#i like to have the Shape of the thing for my own reference

[heartfullofleeches]

Drabble ft Thembo Darling mistaking one of Aspen [Housewife Yan]'s night slips for a tank top. (GN Reader, but they are described as having big naturtals and slightly implied to be taller than Aspen. Reader's chest is referred to as tits once or twice. Slightly suggestive.)

-

Wedded and residing in the same home as your spouse for several odd years, misplacement of your separate possessions as individuals is a one of numerous staples tied to married life. Your toothbrush in the slot where his would normally be. Leaving home smelling of lavender and honey instead of your regular body soap. Taking out the trash in pink slippers due to your own being nowhere in sight.

It's never been a point of issue to either of you. As a matter of fact, your wife seems delighted to find you at the breakfast table sipping from his favorite mug.

Groggy and drained of energy by the steam of a nice, hot shower before bed, you stumble into the bedroom as the click of the bathroom door muffles the sound of running water. Your wife enjoyed taking his time when he had it to spare, but unfortunately you were too exhausted to stay with him longer.

Pawing through the darkness, your fingers lace around the chilled knob of the top dresser drawer where you normally kept your nightwear. The insistence of your wife urging you to join him lead to you forgetting to grab a shirt for yourself. Losing your battle with the beast known as fatigue, you grab the closet one - throwing it over head as you switch trajectory for the bed.

"Something feels.....off."

As the fabric petals around you, you immediately notices something strange about the garment both in texture and the form at which it shapes to your frame. At first feel, you chalked the silk like touch of the shirt as some effect of the new laundry detergent Aspen picked up the other day. For a split moment, you pondered if you even put on anything to begin with - the material light and breathable like warm spring air. The familiar bind of your tank tops makes an appearance as the shirt rides the curve of your ample chest, biting the skin as you huff in frustration.

"Did it shrink in the wash?? Didn't he just buy these for me?"

Fiddling with oddly thin straps, your tits squish through the top of the shirt as you pull its hem in tandem. Your nipples pucker at the iciness cupping your chest as the fabric adjusts to the warmth of hot-bloodded body. Your teeth chatter as cool air blows over your bare stomach - the shirt barely having enough material to cover your navel.

"This thing totally shrunk! And it's brand new too...."

Slumped in defeat, cherubic humming echoes from behind the bathroom door - crescendoing as the handle turns and a figure shrouded in fog steps out. Aspen hangs his towel on the shower rack drilled to the backside of the door, facing away from you as he questions-

"Is everything alright, my love? Could've sworn i heard you saying something a moment ago."

"I think my tank top shrunk in the wash...."

"What?!" Aspen spins on his heels, expression flared in shock and surpise at your declaration. "But I just bought those for you! First thing tomorrow, we're marching down to that store to get you clothes that can survive more than one wash."

"I know." You whine, plopping down on the bed center of the brilliance still bleeding through the bathroom door. Aspen's jaws fall slack as he stares at you, but the source of his disbelief no longer regards the alleged faulty tank top.

"Darling?"

"You didn't even need to buy me new ones, but it was sweet of you to do anyway."

"Darling."

"And look what happened. Having to return gifts is the worst!"

"Darling!"

"Huh?!?" You snap to attention as your wife shouts, the fat of your well endowed bust nearly slipping over the low cut of your attire as you jump from the fright of if all. Breath violently yanked from his person, Aspen stammers for the proper words to say as he fans himself.

"Good heavens, if there are higher powers above, please give me strength." Aspen mutters feverishly to himself - regaining his prim and proper composure as he clasps his hands together; nails digging into his skin to remind him of self control.

"Dearest. My sweet angel, my love of loves - you are not wearing one of your shirts. You are wearing one of my slips."

Oh.

Ohhhh.

That explains- so much. More specifically the spilts at the sides and what you now recognize as frilly lace stitched around the hems.

"Oh, no. I'm stretching it all out, aren't I? Here, I'll try to get it off before I completely ruin it."

"NO!" Aspen's hands shoot forward as if you're inches from placing your hand on a hot stove. He clears his throat, rounding the bed to where you sat.

"Ruined is a rather bold claim, wouldnt you say? You already have it on, so there's no point in taking it off. Besides, I have plenty more you can stretch out some other day. It's getting late. Why don't we lie down?"

"I guess you're right..."

Sighing, you roll onto your backside as Aspen crawls over to his side of the mattress to join you. Elastic expanding to the fullest of its limits, your nipples peak out the sidelines of the slip as you lay there none the wiser.

Aspen shoves his knuckles between his teeth to stop himself from screaming.

[obscurecurse]

i was thinking about chay's sad-in-the-club look, which includes a heavy/(imo)kim-coded chain:

...and so i did something so goddamned normal: i examined all jewelry kim & chay wear in the whole show to see if i could extract any meaning. (one of my favorite things about QL is the subtext they sneak into wardrobe details.) this was really for my own analysis but, tumblr, i like to share. my entire educational career people have cheated off MY TESTS, OK?

kim often wears a single, Heavy curb/cuban/herring chain, but sometimes he stacks (wears TWO):

so i'm like... did kim give chay that chain? it's the same length.

also, like, having loved men who wear chains b4. these are moments where the chain is visible, but sometimes, if it's not, they're still wearing it and it's just tucked under their shirt - against the skin.

bookclub - do the chains themselves represent bond/connection?

(also... as a guitar player, i do want to point out. kim also almost always has a chain on his LEFT wrist. the left hand is the one that forms the chords on the neck of the guitar. you strum with your dominant hand, so, uh, idk, that's something.)

he also has a safety pin one (EMO.):

but, chat, what fucks me up about that is that chay has a CARABINER. which kind of matches/mirrors kim's? the icon is a similar shape/it's a similar chain length. carabiners are for Holding Weight (keys - if you're gay, rock climbing, etc) whereas safety pins are for STABBING layers together. mechanically, functionally, they are similar, but how they actually achieve the connection is fundamentally different in operation. the bar scene is the only time they are wearing their respective safety pin and carabiner congruently - which is... SOMETHING.

extra emo tho, the barbed wire:

(sidenote - kim's "bitch, if you cry then i will fucking cry too" face gets me every time. he is so LIKE THAT all the time.)

kim has this one more complicated chain for his pivotal moments, and it's closer to the throat?:

chay also has what i will refer to as a Dog Tag (i can't tell what the engraving is) which he wears for most of their "fake relationship"/in confessions:

there wasn't really a smoking gun here. i actually think i want to examine Chay's jewelry as it relates to Porsche's, as well as Kim's in relation to his brothers'. i kind of had kimchay tunnel vision but i think... Kinn doesn't wear chains at all? if that's true, WHAT DOES THAT MEAN??? WHAT DOES THE CHAIN REPRESENT?

also, some times kim is - confirmed - not wearing chains: when he and chay spend the night together (WHICH MEANS HE TOOK IT OFF SOMETIME AFTER THEY TALKED AT THE STUDIO???) when he pulls chay from the warehouse, and when he confronts him at the club, when he shows up at school/in uniform.

taking a chain off/tucking it to fight kind of makes sense - though he doesn't tuck it for the bar scene? so like kim behaving "unchained" literally is SOMETHING!!!!!!!! aint it?

[synthaphone]

Allowing myself to go on a tangent about the nearly 26 year old virtual pet website that i am way too invested in.

So today they released the Candy Pteri. While I appreciate what they were trying to do here with it effectively having two designs that you get to choose between (The "Melted Candy Pteri" on the left is a Paint Brush wearable that can be removed to reveal the customizable base pet on the right), I think in this case, they have created two extremely boring designs when they could have easily created one strong design, or hell, even two strong designs if they wanted to do extra work.

Because with this release, we get a base Candy Pteri with no real lineart changes (like the rounded hair tufts and spines on the Candy Zafara), and an alternate design that's just... a drawing of a Marshmallow Peep™???

I would have WAY preferred a base Pteri where they did something like give it a little marshmallow dollop shape on its head and in place of the tail tuft, like my friend @darieyrie suggested. Or they could give it the Peep dot eyes and more rounded features! There's all kinds of ways you could do this concept.

I'd be less frustrated if the Peep wearable had any Pteri traits whatsoever, but its JUST a Peep that's been slightly microwaved. Which is a little funny, but even more than the Toy Poogle is just an iDog, the Candy Pteri does not have any deviation from its base inspiration at all. It's not actually an execution of the concept of "Candy Pteri thats based on a Peep" if there's no Pteri left at all!

(also are they just banking on the Just Born corporation (who make Peeps) never taking any action on this? it kind of goes beyond 'cheeky reference', its EXACTLY their product. I mean, it seems unlikely that they'll notice or bother doing anything if they do, but i don't really know why you'd risk that.) The saving graces of this design, imo, are that the pink and cream color scheme of the base pet IS pleasant (though the lineart and shading treatment aren't really my bag), and some people will enjoy the novelty of having a pet Marshmallow Peep™.

But really this is just the latest of a number of recent outfit and color releases that feel like they don't think people want Neopets. Like. This cardinal outfit that they also released today.

I love the idea of a cardinal Pteri! But this outfit literally takes away every distinguishing trait of the Pteri to make a high effort, nicely rendered, but stylistically incongruous generic cartoon cardinal????? Its not even a Neopet anymore!!! Even if I set aside my personal dislike of the overly rendered style they're using for more and more of the site assets, this wouldn't work with most of the rendering removed either, because it would still be a Pteri in pose and proportions only.

Not every new design and outfit that's come out in the past couple years has these issues and there have been a number I've really liked, and I DO think its great that the quality of the art has improved since the JumpStart era. But I would really appreciate it if the new pet colors in particular were designed a little more thoughtfully, so that they at bare minimum still resemble the species they're supposed to be outside of the rough pose and proportions. It sometimes feels like there isn't a rough draft or workshopping progress for new colors, and the members of the art team just kind of do their own thing and then the very first draft of an idea is what gets polished and released.

The current art direction for the customization aspects of the site just has me feeling like they've decided to throw out years of relatively cohesive art and world design for a strange jumble of ideas that don't really capture the appeal or feeling of Neopets to me.

[biblicallyaccuratecrow]

rambling about songs my brain associates with isat (pt. 1)

[woe, spoilers be upon ye!]

i have a 250+ song isat playlist. I am unhealthily obsessed with finding new songs to put in it. Here's a few that make me go absolutely batshit insane.

I've already rambled about this one on my art account a while back, but this song is so insanely loop-coded....

I'm standing on a stage Of fear and self-doubt It's a hollow play, But they'll clap anyway

You could give me any song that has some kind of reference to plays or theatre and I could probably find a way to make it about isat. but specifically this makes me think about twohats and how loop views their place in the world as a performance, a pawn, not even a character but a plot device... yeah

I'm living in an age That calls darkness light Though my language is dead Still the shapes fill my head I'm living in an age Whose name I don't know Though the fear keeps me moving, Still my heart beats so slow

I probably don't have to break this one down for you, but yeah, Island North of Vaugarde, the forgotten language... "still the shapes fill my head" has always in my mind referenced the stars and constellations, and how they're familiar but foreign...

-

thanks to @/ricecaqes and their trust ceremony animatic, this song lives in my head rent free. Even just as a whole this song is SO isat for me. literally from the first fucking lines:

Will I know when I’ve gone too far? Or frozen myself in time? An impossible brain with impossible wants Lost and astray, with impossible thoughts

like. it really can't get much more nail on the head than that?

then you got this:

So cold, I’m freezing Every piece of praise and sign that I’m believed in Solid in a crystal ball It bends the waves of the light to mend the rest of my life

and literally the first time I heard this song i paused it and said, out loud, "OH FUCK." Because. it's act 5 siffrin. Like, the slow descent into despair followed by the determination that the only way to perserve the life and the family they love is to keep them with him, to do the exact same thing the king did...

Do you also see your future starting with the farthest part? Live your life to close the space between the end and start And when it’s hard, do you hang onto any chance That you might be in control? That you’re the one who owns

For one, once you reach the end of act 2, you're constantly aware of the head housemaiden being as far as you can go, and then you're planning around it the entire time.

And then, you have. siffrin grasping for any kind of control they can have over the situation, desperately. and failing repeatedly because they simultaneously think that they are undeserving of getting what they ultimately want... yeah...

i won't go into the rest of the lyrics because honestly it's pretty well covered by the animatic but. yeah trust ceremony my sweet beloved.

-

rest in peace siffrin no middle no last name, you would have loved the mountain goats.

yeah uh. this one is also pretty high up on songs that make me go "damn that's siffrin alright".

I am this great, unstable mass of blood and foam And no one in her right mind would make my home her home My heart's an autoclave

i think for me it's the idea of siffrin feeling like they're nothing, and even if they are something or someone, they are bad, worse than bad, worthless. also referencing homesickness.... yeah...

When I try to open up to you I get completely lost Houses swallowed by the earth, windows thick with frost And I reach deep down within, but the pathways twist and turn And there's no light anywhere, and nothing left to burn

I mean, this one is also pretty self-evident. siffrin losing hope while being stuck in the house... wanting to connect with the party but being completely uncapable of doing so out of the sheer terror of being left behind... act 5, with the house literally warping...

I dreamt that I was perched atop a throne of human skulls On a cliff above the ocean, howling wind and shrieking seagulls And the dream went on forever, one single static frame Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name

siffrin feels responsible for the loops, every aspect of them. their deaths, their party-member's deaths, their failures, everything. and in the end, all they really wanted was for someone to truly see them? to have a family, to not be left behind and forgotten by the world.... the importance of names and siffrin's name in particular in the story also makes this hit home for me.

-

for brevity's sake i'll just start with these three- if people are interested in hearing me justify my insane music choices i'll probably do more.... for now, see ya!

[soft5ku11]

Hey so I'm also an artist and a gainer and I was wandering do u have any tips on drawing fat men

Well, it's all about shapes - at least to me. Keep the shapes connected in the right way, with the right volume, and heaviness. That's what I try to focus on. Fat goes over the top of regular anatomy, so learning how that works first can really help.

What I did was just draw whatever and I learned as I drew more of it. It's all about trial and error, learning and evolving and recognising what you want to improve, rather than being discouraged by "this looks bad". Don't compare yourself to others, only yourself.

But, as with anything to do with art, collect inspiration, collect a huge amount of references. Print out your favourite artworks from other artists, smack 'em through a holepunch and keep em together with a treasury tag. Never be afraid to use yourself for a reference picture either. If you cant find something, just save the time instead of mindlessly scrolling image results on your search engine of choice. Especially since you're a gainer, you can use your own body to study how any niche angle or pose might look with your body type.

To add onto this, of course it'll vary from style to style but exaggerate your shapes, (coming back to the shapes thing) for example, I'll use this artwork of my DND guy that I recently did:

See how the shapes of certain parts aren't necessarily more muscled or fatter? The feet and hands for instance, they look better and read clearer if you exaggerate them a bit, and I already set the hands and feet on the 3D reference model I used to almost maximum. You can do this with heads to an extent as well, but it could make the character's proportions feel off. That part is a balancing act and you can find basic proportion guides for the body online to help with that. But - the thickness of the arms and legs and even the neck pulls the figure further from realistic proportions and more into a cartoony illustrative look. I could go on for ages about this but that's the basic gist of it.

One thing I think is exceptionally under-represented in art advice that I've seen in my time is DON'T UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF HAVING ARTIST FRIENDS! Learn from each other, talk about stuff, gather and share resources amongst yourselves, etc etc. You learn more when in groups, that's why school isn't one-on-one.

These are just some tips off the top of my head, there's always more out there and I'm sure one of these things won't work for you and others will, but make the leap like you've done here and ask other artists too. Lots of people would be willing to give some advice to help you get going, and you asking will also benefit others who might be too shy to ask so even if you don't take my advice, you can be happy that you've pulled it out of me for others to see at least XD

[cream-and-tea]

going to do the thing i did while plotting out book one and make a post committing to finishing the ghoststory booktwo outline so. watch this space.

[ryssbelle]

Drew a bunch of Marinettes in a bunch of different artists styles it was a lot of fun!!

Artists who's styles I mimicked: @buggachat @hamsternamedmarinette @ladybeug @sabertoothwalrus and @anna-scribbles all epic artists 🤟😎

[amphibianaday]

day 1821 - half a decade!

redraw of day 1, 364, and 1000, but with a twist - now it's also my frogsona :D

for now i'll be taking a (maybe permanent) break for at least the rest of the year! see you in 2025!

previous versions for comparison below!

[promiseimnotacop]

jsyk user genderyomi reblogs from ppl identyfing as baeddel/“transman-hater” (w their words). safe to assume she is one.

i do appreciate well meaning calling me out on shit i've reposted and whatnot but that does not to my mind warrant any kind of unfollow/deleting posts what have you

i have been seeing traces of this new wave is 'transmisandry a real thing/is baeddelism real and if it is is it actually a bad thing or kinda based' flooding my dash lately and have very deliberately stayed away from engaging in any of it/weighing up on one side or another.

thankyou for engaging here though in a more polite way!

[monty-glasses-roxy]

Here’s my messed up attempt at a horse (without references)

The legs tho

I mean

You're right about the legs going on for days lmao

I love your horse sdfsfs

[darabeatha]

❝ Please do not wear glasses with wrong prescriptions nor purchase regular fantasy contact lenses if you have astigmatism ❞

[waywardsalt]

mmmmmm two sketchbook linebecks im pretty happy with

[starpros-sunshine]

My knowledge on culturally significant media is like. The only thing I have going for myself who am I if not the guy that knows fun little references about things...

[vetyr]

hi, i ireally love your work and i don't know if you've answered this before but, what kinds of studies do you do or how did you learn color theory? i wanna get better at rendering and anatomy but im having trouble TT TT

Hi! Long answer alert. Once a chatterbox, always a chatterbox.

When I started actively learning how to draw about 10 1/2 years ago, I exclusively did graphite studies in sketchbooks. Here's a few examples—I mostly stuck to doing line drawings to drill basic shapes/contours and proportions into my brain. The more rendered sketches helped me practice edge control & basic values, and they were REALLY good for learning the actual 3D structure behind what I was drawing.

I'd use reference images that I grabbed from fitness forums, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, and some NSFW places, but you could find adequate ref material from figure drawing sites like Line of Action. LoA has refs for people (you can filter by clothed/unclothed, age, & gender), animals, expressions, hands/feet, and a few other useful things as well. Love them.

Learning how to render digitally was a similar story; it helped a lot that I had a pretty strong foundation for value/anatomy going in. I basically didn't touch color at all for ~2 years (except for a few attempts at bad digital or acrylic paint studies), which may not have been the best idea. I learned color from a lot of trial and error, honestly, and I'm pretty sure this process involved a lot of imitation—there were a number of digital/traditional painters whose styles I really wanted to emulate (notably their edge control, color choices, value distributions, and shape design), so I kiiind of did a mixture of that + my own experimentation.

For example, I really found Benjamin Björklund's style appealing, especially his softened/lost edges & vibrant pops of saturated color, so here's a study I did from some photograph that I'm *pretty* sure was painted with him in mind.

Learning how to detail was definitely a slow process, and like all the aforementioned things (anatomy/color/edge control/values/etc.) I'm still figuring it out. Focusing on edge control first (that is, deciding on where to place hard/soft edges for emphasizing/de-emphasizing certain areas of the image) is super useful, because you can honestly fool a viewer into thinking there's more detail in a piece than there actually is if you're very economical about where you place your hard edges.

The most important part, to me, is probably just doing this stuff over and over again. You're likely not going to see improvement in a few weeks or even a few months, so don't fret about not getting the exact results you want and just keep studying + making art. I like to think about learning art as a process where you *need* to fail and make crappy art/studies—there's literally no way around it—so you might as well fail right now. See, by making bad art you're actually moving forward—isn't that a fun prospect!!

It's useful to have a folder with art you admire, especially if you can dissect the pieces and understand why you like them so much. You can study those aspects (like, you can redraw or repaint that person's work) and break down whether this is art that you just like to look at, or if it's the kind of art that you want to *make.* There's a LOT of art out there that I love looking at, probably tens of thousands of styles/mediums, but there's a very narrow range that I want to make myself.

I've mentioned it in some ask reply in the past, but I really do think looking at other artist's work is such a cheat code for improving your own skills—the other artist does the work to filter reality/ideas for you, and this sort of allows you to contact the subject matter more directly. I can think of so many examples where an artist I admired exaggerated, like, the way sunlight rested on a face and created that orange fringe around its edge, or the greys/dull blues in a wheat field, or the bright indigo in a cast shadow, or the red along the outside of a person's eye, and it just clicked for me that this was a very available & observable aspect of reality, which had up until that point gone completely unnoticed! If you're really perceptive about the art you look at, it's shocking how much it can teach you about how to see the world (in this particular case I mean this literally, in that the art I looked at fully changed the way I visually processed the world, but of course it has had a strong effect on my worldviews/relationships/beliefs).

Thanks so much for sending in a question (& for reading, if you got this far)! I read every single ask I receive, including the kind words & compliments, which I genuinely always appreciate. Best of luck with learning, my friend :)

[talkorsomething]

realizing i am just a weeeeird shape

[runningwithscizzorz]

(1)Learn the rules before you break them + Gather proper references

(2) Understand what you want to break and how

(3) Can't do it? Find someone who can

(4) It's going to look really bad for a while

(5) Have fun with it!

(1) -Yes, I am that kind of artist. Yet, not in the conventional way. I encourage people to go in guns blazing when it comes to drawing something new, then coming out analyzing what they know, and what they need to learn more of right away.

-Here, I broke down the anatomical pieces of Nour and Narinder's face with the same labels so you guys can understand this weird invisible pattern that I follow in my work. Doing this with any animal you're attempting to draw greatly improves your line confidence when drawing different face shapes. Also understanding the biological function for why animals look a certain way helps you keep consistency.

(3) Time to throw any artistic guilt you have for heavily referencing people's art OUT THE WINDOW and start ANALYZING PEOPLE'S WORK YOU WANT TO BE LIKE✨ I've always done this, having a reference of someone else's amazing work right next to my own drawing so I can try and understand how they make their magic work! No shame, no embarrassment, nada. Pure, unadulterated will and spite that I would be just as good as the artist who made me so motivated and happy with their work! I couldn't figure out how to make Nour's face both sheep-like, and humanly expressive, so I looked at a LOT of Zootopia and old Disney art for help!

(2) With how I draw narilamb, I'm still working on it (as you can see) but I wanted to break Narinder's face to be fluffier and slimmer, while Nour's face would be shorter and flatter. If you look at it for too long, it's absolutely going to look weird, in the way that if you look at Anna from Frozen for too long she starts looking really weird. The anatomy isn't meant to be correct or consistent, it's meant to convey the emotion and energy I want out of the characters in that moment. If you're able to properly get that across, then you don't need to think about how broken something looks, as long as your eye is happy enough to trick your brain into thinking what you're seeing is canny.

(4) Yeah, I hate this part too. It's going to look like shit at first. I can't even look at my art from a few months ago when I was figuring out their designs... God, so fucking ugly. If it weren't for the shittiness of those drawings, I would have never gotten here! Wading through the "trust the process" stage always really sucks, but it's absolutely worth the relief of when you finally get something to look right.

(5) Art is work, yes. It's stressful, it's long, it's straining, its draining, it's exclaiming, blah blah blah. But, I try to keep my art FUN. If I find my artwork becoming slow as I depressingly drag my pen over my tablet, I'm failing. You MUST keep spirit and life in your work. The spirit of emptiness or the life of sadness can have a very meaningful place in art, but those can only exist with keeping work light, easy, and fun! If you're stressing how a specific thing looks or how you can't get something to look right no matter what, FUCK IT. Draw something to bring the flavor back in your work! I'm kind of rambling, but just, HAVE FUN!✨️ Be messy, scream, laugh, slash canvases, throw paint, smash sculptures, tear apart books, GO CRAZY