#fun fact!!! this was a traditional doodle that i then took a photo of edited a bit then used selection tool on to get lineart

[pluto-hweat-halcyon-skytober]

Day 12: Plant life

I HAVE BEEN WAITING 5 DAYS TO POST THIS. Lineart under cut (feel free to use it as a "coloring page" bc I've been told it gives those vibes)

[whoslaurapalmer]

for @asouefanworkevent’s woevember day 1, sugar bowl gen siblings, i put together some ~sebald sibling headcanons~ ⭐⭐

-gustav is older, by three years

-gustav wears green and black (he likes suits), sally wears black and white (she likes stripes)

-when they were kids, they played a game (in the grand headcanon tradition of ‘sugar bowl gen siblings like Playing Games’) called cat. there was a cat who hung around the library of the city headquarters, a little black cat named doyle, who spent her time gently pawing things to the edge of the table they were on (books, pens, ike’s cup of water, beatrice’s glasses she’d purposely leave around), and then knocking them off, and gustav and sally would watch her and go ‘oh that looks like fun?’ so they would balance things on the edges of tables to see where the center of balance was, and take turns finding high places around headquarters to drop things off of for the other to try and catch

-sally is into photography, and music

-when sally was old enough to have her own camera, she definitely took lots of pictures of Things Falling Through The Air while playing cat with gustav. she thought they were very artsy. adult!sally is slightly embarrassed about all the photos, but still thinks they look pretty cool.

-she helped gustav on almost all of his films (specifically, she did the scores)

-gustav’s greatest love is film, but he also worked in codes, and with monty in herpetology

-the two of them didn’t spend a great deal of time together actually, after their apprenticeships (which were both in the city, so they saw each other a lot then), but they were usually working on the same things just separately – sally would gather the information that gustav put in his movies, they would keep the scripts in one place and go there separately to make edits on the other’s work, one would be on set and the other would be somewhere else, they sent each other a lot of coded telegrams and would doodle around the edges of them (gustav drew little squiggles, sally drew clusters of stars) (sally’s handwriting is very loopy and gustav’s is very tight but they both write numbers very similarly)

-they clearly aren’t twins but they look so remarkably alike that they’re still often mistaken for twins. they’re both very tall and have the same close-cropped black hair

-sally once broke into anwhistle aquatics to get information on the medusoid mycelium, on kit’s orders

-gustav would put any information in his movies. whatever was important, regardless of what “side” of vfd it was about. not like…..locations, or plots or assignments, but Facts. (like, he doesn’t give the exact location of the survivor of the fire, but puts it out there that there was a survivor of a fire.) his primary goal was that information and facts were available. that the medusoid mycelium was a thing that existed did go into a movie.

-even if they were rarely together, they were more in sync with each other than most other sugar bowl gen siblings. they implicitly trusted each other and knew the other would always be around somewhere behind them to have their back.

-they shared a lot of the same traits just by virtue of being siblings; of doing the same thing your sibling does, because that’s your sibling, because you’re related, and you do unique but similar things without even thinking about them because you’re always a part of each other

-they’d regularly eat in the same diner but at different times of the day, and sally would usually be in there first, and would put all but one of the sugar packets at her table in her iced tea (it was never sweet enough for her). she’d leave the last packet balanced on the edge of the sugar container on the table.

-when gustav would come in later for dinner with monty, they’d sit at the same table, and gustav would pick up the sugar packet and smile and then have to ask other tables if he could use their sugar packets because the iced tea there wasn’t sweet enough for him, either. he’d leave a different brand of sugar packet balanced on the opposite side of the container sally placed hers on.

-they both carried a lot of Things with them. gustav always put things in his jacket pockets and would pull out things ranging from salad dressing to whole books (he used the salad dressing as actual salad dressing, but also in chase scenes.), sally always had a waterproof bag with her and pulled out things ranging from her camera to board games (she favored stratego) (both of them like to be prepared for any eventuality)

-gustav had a pen clipped to the front pocket of his jacket, sally would have a pen behind her ear

-they were both talkative, but in different ways. gustav was long-winded and wordy, sally was to the point but also incredibly detailed when explaining something. they make the exact same “oh!” noise when startled or excited.

-both of them had a go-to topic of conversation when things got awkward and it was just variations on discussing the weather. they’re both very interested in what the weather is because it can make or break shooting a scene or taking a picture

[corpsentry]

january: an art retrospective

i did some stuff last month (but it’s a lot of stuff and there’s a photodump + some Serious Fucking Reflection, so it’s all below the cut)

so ok, let’s start with this. here are some heads. each head has a red arrow. that red arrow is what i call the red line of the devil. it’s the slope of the face from the side of the eye to the cheekbone and then down towards the chin. up until like 2 weeks ago, i couldn’t draw it. i couldn’t fucking draw it. i would edit over that part of the face over and over again until i was frustrated and tired and i had a raging homosexual headache and it still never looked right. notice that each head is different. notice that each head looks wrong.

at the start of 2021 i finally admitted to myself, as per the image above, that i was deeply, deeply unhappy with my art. what was the problem? i dunno. but i decided i was going to fix it and i was going to do so via another one scribble a day event wherein for every day of january i would find a photo of a human head, and i would draw it.

january 1st, 2021. i was embarrassed to tweet this even on my private account where like 5 friends and a rock would see it. in retrospect, you can also see all of my bad habits emerging like dicks from a hole in the ground. it’s disproportionate. the brows look flat. the eyes are slanting upwards. the entire drawing looks flat, like this isn’t a 3d person but a caricature of one.

january 2nd, 3rd, 4th:

on the 2nd i decided to start a separate thread for doodles and applied learning. here’s the first set of tests

the rest of the week is kind of uneventful so we’re going to skip those. fast forward to january 11th

this one is especially bad. i am acutely aware, suddenly, that i am not changing anything at all. i’m stressed and miserable about it because i’m still trying to see people as people and trying to draw people that look attractive and proportionate and hot. my friend, leny, reminds me that i need to think about faces in terms of planes. i have a moment. my other friend masha sends me some links to anatomy tutorials. i have another moment.

january 11th. applied sketch

january 13th is when i start the troubleshooting process. the link above drives me mad because i’m pretty happy with the face but then i realize that there’s something very fucking wrong with the shape of the head LOL and then i realize that i’ve never had any idea what the proportion of the face to the rest of the skull is so i grit my teeth and i open a new canvas and i

bald studies. it seemed like the right thing to do. can’t draw heads? ok draw some heads. look at some photographs. i traced each photo but tried to stick to straight lines so that i could replicate the shapes more easily. i broke each face down into shapes. i thought about airplanes

i got really excited. i started doing studies, then applied studies, then stylized studies.

sketches. i’m not sure what’s going on (as always) and it’s very rough, but they look different from the sketches i did on january 2nd. that’s a start

january 16th’s daily study. looks more like a person now. juuuuuust a bit

more applied studies

on the 18th i take a break and go stare at some lips because i don’t understand how the fuck they work. again, i focus on shapes, on volume, on the fact that these things exist in 3d. holy fuck lips exist in 3d. holy fuck we are real

january 19th. i’m working on it.

january 22nd. some sketches + a daily study. it has finally occurred to me that heads can tilt up and down and that things look different accordingly. yes i was not aware of this before. yes i have been drawing for over a decade.

january 23rd. by this point after doing my daily sketch i almost always go back and do an applied study which is basically to say i drew a lot of fucking links. this one looks kind of okay. i’m kind of proud

january 25th. links. trying to make sense of everything i’ve learned

26th, 27th, 28th. daily studies

january 1st. january 31st

The End Of The Photo Dump (dab)

ok NOW i get to talk about what i discovered while studying the shit out of human beings

FIRST OF ALL, there is something precious and magical about drawing shit without the explicit knowledge that you’re going to tweet that shit out to 45 people later. it takes the burden of perception off your shoulders and that does something to you, or at least that’s my theory. i told myself i wouldn’t post any of this stuff until the end of the month (if i wanted to post it at all) and kept everything off my public social media accounts and that meant i could draw ugly as hell without worrying about who would point and laugh, which i absolutely fucking did. a lot of these are fucking trainwrecks. most of these are fucking trainwrecks. why do they look like that?? why??? this doesn’t look like the work of someone who’s allegedly been drawing since they were in kindergarten, does it?????

here’s why: because that person took a huge motherfucking swing at everything they’d ever known about art and spent a month building something new in its place. the abstract explanation is that i grew up on shoujo and weird old anime and my understanding of anatomy was unironically kamichama karin and while i love kamichama karin, when kamichama karin is your rule even if you try to break it, you’re going to end up going nowhere. “you have to know the rules to break them”, yeah? well i didn’t know shit. the abstract explanation is i’ve been miserable about my art for a few years now because i saw other people doing things effortlessly which i couldn’t and instead of going back to the basics, i tried to do what they did (not plagiarism, mind you, i mean i literally tried to copy the red line of the devil i mentioned above because i couldn’t even make that happen) and then i fucking failed.

the simple explanation is this. i had to unlearn everything, and relearn it again (like some kind of new renaissance clown, what the fuck is this?)

take this for example. all my life i’ve drawn faces in the order: eyes, nose, mouth, face shape, head. this works for some people, im aware, but it was something central to how i had always drawn, so i decentralized it. i said fuck you to the old me and changed the order up. now i start with the nose, then the eyes, mouth, the chin line, and the sides of the face. now i force myself to think about the human head as a series of parts interacting with each other instead of a bunch of disparate features which i want to look pretty.

or let’s use this zelda from last year. something about this looked wrong last october, the way something about all of my drawings looked wrong, but i couldn’t pinpoint it for hell the way i couldn’t articulate Any of my feelings about the visual arts. now, looking back, here’s what i see. that nose is sticking out far too much given how she’s not really facing very far away from the camera. that ear at the back shouldn’t be there. her forehead is too big. she doesn’t have a forehead. what the fuck is up with the shape of her head?

so apparently reject modernity embrace tradition has its roots in alt-right terminology and i’m not very horny for the alt-right (you understand), but the spirit survives here. you know sometimes you have to admit that you have no idea what the fuck you’re doing and draw people for 31 days. i’ve spent my whole life drawing stylized people and while again there are artists who have no issue with this, i veered off the track of the Good and the Holy and couldn’t get back on. i had no point of reference because i’d never thought about what an actual human being looks like, so i had no way to fix what i knew in my gut looked wrong but wouldn’t come out better.

this was hard. this was like oikawa tooru swallowing his worthless pride and admitting that ushijima wakatoshi had gotten the best of him for the last time in his high school career, but in haikyuu!! by furudate haruichi oikawa tooru fucks off to argentina and then joins the argentinean national team, and you know what, i think i’ve made it to argentina (not the team just the country). as per the golden rule of dont fucking move until you’re at least two thirds of the way through the month, i only started trying to draw Shit shit on like the 22nd or something, but i was happy with that i created. i am happy with what i’ve done. i’ve posted like 2 things this month that involve people with what i now call ~applied Knowledge~~ and they’re, like, not perfect obviously (perfection is an unattainable ideal), but i’m fucking proud of them. i didn’t spend 5 hours hunched over my laptop adjusting the red line of the devil because it’s not a devil’s line anymore. because i finally sorta get how people work. because i sat down and i said ‘we are not going to fuck with this misery shit anymore’ and then i did that. it’s just a line now.

here are 2 collages tracking my painstakingly carved out progress from january 2nd to february 2nd because i’m a slut for collages

and here’s what i’ve done to my art! the same person drew these but also Not Really! you know! for the first time in a year i don’t immediately hate what i’ve drawn. you know what guys? art is fucking fun. zelda’s forehead doesn’t scare me anymore because i know how foreheads fucking work now, and i don’t know everything, and i’m going to keep troubleshooting stuff as i go (i want to draw a skeleton. like a. i want to draw a goddamn skeleton guys) but i’m honestly and genuinely proud of what i’ve done in the span of a month, and i’m also in disbelief. i started this month-long challenge out as a last ditch effort to make peace with my art because i’ve been tired for a long time and i was ready to kick the bucket on drawing people altogether. i didn’t think anything would happen. nothing’s happened for years. i’ve been miserable for years.

this was the caption for january 1st, 2021. i was super, super fucking embarrassed and it looks like super fucking shit, but you know what, i think i did in fact triumph over the bullshit. surprisingly enough, when you put in consistent effort into something, You Will See Results. didn’t see that coming, did you? i know i didn’t.

this isn’t a success story. it’s a happiness story. i never gave a shit damn about the institute of art or whatever, i was just mad at myself because what i saw in my head didn’t match up with what was on the canvas. and now it’s getting better. now i’m calibrating the compass. now drawing not just backgrounds but also people is exciting to me, and i can stick my links in your face and tell you ‘they hot’. i’m going to keep doing that. i’m going to keep going until i drop off the side of the earth and then spiral towards mars like some kind of fairy, and then i’m going to create something beautiful.

thanks for reading. here’s a pr department link for sticking around until the end