in you. It's the flavour of late-night introspection.