#conceptual practice

[optikes]

Klippel with assemblages in his studio

Number 1060, (1995) painted wire, tin  22.5 x 7.6 x 7cm

Number 714 - Prototype for Adelaide Plaza (1988)  Construction of brazed and welded steel, geometric sections, found objects, formed sheet metal. 69.5 x 64 x 49.5 cm without base

Number 329, (1977) assemblage of collected wood parts  300 x 350 x 135cm

search @www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au

A Klippel's practice exeplifies the interconnectedness of the conceptual and the material. His bodies of work explore the relationship between the organic and the mechanical.

B By the time Robert Klippel died in Sydney in 2001, aged 81, he was critically acclaimed and well collected in his home country. But as with most Australian artists, although he had lived for stints in Europe and the US from the 1940s until the 1960s, his work was largely unknown abroad.

Eleven years on, his son has secured a blue chip shot at changing that. Klippel junior has signed Galerie Gmurzynska in Zurich as the sole representative of his father’s estate worldwide, catapulting the artist into the company of Pablo Picasso, Yves Klein, Alexander Rodchenko and David Smith, whose estates the gallery also represents.

  Some of Klippel’s large wooden sculptures have already been on the Gmurzynska stand at Art Basel, Art Basel Miami and ArtHK, and a substantial publication and exhibition is being planned for the coming year.

  Klippel is the only Australian artist to have been taken on by the 50-year-old gallery, which is best known for introducing the Russian avant garde to western Europe and for representing modernist artists working up to 1980.

  “We have a solid reputation for ­scientific research, and for promoting interesting, important historic figures who have created something authentic but who have not had the exposure they should have had,” says gallery co-owner Mathias Rastorfer.

  Klippel, an abstract artist and loner not easily slotted into one particular movement, was loosely influenced by surrealism, cubism and constructivism.

  According to Deborah Edwards in the 2002 Art Gallery of NSW retrospective catalogue, “his attitudes to art making were grounded in European modernism and postwar intellectual thought”. It is for this reason, in part, that Gmurzynska was interested in taking him on.

  Rastorfer says: “We found him very interesting due to his connection to the constructivists, his Polish ­origins, his time in America. The more you go into Klippel, the more modernist links you find.

“We will introduce his work in the context of those peers, taking him out of the Australian context and putting him into an international one. We want to show where he fits in worldwide.”

  Klippel’s bronze sculptures have been the most collectable in Australia. They appear regularly on the secondary market and can fetch more than $100,000. The top price paid at auction – $507,800 – was in 2006 for a miniature steel, tin, acrylic paint and coloured paper collage.

  Gmurzynska plans to use the large, wooden sculptures and tiny coloured plastic ones that Klippel did in the late 1980s and early 1990s to introduce him internationally. This is in part for practical reasons, because this is most of what is left in the estate, but also because he thinks these will work best there.

  Rastorfer expects to take at least three years to achieve traction internationally for Klippel. “One of the biggest temptations is to sell the four or five most important works straight away, because that’s the easiest thing to do,” he says. “But then the estate is left with the lesser known work and often doesn’t know what to do with it.

  “It’s about placement in museum collections, in significant private ­collections, and with opinion makers, not just about selling. If we show him in the context of his better- known peers, the rest will follow.”

  There are no guarantees the strategy will work, but Andrew Klippel is quietly excited that his father, to whom he was very close, is getting a posthumous chance at an inter­national career.

After years in the music business, where things happen very quickly, his foray into the visual arts is teaching him a new virtue: patience. “This is a long play.”

  Katrina Strickland http://www.afr.com  (2012)

[gophergal]

there are many kinds of love

TFTober 3 - Relationships

[justladders]

a friend very threateningly told me "I will baby talk your springtrap" so

[serpentface]

This was going to be a panel of a little comic but I got too invested in drawing minute background details so, here.

[vamprisms]

penny dreadful would have been so good if it were good

[elucubrare]

the biggest problem i had with my boromir lives fic is that i talked about where it was going & came to the conclusion that

it was Gondorian factional politics and

i didn't want to do that

[slitheringghost]

A narrative thread I find interesting is Family As Teachers and how characters influence and mirror each others’ abilities in familial dynamics - particularly in sibling/"twin" dynamics - which is fitting in a society where children’s magical education seems entirely controlled by their families until age 11 when they start Hogwarts and intermittently afterward. This theme is reflected in Ollivander’s words in DH while discussing the mystery of the twin cores and general wandlore with Harry:

"The best results [...] always come where there is the strongest affinity between wizard and wand. These connections are complex. An initial attraction, and then a mutual quest for experience, the wand learning from the wizard, the wizard from the wand"

You even have the three Peverell brothers inventing the three Hallows together to conquer death

Fred and George - as the actual siblings/twins, the most in tune - drop out and invent Weasley's Wheezes together, shared sense of humor via a literal Joke Shop. They find the Marauders' Map ("This little beauty’s taught us more than all the teachers in this school"). This twin duo sometimes turns into a trio - see post about Hermione’s contributions to their inventions in my meta Hermione As Teacher and Connections to Lily (who eventually joins the Weasley family, so like a sister to them); and additionally the twins’ best friend Lee Jordan helping them:

Fred and George Weasley with their friend Lee Jordan, all three of whom were carrying large paper bags crammed with Zonko’s merchandise Fred and George appeared finally to have perfected one type of Skiving Snackbox, which they were taking turns to demonstrate to a cheering and whooping crowd […] Lee Jordan, who was assisting the demonstration, was lazily vanishing the vomit at regular intervals with the same Vanishing Spell Snape kept using on Harry’s potions. (OoTP)

George then mentions utilizing Vanishing into their fireworks: (“Oh, I hope she tries Vanishing them next…They multiply by ten every time you try”). Snape’s skill at Vanishing ties to dynamic with Mcgonagall as she’s shown teaching 5th years Vanishing Spells in OoTP, and later in the book LV’s emphasized as weaker in Conjuration with his conjured shield, unsurprising given Dumbledore was his Transfiguration teacher.

THE MARAUDERS - James and Sirius collaborate on the Marauders' Map (with Remus; shared sense of humor built into it via insulting Snape), two-way mirrors called "twin" mirrors in DH; James's wand is "excellent for Transfiguration", he's a confirmed prodigy and Sirius is equal to him - both Animagi, McGonagall's favorites ("Both very bright, of course—exceptionally bright"), Sirius goes "I don’t need to look at that rubbish, I know it all" re: Transfiguration textbook; looking to create a new identity from his family's Dark magic, Sirius's interest in Transfiguration likely stemmed from James. Equal in DADA (finish the OWL early, "I’ll be surprised if I don’t get Outstanding on it at least" "Me too"), hex people together.

Remus - Dark Creatures interest from his father (Lyall was "a world-renowned authority on Non-Human Spiritous Apparitions" such as "poltergeists, Boggarts and other strange creatures") shown in Remus with Peeves and the Boggart lesson. A possible hint of Remus and Tonks friendship affecting her interests - Tonks helping with a "murderous old ghoul lurking in a toilet" in 12GP.

THE BLACK FAMILY - the Blacks are all brilliant. Sirius and Bellatrix are mirrored in battle implying Bella taught him and/or they dueled together - a connection transferred to Sirius mirroring James and Remus in combat ("Then, with identical fluid movements, they reached into their back pockets" in the prequel; "Then, with one movement, they lowered their wands" in PoA). Same weapons: Knives - Sirius slashes the Fat Lady and tries to stab rat!Peter, gifts a penknife that opens any lock to Harry; Bellatrix tortures Hermione and murders Dobby with a knife (potentially they keep them handy for blood magic - "rusty daggers" in 12GP nearby the crystal bottle of blood).

Bellatrix, Narcissa, and Regulus can all occlude LV and Bella trains Draco. Sirius knows a lot about Dark Arts and Harry's curse scar from the horcrux, Regulus identifies LV's horcrux, Bella is LV's Dark Arts student and given a horcrux.

Sirius and Orion - Orion warded Grimmauld Place, adding "every security measure known to Wizardkind", made it "Unplottable, so Muggles could never come and call"; Sirius maybe used his family's magic on the Map (a tool in part to make Hogwarts safe from teen DEs, and I HC Sirius worked on it most, as Hogwarts was also a home and escape from 12GP to him), role as Secret Keeper, offers GP as safehouse to the Order, undoes its enchantments to let halfblood Harry inherit. Sirius and Walburga both use the Permanent Sticking Charm - Walburga to terrorize and scream bigotry, Sirius to flaunt his differing politics with Muggle stuff.

I HC Bellatrix invented some Dark artifacts in 12GP - the "unpleasant-looking silver instrument, like a many-legged pair of tweezers, which scuttled up Harry’s arm like a spider when he picked it up and attempted to puncture his skin" which Sirius smashes with Nature’s Nobility: A Wizarding Genealogy (fits Harry and Sirius's interaction with Bella later in OoTP) and the "musical box that emitted a faintly sinister, tinkling tune when wound”, making them all "curiously weak and sleepy" until Ginny shuts the lid - placed right next to Merope's locket (esp. as Sirius’s words after this passage parallel Bellatrix in DH). Raised as the heir, Bellatrix likely had similar training and skill in wards as Sirius.

Bellatrix and Voldemort - paralleled in combat ("Bellatrix was still fighting too, fifty yards away from Voldemort, and like her master she dueled three at once"), both Legilimens. Her speech about the Dark Arts and learning "spells of such power" while teaching him the Unforgivable curses - she's likely as skilled as LV in inventing curses.

Dumbledore and Grindelwald - "just as precociously brilliant", "even after they’d spent all day in discussion — both such brilliant young boys, they got on like a cauldron on fire", "at last, my brother had an equal to talk to, someone just as bright and talented as he was". Twin imagery with Grindelwald as hilariously described like Fawkes.

Next-door neighbors, knew each other only for a few months, yet Grindelwald’s ideas "caught and inflamed him", Dumbledore’s "ideas helped Grindelwald rise to power". Collaborate on the fascism and Deathly Hallows quest, but not Dark Arts (vs. Snape and Lily share the Dark Arts experimentation but not the fascism). Both on the same level in dueling, can conceal themselves without a Cloak.

Bathilda Bagshot - Dumbledore's Mother Figure/teacher, "impressed by his paper on trans-species transformation in Transfiguration Today" which Dumbledore's shown reading, so she presumably mentored him in Transfiguration, clearly a favorite field (While Dumbledore had few close friends, McGonagall's maybe the closest equivalent to a female friend; echoes Snape with Eileen and Lily).

Elphias Doge - met at 11 on their first day at Hogwarts, "Our mutual attraction was undoubtedly due to the fact that we both felt ourselves to be outsiders". They "intended to take the then-traditional tour of the world together, visiting and observing foreign wizards, before pursuing our separate careers".

While the pair are said to not be intellectually on par, Dumbledore's interests clearly influenced Doge, also implied in Doge writing “his friends benefited from his example, not to mention his help and encouragement, with which he was always generous. He confessed to me in later life that he knew even then that his greatest pleasure lay in teaching.”

Doge on his travels mentions "experiments of Egyptian alchemists" and "escapes from chimaeras in Greece" (fire-breathing lion, goat, serpent hybrid) - echoing Dumbledore as a "Gold Medal-Winner for Ground-Breaking Contribution to the International Alchemical Conference in Cairo" and interest in certain magical creatures and associations with fire (Fawkes, dragon's blood uses, "trans-species transformation" research, bewitches a branch of Gubraithian "everlasting" fire which is Charms related, the Deluminator as a cigarette lighter).

Nicolas Flamel - Dumbledore's Chocolate Card notes his "work on alchemy with his partner Flamel" inventor of the Philosophers' Stone (colored “blood-red”) who taught teen Dumbledore; Dumbledore later enchants the Stone and links it to the Mirror of Erised (only one who wanted to find but not use it could get it, or they’d be shown making gold or drinking Elixir of Life). Albus also means "white", after an alchemy principle.

Marchbanks who examined him in Transfiguration and Charms N.E.W.T.s says he "did things with a wand I’d never seen before", won the "Exceptional Spell-Casting award"; published papers in Transfiguration, Charms, and Potions journals - linked more with wand magic fields.

Snape and Voldemort - From his words in HBP (disdain at Mundungus for not being a real Inferius), Snape likely learned necromancy with LV and enchanted Inferi during the First War (fitting to his vampire vibes).

Potions - LV uses "old piece of Dark Magic" rebirth potion; creates the Rudimentary Body Potion of snake venom, unicorn blood, spells of his own invention. Snape's Potions speech in PS - "the power of liquids that creep through human veins" (reference to potions with human blood?).

LV invents the Drink of Despair, Snape modifies the Elixir to Induce Euphoria (and assigns a dementor essay). Snape’s knowledge of poisons (logic puzzle, undetectable poisons essay, etc) and the bezoar trick as antidote, Tom poisons Hepzibah with a "lethal and little known" poison that passes for sugar to frame a house-elf who can’t carry a wand. Riddle petrifies students with the basilisk, Snape brews Mandrake Restorative Draught for basilisk victims (mandrakes heal transfigured or cursed victims, "an essential part of most antidotes").

LV curses the Gaunt ring, Snape heals that curse (golden potion and countercurse, collaborating with Dumbledore). LV turns the locket into a horcrux, Snape heals Katie Bell from the cursed necklace. LV curses the DADA job and the curse on his name, Snape invents Sectumsempra. LV the most accomplished Legilimens; Snape the most skilled Occlumens (and a skilled Legilimens). LV adds a concealed entrance on the Locket Cave/symbolic Gaunt shack, Snape renovates Spinner's End with two hidden doors (both in locations related to their Muggle childhoods).

Snape and Lily - to a large extent it makes sense that their magical abilities and interests align even more closely than any other duo save the Weasley twins, because they played the role of "family training" for each other for 2+ years. Both outsiders and ambitious with magic as their way out, Lily's joy at magic and Snape views it as an escape from home, closest to siblings living in the same town. Snape's keen on sharing everything (esp. if raised with an idea of how training works in magical families), Lily on knowing everything (and seems to be following Snape's lead on the magical world in a lot of ways).

Eileen clearly taught Snape a lot about wizarding society and I assume some magic, has all her school textbooks and likely some Prince family books/knowledge, with Dark Arts and Potions specialties, which Snape passed onto Lily. But Eileen either wasn't as gifted or intellectual as her son (we only know she's Captain of Gobstones) and/or just too neglectful for the connection to go far.

Snape tells Lily "you’d better be in Slytherin" in the scene he tells James "if you’d rather be brawny than brainy" re: Gryffindor vs. Slytherin, so he thinks Lily falls under "brainy".

Magical power - unsupported flight, Snape's a Legilimens and there's circumstantial evidence of Lily as one in the early memories.

As with J/S, Lily's wand predicts her mutual interest with her best friend/like-a-sibling (of course their main field as Potions which doesn't require much wandwork) - "Swishy, nice wand for charm work", the Prince invents Charms. They "swish and flick" in Charms (levitating feathers), associated with flight. If taking extracanon, willow's an uncommon wand wood with healing power, enables advanced nonverbal magic (Snape heals Dark magic/etc, invents nonverbal spells).

James and Sirius are wary of Lily's wand means she's a skilled duelist and has gotten into fights; Snape invents hexes. Given the theme of duel between brothers, dueling's traditional in magical families, so Snape and Lily likely practice dueled together too with similar methods (Legilimency in combat); though in application, unlike the Marauders at Hogwarts, they'd be fighting on opposite sides.

Slughorn describing the Prince's work as exactly like Lily's at every turn indicates it as collaborative as the above examples of duo inventions - "You’ve got nerve, boy", "That’s the individual spirit a real potion-maker needs", "Unorthodox, but what a stroke of inspiration", "I really don’t know where you get these brain waves", "intuitive", "instinctive" "a natural" - aka she's creative, inventive, unafraid to take risks with and push the boundaries of magic.

The Prince's disdainful "just shove a bezoar down their throats"; Slughorn laughs at the bezoar, says it's exactly like Lily, gives house points "for sheer cheek" - implies Snape and Lily shared sense of humor often consisted of making fun of how purebloods view magic and incorporating their Muggle background into their methods (matches "as there is little foolish wand-waving here, you will hardly believe this is magic"). Snape's interest in poisons led to the bezoar trick which is Dark Arts related, so Lily knowing the same also implies her Dark Arts interest (of course Potions masters, Aurors, Healers, etc all study poisons, but I assume going deeper into it leads to more effective healing, as with Dark curses and cursebreaking skill on the Gaunt ring/etc).

Like Fred and George, Snape and Lily experiment and invent together constantly over summers - Petunia says Lily "came home every vacation with her pockets full of frog spawn, turning teacups into rats" (Potions, Transfiguration) and the Dursleys don't know Harry can't do magic over summers in CoS, an easy lie for Lily to keep up when doing magic often at Snape's house.

Snape evidently came prepared to impress Slytherins - per Sirius, he was always fascinated by Dark Arts, famous for it, knew more curses when he arrived than half the 7th years (likely showing off his knowledge vs. immediately cursing others). Snape's very aware of Muggleborn prejudice (hesitates before saying it makes no difference), yet was set on Lily being in Slytherin for 2.5 years pre-Hogwarts and groans when she's Sorted elsewhere, so sharing his Dark Arts interest with her fits that, expecting she'd need to "get in with the purebloods" along with him, which means making sure she knows as much as he does (see this post).

Snape at nine thinks Lily's the odd one for being fascinated by dementors:

"Tell me about the dementors again." "What d’you want to know about them for?" "If I use magic outside school —" "They wouldn’t give you to the dementors for that! Dementors are for people who do really bad stuff. They guard the wizard prison, Azkaban." (DH)

Cue Snape's monologue about the Dark Arts years later:

“The Dark Arts are many, varied, ever-changing, and eternal [...]" Harry stared at Snape. It was surely one thing to respect the Dark Arts as a dangerous enemy, another to speak of them, as Snape was doing, with a loving caress in his voice? “Your defenses must therefore be as flexible and inventive as the arts you seek to undo. These pictures [...] give a fair representation of what happens to those who suffer, for instance, the Cruciatus Curse” — he waved a hand toward a witch who was clearly shrieking in agony — “feel the Dementor’s Kiss” — a wizard lying huddled and blank-eyed, slumped against a wall — “or provoke the aggression of the Inferius” — a bloody mass upon the ground. (HBP)

They absolutely mutually encouraged each other's interests in forbidden and Dark magic. Snape and Lily learn magic together, their magic individually and together parallels LV's the most, and they directly undo LV's own magic, Snape's instances even utilizing Potions.

Dumbledore expects Snape to immediately know Lily's work vanquished LV ("You know how and why she died. Make sure it was not in vain. Help me protect Lily’s son"), implying he knows Snape and Lily learned similar magic together and expects Snape to ~recognize Lily's style~. Converse to how he speaks to McGonagall the same (?) day:

"After all he’s done... all the people he’s killed... he couldn’t kill a little boy? It’s just astounding... of all the things to stop him... but how in the name of heaven did Harry survive?" "We can only guess," said Dumbledore. "We may never know." (PS)

Lily and Sirius - Sirius is also knowledgeable about curses - knows the countercurse for the biting snuffbox (Wartcap Powder) and examines his hand "with interest"; suggests the Conjunctivitis Curse "as a dragon’s eyes are its weakest point" which Krum who was taught Dark Arts; often the one consulted regarding Harry's curse scar, recognizes Priori Incantatem, Harry writing to Sirius when he wants someone like a parent "who had experience with Dark Magic".

Sirius breaks Black family tradition in undoing wards/protections on 12GP (maybe manipulating a form of blood magic?) to let his halfblood not blood-related godson inherit and block DE Bellatrix out; and Lily creates blood wards that'd traditionally protect a pureblood family house to protect her Muggle family and eventually protects Harry. Mirroring Snape and Lily weaving their Muggle background in their magic, Sirius enchants Muggle objects like the motorbike (and creates an alternate method of flight).

When Harry says "You never heard her, did you? My mum... trying to stop Voldemort killing me... and you did that... you did it" Sirius goes quiet, which may hint at specific knowledge that Lily vanquished LV (also a possible reason for Sirius rereading Lily’s letter in OoTP, when the Order’s trying to figure out what’s up with the prophecy and the Harry-Voldemort connection).

Harry and Ron - "In the end, he chose the same new subjects as Ron, feeling that if he was lousy at them, at least he’d have someone friendly to help him", write up absurd stories for Divination and make fun of Trelawney together. Harry and Hermione elaborated here.

Parvati and Lavender - Divination, both close with Trelawney (vs. Padma in a different house than her twin)

Moody and Tonks (who was "close to Mad-Eye" "his favorite and his protégée at the Ministry"), Bellatrix and Barty (if you accept he was her apprentice), Snape and Draco (“Draco’s favorite teacher”), Xenophilius and Luna - her family training consisting of... conspiracy theories, Luna first shown reading The Quibbler (Most likely Pandora Lovegood was a conspiracy theorist like her husband - "intellectual equals" - and died due to something like believing an explosive Erumpent horn was a Crumple-Horned Snorkack horn)

[kitsu-smiec]

Satoko and Rika :)

May they find eachother in every universe.

[paging-possum]

"the brain must be the most interesting thing to study-" if I have to learn about another center or tract or nucleus im going to LOSE IT!!!!!!

[normalbrothers]

i need to accept that i'm simply not an intellectual i can read theoretical texts and understand them more or less but i lack the higher faculity that actually makes me give a shit about any of this

[optikes]

1   Haegue Yang (born 1971)  lives and works in South Korea, Germany   

Sol LeWitt Upside Down - Open Modular Cubes (Small), expanded 985 Times (2015)  aluminium venetian blinds

the artist’s site www.heikejung.de/

search at www.guggenheim.org

A  www.qgoma.qld.gov.au    Referencing modernist art history, literature, and social and political events, Haegue Yang transforms spaces through light, colour, objects and movement so that they are constantly shifting and directing our experience. Sol LeWitt Upside Down — Open Modular Cubes (Small), Expanded 958 Times (2015), uses everyday domestic materials — in this case over 1000 Venetian blinds — to create a formal, immersive structure. For Yang, abstraction is highly metaphorical, alluding to  multiple narratives. Her blinds partially block sight, but they also delineate and draw attention to a space, providing boundaries and articulations, and implicating viewers through their transparency and domesticity. In her early sculptures she used IV stands, then clothes-racks on wheels. Like the  blinds, these industrially produced items were deliberately evocative of anthropomorphic forms, while also emphasising a sense of movement and the imminent possibility of change.

2  Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) USA  Incomplete open cube 7/21 (1974)   106.7x106.7x106.7cm  enamel on aluminium

B  www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au    The ‘Incomplete open cubes’ are a sequence of open-sided cube structures, each missing between one and nine of their sides. At once repetitive and varied, this series lays out 122 possible variations on the concept. The ‘Incomplete open cubes’ exemplify LeWitt’s conceptual practice and have been widely interpreted as embodying systematic rationality; they are based on an arithmetic concept which they then take to its logical extreme. While they are internally consistent, they also manifest an irrational, obsessive quality reflected in LeWitt’s own comment that ‘irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically’. Here he presents a binary between the rational and the irrational.

WATCH Sol LeWitt's Incomplete Open Cubes  www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9ROCnWMPww

[rebornrosess]

AGNES

HOW TO BE A HUMAN BEING by Glass Animals is 7 YEARS OLD TODAY.

A tribute I made last year for “Agnes,” the final song on the record, and a song that saved my life.

prints + ig

[unopenablebox]

important part of my relationship is that my girlfriend isn't subscribed to money stuff, so when we walk to work together i can just describe really good money stuff bits to them

[mitcheechee]

Hey, new follower here! (I'm actually in the wrong account so please don't mind me being anonymous!) I really love your art and I mainly wanted to say that your art and style is amazing and beautiful! Secondarily, do you have any tutorials or tips on drawing bodies, hands and I noticed you do blood? I understand if you'd rather not answer that; if so just only the first half! Love your art! Thanks for existing (if that makes sense)❤️

wah... first i just wanna say tysm!!! youre so sweet 😭

i unfortunately dont have any tutorials or anything made already and i dont really want to make any as of right now because i feel like i have a long way to go in terms of learning how to properly draw a lot of things. since i don't know what im doing id feel really lousy putting out a tutorial when i dont even have a lot of the basics down yet...

im gonna blab under the cut about tips (not really tips on drawing bodies themselves as a guideline, but what has helped me practice and thus allowed me to get better at drawing bodies in my own art), so u dont have to read all that if it doesnt interest u! but regardless thank u again for being so sweet!!! sorry i couldnt give u what u wanted.. maybe one day... 😭

again this is just how i practice, but its GENUINELY helped me get so much better.

all i can say as far as tips is to definitely practice with references as much as u can, it really will help u improve. i know people often dont like that advice too much but its really true... every time i use references to practice for a bit i can tell it helps me, and looking back at older art i know its true. i dont often use guidelines (i really need to...), or at least not in the sense that i do in most of the guides i see so i feel like i cant give much else in terms of advice tho, other than that.

anyway, its one thing to just use a reference, but really trying to get it down and learn it (learn the body, anatomy, how to draw it all) so u carry that knowledge on is sorta different, for me

what has helped me to really learn is this method of practice where i

draw a reference photo based off what i see

trace the photo

overlay both my trace and the first drawing i made

go back and choose key points on the photo/trace where i was very off and mark them as a little dot/line and then try to fix the original sketch with those dots/lines to match the photo (look below to understand what i mean LOL sorry)

try and draw it again from scratch based on what i see visually

and for number 4, what i mean is this:

lets say the 2nd is my visual (rough) drawing based off of the original

overlaying my original sketch on the reference i can see where a lot of points are off!

ill make note of a few of the areas that were very off and mark them, then get rid of the reference underneath. ill still look at it as a guide on the side, but overall try to just change the original sketch to match it instead of directly tracing!

i feel like this may not have been exactly what u mean as far as tips for drawing bodies, but ive found that in order to grasp them better in a way that helps u draw them on ur own, doing studies like this really helps! for me, at least, it allows me to better store things in my memory--because looking at the image and practicing doesnt feel like it really CEMENTS any knowledge, but seeing where i went wrong and then working backwards to try and alter it shows me where im lacking in skill, and helps me use that information later!

doing this allows me to understand how bodies take up space. it has helped me to see the body as more of a tangible thing while i draw freehand, and do it more accurately as well, instead of it feeling like its. a limp noodle i cant grasp LOL

i will say, tho, that for hands especially i almost always use my hands as a reference for what i want. like i dont even have a guide for that in terms of what i do to draw them out or guidelines i follow, i just straight up draw them based off what i see or imagine, i dont really do those step by step guidelines...

im sorry again i couldnt rly give u what u wanted, i just dont think im at that level where i can truly give any advice since im not good enough (yet ! we hope) for a genuine tutorial. if u mean something as far as like... body shapes and stuff im still not rly there yet either. i hope this helps even a tiny bit tho, if u read this far!!!

[butwhatifidothis]

Help me, i've been looking at bleach stuff again and suddenly feel that i was too harsh on the thousand year blood war when it first published, and now im desperately scrounging for good byakuya/hisana content.

so with that in mind, what do ya think about the sternritter in bleach? personally i've always felt that for all the cool aesthetics and powers at play, they're just a bit too unsympathetic/monsterous in terms of character writing that it hurts a lot of the drama of the tybw. But also recently I have considered how that was arguably the point in terms of ywach creating an army of metaphorical and literal monsters because the value of their lives mattered so little to him that all he looked for was strength. which... seems somewhat obvious in retrospect but still. idk, i guess all these years later bambiettas fate still unnerves me. and i wasn't even much of a fan of her until all that happened to her.

You asking this on the SAME DAY that I bought six zanpakuto at a con is HILARIOUS timing lmao

The Sternritter are in a sort of weird spot for me. There was always a hint of sympathy from me to them just on the basis of what had happened to so many Quincy by the hands of the Shinigami, and how on top of that many were under the culture Yhwach cultivated of pure-blooded Quincy needing to rule over everyone else as the strongest and if they can't live up to his exacting standards they will be considered just as worthless as impure-blooded Quincy/non-Quincy - for the majority of them it's kinda just a no-brainer that they would end up being as cruel as they are even to each other, after living in what is essentially a dog-eat-dog world filled with Uber Racism. And you can see how deeply some of the Sternritters buy into this, how even being sentenced to death or having their powers stolen from them does nothing to shake their belief in this man who stabbed them in the back. The dogmatism is engraved into some of these characters, to the point where literally nothing will make them ever see Yhwach as anything other than their leader.

Along with that, some of the Quincy, like Bazz-B and Liltotto and others, realize (at least somewhat) how shit their system was once they see how easily they are thrown away after doing everything right (or, if nothing else, never doing anything more wrong than the Quincy Yhwach chose as "the best"); they're willing to work with Shinigami to get justice against what was done to them by a leader they genuinely saw as god.

And in the middle of absolute dogmatism and rebellion, there are ones like BG9 and As Nodt, who seem to follow Yhwach not out of outright loyalty but out of a fear of death itself. Given who they're fighting (literal death gods) and who they both are as characters (As Nodt being someone who induces fear into others, BG9 being a robotic lifeform), it's definitely A Neat Choice to have these two specifically follow Yhwach not out of a sense of loyalty but out of an intense internal fear that they feel Yhwach both alleviates (by giving them the means to avoid death) and induces (by promising to kill them should they fail him).

They aren't all a monolith even with how deliberately isolated they were from pretty much all non-Quincy society, which honestly makes them pretty interesting as a total group.

But, yeah, on the other hand a lot of them don't really have much in terms of individual personality outside of cool one-liners or My Power Is My Personality. And some others have that issue and their power is just fuckin' annoying as shit and makes them inherently unlikeable GERARD. FUCK YOU GERARD HOLY GOD WERE YOU THE ACTUALLY THE WORST QUINCY EVER. There will be Bazz-B and Jugram's immensely interesting dynamic with each other, there will be Bambietta's genuinely tragic fate despite how deeply despicable she was as a character, there will be the Femritters' absolute determination to continue living and not letting anyone including Yhwach kill them... and then there's fuckin'. Pepe, the Bootleg Zommari that Kubo bought on the black market loose in an envelope. Or The Yapper who literally died in a montage and whose name no one gives a shit to remember. Some who really have nothing to them at all despite being elite enough Quincy to be given Schrift at all.

So, like. Overall I actually like them quite a bit? At least definitely as a generalized group. Individually there are some really really good stand-outs here and some really really wet farts there. And Gerard fucking sucks and I hate him

[mechanicalriddle]

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perhaps you thought i had forgotten... well... heh heh

🚪: OC in what they wear when lounging around at home (x)

Science can't explain why i like zenithoids so much