#but… it’s so tempting to consider him in queer context

[intergalactic-chameleon]

no sorry i just saw this tweet and im having a moment cuz like … i already love joe keery. but if he actually ever came out as bisexual ….? i would. well let’s just say i would “end up” on “the news”

[momsforroadhead]

hey bestie please say more about labyrinth?

nooooo i asked for this lmao um well

i thought about straight up posting my paper, but it's in french so. yeah.

BASICALLY it was for a mythologies of cinema class and we had to pick a mythical figure whose presence could be argued in a movie. i chose Peter Pan as a mythical figure, which was present in Labyrinth's Jareth. My paper was titled "The eternal child or the old boy", because old boy ("vieux garçon") is a euphemistic way of referring to older, gay and therefore unmarried men (in french).

a mythical figure refers, in thias context, to any figure/character who represents a type which can be replicated, along with it's themes, in stories forever, which transcends time.

in Peter Pan's case, he is used, often in pop psychology, to refer to a "man child" (peter pan syndrome etc), which is also often used to refer to queer men, because can rarely (if ever) achieve what is percieved by a cis/heteronormative society as adulthood. in one paper i read, the author highlighted the fact that "boy" only makes sense as a transitionnal state towards "man". if one never achieves manhood, then what does being a boy really mean for them. in this paper, the author then focused on the importance of the boy for transmasc people, touching also on "bois".

jareth has, unlike peter, achieved a sort of biological adulthood, but his societal role is not that of The Man. he remains unmarried, rules over a kingdom which is disorderly and immature and, at his core, exists only within a childlike fantasy world. by kidnapping sarah's brother and by attempting to marry her (or have sex with her, which, in this fantasy world, is considered equivalent).

like one of the rebloggers mentioned, the narrative is very rooted in stranger danger on sarah's part, much like it is for wendy in peter pan! wendy is led out of the home, away from her new motherly responsabilities (she is 14 and moving out of the nursery, starting to care for her brothers) by a figure which threatens to keep her in eternal childhood, away from the societal role of the woman. we even learn that peter visited her mother when she was younger. however the scary stranger who would corrupt a young woman looks much different in the late 80s than he did in the edwardian era.

the casting of bowie is not coincidental here. with his public persona, he very much represented in the minds of then everypeople this idea of queerness. they also added to this with his costume. the revealing tights, the leather boots, gloves, vest and whip (!!!) the big hair metal mane, the flouncy shirt (at the time, pirate clothing was very in fashion with the new romantics, a very queer (yet apolitical it's complicated) subculture (think boygeorge) which was inspired by bowie and which he had recently associated with) and the kabuki makeup (a theater in which casts were initially entirely made up of female sex workers, and later of men). this all contributed to project this image of sexual deviancy and gender fuckery, of deviation from the norm which, as we see in the film, was actually tempting to sarah!

however, at the end of the day, the story is not about him. she's the heroine, she has to succeed. jim henson has said that he really wanted to empower young girls with labyrinth, so sarah states that he has no power over her and goes home. back on track to the societal role of the woman, the motherly role (taking care of her little brother). but henson is kinder to young girls than barrie was, and he allows her to keep her childlike wonder, her imagination, her fantasy. all her friends from the labyrinth (three different but positive masculine figures) appear in her room, the sanctuary of the Girl in the 80s, they tell her that they'll always be there when she needs them. but Jareth, cannot enter this sanctum, this "re-gendered" society. he is a menace to it and therefore stands at the window, in bird form (i have to note that peter pan is, in the book, cannonically half-bird), looking in before flying away.

i had never considered the teenage predatory/rape fantasy that one of the rebloggers brought up, that's actually so smart!!! and apt!!!!!! wish i had thought of it in time to write it into my paper cause my conclusion was pretty weak!!!!!!!

so yeah there you have it. i will understand if you don't have the time to read all that.

[kunsthalextracity]

The History of Queer Nightlife in Antwerp: Self-Interview in a Convex Mirror

In the framework of the group exhibition ‘Daily Nightshift’, Kunsthal Extra City collaborated with the Urban Studies Institute of the University of Antwerp on a lecture series. Due to COVID-19 we unfortunately couldn’t allow these lectures to take place at our premises.

To replace his lecture, professor Bart Eeckhout wrote an interview with himself.

In his text Eeckhout, board member of the Urban Studies Institute at the University of Antwerp, researches the history of queer nightlife in Antwerp and the spatial shifts that have occurred along the way. Where in the city were sexual minorities able to make contact? In what kind of places of entertainment? How did these change in shape and location? Which material traces of this nightlife remain?

Text & images: Bart Eeckhout

The History of Queer Nightlife in Antwerp: Self-Interview in a Convex Mirror

Q. So, professor, before Covid-19 changed everyone’s plans, you were going to give a lecture about the history of queer nightlife in Antwerp as part of the public program for the exhibition?

A. Well, not quite a lecture.

Q. But you were going to entertain our audience with lots of slides and flashy pictures?

A. Not really. As a matter of fact, I was wondering how to turn the presentation into something more than the delivery of an academic text, something that could satisfy an audience that is drowning in audiovisual information. The thing is that I saw myself forced to talk about a topic that is hard to illustrate, and to do so moreover as an amateur historian.

Q. How do you mean?

A. I actually teach English and American literature. But I happen to be the only board member of the Urban Studies Institute at the University of Antwerp who is simultaneously on the board of A*, the network of colleagues who specialize in gender and sexuality studies. There I have a reputation for being into queer studies and for stimulating the collaboration between queer academics and activists, since I consider myself to be both.

Q. And so the organizers came knocking on your door to ask if you could speak to the topic of queer nightlife in Antwerp?

A. Yes. And I accepted to do so because I have coincidentally been acquiring some expertise on the topic. Last year a colleague with whom I love to collaborate at the university, the media scholar Alexander Dhoest, got an invitation to contribute a chapter on Antwerp for an international book on gay neighborhoods in cities around the world – what used to be called “gay ghettoes.” We remembered that a PhD student of ours, the musicologist Rob Herreman, had spent a lot of time in archives to find out more about the recent history of LGBTQs in Antwerp in relation to music. Though we were hesitant to venture into terrain that should ideally be explored by skilled historians, we’re not aware of any Flemish colleagues doing academic research into recent LGBTQ history, certainly not with a specific focus on Antwerp. In addition, the book for which we were invited was being put together by architects and would thus probably cut us some slack. So we realized that the case of Antwerp would get attention in the collection only if we were willing to undertake the job ourselves.

Accepting to write the chapter has meant that we were forced to immerse ourselves quickly in the materials and sources we had at our disposal so as to develop a critical narrative that would meet the minimum requirements of academic scholarship. We were primarily interested in all the things we might learn from the exercise.

Q. And did you learn a few things?

A. I certainly hope so! One thing we hypothesized from the start is that the Anglo-American way of understanding gay neighborhoods would be only partially applicable to Antwerp, at best. And that is also what we argued at the more theoretical level. If you want to look for queer forms of geographic clustering in a Flemish city such as Antwerp, you should omit a lot of the social functions you find historically in the gay neighborhoods of New York or San Francisco. The “reverse diaspora” of sexual minorities from the countryside to the city that underpinned these metropolitan neighborhoods in the US never took place to the same extent, or in the same manner, in Flanders or Belgium. 

In addition, a historic city such as Antwerp is relatively small by international standards. Getting around, even on foot or by bicycle, is easy, so that there’s no urgent need to choose particular residential areas if you happen to be queer. For these and several other reasons, the first thing to note about gay neighborhoods in Antwerp is that there was never anything more than some spatially clustered nightlife.

Q. Let’s talk for a moment about that nightlife then. How easy was it to go back in time to undertake your investigation?

A. That was one of the difficulties. It’s not as if you can simply fall back on standard published histories of queer life in Belgium or Flanders, let alone histories that deal specifically with Antwerp. The larger context isn’t so hard to sketch, but the specifics are a bit of a problem. When you research the history of public sex in Antwerp – by which in this case I mean the institutional environment for nondomestic sexual interactions among citizens – it isn’t hard to figure out how the first red-light district emerged during the city’s historic heyday in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. As this red-light district catered primarily to sailors, it was understandably located close to the river, in the narrow streets just north of the City Hall that came to be known as the Schipperskwartier or Skippers Quarter.

This much is standard knowledge. But how did same-sex interactions ever figure into that lusting, lawless, lowlife milieu? What might possibly be the historic sources in which you might find reliable evidence for same-sex intercourse taking place in this environment? There isn’t much you can go by. You must hope that somewhere a slight flicker will flare up to evoke a fleeting image of what might have been going on. Let me illustrate this by showing the invisibility of our topic at its most palpable. Here’s the picture of a street in the former Skippers Quarter. Do you recognize it?

Q. Not immediately.

A. Don’t blame yourself. Though I personally love to roam through all the little streets of Antwerp’s historic center, I must confess I had never bothered to walk through this one before my research took me there. It’s called the Gorter Street and it’s a very short, narrow, one-way street that is about as bland and uninteresting as you can imagine. Do you see the red-brick house in the middle of the image? That wasn’t always there, of course. If we can trust the history of house numbers, it stands where previously the Crystal Palace was to be found, a gay bar whose building collapsed, literally, sometime in the 1960s. But before the Crystal Palace was a gay bar, it was a luxury brothel, as far back as the turn of the twentieth century and even earlier. And that’s where we were able to locate our first piece of not entirely reliable evidence for same-sex goings-on – not entirely reliable because it requires a detour via the fictive world of novels and a willingness to fill in the blanks. What do you remember about the Flemish writer Georges Eekhoud?

Q. Not much.

A. He was our own Oscar Wilde, if you like – the first famous gay writer in Flanders who, like Wilde, had to defend himself in court. Unfortunately, he wrote in French, which means we’ve forgotten him even more efficiently than if he’d written in Dutch. Anyway, he published a novel in 1888, La nouvelle Carthage, in which he appears to evoke this particular brothel in great detail as a cave full of mirrors in which “all stages of debauchery” took place. Given his own sexual orientation, it’s very easy to imagine that these must have included same-sex interactions, but in his description Eekhoud preferred to remain coy about the sexual acts, so that it’s really for our own 21st-century imaginations to flesh out the specifics.

Q. So for what period did you find the first evidence of same-sex activities in the Skippers Quarter that didn’t take the form of literary fiction but of nonfictional testimony?

A. We had to jump to the first half of the twentieth century for that. Mainly, what we then find is people testifying to drag performances taking place in the Skippers Quarter. Our favorite example is that of Danny’s Bar, a notorious bar for sailors where both the owner and his male staff were dressed as women and the sailors were being tempted into maximum binging.

On an online forum for retired sailors, we found some very juicy recollections of the kind of ritual that typically went on in this bar – how young sailors were being lured in as a sort of prank by older sailors, how these youngsters tended to be awestruck by the Hollywood-star prettiness of the women, and how they would be made to drink so much (and sometimes be drugged as well) until they woke up in bed upstairs only to find they had been sleeping with a man. It’s fair to speculate that some of the visiting sailors must have known they were going to be able to sleep with a man at Danny’s Bar and must have returned to the place to experiment with sexual desires and gender identities that fell outside the mainstream norms of their day and age.

Q. Are there any signs left of Danny’s Bar?

A. Not unless you have x-ray vision. The street is now almost entirely residential, though there is a modern-day “brasserie” in the house where the bar used to be. If walls could talk!

Q. These recollections of Danny’s Bar take us automatically into the second half of the twentieth century, I guess?

A. Yes they do. On the eve of the Second World War, we know that the Skippers Quarter had acquired a gay connotation to those in the know. Yet it didn’t stick to that area. After the war, its gay nightlife started to spread beyond the city’s traditional red-light district. A few of these new bars were still nearby, in the area around the Cathedral and the City Hall, but the majority sprang up close to the Central Station. This is also when we’re beginning to see some diversification. The Shakespeare, for instance, was a bar in the historic center. On the one hand, it was still occasionally visited by sailors and sex workers. On the other, and more importantly, it had a female bartender and gradually came to attract a female crowd – a niche for which there hadn’t been a market yet in the Skippers Quarter. 

Meanwhile, in the working-class streets leading toward the Central Station, a number of bars were opening that were all operated by men and served a male clientele – places like Fortunia, Week-End (later known as La Vie en Rose), and La Ronde. These were generally small operations. One of the streets, the Van Schoonhovenstraat, would go on to sport more than twenty such gay bars. In this picture I recently took, you get a sense of what this may have been like when you look at the structure of the street front, for instance the houses in the middle painted in blue and mauve (one of them surviving as a sex shop):

But the Van Schoonhovenstraat wasn’t the only street. Even if nearly all of the area’s gay bars have in turn disappeared, you might still recognize this iconic place, the one with the greatest staying power and cult status: 

Q. Ah yes, Café Strange! It’s in the Dambruggestraat, right?

A. Yes, and it still allows you to step into a time machine and take a trip down memory lane. We used it as our prime architectural case study, because its history shows you a lot about such gay bars in the second half of the twentieth century. A few facts and details hopefully help bring this history to life.

Café Strange was started by a gay couple as a gay-friendly “brasserie” back in 1955. The name, “Strange,” was meant to be suggestive without being explicit. In those years, the curtains behind the windows were still systematically drawn so that no passerby could look inside. You couldn’t just step inside either, but had to knock or ring a bell and wait for someone to let you in. To expedite this process, a small porch was constructed so that you could first step into the anonymous porch, close the door behind you and then open the door to the actual café – all with an eye to being as discrete as possible. 

Over the years, the bar became so successful that its interior had to be reorganized and expanded so that it could accommodate not only a buffet at the back but also make some space for a dance floor. The café had a good reputation for many years until one of the owners died in the mid-seventies and his remaining partner got into various kinds of trouble that ended dramatically with his getting killed. It was then that a new gay couple, Armand and Roger, took over – you probably know Armand as the remaining owner. This was in 1980, in the era of early emancipation, and so they decided to be less discrete by painting the building’s façade in a sort of pink and adding a drawing of a sexy sailor on the outside. Inside, pictures of semi-naked and naked men were hung on the walls. The buffet was moved to the front of the room and a professional DJ was hired to turn the place into a small part-time disco. For a while, the owners even produced their own little magazine to inform gay patrons about leisure opportunities – remember that this was before the internet made looking up such information a piece of cake. 

The first decades under the new owners went well: the place had the reputation of being at the same time modern, unpretentious, and laid back. There were a lot of flamboyant theme parties in which patrons could win grand prizes such as a flight to Athens or a weekend in Amsterdam or Paris. What’s interesting to observe also about the history of Café Strange is the shift in demographic over the years: while in the 1980s you could find a mix of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals from a wide range of ages and social classes in the bar, this narrowed down in the 1990s to mostly gay men, and then by the new millennium morphed again into a mix of gay and gay-friendly visitors. Indeed, by the nineties, these smaller gay bars in especially the area close to the station were increasingly being pushed out of business by a new type of venue, such as The Hessenhuis. 

A building with a totally different allure, of course. It’s originally from 1564 and part of the city’s historical patrimony. After undergoing renovation in 1975, it reopened as a temporary exhibition space, and then in 1993 a gay-friendly bar opened that doubled at night as a club for mainly gay youngsters. Soon, the Hessenhuis became one of their two favorite commercial nightlife venues, together with the Red & Blue. This new generation of larger, trendier, more spectacular, and essentially self-contained clubs gradually drove the small gay bars out of the market, and thus also put an end to the sense of a particular neighborhood or area in which many such bars were clustered.

Today, much of the city’s history of gay and lesbian nighttime entertainment has evaporated and become materially invisible in the streetscape. There was a time, during the second half of the twentieth century, that Antwerp contained literally dozens of gay and lesbian bars, but almost none of these survive now. Unfortunately, I’m not aware that anyone is actively trying to honor this material history by installing commemorative plaques or making exhibitions about it. It survives mostly in the memory of an aging cohort of participants, hence my insistence at the outset about the relative difficulty of bringing my topic to life to a younger generation raised on a constant stream of immersive images. But perhaps now that Alexander, Rob, and I have made our first archeological efforts and undertaken a basic form of mental mapping, a curious young historian will come along to flesh out our very schematic findings and dig up all the beautiful, funny, and naughty traces of queer nightlife that may still be hiding in public and private archives. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

[airagorncharda]

I finally watched Voltron, and quite liked it! My review of the show, and also the fandom, is below:

So, the show is right up my alley, I liked the animation and characters a lot, and I’m very very pleased with the effort the writers have gone to to include a multitude of representation, especially considering it’s a remake of a show that had extremely bland character designs! Genuinely I ended up really caring about the characters and I’m excited for the last season.

So my feelings on the show are, like, 70% positive! 

That being said, I definitely have some--

°˖ ✧ Complaints about the show itself!   ✧˖ ° 

Characterization:

Mainly, that the characters were basically 2d characters until like season 6. Five seasons is a long time to wait before giving anybody character development, guys. Or even, like, character TRAITS outside of their base trope. 

Hunk is a big guy / the fat comic relief character, so his character traits involved eating, cooking, vomiting, and being a coward, and the jokes about him were all about him being fat. Oh, also he’s the “stable” one of the group. This is a complaint on multiple levels, since it’s fatphobic and obnoxious, but it’s also obvious and two dimensional character design.

And all the characters were like that, basically. 

Allura was arguably less so than the paladins, but only to a point. When Matt showed up, he was more 3d in the first like 2 minutes of screen time than the entire main cast had so far displayed in multiple seasons, because all of his character traits weren’t instantly predictable. Side characters tended to be more interesting and less predictable than main ones, which was just kind of weird.

Shiro and Adam:

I honestly just wish that the writers had been allowed to make their relationship more explicitly romantic, and thus make their breakup more explicitly a breakup. Instead it was kind of vague, which I understand wasn’t the writer’s faults, but it still felt a little weird.

Lotor:

I just feel like they slightly mishandled the end of his arc. I wish they’d either made him more clearly 100% wrong, or else more clearly explained why he wasn’t 100% wrong, which brings my to my last one:

“Galra need Quintessence!!” ft Lotor

This is my main complaint about the show (at least 20% of my frustration with the show is this one thing), because.....

Why?

Why do they need it? Did I miss a line where it’s literally ever explained why the galra NEED quintessence? Or even WANT it, as an empire? We know why Zarkan needed it, and why individuals need it (it’s immortality juice with drawbacks they don’t care about) but I never got the impression that the entire galran empire is immortal-- and even if they are, then they shouldn’t be. “Help us maintain our immortality at any means necessary!” should have been answered with “No.” followed by “Learn to deal with your mortality like everyone else.”

Literally, Lotor was like “We just need unlimited quintessence, and then the galra will do whatever we want!” and nobody in the entire cast was like “cool, we’re on board so far, but like, what exactly do you need it for?”

I still don’t understand what it was all for.

°˖ ✧ Complaints about the fandom! ✧˖ °

I feel like I’m kicking a hornets nest by even bringing this shit up, because:

This fandom is goddamn cursed:

Nobody in this fandom seems able to agree on the character’s characterization, I suspect largely because they barely had any for 5 seasons. Instead of saying “these are my headcanons” and letting it go, though, I keep seeing people being adamant that their headcanons are canon and anybody who disagrees is wrong / bad.

People in this fandom appear to be largely unable to stay in their own spheres of interest and let other people enjoy other interests. Every tag is full of negativity.

I think it’s a really bad sign when most of the best artists and writers in the fandom try to keep away from the fandom, and a lot of people have been deterred from watching the show at all because the fandom is so apeshit.

I’ve seen people being called a lot of names, told they should die, and called pedophiles based on which adult characters they ship with each other. It’s been a wild ride and I only dipped my toes into this fandom. I’m not planning on going much deeper.

K/l/a/n/c/e is a plague:

Let me be absolutely clear, I am not talking about the ship. The ship is fine, I can see why people like it, I have no problem with it. 

The problem is the shippers that it is impossible to avoid.

There doesn’t appear to be a single tag I can go into that doesn’t contain meta about this ship being canon. People who ship this ship are the worst perpetrators of my previous point (they’re the ones I’ve seen saying all that shit), and they flood other tags with negativity, and meta about their own ship. 

I’ve never been more tempted to refer to someone’s ship as their agenda, either. The only thing that seems to matter to them is whether or not it’s canon, which is... wild... because that’s really not the point of shipping? And because it’s not canon. Sorry, but there’s only one season left, and they haven’t laid any groundwork for it. Also neither of them is the canonically mlm character, and I doubt they’re going to turn this show into one with 3 main mlm characters within the last season.

And yet.

When I say there isn’t a single tag I can go into that doesn’t contain meta about this ship being canon, btw, I’m not exaggerating. I went into the Allura tag. Meta about how k/ance is “canon”. The Shiro tag. Meta about how k/ance is “canon”. The Allurance tag. Meta about how k/ance is “canon”. The Lotor tag. Meta about how k/ance is “canon”. The fucking "Garfle Warfle Snick" tag! Meta about how k/ance is “canon”. “Adam Voltron” tag??? Fucking meta about how k/ance is “canon”.

And even when it’s not meta, and it’s just comics or art or fanfic ideas, the thing that frustrates me is that it’s constantly things like “What if Lance [does something Shiro already did @ Keith] @ Keith!” and “What if Keith [does something Allura already did @ Lance] @ Lance!” and “What if Keith and Lance [did a thing two other characters have already done]!” with zero self awareness that their AU has already happened in the literal show, just with different character combinations than they’re interested in. They seem to only care about those two characters, and only care about them in relation to each other, and it’s exhausting.

Allura:

1) People who draw Allura looking less black than she does in the show are cowards. It doesn’t happen often but it does happen and it’s Bad.

2) People who are baffled by the concept of Allura and Lance having a relationship, and spend lots of effort trying to convince people that they’re friends or that the possibly canon endgame of them dating “came out of nowhere” and “doesn’t make sense” etc. 

You’re racist and we can see you.

Shiro and (mostly) Adam:

The people who decided that Adam was Shiro’s love interest after Adam was introduced in a flashback in which he broke up with Shiro (as far as I can tell they were mostly k/ance shippers who were excited to have a “gotcha” @ sh.eith shippers) and then lost their absolute minds when Adam died... exhaust me.

The people who are calling Adam’s death “bury your gays” and “queerbaiting”.................. exhaust me a lot. The context of Adam’s death is not what either of those terms mean.

I understand that it hurts when queer characters die, because so many queer characters historically have died. That doesn’t mean every single time queer characters die is automatically homophobia. This show did not kill all their queer characters, and it didn’t even kill it’s MAIN queer character, OR kill the main queer character’s love interest (because that’s never what Adam was presented as or meant to be). And Shiro IS a queer character. He’s not being baited, he’s still queer even when Adam isn’t present. Newsflash, Adam’s purpose as a character was to convey canonically that Shiro’s been queer the entire goddamn time.

I don’t necessarily like that they chose to kill him, but I don’t think the context was homophobic. He died in a war, along with many other people. 

And furthermore, who did you want them to kill? They needed to kill at least one existing character from one of the main cast’s backgrounds for narrative reasons. The options they had, because of how much effort they’ve put into filling this show with representation, were:

Characters of color

Pidge’s mom

That’s... literally it. Characters or color and women (especially older women), btw, are also constantly killed off in media the same way queer characters are, to further other character’s narratives. This is what happens when the cast is primarily rep for marginalized people and the story involves war. Characters die. And when the only characters that exist are from marginalized demographics, the choices about who dies are never going to feel good. That doesn’t make them based in bigotry, or even necessarily bad choices, just because they hurt. 

°˖ ✧ Conclusions! ✧˖ °

Fun show with a few frustrating elements and a cursed as Fuck fandom.

[mysticsparklewings]

Europe’s Eclipsing Sensation

Ta-da! This is the infamous school project I was working on a while ago. Funnily enough, it took about three weeks to complete, and it took about three weeks after before I could post it, partially due to me wanting to wait until it was graded so it wouldn't look like I stole it from myself, and also because I just haven't had the time to give this description the attention I think it deserves. And so, here we are. So who and what exactly is this? The Master of Mystery before you, if you don't recognize him, is none other than Harry Houdini, the famed magician. And here I have recreated this photo of him completely out of text, and photoshop brushes made from individual letters and characters to speed up the process once I realized how slow-going typing out words and them using the warp tool to shape them was going to be. (Mostly because I've been having some lag issues with Photoshop I have no explanation for.) Now, loyal watchers of mine will likely notice this is pretty far outside the realm of things I normally make. Firstly, it's photo-realistic. Secondly, since when have I ever made images out of text like this? The reason this thing is so abnormal is that I was given certain projects to choose from and re-creating an image out of text, among those options, was the one that appealed to me the most. It was also the only project on the list that was digital, which I thought would really play into my strengths, give me a chance to use my drawing tablet (which was still pretty new to me back in August) and would be a good option to ease me into working in the classroom environment with a project close to what I'm used to doing. As they say, it's better to set yourself up for success, so that's what I tried to do. The funny thing is that while this project is pretty different from Painting, I actually ended up listening to a lot of advice the teacher was giving. For context: There are three levels of Painting and my Design class going on in the same classroom at the same time. Which sounds like a nightmare, but it's actually kind of nice. I'm not much of a painter, but I believe the advice I'm overhearing to be very solid, and the overall environment...Let me tell you guys, more than once already I've wanted to cry tears of joy because compared to the high school art classes I'm coming from, this is so much better and more helpful. It's made me realize just how toxic those previous classes really were; that it wasn't just me dragging my feet in the mud when I didn't like them or saw problems. This class is so much healthier a learning habitat for an artist! Anyway. When I inquired about the project, the teacher told me to pick someone iconic, and then proceeded to tell me that people like Miley Cyrus and Lady Gaga are not what she considers iconic. I will agree to disagree on that, at least as far as Lady Gaga is concerned. This was mildly disappointing because I knew my choices were going to be limited, and I did not want to pick someone I had no interest in spending a lot of time studying. Already I was traveling outside of my comfort zone in a few ways, and I know it shows when I'm not passionate about or remotely interested in a project. Other "icons" I tried before landing on Houdini include; Pharaoh Tutankhamen's funeral mask, Willy Wonka, Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, Elphaba from Wicked, and Edgar Allen Poe. Because things that I consider iconic and also actually like are not two categories that overlap terribly. And I wanted to do something a little unexpected or unconventional. Something I could have fun with. I forget how exactly I thought to try Houdini, though I think I was thinking of things I had an interest in and magic (both as in shows and as in fictional) came up, and Harry Houdini is arguably one of if not the most famous magicians of all time. And while I won't bore you with all the details here, if you look him up he turns out to be a pretty interesting character in general. So as far as constructing this thing went, I started by using the original photo to create a general outline, then had it and my working canvas set up side-by-side in Photoshop pretty much the entire time I was working, so I was never without the visual aid. Then I started with a rough layer of words to get a general idea of where different shades of gray would go and to get a rather unsteady feel of how the whole process was going to work. (Fun fact: The words I used were words I thought you could association with either Houdini himself or magicians in general, including Spectacle, Magic, Illusion, Escape Artist, Facade, etc.) It didn't take long for me to realize that going about it that way, while an interesting idea, was going to require more time and patience than I really had to give. So I pulled an old Photoshop trick out of my sleeve. I typed out certain letters and characters like (), T, o, i, H, and then made brushes out of those letters so that I could still have the textured look of the, uh, text, while getting a feel closer to normal brushes that I'm more used to using, and it sped up the process dramatically. After I figured that out, it was pretty much a back and forth of adding layers of black, then adding layers of white until the area looked how I wanted it to look. I focused on smaller sections at a time, and out of the different sections, the face is probably the one I spent the most time and effort on. There are layers, upon layers, upon layers that were built up all over this thing, but the face got three primary major alterations in the hopes of making it look like the original, because the first time around it was very, very off. And speaking of things that were very, very off...Hands in art, in general, are not my strong suit and are generally agreed upon as one of the more difficult parts of basic anatomy, at least from what I've seen. However, in my defense, the hands in the original photo are...strange...And even after a lot of contemplation, I'm still not quite sure why, beyond the simple answer of it being an awkward position because of the handcuffs. The experienced students in the art class and the teacher had the same general consensus. So, if you were wondering, here is your explanation as to why the hands look so queer. Take it or leave it. There are some minor differences between what I've done here and the original image, namely the texture (which is a product of how this was made, so I don't count it and actually really like the visual interest it adds) and a few small differences in shading. Most of that was done at the teacher's suggestion because anyone who knows me knows that when it comes to a recreation of this nature, I am usually a stickler for accuracy first and foremost. But I can't say it's a bad thing here. It works, and it adds more than it outright changes to the look of the original. Overall, though it is still very outside my normal scope of artwork, I am satisfied with how it turned out. And hey, I got a 99 on it, so at the very least I can be happy I got a good grade for it. I do wish it hadn't taken me so long to get around to posting it, but given that Inktober has come and gone and I'm struggling with this year's NaNoWriMo big-time, it is kind of a good thing I have a few things in reserve to post while fresh content is a little sparse. Oh, and a fun little tidbit about where the title for this came from: Turns out there's a poster for one of Houdini's shows that features the same pose as my reference photo, and that's the headline at the top. But I was stuck between that and what appears to be the most common phrase in his advertising, "the Master of Mystery." What made my decision for me is the interesting part. There's this book I read in grade school called "Hocus Pocus," which is told by a sort-of real-life magician who worked on some of the Harry Potter movies, Paul Kieve. In the story, Paul meets a lot of famous magicians from the past (they literally pop out of the posters he has!) because they want to help him be a better magician. It's really fun and you can actually learn a few tricks along the way.  I ended up with my own personal copy (I originally read the school library's copy sometime after I ran through all the Goosebumps books they had) and there's a little folder stuck inside the back cover, which I remembered having not only a few cards for some fun visual tricks but also a few postcard prints of the magician posters. On a whim, I decided to check and see if there was a Houdini in there. And wouldn't you know it! The poster with this pose was one of them! And thus, my decision was made for me.  (I'm tempted to bring the card to class tomorrow to show the teacher, but she's usually pretty busy as it is, so...) It sure is funny how life works out sometimes. Next up: Likely another colored pencil review I've been meaning to post, I need to update my Meet the Artist picture, and I have a couple of text-oriented ideas I need to figure out what to do with. And also probably a commission I finished the concepts for today. (And maybe maybe maybe some NaNo stuff? I have an idea to get back on track...but we'll see.) ____ Artwork (c) me, MysticSparkleWings I do not own the original reference image. ____ Where to find me & my artwork: My Website | Commission Info + Prices | Ko-Fi | dA Print Shop | RedBubble |   Twitter | Tumblr | Instagram