#I'm far from professional; I'm still learning myself

[koeal]

I accidentally deleted an ask where someone asked for some art tips (whoever you were anon, I'm so sorry)

But I made this post still

All I ever posted here was fanart, so I will mostly focus on characters

1. Work on anatomy!

And from experience I know how hard it is to actually find out how to learn it, so here is little example

While knowing these few fun facts, you can experiment a lot!

For example, while people's eyes grow untill early 20's (around 8 milimeters since they are born), noses and ears never really stop growing. So while drawing babies - you can draw their eyes bigger; and while drawing elders - the bigger would be their ears and noses

1.2. Look for shapes!

Another example, because I don't know how to explain it

If it looks hard to you, don't worry, there are many tutorials online that will guide you!

2. Always have a reference!

And if you can't find a good one, I recommend taking picture of yourself! No one is going to see it besides you, right?

I also recommend tracing the reference first in shapes, boxes, as a stick man or whatever you prefer and then trying to recreate that sketch on a clear canvas

3. Follow many artists!

Just visit their page every so often, what is it that caught your attention? The way they color, the way they render? Maybe amazing backgrounds, awesome perspective? Some little details they put on every piece of art they make?

Maybe try using few of these on your art as well!

Also, it's pretty convenient in other ways as well - on platforms like Tumblr they can reblog art they like, and it's more likely for you to see more artstyles and techniques; on places like YouTube they often post speedpaints and tutorials you can take a look at!

Well, these are the main ones, but I will write some other things I can think of:

↳ While rendering, lower opacity of your brush

↳ Sometimes you can try to challenge yourself to use 1. As many brushes as you can or 2. As little brushes as you can (If you are new to art, it can help you find your favorites!:D)

↳ It's good to study a bit of everything - hands, neck, shoulders, back, feet, arms.. You get what I mean!

But it's nice to work on some other things from time to time as well! Try drawing a strawberry, a bunny, some flowers!

↳ If you can't understand how something works, try looking at human skeleton and muscles!

↳ While shading, color of your shadow will be on the opposite side of color wheel from the light (that means if your light is yellow, your shadow will be purple)

↳ Don't be afraid to step out of your comfort zone! Try new things, experiment!

I wasn't sure what type of tips you were asking for but I hope I helped at least a little<33

[justliketoreadsowhat]

Delusion Of Jealousy ꨄ

✰ this was a request from my Wattpad I abandoned, but I thought it’d be fitting since I’m still stuck on the leg sleeve physique ✰

oh!! and another thing, where the FICS AT?? I’m seeing a whole bunch of yapping and not enough strapping, no put intended ya’ll be killing me with the sm!ut. Where did all my good reads go?? I know the girls know how to WRITE. Either imma be fed with good literature or imma start feeding myself, that’s it that’s all.

ꨄꨄꨄꨄꨄ

—————

"𝐓𝐇𝐀𝐓'𝐒 𝐆𝐀𝐌𝐄 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐘𝐎𝐔 𝐊𝐍𝐎𝐖 𝐈𝐓!" 𝐏𝐚𝐢𝐠𝐞 𝐬𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐦𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐬 𝐬𝐡𝐞 𝐣𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐭 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐚𝐟𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐲𝐞t 𝐚𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐟𝐚𝐢𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐩𝐭 𝐚𝐭 𝐛𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐝𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚 𝟏𝐯𝟏 𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐜𝐡 𝐮𝐩.

You were never the athletic type of person but when it comes to Paige begging you to participate in her antics, you can't ever deny her. If it made her happy, you'd be down to do whatever.

"Alright that's enough of taunting me, you're a professional! It's just the inevitable" you sighed watching her dribble the ball with ease toward your feet.

"Aw don't sound so defeated mama, you just gotta get your skill game right" she stated in a confident tone. Her face twisted up into a sly smirk. Those "skills" she yapped about were far too out of your reach, but not because you didn't learn them, Paige just had a horrible way of teaching you them, at least in your defense she did.

"Well maybeee if you had enough patience to properly teaching me these amazing skills, I could probably beat you-"

Your statement laced with attitude was halted as you felt the strong impact of a basketball hitting your back. Spinning around on your feet nearly losing your balance from the unexpected force, who was no other than KK.

"DID I SCARE YOU POOKIE?!" She laughed pulling you into a tight hug. You solo forget about the stinging sensation you felt on your back. You absolutely adored KK but in all honesty, who doesn't??? Her energy always remains unmatched and unhinged.

"Not really but you definitely got stronger during this offseason cause that hit was low-key a little strong" You pulled back from the hug tugging at her arms in amusement.

"Girl boo now you're just yapping" She put your hand in your face dramatically and turned to Paige who was unimpressed by the conversation. "Fix your face Bueckers you know you're happy to be in my presence" she beamed twirling her twists in her face. "Why y'all are in here anyways ? Looking all sour-faced?"

You giggle at KK's words "Nothing much, just another day of me getting beat in a matchup by yours truly" you shrug nudging Paige in her side.

"Don't let her fool you, girl, she just likes to win at everything- she's not THAT good" The strong empahsis in her tone made a light bulb go off in your head.

"Now why are going to sit here and lie??" Paige questioned laughing at the statement. The two of them hardly ever took each other seriously, especially when it came to competition. "Baby the proof is in the pudding! Let me teach your girl how to win the right way" KK dramatically pushed Paige to the sidelines, flcking her forehead before running off towards you in pursuit, praying she wouldn't run after her.

"Woww I'm gonna get trained by the infamous KK Arnold, I'm so exciteddd" she giggled patting her shoulder playfully. Paige glared at the two of you with an unamused expression plastered on her face.

Kk cackled at the sight "Okay so boom we're just gonna ignore the big bear being mad over there, let me show you how a real one does it" dribbling the ball in between her legs swiftly, taking a smooth step back from the 3 point line, shooting the ball with her right hand, it drains into the net with ease. "BOOM! short, sweet, and simple" she beamed looking back at you.

You grabbed the ball attempting to mimic her dribbling skills but failed miserably. "Yeah, we're gonna need a little more practice I fear.." you said trailing off into uncertainty.

ꨄꨄꨄꨄꨄ

For the next 30 minutes, you and KK practiced dribbling and shooting the ball like your lives depended on it. You had become too engrossed with learning these skills, you failed to realize Paige had left the gym for god knows how long.

"I think I'm top 5 in the rankings now KK" you breathed out, "I gotta go find Paige".

"OH I know you are, don't forget to mention me when you win that Emmy award" she winked at me holding back her laughter. "Have fun tryna find P boogers"

How unserious can one human possibly be? because you were 100% certain she fit all the criteria for it. Shaking your head at your antics you gathered your purse and keys, dropping the basketball back on the rack, and headed out into the seemingly cold hallways of the facility. You thought you'd find her in the training room chilling but to your surprise, she was nowhere to be found.

Sighing to yourself, you pulled out your phone

𝐂𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠 "𝐏𝐚𝐢𝐠𝐞💜".......

"Oh! Are you done practicing with your partner for the final 4?  Done so soon?" her voice swarmed with annoyance.

"What happened to hello?, why are you being so rude about it we were all just having fun"  Confusion roamed throughout your mind, she never acted like this towards you.

The line went silent.

"Paige? hello?'

"We must have two different definitions of the term rude considering the fact that you didn't even care to notice that I left" her voice echoed from behind you. Swiftly turning around you saw her leaning in the doorway. Her cheeks flushed as if someone sliced the color out of them. She was livid.

"Paige it was all fun and gamessss" you whined hopelessly, "I was just preparing to get my payback for you beating me- "You stopped yourself mid-sentence as the awareness of her irritation wasn't irritation at all. "Aw P are you jealous??" you questioned as your face turned up into a smirk.

She kissed her teeth in annoyance "I'm not jealous y/n... be so fr right now" she scoffed.

"Yesss you are! There's no way you'd be upset over me trying to learn the sport that you love" you poked at her face laughing "You just want me to give you allll the attention hm?" cocking your head looking up at her, you knew you were right, but she'd never admit to it.

"Now you're just chatting" shaking her head in disbelief, playfully mushing your face.

"Your pride is too big for you to admit that your jealousy got the best of you babe, happens to the best of us I suppose"  Resting your head on her chest you smiling to yourself, you had her hooked. "Since you're so jealous I guess I'll go get Canes by myself, wouldn't wanna focus my attention on bringing someone else with me"

"Nah never that! I'm ready to go right now" she shot back at you as she lifted you up into her arms easily, a little too easy for your liking. You never understood how someone so small was able to lift weight like it's thin air.

"Mhm, that's what I thought" you emersed, softly kissing her temple.

ꨄꨄꨄꨄꨄ

________________________________________________________________

[moonstruckme]

Hi lovely!!! As I mentioned earlier, I apologize again do sending so many asks, I'm sick and stuck at home rn, so my brain has been working on overtime, so if I have an idea and think u might like it, I am sending them lol.

I wanted to know if u could write spencer x bau!reader, where reader is a technical analyst with Penelope for the team. But the last case was a pretty big one and she ended up sacrificing her sleep and needs to Penelope and everyone else could rest? So now that the case is over shes beng kinda stubborn and doesn't really wanna adress it, nor rest till she finishes the few remaining things?

Like always, you don't gotta write anything I request!!! I hope you've had a good week so far and get plenty of rest lol <333

Sincerely, :]

Hi sweetheart! No worries, send as many as you like! I'm just answering them at my own pace :)

Spencer Reid x bau!reader ♡ 876 words

“Hello my favorite genius.” Penelope snags Spencer by his sleeve just as he’s about to step into the elevator, using his momentum to swing him around and start him back the other direction. “I need you to get your ladylove out of my office—” she winces. “Our office. Sorry. Old habits, they do die hard.” 

“She’s still here?” Spencer asks, having learned long ago how to bulldoze through the fluff of conversations with Garcia. “I thought she’d be home already.” 

“Oh, no,” she says gravely, voice dropping to a whisper as they near the tech room. “I don’t think she’s been there in days. You cannot say anything, but she’s starting to smell.” 

Spencer prepares himself for the worst as the door opens, but all he finds is you, cute if a little bedraggled, hunched over your keyboard. 

“Hi,” he says tentatively when your glassed-over eyes don’t leave the screen. Your face is awash in blue light, blank but for the determined pinch of your mouth as you work. “Ready to go home?” 

“You can’t kick me out,” you say. Spencer blinks in surprise and a bit of hurt at your blunt tone before he realizes you aren’t speaking to him. “You can’t make him kick me out, either. I just have a few things left to do.”

“Very admirable work ethic,” Penelope shoots back, her own voice chipper with a steel edge, “but you’ve done plenty. We can finish this tomorrow.” 

You don’t stop typing even for a second. “Go home, Pen.” 

She gives Spencer an emphatic, helpless look behind your back, and he nods, signaling for her to go. She backs out of the room with her hands held up in front of her like she’ll need to ward you off, grabbing her bag and shutting the door behind her. 

“Hey.” Freed from the last constraints of professionalism, Spencer slips into his most honeyed tone. “Let’s get out of here, sweetheart. I’ve got a bed and a fridge full of almost-bad takeout waiting for us at home.” 

“Just a couple of things left to do,” you mutter, but your tone is considerably less hard than it had been with Penelope. 

“There will always be things left to do.” He walks up behind your chair, setting his hands on your shoulders and his chin on your head. You smell a bit stale, a sure tell you’ve been too long in this room, but nothing so bad as Penelope had warned him about. Just day-old you. “I may not know the full scope of things, but I know you’ve been working really hard on this case. You deserve some rest. You need some rest,” he amends. “Let me drive you home.” 

Something like longing flickers across your expression, but then it hardens back into resolve. “Thanks, Spence, but I can drive myself once I’m done.” 

Spencer decides to switch tactics. Oftentimes, the best way to get you to accept help is to let you think you’re actually helping someone else. He straightens and takes a couple of quick steps back from your desk with your chair in hand, rolling you with him.

“Hey!” you reach for your keyboard, but Spencer’s already swiveling your seat, turning you to face him. 

He sets his hands on the armrests. “Sweetheart, I just got off a four hour flight after a three day case. I’d really like to go home, but I’m not leaving here without you.” The divot between your eyebrows takes on a new character, frustration softening into sympathy. “And you haven’t even let me say a real hello.” 

A spark of happiness lights your eyes a second before they fall closed, face tipping up in eager anticipation as Spencer dips down to kiss you. It’s soft and lingering, and you rub your lips together self-consciously after it’s over, realizing how chapped they are. Spencer wonders when the last time you drank water was. 

“Sorry,” you say softly. “I didn’t mean to hold you up.” 

“You’re not,” he reassures you quickly, wanting you pliant but not guilty. “I mean, I don’t mind. Of course I don’t mind waiting for you. But are you ready to go now?” 

You cast a hesitant, skeptical look back at your computer, but Spencer smooths his thumb over the inside of your wrist, and you relent. “Yeah, okay. I just have to come back early tomorrow to finish up.” 

Spencer hums noncommittally. He was already planning on disabling your alarms after you’re asleep tonight. You need rest more than the higher-ups need your reports. You stand, grabbing your bag from under your desk and letting him shepherd you towards the door. 

“Do you think we could order some new takeout?” you ask him. 

“Good idea,” he agrees, somewhat relieved. “The stuff in the fridge has chicken in it, I don’t trust that.” 

Your laugh is somewhat lighter than usual, exhaustion setting in now that you’re out of your cave, but Spencer relishes the sound regardless. “Yeah, me neither. Pizza?” 

“Pizza,” he confirms. 

You make it all the way downstairs before your eyes flare and you spin around. “Shit, I think I left the light—”

“Nope.” Spencer takes you by the shoulders, steering you towards his car. “Someone else will take care of it.”

[rederiswrites]

I wrote this out for FB and then thought I might as well share it here as well. So if you have ADHD, are a late-diagnosed adult with ADHD, and most particular if you are a person with a uterus and/or have children, this one might be for you.

...

Last couple of days have been a little...weird. Let's start at the beginning. Buckle up and learn something.

As many of you already know, I have ADHD. It's a condition with a PR problem--a lot of people, often even medical professionals, have a very distorted idea of what it does, and a very limited one. For starters, it's not about parenting, or lead paint, or lack of discipline. It's genetic, *highly* heritable, starts in childhood and persists throughout life, and is a sufficiently severe disability that it comes with a decrease in life expectancy of up to 13 years. It is a visible difference that can be perceived in brain scans. These are all, at this point, well established and thoroughly attested in the scientific literature. ADHD affects up to 5% of the population and appears across cultures. It is very common.

It's not just about lack of attention--in fact, plenty of medical professionals think the name should be changed, as in fact the problem isn't the volume of attention but the way we struggle to direct it. We are motivated by interest, and struggle to properly weight future goals and consequences, specifically because they are in the future. If the robin outside the window is more immediately rewarding to our brain, we will watch that, and not the teacher. Our ability to properly weigh the consequences of that choice is negatively impacted by our own biochemistry.

We struggle with many of what are termed the "executive functions", the self management systems of the brain. Degree and presentation varies from person to person, but initiating tasks, completing tasks, staying ON task, restraining impulses, emotional regulation, and working memory are among the things impacted. My working memory is notoriously horrible. When they send you those activation codes on your phone? I often have to go back and read them out several times to enter a six digit number. I have to stop and remind myself what I'm doing between every step of my morning bathroom routine, or making tacos. Sometimes I take off my glasses to put on my contacts, reset, and reach for my pill bottles while I still can't see. My long-term memory is also affected, with my husband de facto serving as the memory-holder of the family.

Another common symptom I personally experience is "time blindness", which can mean both that you have no "internal clock" that has a clear idea of the passage of time, and that our ability to properly weight the importance of things in the future is impacted. So, for example, I can know intellectually what's coming, but it takes some really complex and exhausting antics to actually focus and work on those things if they're more than a week or sometimes even a couple days away.

Without externally imposed controls, many ADHD people flounder and fail to meet social markers of success. Estimates of how many ADHD people manage to complete college range from 5% to 15%. Again: 5% to 15%! I have failed twice myself. WITH externally imposed controls, ADHD people often have to work far harder to make their brains do what is required, and either fail and develop an image of themselves as failures (usually with plenty of external help), or keep fighting and suffer crippling burnout.

To that point, ADHD is HIGHLY comorbid with a whole range of knock-on conditions, some of which stem from the same brain patterns that give rise to the ADHD itself, and others from the trauma of living with a disability, but they include very high rates of depression, anxiety, fibromyalgia, social isolation, and addiction. I have dealt with depression, anxiety, and fibromyalgia my entire adult life. I have never ended up in the trap of self-medication but let's be real, that's partly about having supports and a healthy social environment. It's not some accomplishment I praise myself for, nor is addiction a sin I shame anyone for.

And anxiety has a very different texture to it when what you're really anxious about is the next time you fail in some catastrophic way. Lock your keys in the car. Completely space on a doctor's appointment. Go to pay for groceries and find that your wallet is next to your computer at home. Because the anxiety is not irrational fear of some generalized bad thing. These things do and will happen, regularly. Sometimes it feels like the only fix is getting good at recovering. Because no matter how many times you manage not to blow it, there's always another chance.

So, the struggle to be a reliable person, to be a consistent parent, to be a dependable life partner, is continuous. And it is so so so hard and it sometimes feels like you're not actually making any progress at all. I have tried therapy. I have tried three (or four??) different non-stimulant medications that sometimes help people. One of them DID help. ALL of them had catastrophic side effects. There were times as I was trialing these medications when I needed to be minded because I wasn't capable of taking care of anything, not even myself. Without Jacob, I don't know where I'd be. Not here. Probably in poverty, which is where he found me.

I have tried probably most organizational tools you know of. I have tried imposing schedules, all of which turned to dust and ash when the next fibromyalgia flareup or the next major life disruption happened. I don't think a new schedule has ever lasted a month before.

I HAVE felt like I'm made progress lately. I learned things that really helped my fibromyalgia, which gave me the space to work on other things--just like getting the borders of a puzzle finished. Enough things were spiraling upwards, and I think I might be cementing some gains. I have felt optimistic.

But in the meantime, I asked my doctor if, now that no less than three cardiologists have insisted my heart is Perfectly Healthy, I could finally try stimulant medications. After decades of use, Adderall, Ritalin, and a couple related stimulant drugs are still the gold standard for ADHD treatment and improve outcomes substantially for many people. And stimulants are in serious international shortage. Have been for many months. The only one she thought she could get me was Adderall. And she didn't dare try anything but the standard 30mg because nonstandard dosages would be even less attainable.

So now I'm taking Adderall. One week on 30mg, which I stopped when it was clear my function was being seriously impaired rather than improved. Reassessed with the doctor, now trying 60mg, because that's two of the pills I've already managed to obtain. It is....too much. And in some ways it fixes problems I wasn't working on, while so far making my executive function, my initiation or even *contemplation* of tasks, virtually nonexistant. Which was, of course, the thing I was trying to fix.

So yeah. When you have the context, I figure you can understand the substance of my frustration yourself. If you have children, I don't think you need my help to imagine what it would be like to know that you are unpredictable, or to see that your children are used to to you undergoing events that make you act strangely and erratically. I think just knowing that often, new medications introduce themselves by giving me a migraine, and I know this is possible when I take that first pill, is fairly self-explanatory. And so I expect you can imagine what it would be like, with all of this as a backdrop, to experience worsening of your symptoms, probably because of age-related hormonal changes. To in desperation try something you'd previously been denied. And to learn that it probably won't help.

In a week, I will either give up on Adderall for now or find a way to make it work. I'll put together the pieces yet again--at this point, possibly my strongest personal skill--and continue that upward climb as far as I can get. I'm incredibly fortunate in that regardless, I will be fed and dry and warm and loved. But right now, I feel justified in some serious dismay.

[superdillin]

That Time I was on Adventuring Academy

Ok it's a clickbaity title but I've been thinking a lot about where I was in this moment, and who I am now, and what an ENORMOUS difference there is, a verifiably ocean between moments.

We can get the obvious differences out of the way like:

my name

my gender

my camera situation

all of which have improved drastically I must say.

When I was asked to do this I had published my first game supplement ever, Neverland: The Impossible Island. And I LOVE it still. For what it is, it was a killer first project. A fully playable D&D setting for JM Barrie's Peter Pan setting, Neverland. Concept and execution, I did a pretty decent job.

Gang, I was SHITTING myself during this entire interview. And I don't really even mean just because Brennan was someone influential to me, someone I didn't know at all at this point, but I was new to interviews and being on a public platform too. I was even still new as a performer, which I would confidently say is my strong suit now. I was being held together by adrenaline. Now, it's kind of hard for me to watch myself stumble through that. I've come like...an exceptionally long way since then.

And I have more to say now than I did then. Brennan introduces me so kindly as a game designer but truthfully I wasn't yet! I had written a module for D&D, and that's all. Fine, and fun, and I did a good job - but I've learned so much and experienced so much and I have so much knowledge and love and feral, unabashed passion for games now that I wish I could tell this past version of me about. I get to share that now, every single week, on One Shot - introducing people to new games and beautiful artists.

What I care about in this industry has also grown and shifted. Back then I was still fighting my way through the horde of misogynists to create space as a seemingly feminine person in the hobby by getting my mits all over their favorite franchise (D&D).

Now, I want us free from corporate fast food games, I want people to see the magnificent iceberg of art and exploration and humanity that games have that we can experience. I want designers who are paid to create their own art, not serving a corporation's image for pennies. I want to radicalize this hobby against the colonialism and transphobia and imperialism that snuck into all it's roots.

Anyway I'm SO proud of who I've become and where this moment has led me and for how far away it seems. I've lived and I have grown and I've become someone I'm even more proud of.

((oh and one final aside - this was one of the most professional experiences I ever had, from not just Brennan but everyone who set things up behind the scenes. That also taught me a lot about what was acceptable and what was not, going into future, often less good, interviews. ))

[raccoonscupoftea]

🎮A Gamers profession

Timeskip!Kenma Kozume X F!Y/n

Summary: Y/n and Kenma are a couple, also living together. While Kenma is streaming and struggling with a game, he soon admitted to need help from you, a professional game breaker.

Warnings: Nerd talk, SFW, possible grammar mistakes, cause english is not my native language.

| MASTERLIST | REQUESTS |

//----//----//----//

You love your job. It's fun, well paying and not so stressful. Kenma, your boyfriend, also likes your job, but sometimes he just wants you to stuff your face with a pillow when he's playing, especially when he's livestreaming.

You often get to know the next top game before everyone else. You get information on a game while it's still in the making and you have to play the game for endless hours before it's officiall release.

You're not designing the game or anything. No, you're here to break the game into pieces, testing limits, testing the code, testing AI. If it breaks, then the developers have more work to do. Or they simply just decide it is going to be a 'feature'. It's their choice. You just deliver the bugs to them.

So, then why does kenma want to shut you up sometimes?

Because of your job, you have developed a very good sense for game mechanics, attack patterns and the more advanced stuff on how a game is build. When Kenma encounteres a boss, he just knows you could beat it in a few minutes. He knows you could rush to an over the top overpowered boss and never get hit once, thou it would take longer to beat it.

It's when Kenma's visibly is frustrated, staring at his screen with an unhealthy posture, you then sometimes get up from your couch and take a look at what he's struggling with. As soon as you got into frame the viewers will start to spam the chat with messages about you.

Mostly just spamming your name but others will write absurd things like "mama's here to help" or "the professional is watching"

You just have to stand behind the chair and kenma starts to tell you to not say anything.

"Don't you dare tell me, I want to find it out myself" he complains and you just put up your hands "I didn't do anything, I'm just watching, but tell me if you need help"

So far he never needed help from you. He of course is an intelligent and very good gamer himself. Never have you doubted him.

___

You're currently on your own pc in a separate Office in your and Kenma's home. With a switch controller in your hands and feet up on a footrest, you happily enjoy playing some animal crossing on the bigger screen of your gaming setup.

Today's quiet cold so you're wearing a wearable blanked with a hoodie combined. It looks like a cat. On your table is a steaming hot tea, waiting to be cooled down a little. You were fishing all around the island in game to get the last fish of the museum collection, but the sporadic waves of tiredness are definitely not doing you a favour when it comes to pressing the right button at the right time. The game definitely knows how to get you so relaxed you could fall asleep right then and there in your gaming chair.

Another wave made you a little more tired than the usual waves. This time you had doze off for a few seconds before jolting back awake and continued your fishing spree. Work definitely was a bit to much with the winter holidays coming up and a lot of new games wanting to be released in early spring. Is also added up to your tiredness.

You glanced over to the time on your Pc and realised it's only 4pm, definitely to early to sleep now. You also know that Kenma was streaming for an hour now, since he always starts at 3pm.

Thou you don't learn from your mistake to play animal crossing while nearly dozing off and just continued, but rather than fishing you instead decided to continue to decorate the island.

It went well for the first hour. You made a plan and checked on the internet if there's the suitable furniture for it. The first decorations had been placed on their right spot, paths has been made but just a few minutes after the first hour, the tiredness has claimed you back.

While you were in the office relaxing every bone to a complete flat line, the person in the other office was nearly about to destroy a keyboard. The boss he was fighting was beating kenma every time to 0 HP. Kenma had stopped yesterday's stream in a near rage quit but today he had to beat it to get further in the game. He hasn't got past the boss and was getting more and more frustrated as well as confused. Sometimes he swears the boss just doesn't take damage and gets a massive attack bonus. Chat is convinced the boss wasn't beatable and was begging to kenma to bring out the game breaker, aka you.

Of course, he denied it at first but after an hour of trying and dying he finally gave up. Without a word he placed down his headphones, pushed his microphone back a little bit and walked out of the frame. His viewers were ecstatic and surprised that he'll need help from you.

As kenma was busting open the door to your office, the loud noise of the door made you jolt up from your chair. Your hair went places and the hoodie blanket went all the way up to your chin, telling kenma without a word that you were sleeping in your chair just now.

"I was definitely not sleeping" You stated in your defense with a sleep drunk voice, but Kenma did not believe you and smiled at how cuddly you looked. With a quick glance at the time you asked the streamer "Quit already? You're usually up till late at night"

Kenma placed his hands in the pocket of the black hoodie he's wearing and sighed, remembering why he's here in the first place "I think the game's bugged. I can't defeat the boss. I tried so many times" He slightly looked away, feeling a bit embarrassed about asking you.

At the word 'bugged' you stood up, placed the switch controller on the desk and walked over to him. You slipped your hands into his hoodie and took his hands in your own. "let's see what I can do"

The two of you went to his streaming room, but before you entered, the hood from your blanket hoodie went over your head to hide this atrocious mess of hair on your head. You quickly checked your appearance in the hallway mirror. As soon as the viewers got a glance at you and what you're wearing, they all typed in chat 'You're looking so cozy rn' 'where did you buy it?' 'looks so fluffy' 'I want to cuddle with you'

You waved at the camera to greed the viewers and kenma gestured you to sit down in his chair. You smiled at your boyfriend and placed your feet also on the chair, making you a cozy fluffy blanket ball.

He then quickly explained to you what he was doing and what was happening. Kenma then also pulled over another chair to sit down and watch you. You first tried your best max out attack and defence with his current equipment, but there wasn't even a slightest chance. You voiced out a small "Huh?" Before trying again.

The viewers could see on your face that something was up. You aren't a streamer and wasn't talking while playing the game and kenma knew to not disturb your concentration, but the viewers still seemed to enjoy watching you trying the best you could. It was the first time you were seriously playing a game with the intention to win and they were all very ecstatic as you tried to not get hit. One could tell how everyone was excited at this moment, the chat also was getting slower.

After half an hour, you had placed down the controller. The boss could hit the hero, because they weren't dodging anymore and the player dies in an instant. The question marks around your head were very visible. Something definitely is not right here. As soon as the game went to its pause menu, the viewers knew something serious it about to happen.

You grabbed the laptop from Kenma, booted it up, put in his password without a fail and went to the internet. The website from your work company appeared after a few clicks and at this moment Kenma realised what was happening.

He looked over to his camera and explained laughing "Guys, I apparently found a bug. Stuffs about to get serious now" The chat was then filled with suprised emojis. It didn't took 5 minutes and a donation came in.

Kenma glanced over to the donation site and read out loud "Thank you catlover51 for the..." He stopped a second as he saw the amount that was donated and was clearly surprised "Thank you for the 100$ and you had written down 'For Y/n, a little compensation gor having to work now' again thank you very much. You really didn't neet to donate so much"

As Kenma read the donation out loud you had began to smile behind the laptop sceen. Others then jumped onto the train as well and donated money from a single dollar to a little lager than 50$. Kenma was slightly overwhelmed my the sheer amount of donations that came in and couldn't stop thanking everyone, nearly shutting down the donation site so no one could waste more money on them. It was then you who calmed them down after finishing your research. You looked back to the camera and placed the laptop to the side "You don't need to pay me for this. It's my job and I love doing it. Also I get paid whenever I work, so I'm currently earning my money. But thank you for your concern" you smiled brightly at them before continuing to try out stuff in the game.

After some time nothing came out of the testing and you sighed. You glance over to your boyfriend, looking like a vet having to tell the owner some bad news. "You can't progress at this point, I'm sorry" His eyes widend "That's a joke right?" You just shook your head "Unfortunately not. You have found a very devastating bug, which stops you from killing the boss. As soon as an attack misses, the supposed damage gets stored and well... When the boss does hit you, then all of that stored damage gets released. That explains the bug with the one shot kill. This bug alone is manageable and already a known issue, but combined with the boss not taking any damage" you smiled at him with a sad face. "I'm sorry"

Kenma sighed and ruffled his hair "It's not your fault" he smiled and ruffled your hair as well. "Guess my save is busted then"

You took his hand in yours and looked him in the eyes. He squeezed your hand a little and looked back at you. There's a little spark in your eyes, telling him that there's something you could do "What are you up to?" He asked directly. Your eyes shift away, making you look innocent, scratching your cheek a little "I could force you out of the situation, by glitching you through a wall"

Usually kenma is against using glitches and exploits in his runs, but this is maybe the first occasion he'll consider it. He first looks at you with squinted eyes but then stood up "I'm going to the bathroom. Whatever you'll do, I'll don't know about it"

You're smile got bigger as he finished talking and went outside. He closed the door and after a little happy dance, you pressed onto respawn and forced the player to another part of the map. The viewers were watching your every step and were happy about you breaking a game infront of them.

As you were finished, you quickly saved the game and stood up, ready to leave.

"In my defence" you started talking into the camera a little bowed down to fit into the frame "I did not test this part of the game. Not my fault" You grabbed the open laptop and blew the viewers a goodbye kiss before you exited the streaming room.

On the way back to your own office, Kenma has finished his bathroom break. He grabbed your wrist before you could vanish into your room. He also grabbed the laptop and placed it on a sideboard. One hand of his wandered over to your waist, so he could pull you a little closer to him. "Thank you" he whisperd and gave you a little kiss on your cheek. "I'll make sure to finish today's stream a little earlier. Can't wait to cuddle you with this fluffy hoodie" he then again kissed your other cheek and headed back over to his room to see an alive character on a giant grassy field.

You on the other hand smiled and had to control your inner fangirl to not just scream and jump around. The viewers for sure could hear you if you were to loud.

You quickly grabbed Kenma's laptop and hid in your room, filling out a formula to get the new bug over to the Developers.

[highlynerdy]

"I do it because I want to protect him from the world, and sometimes from myself. I want to tell him every secret I ever had, and yet I never want to make him choose, to see the hurt in his eyes, to put this, too, on him. I want-I want so many things. Sometimes, I just want."

Turning The Page by @queerofthedagger / art by @schweetheart

I started this fanARTifact in July 2021 and finally, finally finished it in September 2024. Click below to see so many more pictures and read probably too much about the project.

This project was a LABOR OF LOVE because y'all...I failed so, so many times during the making of it. I had grand dreams of all the things that I was going to do and learn and every single time I tried something it was like the universe telling me to go ahead and go fuck myself, we're not doing that. But it's done and I'm pleased with it. I hope Mona and Schweets are. Let's talk about the process.

I read this story back in July 2021 when it came out and immediately wrote @schweetheart on July 23, 2021 to ask if I could use her art for the back because it was such a crucial part of the story.

She graciously allowed me to use it, and even sent me a high res file so I could have the portrait of Arthur printed on art paper.

THEN. My brilliantly stupid self decided that just making the book wasn't enough. I mean, I had already done that for Arthur's journal back in 2020 and I am nothing if not a nutter about learning to do new things, especially for my fanARTifact series.

SO. I'm going to learn to make paper. Yeah. Totally a reasonable escalation in terms of new skills, right?? ......... Nope. I bought a small 5x7 mould and deckle to practice with and some cotton linters to make the pulp. Twas. A. Failure. I didn't have a press or the felts or the sizing needed to make the paper actually, ya know, usable. This was the first time I put the project down for a while.

Moving on to another new skill in late 2021, I decided that I wanted to make the walnut ink myself. Luckily, I was part of a pigment subscription in 2020 (that is a hell of a nerdy statement, even for me) and had all the supplies in my art studio to attempt this endeavor.

I didn't fail this part! Fucking huzzah for small miracles. Now I had two small bottles of black walnut ink to use for the calligraphy that I wanted to do for some of the excerpts. Except now I was stuck again on the paper making part so I put it back down again for an eternity.

Picking it back up in late 2022, I asked Mr. Highlynerdy to make a custom size mould and deckle for me so I could have long pieces to fold for my signatures. It was his first time doing anything like this but he's a buddy and a pal and gave it a try. Surprising no one if you've read this far, we both failed this part. Even now, I'm still not sure we succeeded but eventually we did get something workable. And considering professional mould and deckles cost in the hundreds of dollars...yeah, it'll do.

It took a hot ass minute for me to feel ready to attempt the paper making again but once I was ready, I ordered wet, pre-beaten pulp from Twinrocker. A very curt man on the phone helped me figure out what I needed and added internal sizing to the pulp I ordered. I didn't take pictures of any of the paper stuff because it was very messy and annoying. Once again, Mr. Highlynerdy helped me rig up a drying box with tri-wall cardboard and ratchet straps and a box fan. Once the paper was dry, I used a gelatin mixture to paint on external sizing. Since I'm primarily a painter, I needed the paper to be able to handle ink, paint, pencil. Sizing paper is the only way to do this, but no worries, I won't go further into the nerdy details about this.

Once the paper was ready, I decided to sew the text block. Here's another part where I failed YET A-FUCKING-GAIN. I talked before on Arthur's Journal post about how books were very, very rare in the 6th century (Arthurian period), but BBC Merlin is soooooo anachronistic that it's fiiiiiine to just do what I wanted. HOWEVER. I did want to try to do visible spine binding. But. Unfortunately I had gone ahead and used all of my paper to bind the text block as if I was going to case it in. FUUUUUUUCCCCCK. It's fine. We're fine. Come on, brain. What can we do.

Well, what we CAN'T do is use a piece of leather from my large remnant that I bought for my first journal because someone - FUCKING ME - measured and cut the last piece NOT TAKING INTO ACCOUNT THE WIDTH of the text block. So now it doesn't fit. And refusing to buy a new piece of leather I'm forced to pivot once again.

I decided to cut the leather spine even shorter, buy some wood pieces and sand them, paint them a matte black, and then glue the leather to those pieces. Cool cool cool. We're moving on. I tested a lot of different glues for this and good ol' super glue ended up being the clear winner. Cue putting this project away again for a whiiiillle.

In October 2023, I decided to pull it out again and do the calligraphy and drawings I wanted. This story has so many gorgeous parts but I finally decided on the first page, the last page, and the page about Gaius.

I mixed my handmade walnut ink with my beloved Finetec gold and used the quills I bought from John Neal Booksellers to practice my Uncial. I shouldn't have been rusty after lettering an entire fic for this fanARTifact, but I was.

The little dragon was inspired by medieval manuscript dragons I found.

Narratively, I loved the idea that Merlin's writing would start off soft and delicate and become stronger by the end of the journal. Also, I loved that the end word "WANT" would be just gold because the ink blend changes throughout. Something magical or whatever.

This part needed tears. They might have been real ones...

Annnnnnnnd, the project was put down again until a few days ago when I decided, after getting back into Merlin fic, I needed to buck up and finish it.

I did so many tests for the cover. I tried embossing, carving, and debossing and hated all of them. I settled on painting it with acrylic paints in the shape of a Celtic knot sort of pattern. I originally wanted to do a triskelion but after reading a bit about how some asshole groups have co-opted the symbol for shitty purposes, I decided against it. It's a mix of black and gold and it's hard to capture the depth of it through photos...eh, I did what I could.

Still. Something wasn't quite working with the brown leather and the black covers with the new symbol so I broke out my matte black leather paint and decided to go all black.

All I had left to do was glue in the text block and it would be done! And that still took me a few days to work up the courage. The book opens nice and flat, which will be good for me as I will use it as a sketchbook.

Sitting here, on September 1st, I have completed a project that taught me many new skills and also taught me a lot about humility and perseverance. There was no way I was going to abandon this project, and maybe I should have started over many of the times, but I am quite in love with the final result and I just hope that it does it's inspiration proud. Thank you @queerofthedagger Mona for all you create and share with the Merlin fandom, and thank you @schweetheart for allowing me to use your gorgeous art.

Also, you may see quite a few other fanARTifacts in this photoshoot because I will use any opportunity to show them off lol.

If you read to the end of this, you deserve a cocktail and a cookie. Thank you. 💛✨✨

[hestzhyen]

Chapter 55 Stress Posting

Greetings, dear void. It is time... FOR A HAKURI PoV CHAPTER! And more JP-EN yapping from me than usual because honestly, this chapter was cool, but it was mostly set-up for whatever's going to happen next week. There's not much to muse on without trending towards pure speculation rather fast. Plus I finally got access to the JP version so I've been despairing at how far I have to go to actually learn the damn language...

But hey! Another color page next week! Hokazono-sensei's really suffering from success isn't he? Kagurabachi's getting the top-tier marketing push now that it managed to get over 1M copies in circulation with only 4 volumes out. Maybe we'll start to see the same level of CPs as Akane Banashi soon!

Samura and the Makizumi

Who the hell are you?

Does whatever he's got going on explain the female bearer's super young appearance...? The EN TL leaves it vague here, but JP is pretty specific that his body is that of a child but he isn't one in truth.

Why the adult in a child's body thing at all though? Why mimic Samura like that too? And why are we getting that packaged with a lazy-yet-competent commander archetype? Something about the combination of traits for this character just rubs me the wrong way. The cognitive dissonance worked -I'm interested in him and his situation- but it's unpleasant to deal with. This introduction felt unexpected in a bad way. I bet I'll be a minority on that though so I'll keep my rubbish opinions about him to myself. Maybe.

I have a theory on why Mini Samura is copying our favourite blind fighter guy at least. The official name for the squad in Japanese is 神奈備御庭番-座村親衛隊 [Kamunabi oniwa-ban - Samura shineitai]. The professional EN TL will parse all that much better than I can, but I just want to point out something fun. The last word (親衛隊) means "elite guards"/"bodyguards". Most of the time. It can also mean "groupies" or "ardent fans". So take that and stuff it in your back pocket in case the squad doesn't job here.

Anyway, this chapter is why we met the Makizumi [巻墨] a few weeks ago in chapter 50. Yes, it's the same kanji as "Masumi" that they were introduced as. I'm not sure why since my Japanese is, uh, not great. But it's not an EN translation error. The original JP indicates that Uruha says ますみ [masumi] in Ch. 50 via the Ruby next to the kanji. This time, however, the Ruby over their name in the spread says まきずみ [makizumi]. At least it's not truly a new name I suppose? The meaning -Rolled Ink- stays the same regardless.

At any rate, these guys are definitely all going to live and fight another day. Because named teams full of elite personnel formed for a specific purpose have great survival and success rates in this series. Yup. (Maybe being ninja will make the difference? Somehow???)

Who trained these guys, I wonder... Samura's hella scary for an "assistant master".

Samura getting annoyed that his disciple joined the fight...! It's sweet of him to care and still treat Uruha like an apprentice in some ways. They're both war veterans who have seen and experienced too much, but some dynamics don't change with the passing of time.

I appreciate that the villains and their tactics are well-thought out. Adjusting to fight a blind man with super senses isn't done as well as one would like in many series, sadly. They often get to style all over their enemies because they're underestimated, then are treated like a sighted person with a gimmick thereafter. But the Hishaku ain't about that and have actively planned against him by scrambling his smell and hearing while also sending Mr. Hatshaku and his undetectable trees. Very smart on Hokazono-sensei's part!

This is just so awesome! The spreads of Chihiro and Hiyuki meeting and parting again in ch. 29 are two of my absolute favourites in the series so far, so to see it again (kinda) makes me happy.

Samura cut part of Uruha's topknot here. He played it that close, huh. It's pretty cool that Samura has a wild fighting style that his allies have to adjust around. Normally blind fighters are super precise but Samura's just slicing and dicing anything that's living and ready to kill! But if you're that good then I guess it's worth training a few people to be able to compliment your moveset so they can safely support you.

Samura and Uruha aren't in perfect sync, and Uruha's still willing to take risks and throw himself into danger. But he's more than capable of being an asset in this fight without guaranteeing he'll become a burden later (unlike a certain someone...).

Uh Oh

He's so cute with his big ol' eyes and pensive expression.

Did Chihiro whip out his phone while keeping Hiruhiko pinned to the seat with his foot!? Anyway, this is only the second time in the series where he hasn't appeared in even a single panel. So we get to spend a whole chapter getting exposition via Hakuri!

I'm gonna take some time to yap about him because it's been nearly three weeks since he showed up a lot and I missed him terribly.

Stop, stop, STOP!!

Note: Hakuri's line in the panel before (...俺だけじゃないか" ["I'm the only one."]) doesn't directly match up to Kyora's final line from Ch. 43 (私だけだ... 私だけが全うできなかった ["I'm the only one... who failed to fulfill my duty."]), so it's not a direct reference even if the TL makes it seem like one. Hakuri's sentiment is different- his is "I can't be the only one" vs. Kyora's "I'm actually the only one". There are just a lot of characters who are convicted in their beliefs in this manga!

So much for getting to recover in 30 minutes, I guess.

Really cool that we see the mask "assembling"! It's only been shown intact when he activates the storehouse sorcery up to this point. So it's a neat visual representation of his resolve coming together during the time crunch as well. Hakuri is nothing if not dedicated to hurting and throwing himself into danger for the sake of others. Even after Healer Lady set up a flag for him to become useless or worse if he does so here. Oh, Hakuri...

He's helping Chihiro because he wants to make the world a safer place. Plus his whole thing after Ice Lady is that he'll "never let a life slip through [his] hands again". It's exceptionally noble and heroic of him! But is it worth potentially derailing the plans via brain damage or permanent ability loss?

Hakuri's not gonna die, obviously. I'm also 50/50 on him losing access to his sorcery at all, much less permanently. But something's going to get fucked up here and it'll probably be his fault. Again. He's gotta learn how to value himself the hard way, apparently. All we can do is wait to see what price will be paid for Hakuri's reckless disregard for his own well-being. (I'm not sure how I feel about this, but what if Hakuri gets Healer Lady killed? He could go 2/2 on women who were kind to him dying because of his actions right in front of him. Man that would suck.)

This is looking to be like one of the developments I was hoping for at the end of the Rakuzaichi arc. Hakuri does NOT chill when it comes to saving lives. Being borderline suicidal about this is his way of atoning for his and his family's sins, in my mind. But is it better to risk your life every time, or let people get hurt -possibly die- to keep doing greater good in the long-run? It's a common question raised in super hero comics, and I hope we get to see it explored with Hakuri (and Uruha) here. I'm really interested in what Hokazono-sensei has to say about it and the dissonance it would cause in Hakuri's character.

Arc Soothsaying

This is just a supposition, and I've been wrong so many times that I'm kind of hesitant to put this out there, but here goes. I know I can be as cringey as I like in your ambivalent embrace, kind void.

I think... I think... Hakuri's growth this arc will be specifically learning to value himself enough that he's able to act against his ideals.

Recall how Hakuri was the one to point out that Uruha knew the value of his life in Chapter 48 when he would have charged right in. And now he's with Samura, the guy who fights and kills to preserve himself despite it going against his Buddhist beliefs. Hakuri's constantly pushing himself to the limit, refusing to let other people get hurt for his sake. He won't let himself be the only one risking his life even if there's no strategic value for him to act- even if it would most helpful for everyone if he ran to safety. So I think he's going to have to put saving his own life above anything else later this arc and it's going to be terrible for him.

It would compliment the theme of negative self-image that's been set up with Chihiro too. They're both heroic, though it usually comes across in completely opposite ways (Chihiro's in his villain era right now, for one). And both of them have a lot of work to do when it comes to learning how to love themselves. Hakuri to understand his own "value", Chihiro to understand he's not a monster.

Learning more about the Bearers, Kunishige, and what happened in the Seitei war will almost certainly help Chihiro to realize he really isn't so different from the heroes he idolizes. As for Hakuri, it's hard to say right now. Uruha's going to be important to his growth I'm fairly certain. But we haven't even met all the Bearers yet so I don't want to start thinking in absolutes about who will help who and in what way.

We also have to wait and see what becomes of Hiruhiko after this encounter. He's obviously meant to be a counter to both Hakuri and Chihiro; how that manifests, exactly, is something I'm looking forward to seeing. It'll give more insight on how we can expect them to develop. Chihiro and Hiruhiko are pretty blatant right now with their outlook on what it means to kill and such, and there's set up for Hiruhiko to clash with Hakuri over what it means to be an equal and a friend.

For Chihiro and Hakuri... too early to say. Need to see what happens at Senkutsuji. My instincts are saying a rift of some kind will form between them over killing, equality, and/or their self-sacrificing tendencies but I'm always wrong, so. Just waiting and watching on that for now.

Anyway. Thanks as always, void. Here's hoping our boys don't have to suffer too much in the coming weeks/months. Except Hiruhiko. He can suffer enough for all of them.

[idoodlestuffsometimes]

DRAWING BACKGROUNDS: TIPS AND TRICKS

So many people are afraid of drawing backgrounds and I think it's a shame, so here's some tips and tricks, because I'm not perfect at it myself but I think the hardest part is really just knowing where to start.

First off: Perspective

Yeah, yeah, that's the scary word. But I promise you, once you're familiar with the basics, backgrounds are a LOT less intimidating. Don't get discouraged if WHEN you have trouble with it. Even professional artists struggle with it. I promise you, screwing it up is good and normal. That's how you learn after all!

Now I'm not going to go into detail on how to do it here, because honestly there are a thousand and one free resources online and in libraries that can explain it far better than I ever could in a singular broad-strokes tumblr post. But I AM at least telling you you should familiarize yourself with these basics:

Important Terms: Horizon Line: A horizontal line across your canvas, showing your viewer's eye level and providing a location for most of your vanishing points. Vanishing Point: Integral to drawing in perspective. The sides of a 3D object get smaller as they become farther away from the viewer in space. This point is where the parallel lines of a side eventually meet.

The Basic Types of Perspective: One Point Perspective: Good for drawing things that you're looking at straight on. Two Point Perspective: Good for drawing things at an angle. Three Point Perspective: Good for drawing things the viewer is looking up or down at, especially at an extreme angle.

[Click images for ALT descriptions]

And if you're comfortable with these and serious about improving your skills for use in storytelling, I also might suggest looking up:

4 Point Perspective: Great for extra wide or tall shots and for camera tilts if you're doing an animation or animatic. I think some other names for this in animation include "banana pan" and "warp pan."

5 Point Perspective: Fish-eye lens. Good for all your angsty anime boy slipping into madness needs!

Some perspective tips I wish someone had told me earlier:

Objects' relation to the horizon line is constant. A super helpful tip to remember when placing a character or object in space is that they will always (assuming they aren't changing in size or moving up or down) have the same relation to the horizon line no matter how far or close they are. If your horizon line is at shoulder height for your focus character in the foreground, any character of the same height in the background will still line up with the horizon line at the shoulders.

How to pick the distance between your vanishing points: 2 pt perspective uses 2 vanishing points, 3 pt uses 3, etc, etc, but how close should they be? Well, first of all, for anything that isn't one point perspective, one or more points will usually be off the canvas. Super annoying, I know, but the closer your vanishing points are, the more warped your drawing will become. Second, a helpful thing to know is that choosing the distance between your points is basically the illustration equivalent of picking your camera lens! Photography buffs will know that wider (shorter focal length) lenses show more space and make the distance between foreground and background more dramatic, while longer focal length/telephoto lenses are flatter, and more focused and intimate. The same is true of vanishing points that are closer (shorter focal length) or farther apart (longer focal length).

2 point/3 point/etc doesn't actually mean you're limited to that many points total on your page. this one confused me a lot when I was getting started, lol. A lot of examples will show you drawings of nice, neat cities or something, in which all the buildings are facing the same way in order to demonstrate perspective drawing. But in real life, buildings don't all face the same direction. They're at all sorts of different angles. So how do I do that??? Answer: Just because you're drawing in 2 point perspective or whatever doesn't mean you... have to actually keep your 2 points in the same spot. You can move them around, just keep them the same distance apart, so you're not screwing up your camera lens.

Other Tips:

Use reference! The instant you try to draw a house, you're going to forget every house you've ever seen. That's just how it goes. Buildings are complicated. Do yourself a favor and collect a few reference images first, buddy!

Consider details (like architectural style, amenities, and materials) Your building will look more like a building when you keep in mind that buildings have gutters and door knobs and light switches and paneling and stuff, and aren't just boxes with roofs on them. Again: reference! You will forget electrical sockets and baseboards exist immediately. Art brains are dumb.

Use details and texture to fill in negative space Giant stretches of blank space tend to be boring and distracting. Put a few suggestions of wood grain or something on that wall back there, bud, just don't overdo it.

Line weight Darker, thicker lines draw more attention, look heavier, and look closer to the viewer than lighter, thinner lines do. Take advantage of this to draw the viewer's attention to your focal points, de-emphasize less important details, and imply depth. It's up to you to decide how you want to use this and what your style is, especially once you start getting into combining or replacing it with shading, values, and color, but a helpful rule of thumb is to try reserving your thickest lines for focal foreground characters and use thinner lines on backgrounds, especially details in the far distance.

Perspective guides If you're drawing digitally, take full advantage of any perspective tools you have access to! A lot of art programs lately have begun adding perspective guide features that let you set up vanishing points and then literally guide your hand as you draw so you stay in perspective. Some of these include Procreate, Clip Studio Paint, and Adobe Fresco. (still sadly none in Photoshop as far as I'm aware, what the heck, Adobe!). Check through the settings of yours to see if it gives you any perspective guides or other similarly useful tools. They're 100% worth it! And for god's sake, if you've got any skew or perspective warp tools, draw your complicated shapes flat and then warp them instead of spending an hour on it! Don't make my mistakes!

[tenderlady]

hi love!! out of curiosity, i didn't know about the lindsay ellis video, how bad is it?

hey, friend!

so, the video itself is here:

in the interest of full disclosure, i haven't actually seen it, so i really can't comment on the quality. my beef is not with lindsay ellis or the work that she's doing--as far as youtubers go, i think she's actually one of the better ones. this video might actually be good! but i haven't watched it, so i, frankly, don't know. my beef is much more with the video essay as a form and what it's doing rather than with lindsay ellis, or this video, specifically.

i'm guessing you're asking because of my tags on this post, which articulates a lot of my issues with the video essay industrial complex lmao, which gets at a lot of my discomfort with them. i used to watch video essays (a lot!), and a lot of my friends still do. like a lot of people, when i got out of grad school, i found i wasn't reading as much anymore, but i still wanted to be stimulated intellectually, and video essays were a good way to do that. but eventually i realized that i wasn't actually Learning Anything lol.

as ismatu gwendolyn says in her piece, "short-form video entertains more than it sticks." this was the place i was finding myself getting into when i was watching video essays a lot, and also the place i see my friends getting into. they are video (and arguably this isn't really short-form since it's over an hour long but i digress), but i find that most people i know don't actually Watch Them the way that you would watch a movie or, say, a lecture in a college class. instead they listen to them as you would listen to a podcast or an audiobook, which is to say While Doing Other Things. some of this is definitely because of the way our current economy is structured (a lot of the people listening to video essays are very busy, i.e., in university or working in a professional desk-type job, or have minimal downtime when not doing those things and have to double dip with their free time, so like things they can use to multi-task), and that is something i totally understand. but if we're looking at these as pedagogical objects (teaching tools from people who are trying to impart knowledge in some kind of way) they're actually not very effective. i respect folks like philosophy tube or contrapoints who include reading lists with their videos, but how many people are actually turning to these original sources? another of gwendolyn's points that i absolutely agree with is that you are engaging with a work in a totally different way by reading it. you have to give a written text your full attention, which is why the backbone of education is still Reading. this full attention forces you to have a deeper engagement with a text than you would while listening to it ambiently, or even just watching it. i get that there are people who can't do this for various reasons, but if actually sitting down with the texts a video essayist is talking about is available to you, you will find a totally different experience, even if those texts are just beatlebooks lol. (additionally, primary video texts--like interview footage of the beatles and yoko--are also hugely informative and different from the interpretive work i'm assuming is happening in lindsay's video)

i actually watched a good chunk of contrapoints' most recent video on desire but ended up dipping around the middle because she brought up anne carson and i realized i could just be reading anne carson lmao. i told a friend about this and he looked at me like i had sprouted an extra head and said "i never really thought about doing that. you're probably the only person i know who's ever done that." i get that like, 5 nerds in usamerica are hardly a representative sample, but that is the kind of behavior i see with video essays: people using them to fill a void of silence while they work/study/play video games/fold laundry rather than engaging with the material critically and learning in a concerted way.

the entertainment aspect is also something that bugs me, but i am a joyless hag, so that may just be me. i have a similar issue with john oliver. folks like oliver and the video essayists are definitely making complex issues more accessible to people who may be unfamiliar, but i don't know if they actually do much in the way of using that opened door to get people anywhere. there's also the issue of video essays being monetized. this isn't to say that Theory(TM) Isn't Monetized (they are published in journals and books, which you often have to buy), but that monetization isn't embedded into the work itself the way it is with video essays. nothing kills the vibe for me like talking about the great works of a philosopher and getting jumpscared by an ad for rocketmortgage or nordvpn halfway through.

like i said: i've watched video essays from time to time. i still do! but sometime in the last like.....4 or 5 years i realized that there were other things i could be doing with my One Wild & Precious Life.

to bring it back to the lindsay ellis video: i had a bunch of irl's (including a fucking ex that i don't talk to anymore!!!!!) send it to me, and i'm sure lindsay does a good job, but i kind of doubt she's going to tell me anything i don't already know lmao. one thing i love about the beatles fandom on here is that (for the most part) we aren't afraid to actually do Real Research Ourselves. the girlies are reading primary sources!!!! i just feel like the lindsay ellis beatle video is Not For Me, but feel free to prove me wrong!

[dnalt-d2]

Christ alive can anyone get a break right now??

(Ahem)

Update time, once again!

Also once again, it is a mixed bag

So to start off with, as most everyone knows, Pomme and Dapper's admins have resigned from their positions. This is incredibly unfortunate, and I honestly don't know what it's gonna mean for the French Creators who said they wouldn't stay on QSMP if Pomme's Admin was fired. Since she technically left of her own volition, I really don't know what they're gonna do

(Edit: I talk about Quackity's stream here but I don't speak Spanish so I can't personally say what was said exactly. Thankfully, it looks like someone JUST POSTED an English Translation so I'm just gonna drop the link here for anyone who wants to read it)

On another note: Quackity has finally given a slight update. For obvious reasons, he can't say anything specific, and I wouldn't have expected him to. But according to the translations I've seen so far, basically said that he can't update because the leaks that happened are creating added complications in the restructuring process. I'm assuming his reason for that is that he simply doesn't want anymore information to be leaked out, but unfortunately, that's just counterproductive to the miscommunication problem

AND SPEAKING OF MISCOMMUNICATION???

So as you all know, I've been in support of the French Union getting involved with this. As I've stated a dozen times now, Unions are meant to be resources, people who inform employees of their rights and do what they can to help them get those rights. As far as I know, one of the main things they do is mediate between the employees and the employers. But APPARENTLY the Union has not attempted to reach out to Quackity outside of Twitter. Which REALLY isn't all that professional. Twitter is a NETWORKING site. Meant to START building connections. Afterwards, people typically move onto email or even discord, which are way better equipped for the long-form communication that's about to have to happen

So even if Quackity WAS active on Twitter, which he isn't. And even if the Union DIDN'T know that, which they do. This isn't the right route to communicate. They have stated that he "has their email" and has to "reach out to them." They are apparently working on the logic that SOMEONE would have had to pass on the information to him by this point, which isn't a fair assumption at all, considering that we know there were Admins ALREADY hiding information from him before all this

They're acting like Quackity is the CEO of a major corporation, with COUNTLESS RESOURCES on-hand. Yeah he's the CEO of this business, but he's also a 23-year-old Twitch Streamer who in all likelihood is learning a LOT about running a business for the first time AS WE SPEAK. I'll tell you right now, when I was 23, I didn't know jack-shit, and I'd still say I don't most of the time. And the only reason I LEARNED jack-shit was because someone would actually TELL me about it. When someone makes mistakes, it REALLY helps them learn when someone is able to not just point out the mistake, but also HOW to fix it. I don't know how they're expecting him to grow from his miscommunication mistakes when they aren't willing to give him the chance to

And yes, there are MANY problems that need to be fixed, as I've said before. But Quackity did outright confirm some of the other things I've said too. That things ARE happening, and we aren't hearing about it. That we aren't GOING to hear about it. Which is fine. It makes sense. We aren't the people who need to know every step of the process. But he is going to have to figure out a better system for talking to the Admins. It's a real problem when he's communicating with people like Aypierre that Pomme's Admin has her job still, but didn't tell the Admin herself

There's still lots of problems, and I know it sounds like I'm just repeating myself, saying to wait and see, but in reality, there isn't much else we CAN do besides that and voice our support

This might be the last time I make a post on this for a bit, because this has been a little draining on me. Which I would normally be able to handle SUPER easy, I'm pretty good at handling stuff like this well enough. But now I've also got real-life stuff reminding me that no matter how much better things SEEM to be getting for me, something's gonna come smack me in the back of the head to remind me that actually things suck, and I just should've known better! And unfortunately that stuff requires my focus more than this. I'll still be here, watching everything, maybe commenting on stuff, but I might not be quite as vocal as I have been

Once again, I remind you all, take care of yourselves first and foremost. Whether it's physical, emotional, or mental, or whatever else. You matter more than the events taking place here right now. My support goes out to all of you, as well as the Admins who VERY WELL COULD BE SEEING THIS APPARENTLY. So I guess this message goes out to them as well lol. You guys rock and I've enjoyed all the contributions you've made

Anyways, see you all later

[lilybug-02]

Can we see your notes and other assorted things you made for a previous Chara Timeline page? I'm thinking of making an AU story myself, and seeing things like how much information you include and how it is structured would be a major help!

(Also whilst I'm here, gotta give a round of applause to you for making it so far in such an excellent comic.)

Yeah, sure! Below is an example of one of my pages from CT Part 22. I attached my thoughts and progress in the Page Description [ALT] for each one.

I'm NOT A Professional btw. I am still learning as I go. Even in the past few days, I feel like I've learned new skills to better my art <3. It's an ongoing process.

[slick-devon]

Musing out loud

This post may not be what you think. I just noticed a single negative comment in my feed for the first time in months. I can probably count on my hands the few times my 2,000+ posts have been criticized. Outside of our gay AI-generative bubble, there is a lot of noise around this still relatively new form of expression...the debate whether it's art or not or is the AI learning process actually learning or stealing from legit artists. The hetero creators seem to get more flack over their impossibly volumed busty creations. In my other life, I push pixels professionally with little use for generative AI (though machine learning tools in Adobe have been a lifesaver). My work hasn't been threatened yet. I chose to learn and embrace this technology so that when the time does come in my day job, I can adapt, rather than be left behind.

But here in our world of gay generative creations, we're having a lot of fun discovering what we can do. This is a new revolution that in many ways to can be compared to the tools Adobe and MetaCreations gave us years and decades ago with morph, warp, and liquify tools visualize our desires to share with others.

And there is room for this new form of expression without shoving out the works leading up to this point. HS Muscleboy's sketches are legendary and can still excite me! Silverjow will never be out-AI'ed (is that a thing) from their artwork that practically bulges off the screen without the need for 3d specs. And many, many others that I hope continue to create.

Back into the generative AI segment...I do hope that general consumers do understand that there are different levels of effort in this from casual or carefully worded prompts into MidJourney or Bing, to the works of those that train their own models and Loras, pushing and directing their creations via dozens of tweaks via ComfyUI, Automatic1111, and other emerging tools.

Myself? I fall somewhere in between. I'm not so good at training models which takes some patience and dozens if not hundreds of source images and coaxing. I do what I can and try to come in from the analog side of things and sketch the final touches of what the AI gives me.

Hey if you followed my musing this far...what do you think? I suppose I'm looking for some feedback. I wonder if this stuff is worth my time beyond just collecting likes. (I love the likes though and I like all of you back!)

[alexanderwales]

Concert Review: Weezer's Blue Planet Tour

I'm not a music guy. I blame my dad for that: he was an orchestra conductor and music professor, and obviously I needed to set myself in opposition to him by not listening to music or learning to play an instrument despite the prodding of my parents.

There were only a few exceptions to my general abstention from music when I was growing up, and one of those exceptions was Weezer's Blue Album. So I still would not consider myself a music guy, but I did go to this concert, since it's one of my favorite albums of all time. Top five, definitely. It's only the second concert I've ever been to, unless you count classical music, in which case it's the 213th (number not exact).

The first opening act was Dinosaur Jr., who I had not even heard of until the day of. I had no idea what their music was going to be like, and decided that maybe I would become a fan after hearing them live.

Look, I don't normally like to talk bad about things that I can tell aren't for me.

Dinosaur Jr. made me question whether I had ever actually enjoyed music. The guitar sections sounded like a cat yowling, in a bad way. I was far enough away that I began to wonder whether they were playing an angry cat rather than a guitar. I hated every song they played, and one of us misunderstood some of the fundamentals of what makes a good song — which I will freely admit might be me. I thought that maybe live concerts were just like that, and I had made a horrible mistake. I feel obligated to go seek out some of their very best songs and listen to what they sound like professionally recorded outside of the arena, for the sake of fairness, but I actually just want to never hear anything from them again. I wondered whether warm-up acts were like the first pancake, a sacrifice necessary for what follows to be good. I might say "not for me" but what I feel in my heart is "I despised listening to this".

Then the Flaming Lips came on and made me realize that I do, in fact, like music. I'm not a huge fan of the Flaming Lips, but they do have a dozen songs I like, and I must have good taste, because all the songs they played were my favorites. Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Do You Realize, the Yeah Yeah Yeah Song, She Don't Use Jelly ... it made me want to listen to more of their discography to see whether there's more there I've overlooked, even if I've listened to a lot of the Flaming Lips. And all the songs came with cool lighting that added to the experience, sweeping shafts of light that swept over us, timed to the music, and none of that seemed like it was all that difficult, but I did appreciate the vibe. There were also props, which I loved: when they played Yoshimi there were two giant inflatable pink robots that swayed back and forth to the music, and during the Yeah Yeah Yeah Song there were two inflatable eyeballs standing on either side of Wayne Coyne, who had inflatable lips. The dancing eyeballs turned from side to side, making it look like they were following the crowd, it was great. Wayne Coyne is great at all the showman stuff, though I think he asked me to make some noise one too many times. I obliged him, and howled like a wolf.

As much as I enjoyed the Flaming Lips, it was Weezer is was there for, specifically the promise that they would be playing the Blue Album from start to finish. This was their very first concert of this tour, so I didn't know what to expect, but they emerged from a spaceship that rose up into the ceiling, and had a charmingly dorky space theme going on, with visuals behind them showing the journey to the blue planet. They played mostly the hits, though a few songs from deeper in their catalog too, and I sang along to all of them. Pork and Beans, Beverly Hills, Island in the Sun, Pink Triangle ... there was a whole Pinkerton section, which I appreciated, because I'm fond of Pinkerton. There were a few references to this space theme they had going, and it was dorky, because Rivers Cuomo is a dork, but I liked it, because I too am a dork.

But when they started the Blue Album it was like the real concert had begun. The crowd got louder, there was more energy in the arena, and the Blue Album is one of those rare albums that's just all great songs, one after the other. The performances were very close to what was on the album, and I do wonder about that, because it's been thirty years since it's come out, and ... does Weezer feel beholden to it? Does it not feel suffocating to feel compelled to go with the choices you made when you were in your 20s? Do your tastes not drift? But of course the fans want what they remember, and though the music is live, the band is playing music that's long since crystalized. Whatever my thoughts on the thirty year gap of time, the Blue Album is still just full of songs I love and deeply relate to.

My one problem with the Blue Album has always been Only in Dreams, which is eight minutes long, and that's just too long. It feels eight minutes long. By contrast, Bohemian Rhapsody is six minutes long, and really earns that six minutes. Here though, as the final song of the concert, I thought it worked. The extended song felt like it's supposed to feel, like the album doesn't want to end, and by extension, like the concert doesn't want to end.

The big takeaway for me is that I should go to more concerts. There's something hard to put into words about what it feels like to sing along to a song with ten thousand other people, what it feels like to have the bass thumping through your body and have the full sensory experience of the light show in a dark room.

The small takeaway is that I really hate Dinosaur Jr.

[turnstileskyline]

RockSound June 3rd, 2024 – Dallon Weekes Interview (Transcript under the cut)

hello all!!!! i am still taking a little tumblr break (gonna upload and dip) but my copy of the rocksound idkhow issue came so i wanted to get these photographed and transcribed because i know i have shaky hands. (if you spot any mistakes let me know and i'll fix them asap!)

Taking Over The World (One Show At A Time)

As they close out their UK headline tour, IDHKOW's Dallon Weekes reflects on the lessons learned from taking 'Gloom Division' out on the road.

Words James Wilson-Taylor

Photos Corinne Cumming

Now that the UK tour has come to an end, how are you reflecting on this latest run of shows? Well the shows were fantastic. All of the crowds were great and it was really exciting to be back there after, you know, COVID and the album delays and everything. It's felt like it was forever since we've been back. But to be able to go back with this new lineup that I have, it was pretty special. Because I feel like the live show has grown a lot. Being able to add more live musicians to it, and rely less upon synth tracks and things like that. To have people up on stage actually doing it live, we're a little more untethered, which, must like that tour itself, was pretty chaotic. But we seem to thrive on chaos. So it worked out. It was really fun.

Did it click together quite quickly with the new band? What were the initial live rehearsals like? It was really fun for me. My heart goes out to the guys who are playing for me because they had this whole catalogue of music to learn before we hit the road, but they are such professionals and so talented too and most of them live here around Utah where I'm from. Anthony, my guitar player, still is in LA. But whenever shows come up, he flies out here so we get some proper full band rehearsals. But to be able to have really professional musicians dig into the songs and learn how to play them and have some input as well is really invaluable to me because I always really enjoy when a live show has tiny deviations from the recorded versions of the album that you might have in your collection. Sometimes bands can go a little too far from that and it can be fun sometimes. But it can also be a bummer, it kind of depends on the song, I guess. But I like having small moments or extended bits, or maybe an idea that you got post recording an album, when you're all jamming it together and someone does something cool. And you go, 'Dammit, I wish that was on the record'. So you just put it in the live show and it makes for a cool experience, I think.

With the added band members, it gives you a little extra freedom to step away from the bass at moments and explore your position as a frontman. It feels good, but it's interesting too, because that was never on my bucket list. I never had that in mind for my life to be a frontman, or a lead singer. I just always wanted to make music and write and record and have that be my job. I've been lucky enough to have achieved that goal. But, you know, circumstances being what they are, I eventually landed into that role without having it as a goal, but it's something that I do enjoy. It's something I did years ago with Brobecks. But between then and now it's been more than a decade. So I think it took me a minute to sort of relearn that role and find myself in that role again, and luckily once it started rolling, it didn't take long for me to find that footing again. But there was that learning curve where I tried to remember how to be in this spot, rather than just filling a spot on the side of that stage just playing bass. So yeah, it's been fun to be able to put it down every once in a while and have a little more freedom to wander around or spill water bottles all over the stage, which is a bad habit of mine.

It also allows for a nice relationship with the audience. I mean, that's something you've always had – it almost feels like a conversation in places. It's a little secret club in a way for all these fans. That was the impetus when it started. Because this was a secret project, no one was supposed to know about it. And I really had no goals in mind for it other than to get some music out of my head and play it for a bunch of strangers that didn't know what other bands I'd ever been in and see if that art that I was making could stand on it's own two feet without waving some giant flag saying, 'Hey, everybody, I was in this band before, come and see what I'm doing.' There was something about that which felt really disingenuous and kind of gross to me. So starting this project in secret with this ridiculous band name that no one could ever find appealing made a lot of sense at the time. But as things snowballed – and what a wonderful problem to have, I'm talking about this like it's some sort of bad thing but it's not, it's a great thing – eventually it became too late to choose a more sensible band name. But, you know, band names are ridiculous anyway, so who cares? I guess the secret is just to not care. But yeah, finding that role again. It took a minute, but it's been a lot of fun. I'm enjoying it a lot.

In terms of the newer songs in the set, did playing them live and seeing the audience reaction change your opinion about them at all? It's a similar feeling for both me and the audience. Because the way that writing and recording music works now is different from how it was 20 years ago. You used to write your song, go out and play it every night, workshop it, tighten the screws on it, and then you go record it and put on a record. Now, with Youtube and streaming services and bootlegs and things, you have to keep a tight lid on this new stuff that you're working on until it's been officially released. So now, you write your song and you record it and then you learn how to play it afterwards. So taking those out into the world for the first time on stage after you've recorded it, I think it's a new experience for the audience and for the performers as well, because you get a handle on this new thing that you've already recorded. Then night by night, kind of like I mentioned before, someone might do something different. The song sort of evolves and changes a little bit from the way that you recorded it. I think there's a lot of fun to be had in that. Sometimes those things can only happen once you are in front of people and playing those songs. It's all a really organic process and I really enjoy that.

I guess the other thing you had to consider was how best to balance this new material, which pushed you into some new places musically, with the older songs that everybody knows. It's become a challenge now because when this thing started, I hadn't recorded or released anything. It was about four or five months of playing dive bars in secret and just denying that this was even a thing while I was recording. Then by the time we did have something out there, I think we put a song on YouTube first with no record label, no radio, nothing. Then that song just kind of took off. Then we were expected to fill an hour whenever we would go on tour and we had only released five songs. So learning that frontman role and stretching bits out and filling in our set with some covers and maybe some old Brobecks songs, that was the challenge. Now, the challenge has become picking a setlist that has bits and pieces of stuff that you love and that the audience would appreciate from the past and from the current record. So it's a different challenge now, but it's one that I'm enjoying. Revisiting stuff that is important to me from the past and things that I really like playing and stuff that the audience either needs to hear, because we're promoting it, or is stuff that I know they have responded to well in the past and that they'd like to hear. So it's a combination of different factors to make a decent setlist, I think, but I try to keep all that stuff in mind.

One particularly special moment at the London show was when Will Joseph Cook joined you onstage to perform your collaboration "Sunnyside'. That was fun. He's a London boy. The algorithm sent me some of his music a couple of years back and it was a song called 'Take Me Dancing', one of his songs from maybe four or five years ago. It was one of those songs that when you hear it as a songwriter, it's so good that it kind of pisses you off, you know? Dammit, that's good. So I reached out to him to see if he wanted to collaborate on some stuff, and it's been a great working relationship ever since. Then we just pass each other ideas back and forth all the time. He hit me up and asked if he could come to the London show and I said, 'Why don't you come out on stage and we'll sing this 'Sunnyside' song that we to wrote together'. He's like, fuck yeah, so we hooked up a spare microphone and ran it on soundcheck and then brought them out on stage for the set. It was a lot of fun to be able to do that. To play it live with the person who helped cowrite that was pretty special.

So you see that collaborative relationship continuing on more songs in the future? We hung out pretty much all day that day backstage and showed each other ideas that we have floating around. After I got home, I send him some more songs. So yeah, we're definitely going to keep that collaborative working relationship going. He's a good young man with a bright future.

You have also been able to bring some more Brobecks songs into your setlist and put a new, IDKHOW twist on them. Are there any more of those older songs you'd like to re-record or perform again? I've got a shortlist of maybe four or five old Brobecks songs that I think never really got a proper chance to be a proper song, you know, whether that was because we didn't have enough money to record it properly or get it mixed or mastered or even release it. Then I eventually released the songs in a vacuum and no one ever really heard it. But there's four or five I think that I would still like to give a proper chance to. It's not super high on the priority list. But it is something that I'm interested in because I am a fan of songs. And you know, probably more so than albums as a whole, I'm a song man. There are a few from the past that I think had some potential. But I would probably have to consider, you know, the passage of time in between when I first wrote them as a young man and, if I did rerecord and release, now there might have to be some lyric adjustments or something because I don't know how well some lyric choices when you're 22 would go over when you're 42. So there might be some rewrites in order. But revisiting some of those I think would be fun because this project and that project, they aren't unrelated to each other. I very well could have easily called this The Brobecks. But whenever I started this, putting a period at the end of that old project seemed like the right move and moving on to something new that didn't have any baggage to carry along with it. It felt like the move. But yeah, that doesn't mean that that stuff isn't still important to me. It's still very meaningful and I really love playing old Brobecks songs and I think that I always will.

Now that you have had some time to reflect since the release of 'GLOOM DIVISION', how are you feeling about that collection of songs now? It's interesting how your perspective changes on things. When I first recorded it, and was getting ready to release it, I was so excited and I thought this was the best work that I've ever done. Then even with the good reviews that it has gotten and the fan response, there was still more mixed reviews, or mixed feelings, about it than I thought there would be. But seeing that happen has given me a sort of step back, trying to be more objective, which is hard to do when you're making art, you know, because it really is for you. That's still number one for me whenever I make art. It is for me, and I want to like the thing that I'm making. That's the most important bit and if anyone else happens to like it, that's just a really great bonus. But I made this record and I loved it and I thought that surely everyone else would too. All of my favourite records and the things that I draw inspiration from are not popular records. These are not things that were at the top of the charts. You know, even on some of my top 10 Records of all time – Elvis Costello's 'This Year's Model' or The Flaming Lips or Ben Folds Five, all of my favourite stuff, these were never people that lived at the top of the charts. So, to me, the response kind of makes sense. As long as you're making something that you like, and you're not trying to play to the gallery, then whatever their response is, so be it.

UK artists in particular seem to have always had a big influence on you. I've been a sucker for everything British since I got into the Beatles, and if it was from the 60s and it was British then I was all about it. Even in the 90s, | was a big Britpop fan. In the post grunge-90s, Britpop in America was not the cool thing to be into, but I was all about it. Blur was my favourite. I loved Pulp and I liked Oasis too. That was my shit back in the 90s while everyone else was listening to Rage Against The Machine, which I can appreciate more now. Back then, I viewed it as the stuff my older brother and his friends were into and they're all bros. So I was being kind of a little hipster about it. But I love Rage now. But yeah, back then in the 90s, again I was into stuff that wasn't living at the top of the charts.

It must have been particularly exciting to finally come over here and play shows for the first time. Yeah it was very cool to be there finally and see where rock and roll...wasn't born but where it had been fine tuned and perfected. We may have done it first but I'm always of the mindset that y'all did it best. There's no pride in regards to, you know, who did what and when. I'm a fan of what y'all do. I love it over there.

One UK show that must stick in the memory was when you played Brixton Academy in 2016 with Panic! At The Disco just after David Bowie had passed away. That must have been quite a surreal but special moment. I remember waking up in my hotel that day to the news and being hit with it harder than I probably thought I would have ever been. I'd always been a big Bowie fan, but sometimes you don't really realize how much you like something until it's gone, which is kind of fucked up. So I woke up to the news that he had died and I cried a little bit, you know, which kind of surprised me. Then I went out walking the streets, because we had a full day before we had to be at the venue for soundcheck, and his music was everywhere. Walking past that mural that's down the street from the venue where people had made this makeshift memorial, there was this awesome sense of community. That was a great reminder about the importance behind art and behind music. All of these people walking the streets, they might not share anything in common, but at least for today, or that day, everyone's sharing this art that this man made. There's something so special about that. Whenever an artist passes along from this world, you hope that your art that you make continues to be enjoyed by people and that way you get to sort of live on and still impact people. So that's the hope. I certainly hope that's the case with me and I'm sure I'm not alone in that. Playing that venue in particular, or really any historical venue where I know for sure that someone I love has played there and has walked down this staircase to the stage just like I'm doing, I always think about that right before we're about to take the stage. There's something intimidating about it and something comforting about it at the same time.

Similarly, when you played Camden Electric Ballroom with IDKHOW, that is another venue with so much history. There is a plaque outside in memory of when Prince performed there. That's another reason why I really love playing in London because there's so many choices. You throw a stone and there's a gig happening somewhere and you have your choice of just about anything under the sun that you can go see. So the fact that there are people on the other side of the world that would choose to come see this project and watch us play the songs that I write here in my basement is nothing short of a miracle to me. This last round of shows that we played over there, particularly that last show in London, to be able to have that venue full of people is so special to me and does not go unappreciated.

[bhpop]

I apologize for the long time I've taken to post, I've currently been working on going past my limits in digital art like rendering.

I've previously mainly just been either sketching or simplifying my art and filling it with color with not much detail so I've been putting more effort in attempting to render my art which has taken a while due to my previous lack of effort in it. But I'm still determined and I have a lot to learn, so far I do see some improvement but I might just be a bit biased.

I've mainly been trying this with fem Scene-Yuu, their design was more fun to work with since I've been working on slight changes or overall redesigns for some of my characters. I want them to have more of a Twst appearance (mainly with their versions of the school uniform) but still having obvious differences since they each aren't from that world.

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Scene-Yuu:

There isn't really much of a difference in their redesigns besides slight longer but choppy hair and duller colors. I had said I'm not good with bright and neon colors although they look fun to use, so it's something I will be working on to be more flexible with, but for now I'll mainly continue to use dull and darker colors due to it being a personal preference.

Also this is just an example of the rendered art I've been working on, so I will be trying to put more effort into all my art like I did for this one but it might just take more time since this one took 2 hours and 25 minutes to make, but I do hope you'll like it !

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"Perfect"-Yuu:

They're a character I've already been planning on redesigning a while back but I've just never really came to an agreement with my self on what they'd really look like since their design was really rushed.

I've overall decided to fully base them off porcelain rolls but to also keep them simple yet not to average since I want to still have a creepy aesthetic with them. I mainly focus on keeping some of my characters eyes a main part in their design since to me eyes are something rly important to how some would portray a character. Though "Perfect"-Yuu is still going through concept sketches but I've come to a slight conclusion on what they may look like.

(Male Scene-Yuu still looks the same btw, his design is one I'm more proud of !)

Their design is simple and more feminine along with slightly conservative and more "professional" if it makes sense to y'all with what I'm trying to invision, but idk I might go against myself and make them over styled but I'ma try and make them look simple but with small details.

Bonus: I'm also working on sketches of both Yuu's versions of Grim since as I previously said each Yuu has their own version of Grim that still acts the same as he does in game and in the mangas but just with slight changes and differences in his appearances that aren't to major and just let him almost match with his Yuu !