#genre I don’t know her

[blaithnne]

Local big sister experiences emotions, more at 6

Been wanting to do one of these with Lauren for AGES, but I never got round to it. Then I saw the Lydia and Phinium expression sheets on @littledigits’ website and I felt inspiration like never before.

The funniest struggle I have with Lauren’s design right now is that she nose too big for she got damn face. Literally, Hilda characters noses take up a fairly small portion of their faces, and her’s took up WAY too much, leaving little room for her to make facial expressions. But I struggled to find a fix because when I made the nose smaller it just didn’t look like Lauren anymore, so I took this as an opportunity to work on that!

She still has a larger nose than most characters, starting higher up (like her grandad!) and ending lower down (but not quite as low as before). I also made her eyes a little smaller and with a shape similar to Lydia’s (though you can see in some of these I hadn’t quite landed on that yet and her eyes are a bit too big), which works both as a nod to her parentage and because I think it makes the nose look bigger. This still doesn’t leave as much room for the mouth as most other characters, but that’s okay — Lauren is a very private person who keeps her feelings close to her chest, I think it works for her to have subtler expressions, adds to how guarded she is! Oh and I also updated the shape of her hair slightly, just to make it a bit more style accurate.

These changes are pretty small on their own, but I think combined they work well to make Lauren feel a lot more…alive? Far less stiff, anyway. I think she also has a more unique facial structure now, instead of just “what if Johanna was 90% nose”. She’s still got a big old nose and I love it but now she can emote, yay!

This is really all just concept stuff, I’m hoping to get a new fullbody style-ref for Lauren out soon! Now that I’ve improved the main issues I had with her face in the last ref, now it’s onto the silhouette! I want her to read as more of a strong character (though it comes across decently in her current ref, I wanna push it more without being as exaggerated as Ahlberg, which is. A challenge for me lol), streamline her silhouette, and finally make her taller than Johanna like she’s always meant to have been <3 I made her shorter for so long because I thought it would help her read better as her daughter but you know what? That’s dumb actually, she’s tall.

ANYWAYS, thank you for listening in on the annual Lauren redesign, and to the artists behind the show for posting so much amazing inspiring show stopping concept work for free because it makes my autism worse /pos

[iheartbookbran]

i cackled before the season came out and everyone was freaking out about the brothel scenes because they wanted demi!Colin and now the possibility was lost forever, when it was precisely the brothel scenes (+ the diary bit) which cemented demi!Colin to canon prosperity!

[zee-has-commitment-issues]

Yall literally leave him alone. God forbid he grows up and figures himself out. Jesus Christ.

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

Outdrawn

f/f contemporary romance

two cartoonist who’ve been rivals since uni, and now have competing webcomics online, have to work together on the relaunch of a cult classic at the comic press they both work at

they both struggle with art-related physical and mental health issues, and complicated families

[loosingmoreletters]

so about that regressing saintess trope—

Cedric was sure he was making a fool out of himself in front of all of his Knights, but he couldn’t give up after coming so far.

“Your Grace,” his Knight Commander finally addressed him. “Is there a particular reason we are in this city?”

The Knight Commander had already served Cedric’s father. When his parents had died, the Knight Commander had cared for him as though Cedric were his own child. The Ashvain duchy’s reputation hit rock bottom when Cedric inherited it, and many of the servants could’ve left, but instead they stayed to support the child they now had to call their lord.

The least Cedric could do was insure they’d survive this time.

When he’d woken from his seizure, nearly ripped apart by his magic, he’d been granted the memories of a future undone, the continent ripped apart by monsters, their only saving Grace too weak to stand up against them as she was caught up in intrigues of the palace and her training stifled.

“There’s a woman here,” Cedric said. “Brown hair, brown eyes, plain looking. She sells cabbages.”

For half the price if my customer looked really poor, Your Grace! Ah, don’t tell His Highness I said that…

“A woman,” the Knight Commander repeated. “Your Grace, have you—“

“I do not have a lover,” Cedric cut him off. “I wish for you to make her your apprentice.”

The Knight Commander stared at him in disbelief. “Why?”

Because a year from now, they will proclaim her Saintess and the Temple and the Crown Prince will dress her in silk instead of armor.

But Cedric couldn’t say that without raising suspicion or seeming like mad man.

“Just trust me on this,” Cedric asked and took a look around the marketplace. All eyes were focused on them, and there, right in front of the temple, stood an unassuming woman with a stall full of vegetables, wearing a farmer’s garb and an apron.

If she would refuse to come with them, Cedric would damn well strip her himself and put her in armor. God’s most beloved daughter belonged in the battlefield and he’d drag her there himself if he had to.

[system-threat-detected]

Horizontober day 5: “Oh dear…”

I actually don’t know what I was thinking with this one. This just popped into my head with the prompt and I thought it would be fun to give a try!

Maybe a game over screen for a visual novel style game?

[she-posts-nerdy-stuff]

I have a lot of Thoughts about the Wuthering Heights casting announcements that my friends have already been subjected to, but I’ve now seen people suggesting how Luke Pasqualino would’ve been an amazing Heathcliff and I’m so sad that we’re not getting that because it would SO FREAKING GOOD

[angee1011]

Alex Aster is not a good writer.

It’s amazing to me that she has a publishing deal.

[sluttyten]

talking about kpop today and fanfiction today with my coworkers brings me dangerously close to the topic of this blog lmao

[tariah23]

Noooo…… first it’s Yuuta and Shoko, now they’re yo-yoing back around to Megumi.

[jellophoid]

Getting sick of people brushing rap off in light if the new beef— I need everyone to listen to Little Simz right now. Specifically her “Sometimes I Might Be Introvert” album

[arolesbianism]

Bud gaming

[exasperatedoctopus]

Have a crackpot theory: the people who enjoy most of the new police procedurals that have been coming out recently just secretly wanna watch soap operas but don’t have the Guts

[rosencatholic]

I don’t know if it’s just publishers letting anything be published nowadays, but the fantasy romance genre used to be my favorite genre since I was a teen. Now I can’t even get through five pages without cringing or rolling my eyes at the terrible writing or the predictable characters and plot that I can see coming from miles away.

[hopecomesbacktolife]

crying weeping. this book was phenomenal. 100/10 magnificent and soooooo intense and vast and searingly intimate and heartbreaking and swoops of joy and I just. Katherine x Zera 5ever I love them so much

(possible spoilers in the tags even though I redacted the most spoilery bits)

once I’m a bit more coherent I plan to write an actual legible review (a glowing one, of course!) but I had to scream about all my feelings for this book here 😭❤️

[badolmen]

My toxic trait is unironically liking 2000s-2010s country music 😔