#i probably spent an hour erasing the color and shading that went outside the lines because of the sketchy original line art lol

[cowboy-anon]

So... I decided to try digital art lol. Not *totally* happy with it but darn it, I’d say it’s pretty good for a first try! XD Plus it was super fun to try all the new brushes and stuff. :D Aka we don’t have a lot of content depicting Apple’s time with the salesman so I decided to change that. :))

(Fun fact, I actually like the original line art better than the final one? Lol, maybe because it’s not as thick and looks more rough I guess? So I decided to include that one too as a little bonus I guess!)

CW: Blood, bruises, crying, implied past flaying (injuries visible), implied past whipping (again, injuries), partial nudity (waist-up)

[iwaisa]

Hey can you do a Kuroo x reader where you failed in science and you have to ask him for help please and thank u 💓

a/n. of COURSE i can do this (i’m totally not emphasizing this because i just read kuroo angst and now i am s a d) (๑˃̵ᴗ˂̵)

► now playing...

- pairing. kuroo tetsurou x gender neutral reader

- word count. 2.3k

- warnings. mild swearing, one (1) make out session, kuroo being an adorable dork

Two words. Chemistry sucks. More specifically, AP chemistry. You just weren’t getting it at all.

The equations were confusing as hell, and your teacher couldn’t care less if the class understood the material or not - he just kept moving on without stopping. So many questions surfaced in your head, but you were too nervous to speak up in class. So you just dealt with it, trying to juggle all of the new information with the old, while simultaneously trying to speed-write everything your teacher had on the board before he quickly erased it.

You were taking a test, and you simply admitted defeat. You gave up. Everything you were reading on this test happened to be everything you didn’t understand. Was your teacher trying to fail you? You tried to remember everything your teacher went over, but it just didn’t work. The only questions you managed to get right were some true and false questions, which only counted for one point. It was a fifty point quiz, and you would be surprised if your score came around to be a little more than ten.

You waited until the bell rang to turn in your test, slowly walking up to the teacher’s desk with your head down. Your teacher thanked everyone, and with that, you sat back down waiting for the next teacher to come in.

As the last bell rang, you couldn’t wait to get home. You made it through the day, but it was still a Tuesday, which meant you had three days of school left this week.

Hooray.

You walked out to the shoe lockers, only to be stopped by your chemistry teacher. He had asked you to meet him in the teachers’ lounge to discuss your score on your test.. “L/n, you only got five points on your test today. Is everything alright? Did you have trouble paying attention?”

Ouch. Five points out of fifty. That was ten percent. Double ouch.

“I’m sorry, I’ll do better on the next test.” Your teacher asked if you could stay in the library after school to practice some equations. You had nothing else to do, and you would just be bored when you got home. Plus, you really needed the extra practice, so why not? You trudged your way to the library, test in hand. You knew you would only get the true and false questions right. There were so many red marks that you were just embarrassed. You folded the paper and stuffed it in your pocket. As you walked into the library, you scanned the room to see if anyone else was there. You picked a table and opened your textbook. You looked around before pulling the test out of your pocket. You began working on the equations your teacher wrote down, but after about an hour you grew restless. What the hell is a mol?? You burned holes into your paper with your eyes and sighed. “This is impossible.”

“That one’s 5.098 grams,” a finger slid onto your paper. You jumped and slowly looked up to see who the finger belonged to. Your face exploded into different shades of red as you made eye contact with Kuroo Tetsurou. Volleyball captain, total nerd, and total hottie. Every time you saw the familiar bed-headed captain, you wondered how he didn’t have a girlfriend. “What?”

“This equation. ‘Convert moles to grams.’ It would be 5.098 grams since you have to divide these numbers. Can I borrow a pencil?” You just nodded and handed him your pencil without breaking your eyes away from his face. He was so attractive it should be a crime. He squatted down next to you so that your shoulders were touching and began jotting down numbers. Even his handwriting was attractive. He turned to look at you, your faces just about a foot away. “I have some time before practice starts, you want me to help you finish this?” You nodded, not wanting your words to fail you. “So is there a reason you’re still here even though school ended an hour ago?” “U-uh, my teacher told me to practice these some more,” you mumbled. “What, did you fail a test or something?”

Triple ouch. You turned to face your textbook and nodded slightly. “Wait, really? What was your score?”

“Oh you know, a just-below-average score,” you started laughing and dismissing the question with your hand. “And what was that just-below-average score?”

Shit. You would probably die on the spot from embarrassment if your crush of three years looked at your test.

Before you could explain, he reached over you grabbing said test. “Wait,” you said trying to grab the paper from his hands, but he held it out of reach. He skimmed through the test, his eyes widening a bit. “Woah,” he began. 

“It was confusing, okay! The teacher was talking too fast and he didn’t even give us a chance to write the material in our notes! It was like he was talking in three times speed,” you tried to defend yourself. You watched as Kuroo chuckled. “This isn’t that bad, actually. You did the first part of the equation right, but you just got confused a little bit around here,” he pointed to the paper, setting it on the table now. “You’ll get it in no time, so don’t worry about it, alright? You got it.” 

Your heart was about to explode out of your chest as he patted your head and gave you a thumbs up. “Well, I gotta get to volleyball. I’ll see you around, l/n-san!” You didn’t want him to leave yet, especially not after the way he just patted your head. Before you could think, you stood up and bowed at a perfect ninety degree angle.

“Please tutor me!” You shouted louder than you meant to, and you hoped he didn’t think you were too needy. “Sure. How about this weekend I can work on this stuff with you?” You told him yes, and you heard him step closer to you. “Now get up, will you? We’re the same age, and it’s not that big of a deal, I promise.” He smiled at you while leaving his hand on your shoulder. There was no way someone could be this attractive, smart, AND kind. You wanted to thank Kuroo’s parents. “I’ll see you this weekend, l/n-san.”

You waited for him to leave the library to squeal. Did you really just say that? And did you really just bow like that? How embarrassing. On the other hand, you just asked your crush to get together outside of school. You were excited and annoyed at the same time - excited that you got to talk to Kuroo more, and annoyed that you had to wait a whole three days until then. 

Thankfully the days flew by. Your teacher asked you to stay in the library everyday until the end of the week. Kuroo kept coming by as well, so you were thankful you got to keep seeing him and his outrageous but gorgeous hair. You couldn’t help but notice that each time he came around, he kept getting closer to you. It was like he had to be touching you at any given moment. It also didn’t help that he had a ton of chemistry pickup lines. Like, too many for any normal human to memorize. The first one he wrote on your paper almost made you short-circuit.

‘Are you made of beryllium, gold, and titanium? Because you’re BeAuTi-ful’

You just laughed and shook your head at him, but you couldn’t stop smiling the whole time you stayed with him. You hoped the reason he was wearing his signature grin was because of the same reason. “Hey, l/n, I wish your name was Avogadro...then I would already know your number.” You stared at him as the corners of your lips spread into a smile. “Come on Kuroo, you’re supposed to be my tutor, not a comedian.” “Actually, I’m serious about that one.”

Oh.

“So that I know when you show up to my house tomorrow.”

Quadruple ouch.

You two exchanged numbers and Kuroo went to point to another section in your textbook. The rest of the day you stayed quiet, not wanting him to pick up on the disappointment in your voice.

You woke up the next day and dragged yourself to Kuroo’s house.

Kuroo >:O - Remember to be at my house at 10 AM sharp! And let me know when you get here :D

You - right! :}

You knocked on his door and braced yourself to come face to face with Kuroo in all his bed-headed glory. After a few minutes, the door slid open, revealing Kuroo in joggers and a large t-shirt. The tips of your ears turned a rosy color from seeing him in casual clothes instead of the school uniform. Casual clothes that looked great on him. He led you up the stairs and into his room, and you looked around as he shut the door behind you. His room was pretty normal - he had his bed in one corner, a small study table in the center, and a balcony. He sat on a cushion at the table and patted the cushion next to him. You sat down and began pulling your textbook and papers out of your backpack.

A few hours passed and you and Kuroo had abandoned the papers on his table. Now you two were just talking about school and volleyball or anything else you could think of. It was already two in the afternoon, but the time you spent together felt so short. You wanted to talk for as long as you could, but Kuroo had realized how distracted you two were. He watched as you started solving an equation for a random question he picked from the textbook. As you were writing numbers and units, Kuroo asked to see your phone. You questioned him, and you handed him your phone as he assured it was nothing bad. You watched out of the corner of your eyes as he snapped a photo of himself holding up a peace sign with a dorky grin on his face. He typed something, and placed your phone on the desk face down, telling you not to look at it until after you left his house.

Another hour passed and you were still writing. You had gotten carried away and finished the problems your teacher had assigned for the following week. This was partially because you wanted to test Kuroo to see if he would start talking to you again. Instead, all talking ceased except for the occasional “that’s right,” or “you got it.”

You also couldn’t help but notice that Kuroo couldn’t stop staring at you. You turned to him a few times asking him if something was wrong, and you swear you saw his eyes flicker down to your lips. He assured you nothing was wrong and with that, you turned to finish the rest of the page.

Kuroo reached his hand over to slip your pencil out of your grasp, and you turned to question him. Before you could say anything, he began to lean closer to you. You felt his breath fanning your face as he stopped a few inches away. Your eyes switched between his eyes and his lips until he closed the gap. Your breath caught in your throat, and your eyes flickered shut. His lips were soft and warm as they collided with yours. A few seconds passed and he pulled back. “Was that okay?” He asked quietly while keeping his eyes on your lips. “That’s what you’re supposed to ask before you do that,” you retorted. “Hm. Couldn’t hold back.”

His lips crashed onto yours again, and this time he quite literally stole the air from your lungs. Your lips moved quickly and he wasted no time as he brushed his tongue against your bottom lip. You opened your mouth to let him in as you began to crawl onto his lap. He moved so he was leaning his back against his bed, and his hands rested on your hips. Your tongues explored each others’ mouths, and your hands moved to grip onto his permanently messy hair. He groaned into your mouth as you tugged on his hair, and his hands slid from your thighs to squeeze your ass. You moaned in response.

You two pulled back, needing air in your lungs. “So, um… do you like me?” He chuckled. “What do you think the answer to that is, cutie?” You shrugged bashfully, “I don’t know.” “Oh come on. I thought I made it obvious from the pickup lines,” he said while grinning. “You were confusing me, I figured that was just who you were.” “Yeah, like I would call just anyone beautiful.” You shrugged again in response.

“F/n,” he said while moving his hand to grab your chin. “I really like you.” Your heart was beating uncontrollably. Kuroo really liked you? So he wasn’t just telling you those pickup lines for the fun of it? “I like you too, Tetsurou.” He felt his own face and ears heat up at the use of his given name. He guessed that’s what he gets for calling you by yours.

You left his house half an hour later, after gathering all of your papers and books and stuffing them in your backpack. You pressed a chaste kiss to his lips before slipping your shoes back on. He slid open the door for you and bid you goodbye. As you walked back to your house you remembered what Kuroo said after messing with your phone. You unlocked it and were met with a photo of him with the caption, ‘I hope you’ll be my s/o! :D’ You laughed at his dorky photo. Well, your boyfriends’ dorky photo.

You - you’re such a dork! :P

Tetsu <3 - Huh?

You - but at least you’re my dork now :D

Tetsu <3 - So you saw the photo? Thank god.

You - you think i could ignore the photo you set as my home screen? lol. you’re cute.

Tetsu <3 - That’s you ;3

You - thank god i asked you to be my tutor, huh?

Tetsu <3 - That’s exactly what I was thinking. I would’ve died if I didn’t confess to you soon.

[scrawler-jay]

of mice and artblock

So, midterms happened and I abandoned this blog for a while. But now I’m back, and I come bearing mice.

*

I’ve been really struggling with finding subjects I like to draw. I’m happy to work on skeleton studies until Judgment Day to better understand anatomy, but I know I need to balance “homework” art with “for fun” art, or else risk losing motivation for learning to draw -- and I’m so used to writing fiction at this point that no subject really appeals to me artistically unless it’s got 5,000+ words of story attached (or at least some narrative/character ideas, yanno -- something for my brain to pick at). The obvious solution is to draw concept art and characters from my written stories, but I feel really intimidated by that because I’m such a beginner artist that nothing I create now will do justice to the vision I have in my head.

I need art OCs and concepts – things that I will only draw art of, and have never written a story about. Stuff that doesn’t have to match a previously established, written story, and that I can change as I learn more and my skills improve.

I ended up drawing a bunch of mice.

This was initially just a whim. Human anatomy requires a lot of skill to pull off, especially faces and hands, but mice felt more beginner-friendly to me. Admittedly, I was going for a more cartoony style as opposed to photorealism, so if you’re looking at this from a realism perspective then these are pretty poor mice. However, I don’t feel ashamed of them, which I am taking as a good sign.

I kept drawing one mouse over and over. I ended up calling him Leo just because it was funny – “leo” refers to lions, but here Leo is just a little mouse. But of course, giving him a name (and a gender, incidentally) is the start of a story. Via a flight of fancy, I got it into my head that I wanted to do a painting of Leo trying to catch a big snowflake. I made some thumbnails of what I wanted the scene to look like, and then cut out a roughly 7 inch x 7 inch piece of watercolor paper from a big sheet that I had under my bed, sketched the scene in pencil, and then finished with watercolor pencils (and a white gel pen for the snowflakes). The process probably took 2.5 to 3 hours.

So, now the lore is that Leo is a mouse living in a little house in an old tree at the edge of the woods, and he wears a red scarf. I did not like this painting. It seemed over-saturated and the colors didn’t quite work the way I wanted them to. I ended up watching a tutorial on color theory, and decided to redo the painting using my newfound knowledge of color schemes. I used this color palette tool to get an idea of what kinds of colors would look good together, and settled on a complementary scheme with bluish green and brownish red.

And then, everything went wrong.

I tried to redo the painting, still working traditionally. I rushed the sketch because I was so eager to get right into working with color. This time, to avoid over-saturation, I used watercolors out of a pan rather than in pencil form. Mixing the colors in the lid of the pan took a really long time because I was so picky about shades, and because I continued rushing I didn’t allow the layers enough time to dry. Leo’s scarf (now green instead of red) bled into his russet fur, and the mailbox was the wrong shape, and I tried to erase a pencil line and created a dark blotch over an area that was supposed to be white with snow – and then I gave up.

I had downloaded Krita, a piece of digital drawing/painting software, a while ago, but hadn’t had any success using it because my desk isn’t big enough to accommodate both a laptop and my small tablet. Using my lap to hold the tablet was an exercise in frustration, and I knew so little about how digital art works that I just felt really overwhelmed and lost whenever I opened the program.

However, Krita (like most digital art software) has an undo button that I find very alluring, so I decided to try it again, now on a shiny new desk from Ikea that is actually big enough to support tablet and laptop together. I think just the space on the desk really made all the difference, but also I was determined to get this artwork of a mouse to a place where I felt satisfied with it.

I spent a solid 5 hours working on what ended up being a very simple colored drawing of a mouse catching a snowflake outside his little house. I barely blended anything at all, and there’s no light source that required me to shade anything – it’s just flat color. However, I really like these colors, and I think I did well (for an absolute beginner). I want to go back and add textures/shading to give an impression of depth, but I'm not sure how.

Leo – like all of my figures – feels really stiff, so I also want to work on gestures/studies of mice doing things. And, thanks to the popularity of mice as lab animals and pets, there are way more reference photos of mice than I expected! Most refs depict the house mouse, Mus musculus, but I did find the work of a wildlife photographer named Dean Mason who spent 15 years photographing harvest mice (micromys minutus).

Unfortunately, all of the prior artwork in this post I had drawn almost purely from imagination, and I think it shows. I studied two mice from photos in pencil, then erased the lines until they were barely visible and tried to do the fur texture in ink (with a dip pen, so there is some unevenness when the pen was extra inky).

Left is my first attempt doing the fur texture. I was more cautious with layering pen strokes, so you can see the lines of strokes fairly evenly. Right is my 2nd attempt, where I was bolder with the pen. I like these mice more than the one I created in the digital painting; these ones (especially the right) feel more Beatrix Potter-ish, which is a vibe I like.

Do I want to go back and fix the anatomy in my digital art of Leo? Yes. I also want to take another stab at doing this piece traditionally, but this time, I'd go monochrome and try to do everything in brown. However, part of me is exhausted from drawing ten million snowflakes and does not want to relive that experience with a gel pen -- I've already done it once with a tablet pen, and that was enough.

I have a hazy, far-off goal of creating a comic of Leo having adventures with another mousy friend, but that’s so far in the future that it’s not worth spending time considering right now. In the nearer future, however, Leo’s friend might become a reality – I know he’s an albino mouse (name TBD) who either escaped from a drug-testing facility (I loved The Secret of NIMH movie as a kid) or else is a pet who was dumped into the wild by a human owner who no longer wanted him. Leo is outgoing and adventurous, and this friend is shy and cautious.