#asked the Sphinx

[askshivanulegacy]

Something something about strikes on public infrastructure and emergency services

Something something about real life victims who are left in real need of services that are denied that have no substitute

Something something about Tumblr's obsessive morally right crusade for strikes and if you're hurt by them or dare to be opposed or angry, then you're the enemy

Something something about rights and needs existing in fundamental opposition, and something about that being the literal nature of conflict and war

Anyway, I just want Tumblr to recognize that there's no single perfectly moral and "right" side to a lot of pet causes. Actual reality is full of unresolvable disagreements and people are going to fight for self-interest, and they're going to be forced to fight for self-interest. And they're going to be right by their own accounts and wrong by others.

And maybe it's ok, or maybe it isn't, but it's necessary and it's reality and it would be nice if everyone finally realized the world is gray and actions have consequences, and crusaders looked the consequences in the eye and acknowledge what they choose, deliberately, to do at the cost of others.

[edorazzi]

Omg I've been headcanon-ing that felix is like that cause he's autistic for years it's great to see The Felix Agreste Enjoyer agreeing

(Mentor AU) Felix is so deep on the spectrum he classifies as shrimp colours!

He masks with minimal social interaction and an intimidating aura. Only Bri knows what a creature he truly is (and that's why she loves him)! 💖

[celestial-games]

This post is for hummingbird clearwing enjoyers only :]

Support my work on patreon | bug discord

[abbycadoodle]

Hellooo, my question for you is, what is your favourite toothpaste brand? And as a request, could you mayhaps doodle Spock + a cat for some serotonin? Thank you very much, have a good life.

SJSKFKD good question lol -- my favorite toothpaste would have to be Colgate, specifically the cool mint flavor with the lil confetti looking thingies in it lmao

as for your request, here u go !!!

Mr. Wrinkles actually holds the rank of lieutenant because Spock said so

thank u sm for the request !!! this was really fun to draw 🤗

[arttsuka]

Question. Since monster falls au Stan and Ford have tails, do they wag when they're happy??

I dunno i just think that would be cute </3

I can't actually imagine them wagging their tails due to excitement/happiness. Irritation/annoyance and anxiety on the other hand...

[lsdoiphin]

Sphinxes are crafty the same way that coyotes or bears are crafty. Their cleverness shouldn't be underestimated, yes, but they're not going to win any battles of wits against something like a corvid or a parrot.

[trungles]

So I’ve been working on this Sphinx illustration on and off for fun (it’s not quite done, and I’ll pop it up on Patreon when it is), but then I was immediately overtaken with the notion that a Sphinx would just be the most disastrous mythical animal. She’s like if your cat could operate a can opener and also insult your wardrobe and quote Vanderpump Rules. Plus you’d need to keep her indoors because she would be murder on the local alkonost population.

[beausbugbiome]

Hello its me again! found this female at work one morning Google kept telling me it was some kind of regal moth but didn't specify

Thought I ask you on this have a nice evening/night

Hi, friend! I think this lovely creature is a Syssphinx bicolor or Honey Locust Moth! I’m not terribly familiar with moths, not as much as beetles, anyway. So I had to do a tiny bit of digging, but it was fun!

Thank you for asking, I love these messages! Hope you also have a wonderful night!💖

[queewp]

So what's Ford's motivation of research in your Monster Falls au? Is he fascinated by humans and wants to study them without bias? Does he want to publish a paler that would make monsters consider coming out of hiding? Are they even from the same dimension??? What would this au's version of Weirdmageddon look like?

HEHE SO- Ford's motivation:

Ford’s motive for research is similar to the original–he wants to document the weird and the unknown. Even as monsters, I can imagine there’s ALOT that has yet to be discovered–I can imagine Ford is also just rlly into that stuff in gen! He ofc still has the journals, tho they are ofc gonna differ slightly in content cuz some of the stuff in the Journals would already be ‘normal’ occurrences/creatures in his everyday life

Is he fascinated by humans and wants to study them without bias?

Yes and no. He is indeed fascinated with humans, but he’s smart enough to not barge into human settlements. The only reason Ford ended up trusting Bill is because Bill, surprisingly, nursed him back to health when Ford stepped into a trap (which may or may not have been a trap Bill had set up lol). Ford decided that humans couldn’t be THAT bad if Bill had helped him (he was incredibly wrong). Thus, he started feeling comfortable enough to ask questions, draw humans, write them down in his journals, etc. So yeah but also, it wasn't his initial plan--he is indeed incredibly fascinated in them, but part of it was also because the human he was researching was also Bill Does he want to publish a paper that would make monsters consider coming out of hiding?

Kind of!! Not exactly a paper, but he wanted monsters and humans to work together instead of being fearful of each other. He saw how Bill and himself worked and he thought; 'why were we so afraid of humans?' Ford and Bill, instead of working on the portal, were trying to figure out a way for humans to find / cross the barrier protecting Gravity Falls.

Are they even from the same dimension???

Yes!! In my version, Gravity Falls is a town of monsters w/ a barrier protecting them from humans. It's impossible for human to find the town on their own (if a human tries finding it, even with directions, they'll end up walking in circles and never finding it), and they’re also unable to cross it even if they DO find it. They found this out when Ford insisted that he come to Gravity Falls, so that they could go further into their research (Bill at this time, offered to help, and has been helping Ford with his journals and research); with Ford’s guidance, Bill ‘found’ Gravity Falls. However, it quickly became apparent that while Ford could step through this barrier, Bill could not. The next part of the research is like I had said before, trying to make Gravity Falls accessible to humans.

What would this au's version of Weirdmageddon look like?

HEHE basically a free for all hunting ground!! I’d imagine that Bill’s Henchmaniacs are also humans, and also monster hunters :3 They get free rein of a town FULL of the thing they hunt, what else do u think they're gonna do? /silly

I'm still tweaking a lot of the smaller things (and... a lot of other plot points) but that's basically around what I have :D Ty for asking this, this was so fun to answer <33 if anyone else has more questions, or ideas, defo send an ask >:D

[moths-daily]

hello fellow moth enjoyer(s)! i am so obsessed with this blog, i LOVE moths!!

here's a Blinded Sphinx(?) moth i found back in may 2023! some people were terrorizing it outside so i relocated it somewhere safer <3 the lil guy also blends in with my wallet lol

(don't worry about it's antenna! it was revealed to me and my friends later that it was just hidden, and wasn't gone!)

ohhhh delightful thank you

[edorazzi]

Page 32 of my Miraculous Mentor AU comic A Matter of Trust! In which Felix summons the confidence to open up to someone else, and the Miraculous begin to find their balance! ☯️⚖️

Index | Start | Prev | Next

Weekly updates each Sunday! You can also read ahead early on Patreon, and/or buy me a Ko-fi if you'd like to support my work! 💖

[hemipenal-system]

do you have any thoughts on sphinxes?

not a huge fan of the canon-standard sphinx but i do really like the modern interpretation that’s like “lion with eagle wings and a penchant for tricking travelers and then eating them”. the lion head is better to me

[teecupangel]

Hi! I really enjoy your Desmond gets turned into random creatures, and I was wondering if you've done a sphinx? I have a sphinx Desmond, and a very loose plot idea. Instead of dying from the apple, it turns him into a sphinx, and now he's stuck in a lion's body, disoriented, in pain, probably a lot of dissociation because everything is just so wrong. And he isn't exactly small, so Shaun, Bill and Becks have to hide this giant creature and it's a struggle because he can't really move properly and he's heavy so they take way longer than they'd like to get him out of the temple before abstergo gets there.

I think the artifact also affected his mind in a way that, he has the sixth sense, knowledge I think? So he can access an insane amount of isu knowledge, but he can't quite control it, and it causes him massive migraines when he tries to dig for it.

On the other side, sometimes he'll just correct things people say randomly, without even thinking about it, then he just pauses and frowns like "how do i know this?"

you can do time travel with him and interactions with ancestors and such, i just wanna know your take on a sphinx Desmond :3

Oooohhh, I love your sphinx Desmond so much. I’m kinda imagining that he doesn’t really like riddles. Tried them more than once but he just gets a headache and wished people would stop being cryptic.

So he absolutely hate the curse inflicted upon him:

Whenever anyone asks him a question he himself does not know but he ‘knows’ via Isu bs, he’s forced to ask a riddle that must be answered correctly before he could access the answer.

He can try and force it, of course, but he’ll get a growing headache the more time he spent trying to understand it. So yeah, it’s honestly better if people just answer his riddle.

And Desmond’s ‘criteria’ for correct answers isn’t just one specific answer.

To be more exact, Desmond’s affinity to someone makes it ‘easier’ for them to give bullshit answer.

For example:

Rauf definitely needs to answer correctly the riddle given to him but Desmond would be able to give him a riddle that wasn’t that difficult.

Malik gets super difficult riddles because Desmond totally believe there is not a single riddle Malik cannot solve.

But someone like Altaïr?

Desmond could ask something like “what is better when broken?”

And Altaïr could answer with some shit like “a Templar’s neck”

They’d stare at each other for a moment before Desmond a cat-like shrug and go “Yeah, sounds about right.”

While Desmond is explaining the topic that caused his riddle trait to trigger, everybody else is just staring at Altaïr because the favoritism is so blatant it’s ridiculous.

Unorganized Notes:

It took a while before Desmond could get used to his new body. The first few days were the worst. His human experience did not mesh well with his sphinx instincts but it got better the more he realized that, yes, this is his new body now and he has to accept that.

Once he got used to his body, he liked to take naps where there’s warm sunlight or in freshly dried laundry.

When he stretches (like a cat), his wings flutter and shake slightly.

When someone annoys him but he doesn't feel the desire to maul them, he sits on them.

[arttsuka]

Monster falls

[sombertide-0]

I’m thinking about your sphinx!Desmond and about how sphinxes usually guard the entrances of temples and the like and ask riddles, and now I’m picturing him lazing in front of a doorway or on top of an important item (u know , as cats do.) and refusing to move unless someone answers his riddle just to be annoying.

so i maybe went a little nuts but this was too good of an idea to pass on. also feel free to answer the riddles hehehe

Also also a close up on his face since i'm really proud of this one

[sanctus-ingenium]

I was wondering how achieve such a wonderful textured finish on your pieces? They are wonderful and I love their resemblance to aged photographs and the speckles of colors in the backgrounds. Your art is mesmerizing :)

you can see some of the texture brush sets i use in my #info_asks tag but i have some more (procreate) tips aside from just brushes

also hi i made this whole thing and then stupidly hit ctrl z to erase ONE word and i lost the entire bottom half of the post and all my image descriptions so fuck you tumblr i had to make this twice

to get a faded photo or old digital screen look, consider duplicating the canvas (once all the layers are merged) and using a gaussian blur tool on the new duplicated layer. then set that to low opacity to add a misty sort of look. looks nice in combination with some chromatic abberation and a small bloom effect. then a subtle noise filter on top:

for faded print effects, it's really worthwhile to learn how to use layer masks. you can use a layer mask to non-destructively 'weather' blocks of colour or lineart, without erasing the layer itself. the weathered ink/block print effect here was made using layer masks which means that if i just hide the mask, the lineart becomes solid black again and easy to alter or colour in:

for old paper effects you can just set a paper texture on multiply over the art sure, but you can also combine it with the blur & bloom thing, a really subtle drop shadow and canvas tilt, and highlights to make it look like an aged photograph of a card. this originally had a transparent bg but i'll post it here with a white bg so that the drop shadow is more obvious. the scuffed edges of the card (left) were hand drawn, simple white stucco brush. the bigger patch of scuffed ink (top right) was a texture stamp.

for block print looks you can move the colour layer out of alignment by a few pixels - but only after you're absolutely sure you're done with it, otherwise you'll get something like this -

i forgot to erase out her eye before i moved the red layer so now her eye defeats the 'look' of a misaligned print. the black lineart and red layer were also given the same layer mask treatment as described above to make them look faded or like the ink didn't stick down right to the paper

you can do this with multiple colour layers too. if the colour layers are separated and set to multiply (as in this cmyk example), it'll leave halos and edges around each shape which mimic old comic book print

just to show what you can do WITHOUT any special brushes, here's a piece of one of my mez tarot cards from before i got any extra brushsets at all. for this one, i added a green tint over everything to mimic a sun-bleached or faded print (my actual goal wasn't 'medieval illustration' but actually 'trading card from the 60s that got left on someone's windowsill for decades'). the background texture is the procreate noise brush. the texture under the green lion drawing is the procreate concrete brush (to make it look painted onto a wall). the lettering and lineart is procreate's 6B pencil. but to properly aim for The Look of it being a printed physical object, i also used a perspective blur so that the edges are out of focus, and metallic gold highlights which don't match the lighting of the actual illustration and appear to be catching some other external light. that texture was made from the procreate noise brush

it's pretty simple compared to my later stuff but i still really like the effect

in terms of colours, you need to keep them unified so that they all appear to be acting under the same external light source, like if someone is holding up a torch to a painting then the painting colours will be glazed with firelight even if there's no painted fire. a really easy way to do this is to slap a multiply layer over everything in one shade - grey-yellow for a weathered paper look, or greenish blue for sunbleached photos. this unifies all the colours of the drawing. or you can apply a gradient map at a low opacity so that there's only a subtle change. or just do it by hand - if you want everything to be slightly tinted yellow, just pick the colours you normally would, but move the colour wheel towards yellow to get a yellowfied version of the base colour. easy

it's really important to consider how fading and weathering can affect printed colour. white paper yellows, black fades. you will rarely see pure black or pure white. which means you can use pure black or pure white to add external effects like the white scuff marks on the hierophant card. if the whole drawing is yellowed from age but there's some white somewhere, it's an easy shorthand to show that the scuff mark or whatever was not originally part of the drawing (great way to add some nasty stains lol)