#i got really lazy with the lines and just cleaned up the original sketch

[iris-drawing-stuff]

Kotoko in her Deep cover warden outfit. I didn't think that any prisoner would be able to compete with Muu for best outfit, but damn, she really changed my mind (though Muu still wins in my opinion).

[writingforfunsies]

The Demon Brothers: Creative Outlets Headcanons

they are all immortals and when you've lived longer than you can remember, you're bound to find a creative outlet to destress, alleviate boredom, or you know, to just have fun!

Lucifer

He’s a busy demon. If he’s not working, he's sleeping, or cleaning up one of his brother’s messes, so he doesn't have that much time to just relax and explore his creative sides. 

That said though, it doesn’t mean he has no hobbies at all.

He plays the piano. He used to play it every morning, back when he’s still in the Celestial Realm, when he’d taught Lilith how to play the piano every morning and she’d sat besides him as his fingers moved across the keys slower so she could copy him. 

Nowadays, playing the piano feels very nostalgic and bittersweet, but you’ll hear soft, bittersweet melodies drift from the music room once in a while.

He also composes his own music, but that's an even rarer occurrence. The last time he created a new music piece was centuries ago. 

(Ever since MC came to Devildom though, he's been itching to write music for them.)

Practices calligraphy for fun. He has a whole set of brushes and ink and lettering pens. His handwriting is already beautiful but his calligraphy is even more amazing.

Another thing he does is gardening. He's got a great eye for landscape architecture, he's the reason why the house's backyard is pretty. 

He plants decorative plants and likes to cross breed flowers so the House of Lamentation's backyard is full of pretty shrubs and unfamiliar flowers. 

He is usually joined by Beel as he is the other brother that finds gardening very relaxing.

Mammon

He definitely shows his creativity by coming up with the most absurdly brilliant, out-of-the-box, original schemes to make money.

Mammon can draw, like really good. His drawings are very realistic. He prefers to use traditional media: charcoal pencils, graphite sticks, blenders, erasers, drawing pens, brushes, and maybe some watercolors.

He usually does architecture sketches.

But if you check his drawers, you’ll find several sketchbooks of his brothers in different candid poses. MC alone has taken up three whole sketchbooks. Mammon makes sure MC doesn’t see those sketches though.

Crashes Asmo’s Art Day regularly, claiming that if Levi’s invited then the Great Mammon should be too. Asmo and Levi always complains but they let him stay anyway.

Mammon also has a natural talent on jewelry making and metalwork. He makes jewelry from buttons, beads, pearls, diamonds, and crystals. From small pendants to elaborate neckpieces, simple anklets to ornate hairpins. 

Mammon has made metal bookmarks for Satan because the book lover always misplaces his bookmarks or destroys them in fits of rage when he doesn't like a book's ending.

He sculpts wood. It takes him months to finish one small piece because he only does it when he's really, really bored, he prefers to make his much more profitable jewelry. 

He keeps all of his sculptures in his room, small and detailed pieces of wood engraving of Devildom native animals lining up on one of the shelves.

Leviathan

This is canon but he draws! He doesn't think he's very good at it, but he really enjoys it. 

Unlike Mammon who likes to draw with his charcoal pencils and drawing pens, Levi prefers to draw digitally. He still switch to traditional media now and then though.

Has a monthly scheduled “Art Day” where he and Asmo hang out together, Levi draws with his sketchbook or his drawing tablet and Asmo paints. They basically just gossip and hype each other’s art.

Dabbles in making short animations but feels like it’s just not something for him. He makes short comics though.

He wants to be able to make his own video game someday though. Maybe after he learns programming.

He makes the most detailed cosplay outfits for his own cosplays. He sews really good and patches his brothers clothes when they ask. Where do you think Asmo learns how to sew his own clothes from?

Really good at dancing and he really likes it too. He's a natural at it. From the most intricate traditional Devildom dances to freestyle dancing. He can make new moves on the spot and can copy any moves from one look.

He’s a shy baby though, you’ll rarely see him dance when he’s sober.

Except when he’s playing DDR (Demons Dance Revolution). Then, it’s like he’s the most confident demon in Devildom.

Satan

Satan writes poetry when inspiration strikes him. He has also written short stories but he always comes back to creating beautiful poems. He’s got a way with words.

Photography is something he has only recently taken interest in but he has a great eye for taking breathtaking shots. 

Has become the family’s go-to photographer.

“Satan, take a picture of me and Mammon!” “Satan, take our picture, quick!” “Satan, help me get a picture for my Devilgram!”

He’s the reason Asmo’s Devilgram pictures always look like they’re taken professionally in a photo studio or something.

Satan loves art, likes to stroll through museums and stare at paintings for hours, but has little talent in creating them. Even so, he still likes to paint even if he's not good at it. 

Sometimes he just wants to slap paint on a canvas and make a colorful mess. It's fun. 

He joins Art Day every other month.

Another thing he does is knitting! It relaxes him. It gives him something to focus at when he's angry (um, angrier than usual), just to give his hands something to do that doesn't involve breaking anything. The simple patterns he makes are easy enough that they don't frustrate him. 

Rarely ever finishes his knitting though, you'll just find this 5 meters long knitted fabric in one corner of his room with the ends coming undone because he calms himself down enough to stop knitting.

Asmodeus

Regularly designs, cut, and sew his own clothes. 

Has a lot of sketchbooks full of drawings of flowy dresses and stylish coats and many aesthetically pleasing shirts. 

He has started his own clothing line and sometimes collaborate with Majolish. 

But for the most part, he designs clothes for himself and himself only, he doesn't want anyone else to wear clothes as fabolous as his.

Nail art? Nail art. 

Asmo paints all of the brothers nails and sometimes he'll persuade one of them to let him do a complete manicure, with glitter polish and shiny studs and all. 

Yes, even Lucifer. You just never see the results because Lucifer wears his gloves almost all the time.

Asmo creates beautiful makeup art. He doesn't really like a lot of makeup on his own face though, so his brothers' faces are his canvases.

He also has a great eye for interior decorating and flower arranging. He restyles his room every month.

Not many people know it but he paints. And he's very good at it. He has done a painting of each brother, the paintings can be seen on the walls of the House of Lamentation's hallways. 

Art Day with Levi (and sometimes Satan or Belphie) is spent with him in front of canvases, chatting with his brothers, paint splatters on his hands. It's the only day that he doesn't mind looking a little messy.

Beelzebub

He cooks, of course!  And bakes too!

It's one of the times he’s willing to wait to eat because cooking the ingredients first rather than just straight up eating them will make the foods taste better. 

Half of the food in the kitchen are his creations. Anything he can make on his own from scratch, he will; jams, ice cream, sauces, juices, bread, chips, etc. 

Likes to experiment and always do something different than the original recipes. 

He garnishes his cooking like it’s something you order from a five star restaurant.

Beel is another demon who has a green thumb. He likes taking care of plants and doesn't mind getting a bit dirty doing it so gardening is another hobby of his. 

If Lucifer plants ornamental plants, Beel grows useful plants like herbs and vegetables and small fruits. He's also good at topiary.

Always has an idea for a DIY project. 

His creations is scattered all over the House of Lamentation. Belphie's drawer divider is made out of yogurt cups. Broken drawer knobs recycled into Asmo's jewelry organizer. The coat rack. The bathroom towel holder. 

Even Lucifer's hanging Demonus rack is handmade by Beel when he's bored one weekend, with Mammon's help for the engraving decorations along the sides of the rack. Beel's got a bit of Bob the Builder in him.

He is very good at singing. His voice is clear and he has a broad vocal range. Has been caught unconsciously humming in class many times.

Has definitely sang Belphie to sleep.

Belphegor

Does his pranks counts as a creative outlet though?���� Between him and Satan, Belphie's ideas are the most creative and out of the box, resulting on some of the best pranks they did.

Belphie does origami. It's relaxing, easy enough to learn, and doesn't take much effort and energy to do it. 

Has stacks of origami papers in his room: standard origami paper, foil paper, traditional Washi ones, the leather-like Momigami paper, all kinds of paper. 

He especially loves to make little origami stars and keeps them in glass jars in his room.

Belphie also has adult coloring books. 

And kids coloring books.

Coloring is relaxing to him. It's very calming to just lay down and fills a page with pretty colors for a while. It's not a tiring way to destress, he can color without moving from his bed, and it feels satisfying when he finishes a whole page. 

He sometimes joins Art Day if he's not too lazy to move. Still prefers to color alone where it's quiet though.

He also journals. It's another thing he can do that is inexpensive and not energy consuming. He writes about anything that comes to his mind, his thoughts, his ideas, memories. 

Definitely keeps a dream journal.

Also I headcanon that as the Avatar of Sloth, sleep and dreams are some of the things he can manipulate. He enjoys creating dreams; the worldbuilding, the story, the details. He can be really creative when it comes to making them, spinning the most vivid and imaginative dreams. 

They’re not necessarily good dreams though. After all, he is still a demon, his dreams will most likely mess up your mind than make you smile in your sleep.

[omgthatdress]

How to make Cats a good movie.

I watched Cats, and once I got over the initial horror, I was actually pretty entertained and found myself enjoying the shit out of it. Like god bless it, for as nightmare-inducing as much as it was, Tom Hooper was clearly *committed* to his vision and you gotta give him credit for that. The scenery was actually really beautiful and the cinematography was frequently breathtaking. Like it really did have a lot of elements that really worked for it. But for every bit of genius, there was something terrible that the movie just couldn’t overcome. So let’s dive in.

First of all, you kind of have to understand Cats: the musical. It’s an adaptation of poems that T.S. Elliott of nihilistic lost generation fame wrote for his godchildren about cats. And the poetry is charming af and totally captures the nature of cats and why they’re so lovable. In the in the 1970s, Andrew Lloyd Webber did a shit ton of cocaine and decided to make a musical out of these poems. As a result, Cats has no plot. It’s a bunch of cats singing their songs about who they are and doing a lot of dancing. The thinnest of narrative devices is created with the “jellicle” ball and the deciding of which cat gets to ascend to heaven or some shit. So yeah. Cats is actually pretty controversial among theater nerds, it’s very much a you either love it or hate it thing. Is it stupid? Yes.  Is it going to make everyone happy? No. Does it lend itself well to film adaptation? fuck no. I get the feeling that Tom Hooper was really going for deep, meaningful poetic cinema here and trying to make another Les Mis (which was way overly long and ultimately sank under its own sheer weight as a movie and probably is better viewed as a play). I’m operating under the assumption that Hooper was going for ground-breaking cinema that would have made millions and swept up during awards season and cemented him as a legendary director and gone down in movie history, because every little detail of Cats is clearly meant for maximum impact. You kind of need to drop all expectations going into Cats, so once you’re there, you can have fun with it. So how do you make it a good film?

1. The HORRIBLE hyper-realistic cgi human-cat hybrids. YES, it’s a technical marvel, and the CGI artists who made it all deserve a ton of credit for the work they did. And I understand why the actors were kept in their human shapes: live dance is a huge part of what makes Cats work. One of the smart decisions made was hiring theater veterans for the filler roles in the cat chorus, so when you have the choreographed numbers, it’s really spectacular. It’s just the end result was way too uncanny valley and bizarre for any of the film’s good parts to ever rise above it. I think a minimalist approach would have actually worked best. Cat ears and simple costumes with clean lines that show off the dancer’s bodies. Go for the suggestion of cats, and kind of let the viewer’s imagination take over, and showcase the cat’s personality. A huge part of what I enjoyed was hearing the poetry and imagining these cats and how they all relate to cats I’ve known. The dance and the music helped heighten this experience, but hybrids kept reminding me of the joke: what do you get when you cross a human and a cat? An immediate cessation of funding and a stern rebuke from the ethics committee.

2. The schlocky, honestly amateurish attempts at slapstick humor. I’m gonna come out and say it and say that Hooper is pretty deeply entrenched in *dRaMa* and has no sense of how comedy works. There was a lot of added in comedic bits from Rebel Wilson and James Corden, and it was honestly terrible. I mean really, a crotch hit? That kind of lowbrow comedy is so crude and base that it’s actually really hard to pull it off well. Slapstick comedy actually lends itself to the whimsical tone, and slapstick done well can be utterly sublime, but Cats seemed satisfied that fat people falling over is the height of comedy and should be left at that. And a second note on the comedy? Weirdly fat-shame-y. A saw a post about how odd it is to see James Corden, who has been very frank about how he’s struggled with dieting and come to accept that his body is fat and can’t be made not fat, playing this role where fat is added to his body, his CGI vest strains at the buttons, and he’s literally stuffing his face with garbage. The theme of fat people as lazy, stupid, and slovenly carried over from Rebel Wilson’s role, in which she also plays a fat lazy cat who is leaned on heavily for comic relief. I know the role is about a fat cat, and gently laughing at a fat lazy cat who loves to eat is fine, but, speaking as a fat person myself, this felt like a gleeful exploitation of a nasty and cruel stereotype. James Corden and Rebel Wilson are both extraordinarily funny people who happen to be fat, and their comedic gifts were tremendously mis-used here, reducing them to simply two fat bodies to be laughed at.

3. Jennifer Hudson. She’s a talented actress who can sing and emote like a motherfucker. And emote she did. She was clearly GOING for that second Oscar. I really don’t want to call her performance bad. The same level of emotion, tears running and snot flowing, in another movie, would have been devastating (Hello, Viola Davis in Fences). But this isn’t Fences, it’s fucking Cats. You need a level of character depth and development that Cats doesn’t afford to make those tears hit. All the crying and misery was an odd maudlin and over-dramatic break in the fun and whimsy. With a subtler performance and a hint of self-awareness, it could have actually brought in an emotional anchor for this light-as-air film, but Cats doesn’t make any attempt at nuance, and as a result the scenes just hit you out of nowhere like a load of bricks. 

4. Francesca Hayward. Okay, before we go anywhere, I want to say that this girl is not un-talented. She’s the principal ballerina of the Royal Ballet, and has a very long list of ballets that she’s lead in. So it makes sense that she’d be hired for a role that’s primarily ballet. This girl is a really really great DANCER. But Cats was clearly trying to make an A-list actress out of her. They tried to make her into Florence Pugh, who has been acting for a while and is blowing up right now because she’s very talented. Like everything about Francesca’s role in the film said “This is a star-making role.” A new song was written just for her to sing as an addendum to Cats’s show-stopping signature song. But the song was just okay, it didn’t carry nearly the emotional weight or all-around beauty of “Memories,” and all in all felt wedged-in and totally unnecessary and really just felt like a grab at that “best original song” Oscar. Francesca’s voice is high, thin, and child-like. It’s not unpleasant, but next to the richness and depth of Jennifer Hudson’s voice, it crumbles, and it’s not the sort of voice that I want to seek out to listen to over and over again. As for her overall performance, she largely keeps the same look of wide-eyed wonder throughout her numerous close-ups, so much so that I found myself thinking of the the MST3K “dull surprise” sketch. But I don’t know if that’s really entirely her fault. There was an attempted romantic storyline with the magic cat, but again, because of the nature of Cats and its lack of real character development or depth, the chemistry fell flat. There really isn’t much of a chance to show off a lot of dramatic range, so to keep going back to her character, it kept reinforcing the one-notedness of her performance. Really, I just kept wanting to see Francesca dance. Ironically, I think they really blew an opportunity trying to make an A-list actress out of her. All she really need to make people want to see more of her is one spectacular dance number, but for some reason, she never really gets that show-stopping moment. 

5. Dignity? I guess this goes back to the whole CGI cat thing, but there were a lot of moments when I felt this tremendous wave of second-hand embarrassment hit me on behalf of the talented actors in this film. Watching Gandalf lap up milk from a saucer was a wholly uncomfortable experience, like come on, grant the great Ian McKellan some fucking DIGNITY here. Which goes back to whatI said earlier that a suggestion and interpretation of cats would have worked better than all-out just being a cat. Or it could again just be how much Cats just fails its attempts at comedy. But then again there was no fucking reason at all for Idris Elba to be that fucking NAKED. I guess they were trying to make him sexy? But his sexy smolder and just being Idris Elba wasn’t enough they had to make sure that we all saw his chiseled pecs and thick thighs. And then at the end when he’s dangling off of the rope of a hot air balloon and what’s supposed to be a funny scene, I think, I kept thinking “I’m so sorry this is happening to you, Idris.” 

There’s a bunch of other small, nit-picky things that I could go into. Those cockroaches would have worked so much better if they weren’t humans with an extra set of arms. Watching them get eaten was some horror movie shit. Taylor Swift’s Macavity song would have worked a lot better if the cat chorus full of cats we’ve gotten to know had sung it, but instead Taylor Swift is brought in as a new cat we don’t know whose only purpose is to sing the Macavity song? but of course a big oscar-bait movie needs to have that pop star that draws in the people who wouldn’t otherwise see it and making her a part of the cat chorus would have had her performing throughout the whole movie and she would have floundered the way pop stars tend to do when performing musical theater around a bunch of musical theater actors. So I guess I get why she was thrown in.

So.... yeah? Is there anyone else who found themselves enjoying it in spite of everything? I’m glad I have dogs and didn’t have to watch this mess with actual cats around me.

[chibivesicle]

Golden Kamuy chapters 220 & 221 - I am the bear.

I finally have a bit of a break from work and have some time off to catch up on stuff.  As I had hypothesized in 219, I was pretty damn sure that Heita was the bear, the wen kamuy.  Chapter 220 starts off with Asirpa trying to find the bear bum that Shiraishi and Sugimoto had seen.  Sugimoto thinks that because they royally screwed up they are being punished by the white bear.

Asirpa meanwhile is just looking at him sternly while he sweats a little with stress lines under his eyes.

The next page is great as Asirpa calls Sugimoto out on his lazy cultural appropriation.  She flat out tells him that using the “excuse” of a kamuy instead of taking the time to think is inappropriate.  I love the framing of this shot, she looks in control, like a leader, yet not a harsh leader.

She follows up the idea of not thinking with the observation that there is no bear as there are no bear tracks.

Sugimoto then orders Shiraishi to find Vasily, though in English Vasily is referred to as “hood guy” implying that Sugimoto is too good to bother to learn his actual name.  Vasily is helping them and yes, he is the enemy of my enemy (Ogata) is my friend sort of situation, but Sugimoto is supposed to be “friendly”.  Not friendly enough to learn the name of a Russian soldier though.  I sense this will come back to cause problems in the future.  Sugimoto is clearly doing is best to other and dehumanize Vasily since if he knew his name then he’d have to more actively face his PTSD etc.  I digress.

The action then returns to Heita finding his Dad and younger brother in a bear snow mound dead.  He hears his brother chanting the Pure Land Buddhist chant, in hopes for salvation upon death into the after life.  There are a serious of several graphic panels of the bear killing Taka as his head gets smashed by the bear paw.  He finds the sexy woman of the group, Noriko and in the stress of watching her boyfriend, die, Heita tries to make out with her as she stops him right as the bear claws her face.

He manages to escape and runs into Sugimoto and Asirpa.  I really love the detail between what Asirpa and Sugimoto observe and “Heitavision”.  When he  runs into Sugimoto, you can see that his face is clean, while the very next panel has smeared blood on Heita’s face as he tells them to run.  Sugimoto with out missing a beat tells him, that we will protect you as he asks where the bear is.

Heita replies that it is not possible as the next page reveals him looking super creepy.  The bear is going to eat him.  It will happen.  He also add is that you [Sugimoto & Asirpa] need to get far away fro him.  Asirpa calmly asks him for clarification.  As Heita names the people killed, Shiraishi has reached Vasily.

Shiraishi also calls him “hood guy” (hoodie-chan in Japanese, par for the course with his habit of calling everyone name-chan, save for Sugimoto).  I can understand Shiraishi othering him since he did shoot him in the leg.  Vasily is furiously sketching!  Look at those eyes!

To build up the suspense, the action returns to Asirpa and Sugimoto with Heita as he explains everyone was eaten and Sugimoto finally realizes that something is off and he asks Heita who these people are that he’d been talking about as Heita looks like he’s in a daze.

Shiraishi is ignored by Vasily as he looks over his shoulder and has a look of panic on his face as he sees his sketch.  It is a great page turn reveal as it is like BAM!  Guess what, Heita was a convict from Abashiri with a tattoo, striking a sexy pose.

What is even better, is that when it shows the flashback (indicated by the black background) all of the faces have his eyes and eyebrows.  This is the visual confirmation that all of these people were/are a part of Heita and his mind has killed them.  It them makes his weird licky/making out face as he watched Taka and Noriko make more sense - he was making out with himself in the air.

Asirpa then in a very matter of fact fashion points out that the item that Heita is carrying in his cloth is a brow bear pelt.  Even though Asirpa is clearly much shorter than Heita, the framing and angle of this shot makes her look like the wisest and most mature of the three of them.  I get a feeling of not quite judgement from her, more like the clarity of a third party observer who has to clearly state the facts.  Her pointing with her index finger adds weight to her observation.

Heita then is complete shot as he feels as though he is being haunted by it, despite disposing of it many times over.  Sugimoto begins to look concerned as he sweats as he points out that Heita was carrying it like it as a precious item, not something he’d want to dispose of.  Asirpa puts all of the pieces together, the bear bum that Sugimoto and Shiraishi saw was Heita wearing the pelt.  I have to admit that I love how the pelt expands and rips the cloth as it unfurls in front of Heita as he sees it grow into the wen kamuy with his eyes before him. Asirpa concludes that this wen kamuy is in Heita’s mind only and it isn’t actually a real wen kamuy.

The wen kamuy stands before Heita on the ripped cloth at its feet.  This is a great panel, I’m not keen on this story arc, but this 100% gets the point across so damn well.  The next few pages are a mix of “Heitavision” and what Sugimoto and Asirpa see as the bear ‘kills’ him and he crawls under the pelt before he stands becoming the wen kamuy.

He then attacks Sugimoto with his front paw and as Sugimoto goes to block he breaks his left wrist!  The chapter ends with Heita frothing at the mouth as he goes “bwooooooooh!” which is the sound effect for bears in GK.

Sugimoto has clearly been caught off guard!  He needs to stop being so relaxed around former convicts, now he’s gonna have to get a cast and rest his left wrist so that it can heal, but first he’s gonna have to survive Heita.

Chapter 221 is the “bear man” and we get Heita’s backstory from Kadokura!  Where have you been awkward old man?  Whatever, I’m just glad to see that Kadokura and Kirawus are back in the mix.

Kadokura reveals his full name to be Heita Matsuda and he was a death row prisoner.  Kirawus is relaxing in the background as he listens to the story as Kadokura is clearly a bit tipsy, he’s got a bit of a flush going on as he looks a little distant.

Kadokura remembers a lot of details about him, since he was a unique prisoner.  He would constantly change the way he talked, using different forms of “I” to indicate how he wanted to present himself, including talking as though he were a sexy woman [Noriko].  This is easier to do in Japanese as depending on the speaker, it would be watashi, boku, ore etc . . . giving more info to a Japanese reader as English lacks an equivalent.  The best way to think about this was in the movie “Your Name” when the characters body swap, they have to figure out which form of I to use when speaking about themselves.

Anyways, Kadokura states that Heita once told him that he has a lot of people inside of him and they switch places; this is likely an indication that he’s suffering from multiple personality disorder.  I had originally thought these people were his victims, and maybe they were, but since he stated that they are inside of him, I’m more inclined to think that they are all Heita and his victims are not a part of his mental illness.  The fact that Noda re-drew them with his eyes and eyebrows makes me think that they are a part of him.

Heita was always terrified, even in prison as he said there was a brown bear always outside of his cell and it was waiting to eat him.  Kadokura states that Heita called it a “what-cha-ma-call-it” kamuy, implying he didn’t put a lot of effort into remember exactly what he said.  He had to add in the fact that it was an evil got that ate people so Kirawus has some context.  Kirawus then corrects Kadokura that it is a wen kamuy. . . his facial expression looks so over Kadokura.

Poor Kirawus, he’s clearly a smart guy stuck with a drunken loser like Kadokura.  Though, I really get the feeling that Kadokura is the type of man who plays dumb so he can get further along in life.  I think Kirawus just needs to hang out and work with someone a little more exciting and I’m curious if Kirawus has talked to Hijikata a lot or if he has been forced to interact with Kadokura as the go between and he’d prefer to have more access to Hijikata.

I honestly think Hijikata is keeping Kirawus at a distance, he didn’t trust Wilk, he didn’t trust Kiro and I really have a feeling that Kirawus knows a lot more than he’s let on (I wrote a meta about this awhile ago).  I think that even though Hijikata says he needs the help of the Ainu for his plan to work (which Tsurumi has pointed out is a ‘flaw’ about his plan) Hijikata has shown absolutely no trust in any of his Ainu partners as Ariko/Ipopote is a literal pawn between him and Tsurumi.  Additionally, it shows that HIjikata has been really crap at figuring out how to work with them, he never learned Wilk’s name nor did he learn Kiro’s real name.  Hijikata is just going through the motions of the logistics in his quest for the gold.

Kadokura then explains that Heita’s people in his head are slowly killed off by the wen kamuy, he then is killed by it, he becomes it and eventually he kills a person in the real world.  Once that happens his body explodes and he returns to normal.

Kirawus explains that the body exploding is based on how some Ainu groups treat wen kamuy.  They cut the wen kamuy into small pieces and scatter is about the landscape.  While they do this, they also lecture the kamuy about what it has done and that it needs to change its actions.

Unfortunately, when Heita “explodes” he doesn’t get lectured so that is likely why he isn’t able to learn and heal from his mistake of killing people.

It is also indicated that since Heita lacked the bear pelt in jail, he was safe since the wen kamuy couldn’t kill him and he didn’t become it.  He also revealed that he ended up with all of these tattoos over his body and he didn’t even know where they came from.  I wonder if one of his personalities agreed to being tattooed and was hiding it from the others?

Either way, at some point in time he shared a cell with Wilk. Kadokura ends with the fact that he was arrested over a victim’s body wearing a bear pelt and he had torn apart the body and it is heavily implied he had eaten part of him.  It is also clear that he had likely done this before but wasn’t caught.

The action returns to Sugimoto, hitting him with his rifle as Heita tries to bite through his winter coat.  The two of them roll off an embankment into a tree as Shiraishi catches up with the picture of Heita in his hand.  No Vasily though, I guess he grabbed the sketch and ran?

Sugimoto’s rifle is caught in the tree and he and Heita are grappling on the ground as he only has his right hand to fight back.  As the bear, Heita is trying to scratch through Sugimoto’s clothing, likely thinking his has claws.  Sugimoto is in shock a the power Heita has and he knows this is going to be a tough fight.

But Sugimoto is able to push him back with his foot and as the bear roars his eyes go white (about to kill) and he pulls out his trusty bayonet and stabs him repeatedly.

As Heita regains control of his self, his hand emerges from the bear and trips an amappo.  It looks like it is about to hit Sugimoto and he leans on top of him so that it instead will kill him.  Heita by grabbing onto Sugimoto is able to take the hit instead.

Heita is happy and relieved that Sugimoto fought back so well.  He lead them to the amappo so that the wen kamuy wouldn’t know that he was tricking it.  He goes onto explain that as a child he learned about wen kamuy and the idea of them terrified him.  He then became a gold prospector and his family wasted all of the money he earned.  Their greed became too much for him and he hoped that their greed would result in some sort of divine punishment.

He states that the wen kamuy killed his family.  I am still unsure if his family are represented by the personalities or he was just using those people in his head as the stand in for them.  The wen kamuy then ate him and then he became a wen kamuy.  The framing of the next shot is interesting.  Asirpa stands over his head almost deadpan.  Shiraishi is very upset as you can tell he’s trying to hold back his tears.  Sugimoto is sitting down cross legged cradling his broken wrist, his eyes obscured.

Sugimoto looks very emotional as he gazes down over his body.  This is a soft Sugimoto, we can see the light and sparkle in his eyes as he looks quite sad and distraught.  I wonder if Sugimoto is thinking of himself when he fights?  Keep in mind that he’s referred to as being a demon and not human when he fights.  Tsurumi was able to recognize him as a result of his demonic fighting style.

Heita thanks him for allowing him to die.  And he then dies as he lays on the snow before them.  This then becomes an educational warning moment for Asirpa to Sugimoto.  She explains that when a wen kamuy kills someone, they rationalize it by the kamuy liking that person and taking them away with them.  However, the wen kamuy is not out to punish people, and Heita did not understand the story, instead he adapted it to his Japanese mindset.  Therefore, he produced an incorrect wen kamuy in himself, creating a flawed monster.

She has such a look of wisdom as she concludes that it is important that information is passed down with accuracy, if it becomes corrupted, bad things will happen.  This is a strong warning to Sugimoto to not cherry pick Ainu beliefs and customs and to place them in his own Japanese cultural context.  He too thought that the wen kamuy of Heita is karmic payback for what they did to the white bear. 

I find it curious that Sugimoto instead ignores her statement and instead wonders if he became the wen kamuy in the process of looking for gold?  This then leads to the dramatic final panel of the major parties in the quest for the gold and the idea that it is driving everyone to madness.

The game is afoot.  Each group is around Hokkaido. 

Ogata is leaving Nagakura’s relative’s house where Hijikata was working out of for some time as shown in chapter 20.  I’m going to guess no one was at Nagakura’s place as Ogata seems to be leaving it rather pleased.  He’s got his happy cat face on.  Seeing that Hijikata robbed the bank and had weapons stored there, Ogata grabbed some cash and clips for the type 30/38 he has.

The major question is if anyone was around - Kadokura is with Kirawus somewhere, likely near Kirawus’ kotan, Hijikata was near Noboribetsu with Kantarou and Nagakura. 

Hijikata is currently shown on a street in Otaru, matching this one from chapter 98.  Not sure why he’s in Otaru, likely waiting for Asirpa to head back home since her grandma and her home kotan are close by.

Lastly, Tsurumi appears to be in Barato, by looking at the mountain ridge line with houses in the foreground from chapter 59 most clearly.

Why Tsurumi is in Barato is interesting - I wonder if he’s looking for witnesses from the shoot out and for information about the skin that Hijikata got from Ogata? 

It looks like the factions are closing in on Asirpa’s kotan and the area where the gold is supposed to be.  Recall that Wilk was caught when his canoe capsized on Lake Shikotsu, and it is a rumor that he had some gold with him to make it sound more reasonable.

But there is the oral story that Huci explains about why there is so much gold in the first place.  The collection of gold, polluted the rivers and the salmon were not doing their runs.  As the salmon were essential to survival the Ainu leaders had to decide what to do.

All of the gold was put in one place and hidden so that people wouldn’t fight over it and it was also agreed to stop collecting it for the salmon.  There was a moratorium on speaking about the gold and eventually each village had only a single elder who knew of the gold.  The overall concept was that the gold should eventually become forgetten.

This was how they figured out the amount of gold is much more than what Wilk told the tattooed prisoners. With everyone back in the area of Otaru it is clear that the parties are starting to look for intel toward the gold.

Lastly, this shows that there are 4 factions; 1). Asirpa and Sugimoto, 2.) Tsurumi, 3.) Hijikata and 4.) Ogata. 

I think this fits in with the chapter 201 title page and Ogata will act as his own faction.  I’m curious to see if he continues to be a solo wildcat or if he will emerge to lead others?

Is Tanigaki going to team up with Koito and Tsukishima?  Will these guys end up working under Ogata?  Sugimoto and Tsurumi are rivals.  Asirpa and Sofia are likely to become allies.  Hijikata had Shiraishi working with him before, will he be forced to work for him again?  I really wonder if Ogata will take advantage of commanding Koito and Tsukishima as Koito is now in doubt of Tsurumi and Tanigaki refused to follow Kikuta’s orders.  Will another rebel group form in the 27th? 

Whatever happens - Ogata’s emergence as a leader will continue to make things interesting.  There is too much evidence now that he’s playing his own long game.  Whatever it is.

[oswald-privileges]

Loudmouth

(I wrote some statement fic. It’s been a heck of a while since I wrote anything for fandom.)

Statement of Ulla Ness, regarding, um... a peculiar transformation. Original statement given March 14th, 1999. Audio recording by Christopher Peake, in an… unprofessional capacity. Statement begins.

I still don’t see why I had to come to you. I know you have an email address, so wouldn’t it have been easier to just scan the form and send it to me? Hell, I would have taken a physical copy sent to me in the post. It would have been slower, but it would have meant I could have stayed at home. But no. I asked, and you just gave me a lot of waffle about how you have ‘strict acquisition policies’, alongside directions that had been copied from google maps. Which I know, because I checked.

It’s not that I’m lazy, you understand, far from it. I used to have what I regarded as quite the active social life. But recently that’s become impossible for me to maintain, for a number of reasons. Which are also the reasons that I’ve come to talk to you.

I used to be quite a religious person. Still am, I suppose. I’m not entirely sure. I was a member of the congregation of Saint Mary’s, a small anglican church in a small, anglican village up in Lincolnshire. Not everybody there was particularly devout, but it wasn’t one of those places where it especially mattered. It was more about the sense of community we had. Catching up with each other after communion on Thursdays, singing in the choir, arranging cake sales or coffee mornings as fundraisers for whatever bit of the building had fallen off now. I’ve been attending since I was little, and more or less grew up with the congregation.

I miss it quite badly, if I’m being honest. I’ve always been the sort to need other people, but I didn’t realise quite how much losing them would affect me. You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone and all that, I suppose.

It started with another fundraiser, a jumble sale this time. I had volunteered to help manage the event, so I was in charge of sorting through the items that people had brought in for us to sell. Like I said, not everyone there was strictly devout, and didn’t always take care with what they decided to donate. Some people seemed to use it as more of an excuse to toss legitimate junk in our direction and call it a good deed.

This was definitely the case with Mister Ashley. He attended purely because his mother was too old to walk by herself, and I rather think that she insisted that he stay with her throughout the service. It was definitely at her behest that he took part in any communal activities. She would always announce that he would be happy to run stalls or make tea or some other menial duty, while he sat by her side, stony-faced, and saying nothing at all.

The only time I remember him giving any sort of reaction was when when his mother announced that her Jamie would be happy to donate some of his shop’s excess stock for the jumble sale. I remember, he turned to her with the strangest look on his face. At the time, I thought it was one of badly suppressed outrage. I assumed that she had simply gone a bit too far in volunteering his services; Mister Ashley was a second hand book seller, and owned the Jabberwock Bookshop just off from Memorial Square. It can’t have been all that easy to turn a profit. Thinking back on it now, though, and I wonder if his expression was something sharper than just anger. If it could have been alarmed, almost panicked. But I believe that is likely be nothing more than hindsight colouring my memories. If he had had some way of knowing, had been frightened of something like that which came to pass, then… well. I cannot honestly say I ever truly liked James Ashley, but neither can I believe that he would be as cruel or as cowardly as to not have said or done anything.

As it was, he brought the books to the side room the next day, where I was going through the donations and sorting the sellable items from those things too broken, torn, stained, or just plain unusable. I had just set aside yet another jigsaw- this one with almost two thirds of the pieces obviously missing- when he knocked on the outer door. In spite of the heavy rain, he wasn’t wearing a coat, hat, or boots. He didn’t say a word to me when I opened it, just shouldered his way in, dropped a heavy cardboard box on the floor by the unsorted donations, and walked out again. He did this three more times, leaving the door swinging behind him, letting in strong gusts of wind and rain, and reinscribing a damp trail of rainwater on the carpeted floor. Then he was gone as abruptly as he had arrived.

Ashley had taken better care to protect the books from the rain than himself. The cardboard was soaked through, but the books inside had been wrapped in several layers of plastic sheeting. They were stacked upright, and had been fitted in without any attempt to force too many into a single space. They were all, without exception, worn, faded, and almost completely without interest. Paperback romances long since out of print, old text books, children’s encyclopedias. It was rather a relief, if I’m honest. I could just reach into the boxes, grab a book, give it a flick through, and place it on the “for sale” pile.

I was about halfway through the last box when my fingers brushed something that did not feel at all like paper. It was dense and yielding, and ever so slightly damp. I recoiled, shock and disgust crawling their prickling way up my arm. My fingers looked clean, but the ghost feeling of something sticky still clung to them.

My first thought that it was some nasty practical joke. That Ashley, stung by his mother’s willingness to give away his stock, had put something disgusting in there by way of relieving his feelings. But that would have been ridiculous- he was a grown man, for goodness sakes, not a slighted child. It was more likely that the plastic keeping the books wrapped up had slipped, and allowed the rain to seep in through the sides. That was the more likely explanation.

It seemed as though I was right when I looked into the box properly, and saw nothing there but more books. But when I reached in again, all I felt was rough, dry paper. Confused, I went through the contents more slowly, looking where I placed my hand and at the books I chose.

I didn’t feel it again until the fifth book I picked up, that same almost-damp feeling. It was broad and set in landscape, almost like a sketchbook. It was dense with pages all jammed together- dense and heavy. It flopped bonelessly in my hand, and I needed to support it from underneath before I could read the title.

Hymnal, it read. The gold letters gleamed wetly on the slick cover.

It appeared to be full of sheet music. No titles or lyrics, just scratched staves and notes that meandered up and down the lines as though drunk. The smell that rose from the pages as I turned them was odd and unpleasant. I wondered if the leather binding them hadn’t been properly cured. Those areas of page that weren’t covered in music were full of sketches, but so dense and overlapping that I couldn’t tell what they were supposed to be. And, I realised with an unpleasant start, the cover beneath my hands was warm, as though I was touching a live thing.

Suddenly, I’d had enough. I was sitting here, working myself up over an old, graffitied book for no good reason. I shut the thing hurriedly, and it snapped closed with a heavy slithering of pages. I caught the soft part of my forefinger on one of them, and a tiny bead of scarlet began to well from the wound. The stinging was welcome- it gave me something to focus on, mundane annoyance drowning out the confusion that had been threatening to become fear.

I dropped the book onto the discard pile. I couldn’t sell something like that, that much was obvious. Then I picked it up again, and dashed through the rain to the rubbish bins outside. I tossed it in, and followed it up with as much of the discard pile as I could bag up in one go, burying the thing underneath threadbare scarves, broken plastic dolls, and half used art supplies.

I felt a little better when it was done, but not much. Whatever those hymns were praising, I don’t think it was Our Lord.

The cut on my finger didn’t heal like it should. It stopped bleeding without any trouble, but the edges became raised, reddened and sensitive to the touch. I dabbed at it with antiseptic and did my best to put it out of my mind. I succeeded at first. I had plenty to keep me busy, both at church and at my workplace, and for a day or two, I completely forgot about it.

At least until it opened up again.

I don’t remember what caused it, or if anything caused it at all. Just that I was reaching for something, and there was the feeling of… unpeeling, almost, the cold feeling of fresh air on wet skin. I checked to see if the cut was bleeding again.

Instead of a cut, I found myself looking at a tiny, fully formed mouth.

The raised, reddened edges I had thought were a sign of infection had become minute lips. They were slightly parted, and behind them I could see the tiniest slivers of white. And behind that, a dark space where something wet shifted.

I didn’t look at it for long. Already I was reaching for the first aid kit, hastily covering the cut- the mouth- with a plaster. I was already convincing myself that what I’d just seen was some kind of infection I was too squeamish to look at, and that since I couldn’t feel any pain, I should probably go to the doctors, in case it was nerve damage or something. The impression of having seen a mouth rather than a cut was an unpleasant trick my mind had played on me, and one I didn’t feel like closely examining. I told myself I had imagined it.

I hadn’t, though. I could taste the soft fabric patch on the plaster.

I really did mean to go to the doctors. Mouth or no mouth, whatever was happening to the cut on my finger worried me. I even got as far as making an appointment. But the next day I went into work, and there was an accident involving a slippery patch of floor and a very, very sharp knife that I was carrying at the time. I ended up with a nasty slice parallel with the underside of my ribcage.

This time, it was obvious how quickly it stopped bleeding, how it was practically dry before I even changed the gauze once. How the scabs began to flake before I even touched them, leaving nothing but those raised, reddening edges around the cut itself.

I didn’t go to that doctor’s appointment. I don’t think it would have helped me if I had.

It took longer for the second cut to open, but when it did, I could stand in front of the mirror to properly see the flat, white, human teeth, and the tongue that moved behind them.

It didn’t feel alien. That’s what surprised me most. I was scared, of course I was scared, I was growing new bits, opening up in places that I shouldn’t- but that was just it. It was my body doing this, not some… weird infection or surgery. Whatever was happening, it felt like an extension of myself.

I could move them, I found. Not as consciously as I could my original mouth, the one in its proper position on my face, but sort of like moving a limb after it’s fallen asleep. It took concentration, like I was working through partial numbness. Like I needed to focus to wake them up.

I didn’t spend very long doing that, though. I would realise with a start that what I was doing wasn’t normal, it wasn’t sane. I would pull my shirt back down or re-plaster my finger with a feeling almost like shame. I wasn’t as scared as I should have been, and that in itself was somehow a lot more frightening.

I’m not clumsy. I can’t be, considering the sharp tools I have to handle at work. But I started to accumulate injuries. Innocuous things at first. Paper cuts from the prayer books during mass, scrapes from the edges of the metal benches at work. And then other things. Pushing down a door-handle would lay my palm open as though I’d been struck with a metal ruler. The pressure of my jacket across my shoulders would tear the skin. I woke in bed one morning to discover that the folded sheets around me had left cuts going from my hip to my collar bone.

Every single one of them bled, reddened, and opened.

The mouths started to become restless as their number grew. They tried to chew on the clothes I wore to cover them, and if I didn’t focus, they would let out soft, but audible moans or sighs. I tried to quiet them. I even tried feeding them, though I only did that once. It seemed to help, but the mangled sensation of swallowing with a throat that seemed to be lodged under my right kidney was so disorienting I couldn’t bring myself to do it again.

I hadn’t stopped going out altogether. I left the house less, certainly, but as uncertain and uncomfortable as my changing existence was, I didn’t want to give up the company of other people altogether. I get lonely easily.

So, one Friday, when when there was so little skin left under my clothes and gloves that no new mouths could easily form, I patched my face and neck with gauze, and went to take my place in the choir again.

Nobody really seemed to notice anything different about me. I had all the right stories lined up for when I was asked about what had happened to my face, but almost nobody did. A few condolences, a few jokes, and that was it. People apparently preferred to gossip about the death of Mrs Ashley, and how her James had stopped coming to church now, and how they had known his heart wasn’t in it all along.

It felt awful. There I was, standing in the middle of them, skin to skin almost, with the most fragile disguise imaginable hiding a secret that would ruin their perception of the world for good- and they were too wrapped up in their own smug assurance of their own piety to notice. I offered up a brief prayer for patience, but like all my prayers lately, I don’t think I was offering it to the God whose praises we’d all gathered to sing.

And when we raised our voices together for All Things Bright And Beautiful, and I opened my mouth to join in, and then opened my mouth again, and opened my mouth again, and opened my mouth again- I wasn’t singing praises to that God either.

I didn’t realise that the others had stopped at first. It wasn’t until I glanced to one side, and saw Julie Wright staring at me with her powerless mouth open and unmoving, that I realised I was singing in harmony with myself.

I broke off, suddenly embarrassed and frightened by the way that they were all looking at me. There was something like awe in their expressions, but there was something else there too. Something that shuddered and recoiled. I desperately tried to remember the words I’d been singing, if I had gotten them right. I had the horrible sense that I might have subverted something holy.

Adam Bromley was the one to break the silence.

“Well now. You never told us you were getting private training!”

And just like that, the spell was broken. The unexpressed disgust sank back beneath their faces, and the others took up the idea almost with relief. A beautiful voice, they told me, what trick did they teach me to make it resonate like that? I forced a smile and said something non-committal and when we took up the tune again, I was careful to sing only the words that were on the page in front of me.

My own relief was short-lived. When I got home, I found the skin I had left was being pulled apart by the restless movements of the mouths. Blood stained the underside of my shirt, and I couldn’t stop the moans and hissings any more than I could have controlled a spasm or a muscular tic.

I didn’t sleep that night, and called in sick to work the next day. I lay on the bed, and stared up at the ceiling, trying very hard not to move.

It wasn’t any use. My skin had become so fragile that even getting up and walking to the kitchen caused it to split, the blood barely having time to dry before the wound began to twitch and whisper. All my fascination was gone now, as were all my attempts to ignore what was happening. All I did was lie on the bed, and let myself slowly drown in my own body. I lived like that for a week.

When next Friday evening came, my entire body burst into song.

I writhed and moaned and hummed without will, without choice, throwing out snatches of hymn before discarding them as not what I wanted, not right. And for the first time, the indistinct murmurs and whispers grew louder, began to form words. Prayers that had been chewed out of shape, pleas for more, more mouths, more brothers and sisters, to come out of hiding and join the great curdling of flesh.

This went on for the entire night.

That was when I decided that I needed to do something. I’d let… whatever this was go on for too long, long beyond the point of saving myself. But I wanted to tell someone first. So I dragged myself to my computer, and searched as best I could. It’s difficult to type with only a confusion of tongues.

And that’s where you came in. You aren’t special. You were just the closest place that didn’t either ignore my emails, or reply with not so gentle suggestions that I see a psychologist.

I don’t think I’ll be leaving my home again, once I get back. I doubt I’ll even bother uncovering, although there’s no-one there to see me. For all that I wanted to let someone know, I don’t want to be seen.

The cupboard below the stairs locks from the inside. I can push the key out from underneath the crack in the door.

Whatever is happening to me, I won’t allow it come to fruition.

Post-statement follow-up: There wasn’t anyone under the stairs when I went to check. The lock on cupboard door was broken, and so was the one on the back door. Either Ms Ness was, um… successful in her attempts to… halt her transformation, and a housebreaker with some seriously questionable motives took what was- what was left of her. Or she wasn’t. And her resolve either waned or the situation was, um. Taken out of her hands. Or. Whatever she had instead of hands.

I wasn’t… going to record this. It’s not my job, strictly speaking, but I was reading some of the old statements, and this one just… sort of caught my eye. And I’ve seen the Archivist and some of the others do recordings, and it just looked so… I wanted to try it out. I’ll be taking the tape with me, though. None of the others need to know about this.

[mysticsparklewings]

Lazy Mushroom Day

This artwork is now available as a free Coloring Page! ____ More experimenting with watercolors! I used the same Crafts 4 All set of 24 that I did on my Watercolor Kitty. And honestly, I'm still very impressed with how they handle for inexpensive watercolors. But this piece was slightly more about trying watercolors in general on canvas. Because for some reason the internet is CONVINCED that if you want to use watercolor on canvas that you MUST prime it first with gesso and then again with an absorbent/watercolor ground. The only explanation is that the canvas won't be absorbent enough on its own and the paint will lift off easier. That's fine and good and all, but the weird thing to me was that it seemed like no one had thrown caution to the wind and tried it anyway. Or at least if they had, they'd been severely drowned out by all of the insistence on priming. This all came about because I've had a pack of 8"x10" canvases sitting on one of my art shelves, waiting for a purpose for a few months because I was previously not much into painting, but now that I'm starting to delve into painting with watercolor, I was wondering if that could be a use for the canvases. The other thing is that, even though I haven't worked with canvas very much, but the few times I have I didn't bother to prime it with gesso (as is typically recommended) and had no issues. (And I wasn't using expensive, pre-primed canvases either. I use typically the cheapest I can get.) Additionally, I've used my Dr. Ph. Martin India Inks and ink in general on canvas with no problem, and from my experience with ink and watercolors, they behave pretty similarly. The main difference is just that ink tends to dry more permanently and usually comes in much thinner/more liquid forms. Naturally, I wasn't satisfied with just taking the internet's word for it that I absolutely HAD to prime the canvas to use watercolor on it. So next time I found myself at DollarTree, I picked up a little pack of three baby 4"x6" canvas boards to experiment with. (Before going straight to one of the bigger canvases and potentially messing it up because I didn't know what I was doing.) Then the other night while I was feeling artsy, I came across some pictures of mushrooms on Pinterest and got bitten very hard by the art bug, so I ended up with a small, cute sketch of a little mushroom trio. It was a bit small for transferring onto my normal papers for coloring with markers or watercolor, and I didn't feel like using colored pencils. Originally, I had scanned it in just so I could make it bigger to use on my regular 5"x7" comfort realm for paper, but even after I had optimized it that way, it ended up clicking in my head that the original might be a good size to use on one of my tiny canvas boards. So I grabbed some thin graph paper and my lightbox, traced the sketch, and then tried a technique I'd heard about where you shade the back of the drawing with graphite or charcoal (I went with graphite just in case I needed to fix it later and so if I wanted to I could erase it more easily), then you place in with the graphite side down on the canvas and trace the sketch with a fairly heavy hand. I was a little skeptical at how well it would work, but it actually did! The only real issue is that the texture of the canvas can tweak the lines a little, but it wasn't enough to deter me from ever trying this again. Then I followed my usual routine of going over the lines in pen; opting for my black Sakura gelly roll so I wouldn't murder a felt tip with the canvas texture but the lines would hopefully not react to the water. Fortunately, you can't really tell in the finished piece, but I did accidentally smudge some of the ink before it had fully dried because it did take a little longer to dry on the canvas.  I was able to quickly grab a Tombow Dual Brush blender marker and mostly clean up the mess though. After letting the line art sit and dry for a little while, I came back to it armed with some small brushes, a glass of water, my watercolor palette, and curiosity to boot. As I already started, these cheapo watercolors continued to surprise me with how well they work. They originally came in tubes, but I purchased a separate palette and squeezed a bit of the paint into half-pans and by this point, they had finally completely dried out. (Last time I used them it had been so humid around here that a few of them were still slightly malleable, but I was impatient) And they reactivated really beautifully; only the white felt like it needed more water, but that had more to do with the fact that I was trying to load it up to mix with other colors, and I needed more of it just because white is easily overpowered. (I have been considering purchasing a separate, bigger, maybe slightly more expensive tube of just white watercolor because of this since I know I'm probably going to go through it the quickest). But even the greens reactivated nicely; though my research had led me to believe that if I had trouble with any of them reactivating that it would be them. To be fair, yes, the paint did lift a little easier than it would if you were using it on paper. However, this didn't really bother me because I actually found it quite useful for helping correct mistakes and occasionally to blend. Just as well, I also noticed the paint seemed to stay wet just a little bit longer and it flowed together a little more easily (though they don't run all over the canvas without your consent), which were also quite helpful to me for blending. I didn't get too crazy because this was more of a test than anything else, but I did play a little and try to flex my watercolor muscles to get a good feel for the process. Honestly, I sincerely don't see why using watercolor on unprimed canvas comes across as such a taboo. Maybe I'm just an idiot who got lucky, but I didn't have any problems with it.  Even the next day when I went back to it in better light it looked just fine. I even sprayed it with workable fixative to help preserve it; no issues. So with my cute little mushroom scene under my belt, I know I'll be more open now to playing with my watercolors on canvas. And since there is no "right" way to do art, I would encourage others to at least give it a try and see how you feel about it with your watercolors. P.S. There may or may not be something else coming up involving my little mushrooms here in the near future ;) ____ Artwork © me, MysticSparkleWings ____ Where to find me & my artwork: My Website | Commission Info + Prices | Ko-Fi | dA Print Shop | RedBubble |   Twitter | Tumblr | Instagram

[groundramon]

My first request is: could you draw a Rookie Warrior for the Spirits of Ice (like how Fire had Flamon)?

Here he is!  His name is Phoquemon!  His name is based off of the french word for seal.

I was gonna line this but I uh….got lazy so I just cleaned up the sketch |D I might line it some other time or draw another picture of him, because I rlly like this design!

SO ANON IDK IF YOU SAW MY POST ABOUT IT BEFORE but the ice warrior was…surprisingly the hardest warrior to design for.  Like, even harder than the “evil” warriors who dont have fusion forms.  Because the ice warrior’s like is a GODDAMN. FUCKING. MESS.  Like Kumamon is a bear with modernistic armor and a gun, Korikakumon is an ape-yeti man with a tribal aesthetic and axes, Daipenmon is a fucking penguin with fucking popsicle sticks and thats it, and AncientMegatheriummon is a fucking mountain sheep with wayyy too many legs.  At least AncientMegatheriummon brings back a little bit of both the gun and the tribal/axe aesthetic because he seems to have canons in his back and his overall design is actually close enough to Korikakumon’s to look like they’re the same Digimon, but I dont know what the FUCK that eye thing is on the top of his back.  Also, yknow, fucking Daipenmon.  I fucking hate Daipenmon.  I dont actually, he’s a fantastic digimon and i love him, but in the context of this? yeah I hate him.

So the first thing I had to do was figure out his basic shape.  Because I didn’t really know where to go with that; Kumamon is already a pretty small and simplistic Digimon who I could call an overpowered rookie if the human forms weren’t supposed to be more akin to the champion stage.  But I mean hey, if Gatomon is a champion, Kumamon can be too.  But I couldn’t just make a smaller bear - that wouldn’t line up with the rest of the line.  So I decided that since every line in the warrior’s line is just a different “ice” animal (polar bear, yeti, penguin, mountain ram) I had to pick an ice animal that hadn’t been used yet.  So I decided on a seal, because why not?  Seals are known for their affinity for ice, right.  And they’re small and cute.  Also I fucking love seals.

So my next goal was to use design elements and colors from the other four forms to make them all look like they had SOME sort of cohesion instead of just being a random assortment of loosely ice-associated Digimon.  I wanted him to stand out as a very distinct Digimon because the rest of the line was so varied from itself, but I also wanted to try and fix the line a little bit - like, to make it make more sense.  I think he looks a little too close to Kumamon, but…I’m not really sure what to do about that

The headband and gloves were originally based on Kumamon’s, but I eventually changed the colors to Daipenmon’s popsicles’ colors because I’m a slut for light pink/blue.  But before I did that, I also added AncientMegatheriummon’s eyeball thing as a necklace/collar around Phoquemon’s neck, which also happened to use that same (or approximate) blue and pink so yay.  I gave him the same fur style with the red band that Korikakumon and AncientMegatheriummon have, but its more similar to AncientMegatheriummon’s.  The color of the brown markings is from Korikakumon, but he shares that approximate coloration with AncientMegatheriummon too.  The bands on Phoquemon’s tail are from AncientMegatheriummon, altho the real digimon has fabric between the two bands so its kinda different.  The horn on the headband is just random, but is the same color as his tailbands.  The marking on his forehead is the symbol found on Kumamon’s chest, and the little pink cheeks are also from Kumamon but recolored with Daipenmon’s pink.  Also I gave him a knife because….well all the other stages have weapons, so why not him?  And a knife is what comes before a gun, right?  Right.

Also I really wanted to make this joke with him:

[clothed-daffodil]

Hey so I wanted to ask if you had any sort of tips for beginners artists?or artists facing artblock?Or both?!I rlly like ur style so I wanted to learn from you!

Okay,first of all I am sorry I didn’t awnsered this before anon,I was busy with school and I just couldn’t believe someone was asking me for advice,Second This is just my opinion on the matter,I am still a rather new artist and still consider that I am learning,anyway,this might be a long post so strap in.

First I know you may have heard this before,but practice,a doodle a day can help you enormously,look pics for reference,understand proportions learn from what you are trying to draw,as Pablo Picasso once said:”Learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist.”take reference pic of yourself,or pose a fool instead just having a reference can be very helpful.I know you might feel like you are overwhelmed by your lack of progress,trust me I,be been there but once you look back at old art you can notice how much you have improved a clear example is this:my first drawing ever posted to tumblr,

I posted it around December 2016,as you may notice there is a lot of stuff that is off about this,the expressions are dull,the anatomy the overall piece,now look at one of my newer ones,

see what a year of practice can achieve?The anatomy and proportions are more accurate and I developed a style I am currently pleased with(there is still plenty of room for improvement though.)

Second,absolutely don’t force yourself to draw,I do this myself quite a lot,If you are feeling uninspired or simply frustrated enough to not draw,then don’t you’ll end up worse and maybe even whit a piece you don’t feel proud of this is the case in the following:

even my most recent pic was done just for the fact that I wanted to finish something and it ended up with me tired and an overall inconsistent piece,the background is off the coloring is just bleh and that is kind of sad since I really liked the line art,yet I learned my lesson,also if you don’t like how it came out you are not obligated to post it,in my case I post a lot of stuff I layer in regret since I am not proud of the end product,I hav even spend hours in a piece just to don’t post it and that is completely okay,if you are not happy enough to put your name on it then don’t.

Third don’t rush yourself,this is the same as in my todod@ku piece where I rushed to make it,along with one of the pieces I am proud now my birthday hunk drawing,now it is not the piece that was rushed but the one I made before,you see I had only about a day to draw it,so I hurried to scrap something up since I love hunk and he deserves more art,different topic but still,this was the sketch of the original piece

,pretty basic and kind of hard to see(fourth tip,clean sketch for better line art)and this was the outcome

,now you may see why I didn’t post it,it all just looks so wrong,so at first I thought:”whatever,my posts never get much notes,I am going to post it anyways who cares?”I did,so I considered a bit more and decided that that was not the piece I wanted to be known for so I got my lazy ass back into drawing and scraped this(a lot bette rim my opinion)

which then turned into this:

see the difference now??

And Fifth and last tip,use whatever medium you like,like traditional?do it!Like digital? do it!Like sculpting ?DO IT!Don’t force yourself to use mediums you don’t like,you’ll end up tired and even disappointed yet it is good to practice different techniques and media’s if you want to!I am trying to do so myself!

Anyway hope this was somewhat helpful to all of you reading this and thank you for sticking for so long️

[sufferthesea]

The Death of a Seamstress  (aka 8 Ninken Jackets and Kakashi Assumes Too Much)

Kakashi Week 2017 - Prompt #4: Ninken

Kakashi! Haven’t you ever heard the expression “You know what happens when you assume”? Anyway, I don’t know who makes ninken jackets but someone has to, right?? (Also sorry for spelling errors and stuff? I’m too lazy to go back through for a 10th time to check...) 

Rating: General Words: 3.132

Also on ao3

It’d been several years since all of Kakashi’s ninken got their little jackets and forehead protectors. He remembered when he’d first got the blue jackets with the Henohenomoheji face embroidered onto them and presented them to the eight ninja hounds.

“Kakashi,” Pakkun had said gingerly, as he pawed at the smallest jacket of all, meant for himself, “this is nice and all, but … we’re dogs. We don’t need these jackets. None of the other ninken wear them.”

“Maybe,” a younger Kakashi had replied, “but you’re the ninken of the Hatake clan. We actually have some pride. Put on the jacket.”

Throughout the years, the jackets had gone through a lot. They’d been torn, stained, forgotten, and even buried at one point - though Kakashi figured that had been on purpose by a few of the dogs who were embarrassed to be seen wearing clothes. He’d done his best to patch them up, but his hands weren’t nimble enough to work a small needle through the fabric. And when he had decided to do it himself, they had turned out rather pathetically. The fabric was puckered, the hems were uneven, and they looked sadder than before. It only took one serious look from his ninken and Pakkun declaring, “I am not wearing that - anywhere,” before he gave up for good trying to fix it himself.

Whenever he got the chance, he’d return to the old seamstress who’d originally made the jackets for the ninken when he was younger. Sakumo had taken him there when he was a child to have a set of custom shirts made with a mask before he started at the Academy, and she seemed like the perfect person to ask to make the matching set of jackets for the dogs. Of course, it helped that she’d already knew Kakashi and didn’t ask many questions - the only thing she’d told him to do was summon all the dogs so she could get their measurements. Every time he returned to the shop, she’d patch up the jackets with smooth seams and polished stitching. She’d even gone so far as to replace all of them with brand new jackets a few years ago as a gift to a “loyal and kind customer.”

Now he was holding a paper bag packed with the eight jackets, each one folded as neatly as he could manage with the tears and tatters fluttering about. He’d done his best to tell his ninken that they needed to take care of the jackets - they couldn’t be reckless, but even with his stern words there was at least one dog who’d accidentally scratch at himself and tear a hole clean through the fabric. Plus he couldn’t help that they’d gotten worn down through use - I mean, you can only fight in clothes for so long before they’re damaged at least a little. This last bought of training hadn’t been bad, but somehow every - single - jacket - was - ruined.

Kakashi felt incredibly bad since these hadn’t even lasted that long, and the old lady hadn’t even charged him for them! But still, he needed to replace them.

The small shop was tucked away in an easily overlooked corner of the village, behind a few weapons shops and a bookstore. A wooden sign hung over the door that read Custom Clothes - Seamstress and Tailor in faded ink and the windows were dark even though all the lights were on inside. Kakashi pushed open the door and was greeted with the familiar chime of bells overhead. There were wooden mannequins placed in the front of the shop, each one wearing a different outfit. A display case over to the side held bolts of fabric, a few sketches, and an old pincushion. At the back of the store was a door curtained off with a sign that read Private - Fitting Rooms. It smelled like potpourri, and threads of linen hung in the air.

“Sato-san,” Kakashi called, wandering over to one of the mannequins dressed in an airy, cream-colored yukata. “I hate to say it but my ninken have torn through all of their jackets. Do you think you could fix them? Or replace them? I’ll pay you this time.”

Someone moved behind the curtained room and footsteps echoed off the wooden floor. Kakashi didn’t bother looking up as he rubbed the sleeve hem of the yukata between his thumb and index finger.

This is nice, he thought to himself. I should ask her to make me one of these before summer gets here.

The curtain was thrown back and Kakashi, still gazing at the mannequins, held up the bag. “I’ve got them all here. Could you see if there’s anything to salvage?”

“What do you mean you’ll pay her this time?” came an unfamiliar voice.

Kakashi turned and was startled to see a young woman standing in the fitting room entrance, the edge of the curtain in her hands, a stern look on her face. She was dressed head-to-toe in black with a white apron tied around her waist, decorated with the same symbol Sato-san had explained was her family crest. The girl had her hair pulled back into a bun and a pencil behind her ear. Her glare was frightening and Kakashi stepped back from the yukata and threw a hand up as if to show he wasn’t armed.

“Sorry about that,” he laughed lightly, “I wasn’t aware anyone else worked in this shop. I was looking for Sato-san. She usually mends these for me.”

The girl continued to stare at him but she let go of the curtain and folded her arms. “Yes, I guessed that. What are you doing having my grandmother sew your clothes and not paying her?”

“Huh? Your grandmother?” Kakashi studied the girl’s face and he could see a faint trace of Sato-san in her - the same large eyes, the same stooped shoulders, even the small flyaway piece of hair on top of her head was the same. “This is a family business? That’s nice. But she’s really the one who does all of my mending, so if you could just go get her —”

“Not until you pay her what you owe,” the girl said sharply, standing firm. “It sounds like she’s been doing a lot of work for you, so I expect you to pay up. What’s your name? I’m sure she kept a record of how many times you came in. I’ll get the guest book and we can crunch some numbers. Take a seat over there.” She pointed to a cushioned bench on the other side of the room before disappearing behind the curtain. When she returned she had a huge book in her arms and a determined look in her eye.

“I didn’t mean to give off the wrong impression,” Kakashi began, clutching the bag to his chest. “I never cheated your grandmother out of anything. She said she’d made these as a gift for me. But I’m more than willing to pay you to fix them.”

“Nice try!” The girl dropped the book onto the bench and flipped it open. “Grandma was very nice and she did a lot of favors - but plenty of people took advantage of that kindness and nearly put us in debt! I’m going to collect every last cent that was owed to her if it’s the last thing I do. Let’s see … What’s your name?”

“Uh - it’s Hatake Kakashi.”

“Hatake … Hatake …” She turned the pages until she reached the page titled HA and went down the list. “Ah, here you are. Hatake Kakashi! Let’s see. You’ve been in - ah!” She stood up and gawked at him. “You’ve been coming here since you were a child?”

The jonin nodded simply. “Yes. I’m sorry, are you able to mend these?”

“Just a minute - Grandma always put a check mark next to orders that were paid in full, and a star next to a gift. Of course, most of these pages are filled with stars - but I know what was a gift and what wasn’t. Hmm, seems that most of your orders have been paid … that’s a first. Ah! Here it is! Eight sets of jackets for …” She paused, puzzled, and reread the page. “Maybe the writing is smudged. Does that say what I think it says?”

“Eight sets of jackets for my ninken, that’s right.”

She turned, giving him a bizarre look. “You had … custom jackets made … for your dogs?”

Kakashi felt a sudden blush cross his face and he looked away. “That was the order that was a gift - the most recent one. I’ll pay you to mend these ones - or to make new ones.”

Huffing, the girl slammed the book shut and eyed him suspiciously. “So, only one order was a gift, huh? I guess you’re lucky. There’s some people in here who’ve been scamming my grandma for years. I’m going to make them pay in full. Can you imagine that bill? Let’s see the damage.” She took the bag from his arms and sifted through the shreds of fabric. “Jeez, you can tell these belong to dogs. Er, ninja dogs. I can’t save any of this. I can make new ones, if you want to order them. My grandma kept all of her patterns so they should be around here somewhere. Maybe in the back …” The girl wandered off to find the missing patterns.

“So,” Kakashi said, following her through the curtain into the back room. He stopped and stared in awe. He had always assumed the shop was tiny, since the front of the store wasn’t much to look at. But back here was another story. To the left were fitting rooms to be used to adjust and tailor clothes, to the right was where customers were taken to be measured, and in front of him was another door leading to what appeared to be a workshop. He suspected he had been back here at some point when his father had ordered his masked shirts, but the memory was distant and faded – and since the ninken were so well behaved (usually), he had just sat on the bench in the lobby reading Icha Icha while Sato-san had led the dogs behind the curtain and taken their measurements.

A long table lined with benches and cluttered with scraps of fabric and spools of thread filled the center of the workshop. It was bright inside and there was a solid wall of bare mannequins waiting to be dressed. A filing cabinet was shoved in the corner of the workshop and all of the drawers were opened; hundreds of papers were pulled out and lying scattered on the floor.

“Sorry for the mess,” she said. “I’ve been going through all of Grandma’s papers to get things organized. I’ve got to finish her orders and collect her payments. Come this way. We’ll find the patterns. What were you saying?”

“Huh? Oh - I was just … I was gonna ask where Sato-san was. I didn’t know she had any family, so it really surprised me that you were working here.”

The girl hesitated, pausing in her walk towards the large table in the center of the room. Kakashi almost ran into her but stepped aside just in time. She shook her head and scurried over to the other side of the table, heading towards the filing cabinet. “I’m sure your patterns are in here. It’ll just take me a moment.”

Kakashi sat on one of the low wooden benches and watched the girl balance the bag of shredded fabric in one arm and frantically shuffle through the see-through patterns in the cabinet.

“Aha! Here they are.” She pulled out a large paper folder and slapped it on the table beside Kakashi. Across the front in scribbled handwriting read, Hatake, Kakashi - 8 Patterns - Jackets, Various Sizes. “I can make as many jackets as you want with these!” she beamed, setting the bag down on the table. “Look here, see these notes? She wrote down what fabric she used, what thread, what kind of stitch, and she even wrote down the name of the dogs the jackets were for. She always paid attention to stuff like that,” she mused fondly, running her fingers along the folder. “So - you wanted to order new ones? I’m sure we have this fabric still in stock. And it looks like there’s a pattern on it.”

“Yeah - it’s Henohenomoheji.”

“… what?”

“Uh, it’s …” Kakashi felt another embarrassed blush rise on his masked face and he cleared his throat. “It’s, you know, the little face kids draw on their scarecrows.”

“Huh — oh! Kakashi! I get it! Hm. I wouldn’t have pegged you as someone with a sense of humor. Actually, considering you’ve had jackets custom-made for your dogs with a scarecrow face on it, I guess you are kind of funny.” The girl took back the folder and went to studying the patterns, looking through the bolts of fabric to find the exact type. “You can wait here or you can come back later. It’ll take me a while. Well …” She studied the measurements for Bull and paled. “This one might take me all night. Maybe you should come back tomorrow afternoon. I can tell you then when they’ll be ready.”

“Sure. Do you want to keep my wallet hostage so you can be sure I don’t cheat you?”

“Very funny. You can pay me before I hand over the jackets when they’re finished, though. I’ll tally up the bill now if you want.”

“That would be helpful, thank you.”

She grabbed a pencil and quickly wrote down a handful of figures. She shoved the paper at Kakashi and pointed at the bottom string of numbers, “That’s your bill.”

Kakashi’s only visible eye widened in bewilderment at the sight but he fought to retain his cool exterior and shrugged. “I … see the price of labor has gone up.”

“Well, it is only me here. If I start these tonight it’s already overtime! Unless you can wait a few days, then I can knock a few zeros off. Otherwise, I’m charging you for priority. I’m pretty backlogged, you know.”

“Yeah, I can tell.” Kakashi studied the pieces of fabric pinned to other patterns and the wicker basket on the floor beside the sewing machine, overflowing with garments. “That price is fine. As much as they hated wearing them, I feel like they’re a little ashamed to be seen without them. It’s a modesty thing.”

“Uh-huh. Right. Anyway, I’ve got to close up soon or else more people are gonna think they can come in this late. I’ll walk you out.” The girl clutched the folder into the crook of her arm and escorted Kakashi out of the workroom, through the curtain, and to the front door. “Stop by tomorrow and we’ll see where we’re at.” She waved at him to stop when he moved to grab his wallet out of his pocket. “You can pay tomorrow. Maybe by then I’ll have softened up a little and reduced the price. Do you mind if I keep these here tonight? I can use them as reference. My grandma always did things a little differently than me. I want to make sure I get them right.”

“I’m sure you’ll do fine. You did those?” He motioned towards the clothed mannequins sitting in the front of the shop.

“Yeah! They were some of the first things I made when I took over this shop. I was getting used to her sewing machine, but I think they turned out alright.”

Kakashi guessed that from the aversion of the question, he knew the answer about where Sato-san was. He took a deep breath, remembering the old woman who’d done so much to help him in the past. Although the village had certified tailors and seamstresses to make the chunin and jonin uniforms, as well as masks, Kakashi had always brought in his clothes to be mended by the woman. He’d also kept all the shirts she’d made for him when he was young; even though he had far outgrown them, they were still in good condition. For the most part. Kunai strikes and bomb shrapnel were not kind to clothes, no matter how well they were made. He looked at the girl, feeling a strange sort of sadness in the middle of his chest, and he muttered, “I’m sorry for your loss. Sato-san was a really wonderful woman. I’m glad you’ve taken over, though, and kept her shop open.”

The girl stared at him in silence for a while before leaning forward with her eyebrows pulled together tightly and her mouth stretched downward. “Huh?”

“Sato-san,” Kakashi said, unintentionally shuffling backwards under the gaze of the girl. “I’m s-sorry for your loss. She really was a nice woman.”

To his surprise, the girl let out a sudden laugh and stood up, looking just as confused as before. “My grandma isn’t dead! Is that — is that what you’ve been thinking this whole time?”

“Uhm … yes?”

“No! No, she isn’t dead. Oh my gosh. I should’ve said something. Grandma retired last year and has been traveling around to different villages. She trained me to be a seamstress like her and left me in charge of the shop before she left. She had a few orders left but I said I would take care of them, but they were a lot more than I thought. I’ve been trying to get through them all, but I don’t work as fast as her. And, like I said, she was too generous for her own good so now I’ve got to collect all that money before we lose the shop. But that’s none of your concern, aha ha ha! I didn’t mean to frighten you, either, by letting you think she was dead. I think she’ll be stopping by for a bit sometime in the summer, if you want to come by again to see her.”

Kakashi wasn’t sure if he was embarrassed or relieved. “That’d be nice,” he forced himself to say. He couldn’t believe he just paid his condolences for a woman who wasn’t dead. “I … should go. It’s getting late and you need to close up. I’ll stop by tomorrow. Goodbye.” He turned and hurried out of the shop, leaving the poor girl behind. He marched down the now-dark street back towards his apartment.

I’m so stupid, he thought as he passed by the shops, long since closed for the evening. I can’t believe I just assumed her grandma was dead. He was absolutely convinced that if it weren’t for the jackets he was going to pick up tomorrow, he would never show his face at the shop again. Shoving the key into his lock, he pushed open his door and dragged himself into the apartment. It doesn’t matter tonight, he tried to tell himself as he collapsed on the couch, kicking off his shoes. I have to see her tomorrow, so I’ll just pretend it didn’t happen. After that, though, I’m never going back.

Soon, he was asleep, the embarrassing moment and the hefty fee temporarily forgotten.

[tinymixtapes]

Feature: 2017: Favorite Labels

When I was a shithead high school kid playing in my first punk rock band, I’m pretty positive that my cohorts and I dedicated much more time to hanging out in a Denny’s booth sketching logos and fine-tuning our astoundingly under-researched shortlists of the record labels that would ideally release our first earthshaking longplayer than we ever dedicated to, ya know, “writing” and “practicing” songs. But strangely, I don’t think this sort of thing happened because we were “lazy.” I think it’s because, a lot of times, the brand name counts even more than the music does. And I guess we all kinda understood that, even back then. Sure, we may all walk around our lives most of the time pretending like our choices and justifications are all pure and internally driven… but — as the introductory statements to three solid years’ worth of these Favorite Labels lists all ably point out — that shit is a straight-up hallucination. What we all really need at the end of the day is to feel assured that we’re part of a bigger story. We want those choices backed up by some weird, impossibly infallible guarantee. On a grand scale, this whole project represents nothing less than the most utterly serious of metaphysical business: nothing and no one stands on their own. Individuals are forgotten. Lines have endpoints. Organisms wither and die. We see this. We know this. We hate this. Brands, on the other hand, endure. Those glorious abstractions known as “classifications,” “families,” “institutions,” and so on can’t be killed. In other words, we’re not just talking comfort here; we’re talking Immortality. But even on the level of our day-to-day exploitation and/or enjoyment of culture, it holds true. For example, even now, as I try to reconstitute the narrative, some of my favorite records of 2017 didn’t just “come out.” They “came out as editions on Sean McCann’s Recital program.” As a writer, I found it downright difficult to parse and explain the evolution of certain monikers without using Hospital Productions as a scaffolding or to discuss this-or-that artist without shouting-out Posh Isolation. And I’ve got to fess up to the fact that, as a fan, I attended several shows and bought several records based on their Don Giovanni tag alone. Is any of this compulsive brand-association particularly justified or fair? Objectively, no, I guess not. But that’s exactly the point: categorizing frail, transient little things into grand structures that transcend the worth of each of those little peons when tallied individually not only provides a nice distraction, but it also helps cocoon us — however temporarily and delusionally — in a cozy and structured-yet-flexible hammock rather than leaving us all sailing naked through the silent, freezing, soulless, limitless, and immeasurable depths of deep space at a million miles an hour. So, um, if it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll just go head and keep clinging like grim death to all the delusional institutions I can get my mammalian hands on. In fact, here’s 14 or so that you might find handy too. Take ’em or leave ’em. –Dan Smart --- Noumenal Loom [$EGA & THE RAINBOW STREETS · TOIRET STATUS · PASCALE PROJECT] Since 2013, Noumenal Loom, run by Garrett Crosby, a.k.a. Holly Waxwing, out of Birmingham, Alabama, has been pogoing around the globe to gather together all sounds exciting and excitable. So far, the label has pepped us way up with seminal releases by aggregative electronic wizards Foodman, Giant Claw, and Seth Graham, while concurrently winding down with gentle albums from the lovably chill likes of Tuluum Shimmering and Angel Dust Dealers. Their 2017 roster opened with an addictively danceable cassette from DJ Voilà, and whether the label has been exploring techno, funk, smooth jazz, or muzak, it’s been an idea of bodily movement that has unified all of this year’s tapes and albums. We’ve window-shopped with Haha Mart and loosened into a swaying groove with Jasper Lee and Earthly. Bouncy releases from Pascale Project and $3.33 scrubbed the dance floor clean, and, to round out the year, the label just dropped two back-to-back bath bombs by $ega & The Rainbow Streets, a new project from Kenji Yamamoto, and some mind-boggling impishness from Toiret Status. Amidst all kinds of paralyzing madness outside, spaces and sounds that invite such movement feel distinctly joyful and freeing. –Cookcook --- Hands in the Dark [BYRON WESTBROOK · BRIAN CASE · MATT JENCIK] Even French label Hands In the Dark’s name dallies with the corporeal, alluding to a sense beyond the visible, a prickle or a tickle when the lights are off. Label founder Morgan Cuinet has compiled a walloping roster of experimental artists whose work mines the occult affect of sub-bass, the pilomotor reflex to binaural wizardry, and the pineal proprioception to the encounter between ambie(/a)nce and the human ear. It’s hardly a surprise, then, that the artists represented — among them Matt Jencik, Brian Case, and Byron Westbrook — positively bodied the electronic music scene in 2017. Even from the pirouetting opening seconds of Westbrook’s “Dance and Free Fall,” the opening track off Body Consonance, tendrils of sound coagulate and consummate with the ear, consonate with the flesh, palpitate along with the temple’s pulse. Mastered by Helmut Erler and TMT favorite Rashad Becker at Berlin’s Dubplates & Mastering, these delicately fashioned transmissions massage and clench, stimulating the viscera and churning the gut. Hands in the Dark has quietly built a catalog of ambient music with gumption, a dance music for the synapses and for the goosebumps. The future is now: forget your antidepressants and anhedonia. With hands and feet and neck and back — in the dark or in the light — we’re getting sensual. –Benjamin Eckman Bieser --- Nyege Nyege Tapes [RIDDLORE · OTIM ALPHA · MAKAVELI] Luck’s acute attribute is having enough faith in letting go of the good and/or bad; a bird shits your in hair: half-think you won the lottery, but you keep thinking, a bird shit in my hair. Communication will forever be sharpened through adverse arts. Nyege Nyege Tapes bugged on 2017 with some excellent cultural deep-dive for listeners to gnash. What hit first was the jux-flow of “Ukuti” by Disco Vumbi. Immediately after, Riddlore’s Afromutations banged so hard, listeners lost direction of “Why?” and pursed immediate: “What timeline does Nyege Nyege Tapes abide by?” The third release defined another unique MC’s entry, Gulu City Anthems by Otim Alpha, baring a certain soul that comes more with the certainty of songwriting than production. Mysterians’s Joyride on Judgment Day was a gem that power-washed nodes on a level of intellect we won’t find until all the pieces of blasted-ambience have fit. But most importantly, Sounds of Sisso vibes on such a level of reappropriative, cultural instinct, one forgets to even find the magnitude of hype, purely grappling at the textures of rhythm. Nyege Nyege Tapes defines the stripped-down airfare to where prestige and lister-expansion take the next step. –C Monster --- Recital Program [ROGER ENO · DICK HIGGINS · MARY MAZZACANE] Whatever happened to the classics? Did we just get over them? Or rather, did they get over us? Is it still possible to remain just a little bit old-fashioned in a world that’s progressing at an exponential rate, when what happened even yesterday is archaic, forgotten, meaningless? For one, maybe study up on Sean McCann’s Recital Program, which spent yet another year shattering the glass walls between “high” and “low” art, proving again that everything is fascinating if we just look a little closer. Between exploring the lost lineage of the Mazzacane/Connors family, exposing the ever-tumbling wordplay of Dick Higgins, and issuing regal, flowing piano works from the likes of Michael Vincent Waller and Roger Eno, Recital kept its cool amidst a musical landscape that continues to self-implode. In reclaiming the opulent world of the classical for the underground of today, McCann’s label creates its own sort of beautiful order out of chaos, a theater in which the mundane and the ornate can freely converse and even trade places for a while if they so choose, unshackled from the class boundaries that so often keep the two camps railing against one another. Whatever happened to the classics? They’re living among us now. –Sam Goldner --- Music from Memory [BENE FONTELES · DUB OVEN · GAUSSIAN CURVE] “Music from Memory” is a misnomer and double entendre both. The records released by the Amsterdam label can’t be from memory in its most common meaning, simply because they have almost never been heard by “the masses” before. The music does, however, come from what could be called a place of memory. It has the ability to instill nostalgia for mysteries, to create attachments to unlived experiences. What started with the phenomenal Vito Ricci full-length in 2015 and was constituted with the Dip In The Pool reissue in 2016 has, this year, become a stalwart of archival transcendence. Although it’s often titled a “reissue label,” every 2017 release out of Music from Memory feels incredibly new. Psychedelic Brazilian music comps feel dime-a-dozen these days, but 2017’s Outro Tempo pillars over them all. The clunky disco of Dutch DJ Richenel feels a step ahead of contemporary house nostalgics. What the label provides is a sort of one-way mirror, looking at a past that was dreaming of its future. The attention to detail and arduous curation that goes into every record from Music from Memory highlights not where we went wrong, but what was done right. –E. Fosl --- The Worst [MINOGAME · X.NTE · ANCIENT ORIGIN] The Worst couldn’t be more misnamed. Since January, the Tennessean netlabel has birthed a baker’s dozen of the squelchiest/geekiest/sugar-sludgiest breakcore the bowels of SoundCloud have to offer. Spearheaded by visual-artist-cum-producer Minogame, the imprint functions as the post-internet era’s answer to the Smithsonian Folkways, cataloguing cyberpunk transmissions from the web’s uncharted territories: aside from surface-level nods to Warp’s cheeky humor and penchant for cluttered drum-breaks, much of the label’s output represents the hyper-individualism within a late-capitalist state that has driven us deep into our own curated aesthetics for solace. The aforementioned Minogame’s a tribe of one, signified by their Lascaux-like scribblings and math-rock source material. The prolific Ancient Origin is also a culture unto itself, one informed as much by Animal Crossing’s pastoral tradition as it is by mid-aughts crunk mixtapes. Visit The Worst’s Bandcamp, click a record cover, and assimilate: this is an expansive charting a miniature world. –Jude Noel --- Profound Lore [BELL WITCH · SANNHET · FULL OF HELL] I’ll be real: last year, I hadn’t heard of Profound Lore Records. Sure, I knew a ton of their past releases, like those of Krallice, Altar of Plagues, and Nadja, but I wasn’t fully conscious of the brilliant and gnarled web that tied them all together. The fateful moment that changed all that was the December release of Ash Borer’s superb The Irrepassable Gate, which was one of the most truly badass black metal records I’d heard in years. I became obsessed, and I started paying attention to Profound Lore (run by the great Chris Bruni). Enter 2017. I came into this year ready to chomp on anything Profound Lore released, and what a fucking year they’ve had. Pallbearer’s Heartless was a thrilling, prog-tinged doom journey that was as compelling as anything the band has done. Full Of Hell’s Trumpeting Ecstasy was an impeccably produced and excellently paced grindcore album, one of the year’s best in the genre. And then there was Loss’ magical doom odyssey Horizonless, whose grizzly howls brought an appropriate sense of melancholic yearning for listeners in 2017. And let’s not forget Sannhet’s aggressive and relentless So Numb, a refreshingly powerful exercise in instrumental metal. But, in my opinion, Profound Lore’s crowning achievement for the year was Bell Witch’s Mirror Reaper, a breathtaking, bass-laden drive through the great beyond via glacial doom metal. The label capped the year off with this month’s epically unsettling 7xLP Rainbow Mirror by Prurient, a release that delivered a whole new set of mysteries and moods for us to relish as we slide gracefully into 2018. I raise my glass to you now, Profound Lore, as I have many times in my life, whether knowingly or unknowingly. You have brought a significant amount of beautiful music into the world this year. Thank you. –Adam Rothbarth --- End of the Alphabet [AKE · OMIT · MARHAUS AND MEEK] I have often wondered the existential meaning behind Noel Meek’s End of the Alphabet label. I can conjure many shortsighted missives about the location of New Zealand, the idea of the letters X, Y, and Z being largely ignored and underused, or perhaps the notion that those same letters are quite weird and therefore loosely lumped together. So I’ll stick to a combination of all three, which is why EotA is such an ear-opening experience. Whether it’s via Meek’s own releases and collaborations, or those spotlighting both his New Zealand and its surrounding — and equally ignored — regional sounds. Considering how stuck Western culture seems to be, I’d rather delve into the XYZs of our globe than the ABCs. –Jspicer --- MOTOR Collective [KLEIN & LACK · SABERTOOTH · R. GAMBLE] Tucked away in the fogs of the Pacific Northwest, this year the gang at MOTOR Collective did not “break through” so much as further refine their version of dance music — moody, spacious, and deep, yet grounded enough that you can actually move to it. MOTOR releases (as well as their excellent parties and podcasts) feel less like music for the club as we know it and more like the jump-off point for some head-trip gathering in the forest; the sense of a group yearning for this vision carries across records as varied as R Gamble’s Realistic Spaces and Heidi Sabertooth’s The Hear Of Now (both highlights for the year). That you can still hear the tape hiss on many digital versions of MOTOR tracks (as opposed to the hyperreal, LOL-perfect rendering of so much modern electronic music) speaks to what the label is going for. Like mighty ponderosa left in the rain, it’s imperfect and gently warped, still sturdy, and full of personality. –Dylan Pasture --- PERMALNK [DETENTE · LEO HOFFSAES & LOTO RETINA · BENOIT B] The Parisian label PERMALNK has been offering what it calls an “empathetic image of the world” since 2014, but it wasn’t until this year, with three strong releases, that it brought that image into clearer focus. The empathy of DETENTE’s Basic Dwell is reserved for the world’s smoldering and static-charged bits, where its energy is locked up, and from whence it manifests in stuttering impact and action-movie fidelity, accompanied by the grungy tremolo of guitar. Léo Hoffsaes and Loto Retina collaborated on Early Contact, the intimate story of a woman’s day out with her son and husband as her second child squirms in her belly, with uterine gurgling joining airy string melodies in a duet of nervous anticipation that spreads, as if contagiously, from narrator to listener. Far from both the incidental onslaught of Basic Dwell and the human intimacy of Early Contact, Benoit B’s Ethereal Drops addressed itself to the world as if to a fantastic, New Age-adjacent vision of nature. Its tracks, like the standouts “Sparkling Stream” and “Diamonds Rain,” combined a high, animalistic chirp with pads colored in shades of balearic and trance, constructing an image that, like artist Tavi Lee’s album cover, carries about it a worldly air, even in its bold color palette and surreal bending of the edges of its “natural” forms about one another. In 2017, PERMALNK has accomplished something rare in releasing three albums with little in common aside from an adherence to the label’s noble mission statement and, more importantly, an uncanny coherence as individual works of art. –Will Neibergall --- Posh Isolation [CROATIAN ARMOR · DAMIEN DUBROVNIK · KYO] In some secret file on Loke Rahbek’s hard drive, one can find my full frontal nudes along with a genetalia garden of many other bodies, desecrated and devalued, for they all were exchanged, vulnerability for vulnerability, with a cassette tape of Croatian Amor’s 2014 album The Wild Palms. In the commodification of the world, all things are abstractly identified with an exchange value, where even vulnerability has a value, for the body is as expendable as every other image. Yet, here we give one’s inability to give as a gift — one’s vulnerability. The self-interest of commodity economy is abdicated in preference of a gift exchange. Here, Rahbek creates an artificial space to find other people. Posh Isolation’s forays beyond noise and industrial to lyrical ambient and minimal techno belie industrial music’s foundation in the incommunicable dissonance of the world of industrial capitalism, where seeking to be heard above the din is a project worthy of art. By fetishizing the empty object in the artificial space of performance, this bubblegum industrial forges impossible connections that, though artificial, become pleasurable and therefore real. Through pain directed inward, as if pierced by a great many arrows, we confirm that one’s self is irreducible to the abstract identification of the commodity, as Saint Sebastian his beauty. The ultimate need to make contact snaps one out of artificiality. In 2017, the cold has become a little bit warmer and a sort of sincerity is resuscitated. –Evan Coral --- Don Giovanni [SCREAMING FEMALES · AGUA VIVA · LEE BAINS III & THE GLORY FIRES] What’s opera, doc? Opera is text by tune splitting story, Italian for “work.” Opera is Don Giovanni, some Austrian seraph’s diminishing sevenths flicking humans into shouting until the sound shakes our hearts. Hearts and mouths shout, so listen: Joe Steinhardt and Zach Gajewski played in a bad band at Boston College, made their own 7-inch, and voila: opera via Don Giovanni. It’s music label as New Brunswick new alternative, nixing commercial interruption so artist and audience are fleet free as a Mozart minuet to trade roles and help each other. “Anyone can do anything and not just that, everyone can do everything. No one’s fucking special,” Steinhardt reminds us. In an ashen historical moment, those words are totem for remembering the good work of “nobody lives unless everybody lives.” Don Giovanni is Aye Nako’s rim shot disrupt-punk and the geography-atomizing Lee Bains III & The Glory Fires. It’s Irreversible Entanglements, unmetered jazz outfit as union collective and A Piece of Water, the Buenos Aires tidal pool dream of Agua Viva, a body’s buoyancy over oppression. It’s La Neve’s American Sounds, a non-binary bodying the electric song as new national anthem sans strict script and the breaking “Glass House,” Screaming Female’s yowl of a collective body’s mission to re-member shards of 2017’s ill-reality into something better for every body. The music label model is the original resisting force, the libretto punk show, a two-fold work of labor output and piece created. Don Giovanni refuses repenting like the title character and screams high C’s into hell, a Looney Tunes promise that everything is movable except good work. Don Giovanni is the good work, opera for us by us. No one’s fucking special. Everyone’s fucking special. –Frank Falisi --- Piratón [MINICOMPONENTE · UPGRAYEDD JESSICA · AMAZONDOTCOM] OK, you caught me; Piratón Records isn’t as prolific as some of these other labels. As far as I can tell, it currently only exists as a Bandcamp page, and since its founding in 2015 by Mexico City musician and music journalist Carlos Huerta (a.k.a. Josué Josué), there are only four releases, all available for free streaming with a “name your price” option for download. One of them, Ruido’s 2015 FUN LP, is a totally bonkers instrumental hip-hop/chip-tune/synth punk thing. Two of them are compilations in a series called No hay más fruta que las nuestra, which means, “There is no fruit other than ours,” a play on a quote by Mexican social realist painter David Siqueiros: “No hay mas ruta que la nuestra” (“There is no other route but ours”). This year’s No hay más fruta que la nuestra 2 is why I’m writing this blurb. Like its 2016 predecessor, it features all kinds of music by female artists from Latin America and Spain. TMT favorite (Upgrayedd) Smurphy is on it, along with 11 other incredible ladies whose work spans pop, punk, rap, techno, and folk. It’s basically all I’ve listened to this year (besides, like, DAMN. and A Crow Looked At Me, so you know it’s good but ultimately responsible for way fewer tears). Snarkiness aside, I hope that somebody finds this at least half as empowering as I did this year. Life fairs a little better when your music’s this good. –Jazz Scott --- Hospital Productions [LUSSURIA · RAINFOREST SPIRITUAL ENSLAVEMENT · NINOS DU BRASIL] 2017 was the 20th year in the business for Dominic Fernow’s Hospital Productions. The label celebrated with tastefully grim releases that fit nicely under the three categories of Fernow’s own projects, Vatican Shadow, Prurient, and Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement. Like Demdike Stare’s DDS and Oneohtrix Point Never’s Software imprints, Hospital Productions never strays far from Fernow’s infernal circle of influence. The label eschews the convenience of modern platforms, preferring physical record stores and distributors like Boomkat and Bleep to platforms like Bandcamp and SoundCloud. Aesthetically, the labels seems to occupy a razor-thin void that exists between the chic, palatable throb of ambient techno — the sort of jilted, swooning sound that intellectual architecture students in horn-rimmed glasses and ket-heads in crop tops can bond over — and the always unpalatable, unpredictable underground noise scene. The latter is the spawning pool of Hospital Productions, a realm of cut-and-paste cassette art and “noise tables,” which basically kept the National Audio Company in business until avant-garde electronica and Urban Outfitters found tapes to be a fashionable medium again. It’s a dangerous game Fernow plays: with every high-bias, 180g limited-edition release at the luxury price point, he runs the risk of playing to the “market,” whether ironically or for personal gain. Industry politics aside, the music is of scrupulous quality and gluttonous proportions. Hospital Productions is committed to releases of staggering, atmospheric scale: the monolithic physical LPs and cassette boxes are like dense artifacts, adding to the imprint’s quasi-archaeological mystique. Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement put out a few large cuts, coming over two hours on a reissue of Green Graves. The project also put out an eight-cassette compilation titled Water Witches, one of many such bricks of tape that the label would drop. Another eight-hour box set of 8xCS was released for Dust Belt’s brooding, dark ambient on Ecocannibalism, and then of course there was the 6xLP release of Prurient’s massive Rainbow Mirror, which was co-released with Profound Lore. The club side of Hospital Productions is equally grim: Ninos du Brasil released their second full-length, Vida Eterna, a bludgeoning set of trance-inducing Latin rhythms, as well as another 12-inch. Natural Assembly put out The Fantasy of Love, a mix of post punk and deep house. Shifted drew a converging plane between metal grooves (the rhythmic kind) that sound like they’ve been rubbed out of literal metal grooves and outsider techno beats on Appropriation Stories. As much as I hate the “outsider” term, there’s still not much of a vocabulary for the sort of undanceable, fringes-of-the-club-basement beats that Hospital represents so well. –Ross Devlin http://j.mp/2iT0sDJ

[nurseperriestyles-blog]

More of the Same

A/N: I do not take credit for this picture. But I did have my husband edit her hair and eye color to match Perrie. This is the closest I’ve found online, and it’s pretty close. 

This post probably had a lot of typos and issues, as per usual. I was fighting sleep when I wrote it

Template from:

https://theboson.deviantart.com/art/Blank-Character-Sheet-2-1-8-390-Questions-460031650

“I’d much rather save the heroes than be the hero.” --Perrie Styles

 General Information

Name: Perrie Styles

Pronunciation: Pear-ee

Name Meaning: Pear tree

Name Origin: French

Other Names: Pear

Gender: Female

Titles: Nurse Styles

Birth Name: Perrie Styles

Birth Date: October 17th

Birth Length: 16 inches

Birth Weight: 6 ½ lbs

Birth Place: Infirmary in Wall Rose

Manner of Birth: Natural

First Word(s): “Uh oh”

Dominant Hand: Right

Astrological Sign: Libra

Catchphrase: “Fuck.” (She says it way too much)

Autograph: Literally just a “P” with illegible scribbles after it

Handwriting: The messiest, most lazy chicken scratch ever. She has very pretty, neat cursive handwriting, though, when she tries.

ID Number/SSN: N/A

License Plate Number: N/A

Appearance

Picture: See above

Height: 5’4

Weight: 110 lbs

Species: Human

Race: Caucasian  

Blood Type: A-

Symbol: N/A

Skin Color: White

Birthmarks: N/A

Extra Anatomy: N/A

Hair Color: Pale, icy blonde

Hair Length: Just above her collar bones

Hair Type: Wavy

Hair Style: A long, messy bob

Widow's Peak: None

Eye Color: Dark blue/grey

Eyebrows: Full with a subtle arch

Nose Shape: Small and turns up at the end

Teeth: Straight and white

Face Shape: Heart shaped

Complexion: She has pretty clear skin, but around her hair line tends to get a few small bumps from sweating.  

Facial Hair: None

 Health and Image

Diet: Perrie doesn’t watch what she eats at all. It’s lucky that she finds time to eat at all.

Exercise: She walks to and from work, and is on her feel all day, but that’ all the exercise she gets

Fitness: That’s one of her least favorite words

Posture: She slouches a lot, but if she’s trying to impress someone, she’ll stand up straight

Dexterity: She isn’t very clumsy, unless she’s really tired

Reflexes: Her reflexes are better than average. She’s pretty good at dodging items thrown by hysterical patients

Abnormalities: None

Handicaps: None

Medication: None

Allergies: Cats

Diseases: None

Illnesses: None

Disorders: PTS from the fall of Wall Maria

Broken Bones: None

Wardrobe: She mostly wears cotton dresses and skirts, her nursing smocks, collared button ups

Accessories: None. She doesn’t wear any jewelry or anything because she loses it or it gets in the way

Equipment: N/A

Musical Instruments: None. She has no musical ability whatsoever

Piercings: None

Hygiene: She’s not a neat/clean freak, but she keeps herself and her hands very clean

Makeup: Nope. Perrie doesn’t have the time or skill to put on makeup

Perfume / Cologne: She keeps a bottle of her mother’s perfume that smells like roses, but she only wears it on special occasions

Scent: She washes in strawberry scented soap and shampoo. She really, really loves strawberries, ya’ll.

Scars: She has a thin, diagonal scar on her left thigh

Tattoos: None

Voice

Voice: She has a sweet, soft voice. When she’s mad or super serious about something, it’s more loud and firm

Pitch: On the higher side, but not obnoxious and squeaky  

Laughter: She has a rather loud laugh, and she snorts sometimes

Impediments: None

   Psychology

IQ: 148

Vocabulary: Perrie has a very extensive vocabulary, especially medical terms and such. She isn’t pretentious about it, however.

Memory: When she’s learning something, or needing to remember something important, she has an excellent memory. If it’s just everyday things, or when she’s really tired, she can’t remember anything

Temperament: Choleric

Learning Style: She starts by reading and studying something, then moves on to hands on learning

Emotional Stability: She is very emotionally stable. She can, however, become overwhelmed and freak out, but not very often

Mental Health: She’s healthy. She has slight PTS and can freak out in certain situations, but it isn’t debilitating.

Philosophy

Religion: None. She believes firmly in science and thinks religion is ridiculous, but she doesn’t slam it in people’s faces. She never talks about religion with others.

Superstitions: None

Spirit Animal: If she had to pick an animal, it would probably be an owl

Etiquette: Perrie is very polite and kind in social or professional situations, but she can be very vulgar in casual situations, or if she’s bothered

Alignment: Lawful good

Perception: Realist

Philosophy / Motto: “She believed she could, so she did.”

Taboos: Murder. No matter what, Perrie could never bring herself to take another’s life. It is against everything she stands for as a nurse

Vices: Cursing, spite

Virtues: Kindness, open-minded, hard-working

Character

Primary Objective: Become a doctor

Secondary Objectives: Enjoy life with her family and friends

Priorities: Her job and her loved ones

Motivation: Being the best she can be

Self Confidence: Very high

Self Control: High most of the time, but sometimes her temper can get the best of her

Self Esteem: High, though she can be self-conscious about some things

Quirks: Chewing her lip, snorts when laughing, dry hands, always has stained clothes, her hair is always a mess. 

Hobbies: Cooking, gardening, reading, sewing

Closet Hobbies: Drawing. She isn’t very good, but she likes to doodle and sketch. She would die if anyone knew

Guilty Pleasures:

Habits: Lip chewing, cursing, hand washing

Desires: Success in her job, safe family and friends

Wishes: Defeat of the Titans, to become a doctor

Traumas: Titan’s invading Wall Maria, being betrayed by close friends...

Worries: Her friends/family being hurt, failing at her job, Titans

Nervous Tics: Lip chewing

Soothers: Quiet places, her garden, cooking, sewing

Soft Spots: Kids, puppies, pretty flowers

Cruel Streaks: Perrie isn’t cruel at all, but she can be a little spiteful. She would never intentionally hurt anyone, though

Accomplishments: Finishing nursing school and becoming a nurse, saving many people, learning how to cook new things

Greatest Achievement: She will always say her greatest achievement is making her dad proud. She’s such a daddy’s girl.

Failures: Not being able to help people when the wall fell, losing patients, she feels like she fails Eren everytime he gets kidnapped. She also felt like a failure when Ty joined the Survey Corps despite her trying to convince him not to, not remembering her mother

Biggest Failure: She feels that Carla Yeager’s death was her fault. She feels that she should have gone and seen if she was okay before fleeing Shiganshina.

Favorite Dream: She dreamt that she had a giant garden beyond the Walls, and there were no Titans. She could hear her father whistling somewhere near by, and she could smell strawberries and tea leaves..

Worst Nightmare: Perrie had a nightmare that her father and Ty were Titans, and she watched them eat Mikasa and her mother. She woke up and felt like crying after it

Earliest Memory: She remembers a woman singing and a vase of roses on the kitchen table

Fondest Memory: There’s so many, but her favorite is her father teaching her how to plant a rose bush

Worst Memory: The day Shiganshina fell

Most Prized Possession: Her mother’s perfume

Most Valuable Possession: A rare cookbook Ty got her for her 19th birthday

Collections: Cookbooks

Embarrassments: She’s embarrassed anytime a guy flirts with her. She gets so flustered

Humor: Sarcastic and silly

Regrets:

Secrets: The fact that she draws, her secret savings stash,  

Darkest Secret: She doesn’t really have one

Pet Peeves: Weeds in the garden, when people can’t cook

Phobias: Germs

Greatest Fear: Losing her family/friends

Confidence: 8/10

Creativity: 8/10

Generosity: 10/10

Honesty: 9/10

Loyalty: 10/10

Insecurities: 4/10

Patience: 7/10

Predictability: 6/10

Reliability: 10/10

Responsibility: 10/10

Trustworthiness: 10/10

Common...

Compliments: “Cutie” “Healthy as a horse!” (She’s a damn medical nerd)

Insults: “Asshole”

Expletives: All of them. Every one of them.

Farewells: “See ya later” “Be safe”

Greetings: “Hi” “Hello, I’m Nurse Styles” (at work)

Mood: Tired and friendly

 Preferences

Likes: Flowers, books, working, new dresses

Dislikes: Losing things, arguments, not being right

Favorites: Strawberries, pastel colors, spring, naps

Least Favorites: Lettuce, cold weather, Military Police (Even Perrie thinks they’re assholes)

Home, Work, and Education

Sleep Patterns: Sporadic at best

Eating Habits: She eats whenever she remembers

Pets: None

Job Title: Nurse

Experience: 4 years

Work Ethic: She is diligent and hardworking

Transportation: She walks

Criminal Record: None

Dream Job: Doctor

Social

Mother: Moria Styles (deceased)

Father: Desmond Styles

Guardians: She’s of age, so none

Siblings: None

Children: None

Close Relatives: Ty Styles (cousin) Ansel Styles (Uncle) Lise Styles (Aunt)

Distant Relatives: None. She had a very small family. Her grandparents on her mother’s side only had one child, and her father’s parents had Desmond and Ansel. Both sets of grandparents were killed in the culling after the fall

Best Friend: Ty, Hanji, Eren

Close Friends: Mikasa, Armin, Petra, Levi, most of the Survey Corps

Confidantes: Hanji, Levi, Ty

Allies: The Survey Corps

Acquaintances: Her co-workers

Rivals: Hanji, but in a friendly way

Inspirations: Hanji, Levi, Erwin, the doctors she works with

Heroes: Ty, Desmond

Mentors: Grisha Yeager, Hanji

Romance

First Love: Levi

Love Interests: Levi

Marital Status: Single

Orientation: Straight

Flirtiness: She’s too awkward and shy, but she has her moments

Turn ons: Intelligence, dedication, loyalty

Turn offs: Cockiness, selfishness, “assholes” (as quoted by Perrie)

Fetishes: None

Virginity: Perrie hasn’t even been kissed. Poor kid.

Reactions

Angry: When she’s angry, she’ll have a stony expression and not speak unless spoken to. She will say spiteful things, but not very hurtful. She’ll roll her eyes and curse even more than usual.

Anxious: She’ll tear into her lip big time, sometimes she makes it bleed. She will pace a little and talk rapidly and nonstop

Conflicted: She’ll go back and forth between her choices, being very adamant that she’s made her choice, but then the next second she’s switched.

Criticized: She can take criticism very well most of the time, especially when it is from superiors. But if someone is just being overly critical and mean, she’ll bristle and call them out

Depressed: She’ll bury herself in her work, and when she’s home, she’ll hide in her garden or bedroom and avoid people

Embarrassed: She’ll avoid eye contact, blush violently, and stammer a lot

Excited: Perrie’s eyes light up and she’ll smile and jitter around

Frightened: She’ll freeze up for a moment, but then slide her mask on and fight through the fear

Happy: She’ll smile and hum and compliment everyone

 Personality

MBTI Personality Type: INFJ-A

[flame-point]

Sunrise Galaxy Zebracorn Tutorial

AKA I’ve gotten a lot of questions about my art process recently, so I thought I’d make a tutorial :)

Step 1: Pencil sketch

For projects that I’m going to ink, I use regular mechanical pencils (no sharpening, whoot!). Traditional pencils can give cooler lines, but I’m just going to be erasing it all, so...lazy wins!

Since this is just going to be scanned in later, use whatever paper plays nice with your ink and doesn’t die when you use the eraser. For me, this means anything from cheap, non-archival printer paper to nicer, thick archival paper if I’m going to sell the ink original. I aim for smooth, cold pressed paper if I go the watercolor paper route because it works better for the next step.

Step 2: Inking and erasing

Erase thoroughly and cleanly, periodically cleaning your eraser by erasing on blank paper or a clean cloth--pants work great for this. Be careful, especially on the edges of the paper. Luckily this method is great for hiding any “oops I just crumpled my art” issues, but it’s easier just to avoid scrunching your work at all.

No matter how nice your eraser, ink, and paper is, some of the ink is going to lift up when you erase the pencil sketch. I’ve learned to ink the bare minimum before erasing--and to photograph the pencil sketch to reference any lines I forget to ink!

While I’m not fussy about paper or pencils for this method, I am very, very picky about pens and erasers. I usually use Staedtler Mars Plastic Erasers (though any white plastic erasers will do in a pinch). Stay far the heck away from rubber erasers for this. They really lift ink, sometimes permanently grind pencil into the paper, and can tear holes in your piece. I’m sure they’re good for something? Just not this.

My favorite pens are ones that are archival, fast drying, low lifting, and waterproof. Specific brands, types, and sizes are a whole ‘nother tutorial though :)

Step 3: Re-inking and filling in solid areas

Re-ink any lines that got too faded when you erased, fill in solid areas (copic markers rock for this), and fix any errors either by rolling with it, using the “a heavy inked outline hides many sins” method, or using white pens as fancy whiteout. For this piece, I also used white calligraphy ink and a brush to splatter on stars after inking the solid sections. This method isn’t good for big stars, but it’s great for random small stars :)

My favorites white pens for corrections are Sakura Gelly Rolls for fine details (the best white gel pens in my opinion) and Recollections broad tiped white markers, which are great for bigger areas but take several coats to fully cover errors. You can also just fix the error on the computer after you scan it, but it’s often easier to fix it on the original.

Step 4: Digitize the line art

This is another thing that is a whole tutorial on it’s own, but basically I scan the original, open it in Photoshop, and use various adjustment layers (mostly Curves and Hue) to get the line art cleaned up and put it on a separate layer from the background. There are LOTS of tutorials online for extracting traditional line art for various programs, so do whatever works for you.

Step 5: Try on some textures and gradients

I make textures by scanning my own abstract paint scribblings, tea-stained paper, fancy paper, and photos and slapping it together in Photoshop using the different blending modes until I like what I see. Making textures is kinda addictive, and I’m constantly making new one--or even making special ones for an individual paintings.

For this painting, I used the top two rows to make the blue, gray, and purple textures. Then I used the textures on top of the gradients on the bottom to get cool results, like the pink in in the sunrise and the glowing drips.

This technique relies about 90% on happy accidents, which makes it extra fun :)

Step 6: Admire your finished art! 

Before making prints, make sure to view it on a few different computer/tablet/phone screens to make sure your computer hasn’t borked the colors. When I started doing this, my monitor was waaay too dark, so the finished pieces looked VERY DIFFERENT to other people, lol.

[velcr0kitty]

What If?

Title: What If? Summary: You indulge yourself in a harmless passion, following a train of thought, but when Mikey catches a glimpse it may not be so harmless after all. Author: Velcr0Kitty Characters: Mikey (2016) x Reader Word Count: 1846 Warnings: Angst, fluff, body image… issues? I guess? Author’s Notes: Welcome to my first fic, I’m so sorry. I seriously didn’t expect it to become so sad my original idea was so happy ;-;

You drift to the bottom of the sketchbook and scrawl a title of sorts.

What If - Mikey

Under it, you put your signature. It’s hard to deny your feelings for the charismatic turtle, but with that whole “different species” issue complicating things you doubted the feelings would ever be mutual. That hasn’t stopped your daydreams yet.

You never imagined you’d be in a situation where you even could think that. Once upon a time you could only imagine yourself with your beloved art degree in a pleasant flat somewhere other than NYC. You would be a master of your passion and your passion, a career. Before you got your chance, however, your best friend fell very ill. You spent your time with her, being supportive. This was the snowball that became the avalanche.

Your friend was released after a few weeks. Then in succession, like a machine gun of shit, your mother died in a car accident, you were hostage in a bank robbery, your new apartment building out of town exploded (You didn’t honestly believe the landlord at first). Three foot clan attacks and a load more bull-shit later, you were broke, homeless, family-less and living, quite literally, under a rock (a storm a few months prior had upturned it in central park.) That’s where the turtles found you. Dirty, starving, and huddled up under a blanket some random do-gooder’s gave you. Though you suspect it was mostly Donnie’s doing, for whatever reason, they took you in and welcomed you into their home.

That was three years ago. Over those three wonderful years, they nursed you back to health, welcomed you, and loved you as one of their own. It didn’t take long for feelings to develop for the youngest. You spent day in and day out with all of the brothers, of course, but most of your time was with Mikey. Donnie always patched you up and made sure you were okay, but Mikey sat with you and made sure you were okay. He quickly became your best friend.

He comforted you, stayed up with you when you couldn’t sleep, you two have more inside jokes than you’d care to count. The only thing you don’t know about him is how much the guys have been hounding him for months, just small remarks during training or while on patrol, to get him to “just turtle up!” and ask you out or something.

For some reason, you kept your art from them. As close as y'all were, having even one thing to yourself can do wonders for your sanity. Sometimes, while the boys trained or for the hours Splinter had them in the Ha'Shi, you snuck out to buy supplies. Nothing too big, just sketchbooks and pencils that you stashed under your bed when not in use.

You often drew the brothers, for good reason. They had both ridiculously interesting lines and unique shapes, as well as always being around. Plus you had found a few well-hidden hidey holes to draw from if you wanted a live reference.

It’s only natural when crushing on a giant talking turtle to, even just once, imagine what he’d look like as a human, right?

Today, you ran with that thought. So, as you finish the drawing, you scan the page for any last minute fixes. You run your fingers over the sketch, being careful to not smudge. You feel the bumps and ridges of your pencil marks travel underneath you like a road map. As you move over his face, your hand reveals his brilliant and goofy grin, but you can almost see the way his blue eyes light up and glint with mischief when he laughs, the way the green of his cheeks shimmer in the light with his constant smiles and grins. You soften and fall into a lazy smile.

Your hand continues over his torso, your mind wandering to the endless amazing hugs, his muscular arms, his surprisingly comfortable plastron. Hesitantly, you move left, over a man. Lean, but built, muscle hidden under a wildly patterned t-shirt. His mid-length blond messy hair falls into his eyes, but the mischief and brilliant smile remain. He stands with his arms crossed. His pose screams youth, confidence and energy. Your eyes flick back and forth between the drawings. You are nowhere near as familiar with this man, but your curiosity is sated.

The sounds of training float from the dojo as you come back to reality. Heavy grunts and dull thuds tell you how far into training they are and, not realizing how late it really is, decide it will be some time until they’re done. You abandon your art supplies on your bed for the makeshift shower down the hall that Don whipped up last year.

When you emerge toasty and clean in your favorite PJ’s, you waddle towards your room and revel in the silence. You’re nearly winded when just how silent it was hit you like a freight train and you took off for your room. Mere footsteps away from the right corner and a soft hiccup of a sob makes you freeze, your heart dropping. You stop, inches from the door. You know what’s coming. Something in you tells you to run. What's around this corner? You know it will break you. You can leave. You don’t have to see those baby blues hating you. Thinking you’ve betrayed him.

You run a hand through your hair. Ruined.

You wring your hands. He hates you.

You take a step into the room, almost trembling. Looking everywhere but where you need to. His eyes are burning into you. Your room is dull. Face this. You could have run, but you didn’t. So, FACE. THIS.

When you make eye contact, you couldn’t and will never be able to accurately describe the sheer betrayal in his eyes. He’s gripping your sketchbook, the drawing. His eyes are red, his mouth agape. He opens and closes it a few times, searching for words.

———

“You know, we were almost human once?” You drop your controller and shift on the couch to look at him better. Disbelief paints your face.

“No kidding?”

———

“… What,” his voice breaks, as does his eye contact, which drops to the paper in his hand. “Y/N, what is this?”

———

“Seriously, Angelcakes. It’s crazy, Donnie had this ooze that we got from…” As he tells you his story you can see how important it was to him to find some normalcy. He wasn’t cracking jokes, he was barely moving. Just talking. This became the most personal and serious night you two had ever shared. He spoke of growing up with ninja turtles. You, of school, of bullies, of humans. You shared worlds.

———

You couldn’t find the words. You knew you had hurt him. Badly. It was just a drawing and a thought to you, but to him… to him it meant you didn’t like him for him. Maybe even not at all.

———

You swapped so much about each other that night, not just talking but learning. He finally opened up wholly when he wouldn’t look at you.

“I wish…” His hands suddenly become very interesting. “I wish I was human, you know? It would just be…” he searches for the word. The word he finds will break him. As he says it, he will cry through his half-hearted smile. You will hold him until you both fall asleep, cradling him to your chest, TV still on.

He looks up with pain and resolve.

“… Easier.”

———

“Y/N!” Mikey slams your sketchbook against the wall searching your eyes for an explanation. For the first time you’d ever heard, your best friend raised his voice. He was pissed.

———

The next morning he woke up embarrassed. He remembered your sweet coo’s and soft-spoken words of comfort from the night before as he took down a wall he never knew he had, for you. He never realized how much he wanted to give you the life you deserve, and just how much he couldn’t actually give you. A certain melancholy took him. He felt so bad as you talked about your life. As far as he knew no one in his family knew anything about you from before they found you, just that you had suffered a great deal and had no one left, but last night? He hadn’t thought about how much had to have happened for you to end up that way. For a moment, you had both bared yourselves, completely.

As these thoughts ran through him, the grogginess of waking up left him. He watched your eyes move behind your eyelids, your mouth open slightly as you breathed through your dreams. He pushes himself up so his full weight isn’t on you and with the loss of heat, you stir. Your sleepy eyes captivate him and he feels like he’s really seeing you. You have no idea. “Morning,” you quietly utter, not wanting to break the peace. Running a hand down your face, you sit upwards slightly. Noticing the vibe rolling off your normally talkative terrapin you sober up and give him a questioning look.

He hovers over you effortlessly, arms holding him up on either side of your hips. He has yet to move his gaze away from you, drinking in your features like a dying man. The only thing he can think of is kissing you until you melt, of running his hands down your waist. Steamy images fog his vision as he disappears in the thought of you. All you see is his expression softening until he closes his eyes with a small sigh.

“Um… Mikey, you good?” This snaps him out of his trance. He’s blushing and burning up but, lucky for him, you don't notice a thing. He coughs.

“Uh, yeah babe,” the nickname that had been used countless times felt heavy on his tongue, “I’m fine, just uh… tired. Do you mind if I…?” He slowly lowers himself back onto your midsection, eyes asking permission.

“Oh yeah sure,” you stammer, concerned. “Go for it.” He snuggles into you further, wrapping himself around your stomach and breathing in your smell, suddenly feeling like a brand new person.

———

When you don’t say anything for a few seconds he storms off, taking your sketchbook with him. You yell a helpless ‘No!’ after him. The room swarms around you and you feel like the floor left without you. The air leaves your lungs and you land on your knees. Soft, wary footsteps pad into your room and pair with your light sobs. Leo reaches down and wraps you up in his arms rubbing your back, speaking calming words, soothing you.

You can faintly hear Raph yelling after Mikey but as your own sobs wrack your body you lose all concentration on them and instead melt into Leo. He picks you up, carries you to your bed and lays you down. He hesitates, wanting to ask about what just happened but not wanting to push your already fragile state.

(THERE WILL BE A PART 2 :D )

Tags: @another-tmnt-writer @darkumbreon9

[val-lanto]

Lanto Talks: #2 Frustrations, Minimalism and Backlogs (And another PSD)

A mixed bag of thoughts to shift through this time around. Won a challenge, didn’t place in the other for two pieces that I consider on the other sides of the spectrum of each other. We’ll cover that and my thoughts technically between two pieces themed around the same thing. And my eternal frustration when dealing with minimalism.  

I’m not really good at being a humble winner nor a humble loser, so when I say I’m both bitter and surprised at the contest results, I do mean it. The two pieces in question are two Cioccolata pieces: MON WED FRI that documents just after his death and The Pinnacle Of Curiosity that focuses on Cioccolata’s background and story. Both based on panels, both expanding out, both relatively the same. Both filled with little details: Cioccolata’s earring appears in both; The flip phone to Secco appears in both; and both pieces have a hidden message in you’ll only see if you really zoom in or watch the speed art. Little details are my favourite thing to put in, all the little hidden things and Easter eggs. So, you’ll forgive me when the results of the competition had flipped the opposite way I had expected. The earlier piece, I believe is the best I’ve one in my newer art, and probably one of my favourites of all time. Enflamed by malice about something, I struck my heart and passion into painting every little detail. The level of touching up and painting to do within the piece was rather extreme. Blending the trash textures, making sure to take small bits of paper fold over each other. There was delicate attention to the detail like the licks of flames and under blurring for the layers of rubbish. The details and time it takes to layer flat textures with depth is something I never want do ever again. In turn, the other piece the number of corners I cut in the piece I won with was immense. A rushed piece sketched out just before the deadline to a friend over discord. The arm in the background is incorrect, the shadowing is wrong on the coat and the perspective on the able is laughable. The reflection on table is actually wrong too, the arm on both the tablet and the background mirror were done at different parts therefore inconsistent. upon retrospect, even the depth is lazy.  It doesn’t have the finishing touches, those extra brushes that separate the former piece out. Then that moves me to a different angle, the difference between concept and technical ability.

There is always the “defence of concept”. It’s something I am always in two minds about. Every contest has a theme and thematic the judges are looking for. To do something as precise as that, even with the speed art makes it harder to notice or see.  Further on, while I miss disagree with the winner of both contests, More so the former, there is always the different n concept. For a theme like “The More You See” there’s going to be a much more heavier weight on the concept. When I first stated signature making about 6 to 7 odd years ago now at Platinum Graphics, I used to be much more vehemently involved on this discussion and all in for concept over tech. Going against the nature of fifty same looking c4d and render sigs in favour of creative ones. The admin himself who I won in a battle to prove my voice about creativity over technical ability would always disagree with me.  Coming full circle now, I seem too much to be on the other hand, vying for my technical ability and a balance rather than two pieces of stock blended with an essay. If we go way back there was a time where I thought many of my pieces that were boring, same and unmoving from the crowd, they are all technically competent at the least. Several dozen girls in long dresses doing things with nature, blah blah. Everywhere all I saw the same angels, vampires and fairies, I made explicit pieces in a fairy competition of a piece “killing” theories.  There is a balance though between concept and technical ability. I made a series of manips taking a stab at the constant same 3 or 4 things I saw maniped. The “Jimmie series” of these four pieces, where taking the “boring” concepts like mermaids and that fisherman statue, but done under the story of a long hair wearing tentacle monster. They are technically, visually good with and interesting concept to marry with a story. I think this is where I peaked between balancing concept vs the technical side.  I think where that balance lines comes back to where you personally sit on the sliding scale of personal taste.

That brings us to my two recent minimalism pieces for the Stewed Tomatoes contests I tried to test this a little but making two pieces I think were on the other side of the scale. One more technically profound, clean and playing with depth to create a jarring minimal piece but has no meaning and was strictly made with anything that could lead to a concept. It’s nonsense. The second piece, not so technically profound and filled with broken clip, incorrect perspective. Yet it’s endeared with a concept at every point. The blue and red. The black and white. The cross and the purposeful little description added onto it. All this is filled together to make a piece with a story deep with hidden meaning, symbolism but not as technically profound.  I purposely crafted it alongside how I felt more what looked the best and placed a story alongside it. Of course, it means very little when it’s so personal, but having this outlook created two different pieces, with different flavours. One very cold, even down to the no humans or anything that’s “live in it” vs the very organic piece with the hands.  It’s interesting making both with a set theme and a goal how I felt making them. I often found myself very stuck making the the rock one and you call tell in its speed art the indesciveness that lingers all around it. While conversely the more emotions ne gave a different type of frustrating about it not being fully what I had wanted. Originally I wanted a straight cross with hands crumbling into blackness with light at the top. Very late piece. But my heart was swayed by a different stock and such is the mess I went with. Perhaps it would have been more fitting and simpler, but not my style. Maybe I am just wholly incompatible with the concept of less is more. Perhaps I will see after the detail which one got more attention and get back to you. Personally, I prefer neither of them and wish the contest theme was something else. But if you never test your curiosity, how can you evolve, hm?

Taking a break from the challenges and endless backlog of things, for jjbararepairweek was also a mistake. I’m really far behind and my work has gained no other attention, nor care for it. This brings me to my feeling about continuing to make Jojo or fanart manips in general. It’s a struggle balance because none of the people who fanart is made for actually like and vice versa the photmanipers don’t seem to “Get” them unless I write down long explanations of what are they relate too. I suppose that is a balance most people face, but it’s annoying. Returning to just random photosmanips would be a good idea, but I fall utterly uninspired without the framework of a challenge or a goal. Nor the image and base to work off with trying to make things real like with my Jojo manips. When the odd thing comes up like Mad-Max-Kun from Jojolion appear then sure I might indulge into it but staying follow on it I a mistake. It’s tough to do both sides and the frustrations from rarepairweek unable to do the draw or edit the things I want.to is painful. Alongside the tutorials and PSDs seem to have fallen flat. Not to say my confidence has been knocked or I’m moaning that much, it just seems like misplaced effort if nobody cares or wants to indulge with it. I would rather the Tutorials on DA but because of dumb roundabout rules, I can’t. So the audience that would appreciate them simply can’t get to them, and vice versa. This is all very frustrating, no?  But to sit on monthly challenges to carry my workflow seems useless. Anyway, to celebrate Mad Max Kun, here’s the PSD of the piece I made of him.

There’s some interesting contests coming up, I’ve sketched for an idea for the Dandelion Wishes contest that I am super hyped about….even if I doubt my skills to go through with it. The Doppleganger contest I’ve managed to push in a Cioccolata reference with. Although it will be one of those simple manips which requires to me to actually pay attention. I don’t have a lot of faith in myself but with both my Dolomite and Mad Max piece I pushed through it and got to the other end. So maybe I might surprise myself. Again, I just hope it doesn’t fall apart qt the concept.  I suppose it’s worth it just to get more into and t least exist within the “Community”. No the irony is not lost on me the fact that I may complain about not much feedback when I spent almost a month forgetting to add my things to the proper groups outside of the Jojo one. Burned the bridge so hard with the only person who would care about Cioccolata I set pluto on fire.  Advertising is always a pain and all my years of photomaniping I don’t know what my audience is.

I suppose, we can only march forward.

[petite-madame]

Hi PM! So I'm starting out in digital art and I was wondering, do you think in term of learning, it's good to trace your reference picture or does it just makes you 'lazy'? I don't know if I make sense but I feel like tracing is the easy way and won't help, and at the same time feel like it can really help with understanding proportions and whatnot

(cont) PS: for the tracing question, I’ve seen a lot of artist getting yelled at for even just expressing their opinion on the subject so if it’s not something you feel comfortable talking about I 100% understand it            

Hi anon ^^

Ok, good question! A bit more complicated than it seems.

at the same time feel like it can really help with understanding proportions and whatnot

Not really. Ok I’m gonna try to explain you in my amazing Frenglish why it’s not a good method, I hope it’s gonna be clear. :)

From what you are saying, tracing could be useful to understand proportions. If we start on that principle, it would mean that all the photos you are gonna trace have models with proper anatomical proportions. I mean, how could it be otherwise? It’s a picture! It’s reality! Well….Nope! It’s not exactly reality. It’s the reality of the camera. The camera itself and even the way the pic was taken can deform the human body and the proportions on the photo you choose to trace can be completely fucked up. Two examples: selfies and sport pictures.

- Selfies: When you take a selfie in front of a mirror, the hand holding the phone is closer to the lens of the camera. That’s why it looks so big. If you render the same proportions on a pic by just tracing without any knowledge of anatomy or proportions, it’s gonna look ridiculous and just give you a “small body - big hand” effect. Someone with a better understanding of anatomy would either draw the hand smaller to correct the deformation of the camera either foreshorten the arm to really enhance the play on perspective and give a cool effect like for instance in this artwork.

- Sport pics: When you take a pic of, let’s say, a baseball player. The body is so much in tension, in action, in MOTION that when you look at the pic, the body seems completely deformed. Does the body look this way in reality? No, it’s the reality of the camera lens. Don’t get me wrong, these pics are cool but if you trace them, for instance, to work on your baseball AU, the characters are gonna look ridiculous. Not stylized. Not cool. Ridiculous. Short legs, arms curved like a bow. They are not reality, they are just an impression of reality.

That’s why tracing will lead you nowhere in terms of learning. If you don’t know anything about anatomy, drawing techniques, proportions, you won’t be able to identify anatomy mistake (or perspective mistake, or whatever mistake). Tracing is mindless,you think you know what you are tracing but in fact, you aren’t.

It’s far better if you learn from the start, whether you are into CG art or not, to abstract your subject. Try to think it as bigger elements, and then study the proportions and composition of the elements. Basic elements used to draw a body, a car, a chair, whatever, include standard shapes such as boxes, cones, cylinders and spheres. Once you grasp the subject using such primitives, it isn’t that hard anymore to draw whatever you want and then add detail. A good part of learning to draw is learning to observe so you can translate what you see into two dimensional line or forms. (I did a post about deconstructing the body into shapes HERE). Tracing does absolutely nothing to help with that.Don’t get me wrong, when I was about 10-11 and that I started to learn to draw, I started to trace (with tracing paper, because…there was no CG art at the time xD) but it achieved nothing. I thought it did but I when I look at the drawings I did at the time, they are all deformed and the faces are wonky (the funniest thing is when you look at the original pics, you don’t see these deformations). In other words, Linda Evangelista, I’m sorry for all the wonky traced drawings I did of your face, where your jaw was super big and your eyes not on the same level. xD

When an artist use a reference picture they don’t just copy it exactly. They correct the deformation of the camera lens to render proper body proportion. Reference pictures are a GREAT help, I use them all the time and I will never shut up about how useful they are because it’s stupid to try to recreate a whole face, car, landscape, guitar, etc.. from memory but if you know about technique, you will correct the mistakes by yourself. The pic will just give you basic depth, proportion and curve perception to build your final work.

Also, tracing won’t train your hand to be better at doing a clean line work either for instance.It’s better to draw again and again and again to train your hand. Your line work will be wonky at first, then cleaner and cleaner.

However, there’s nothing wrong with tracing your own stuff if you are working on a complex picture. Some artists sketch all their characters on a different piece of paper and use a light table to put them all in the same pic (a lot of mangaka do this). They also use this method to do a clean line work (they sketch the character, use a light table and trace their sketch with ink). As you were asking about CG art, it’s different, of course. But there’s nothing wrong with doing all your characters on different layers, even different documents and then grouping them all in one pics. Whatever works. I do it when it’s a complex pic like  this one.

I’ve seen a lot of artist getting yelled at for even just expressing their opinion on the subject so if it’s not something you feel comfortable talking about I 100% understand it   

As if I cared.

If it were a good method, I would tell you, it’s a good method. I will never shut up about the virtues of referencing in spite of what a part of Tumblr thinks, so, you know, as I said, I don’t care.

Voilà! I hope it helped :) Good luck on learning about CG art. You’ll get there like I got there. Slowly but surely.

[ask-jungshook]

how long does it usually take you to finish one artwork/ask??? :o

// Hey there nonny! Lol So I can range from being an average speed artist to a super slow artist, but depending on the style/ how much I need to draw. But it usually can range from several hours to 1 week LOL (Usually for large pieces they can take longer?) For instance, the BTS HP!AU pieces prolly took around a week? (But partially because I screwed up and basically redrew everything to look cleaner) All three parts of the Prologue took a similar amount of time with the exception of Part 3 which took longer due to the sheer length of it. But for more serious pieces, they usually range from 2 weeks- 1 month+ (ex the Jimin ‘Lie’ piece – but I usually work on and off on those so the time is more spread out)

My full process usually goes like this I’ll use some stuff from when I was drawing panels for Prologue Pt. 3 as an example:

Brainstorming a reply: This can take awhile– but some asks are easier to answer than others. I have a google doc with random phrases jotted down for some of them (I usually do this at work on my lunch break LMFAO)

Rough sketch: Basically stick figure city on post-its. This is my postit dump from the Begin!AU series … these probably take like 10 seconds each to draw LOL

 As you see, I had a lot of scraps – this was the majority of  drafts for parts 2 & 3 (I also do this at work during my lunch break LOL) pls pardon my messy desk

Digital sketch: Translation of the post it doodles onto a digital platform– this usually involves more stick figures lol 

Better sketch: This is where I try to clean up my original sketch up a bit so linearting is easier – I usually don’t do a good job at it though …

An attempt at lineart: Usually for chibis and my more anime-esque pieces, it’s not as bad, but semi realism I get really lazy and just wind up painting over my lines which I usually regret because I can’t paint for my life (CASUALLY STARES AT MY UNFINISHED JHOPE PIECE)

Flats & colors: Can range on complexity? If you ever catch my livestreams, you’ll see that I have a shitton of layers (75% of which are probably just test layers lol) But I like to experiment around with colors and stuff. It can often take me awhile to get a good sense of what I want my color scheme to be. And to be honest, I’m still struggling with color theory lol Rendering usually takes the longest because I get frustrated a lot hahah so there’s a lot of going back and re-doing things.

Final Touches: If I wanna do animation, add sparkles, slapping filters on everything lol or whatever.

Here’s an example of a crying Taehyung from Pt 3. (I’m sorry this was like the only panel I found progress shots for LMFAO)

I usually wind up cropping out a lot to hide my mistakes HAHAHA also idk why that picture came out super blurry im sorry lol

But I feel like it also depends on if I’m in a good drawing mood or not haha. I have a lot of off days and sometimes my brain is like OK LETS GO then my hand is just like LOLNO DISSU U CAN’T DRAW TODAY, so I have like those minor setbacks where I lose a day, but I usually try sketching something every day to get a sense if I’m having a good drawing day or not. and pray to the drawing gods  :’D

But since I work full time, I really only have time to draw during the weekends or after work, that and my ‘golden hour’ seems to be like from 1am- 4am so  …  lol as you can see I have an amazing sleep schedule. /weeps howdoyouadult

Long story short though (sorry I kinda got off topic adjfhlda), it really depends on the piece I’m working on, the style I’m drawing in, and how well my initial brainstorm translates into drawing. Because sometimes I have a really good idea in my head, but I can’t draw it out LOL So I have to scrap it and go back to step one @_@ But on the bright side, I’m def learning a lot as I go haha! :’D