#milne ask

[ask-team-geode]

can we honestly e date? you’re so beautiful. You always make me laugh, you always make me smile. You literally make me want to become a better person... I really enjoy every moment we spend together. My time has no value unless its spent with you. I tell everyone of my irls how awesome you are. Thank you for being you. Whenever you need someone to be there for you, know that i’ll always be right there by your side. I love you so much. I don’t think you ever realize how amazing you are sometimes. Life isn’t as fun when you’re not around. You are truly stunning. I want you to be my soulmate. I love the way you smile, your eyes are absolutely gorgeous. If I had a star for everytime you crossed my mind i could make the entire galaxy. Your personality is as pretty as you are and thats saying something. I love you, please date me. I am not even calling it e dating anymore because I know we will meet soon enough heart OK I ADMIT IT I LOVE YOU OK i hecking love you and it breaks my heart when i see you play with someone else or anyone commenting in your profile i just want to be your girlfriend and put a heart in my profile linking to your profile and have a walltext of you commenting cute things i want to play video games talk in discord all night and watch a movie together but you just seem so uninsterested in me it hecking kills me and i cant take it anymore i want to remove you but i care too much about you so please i’m begging you to eaither love me back or remove me and never contact me again it hurts so much to say this because i need you by my side but if you dont love me then i want you to leave because seeing your icon in my friendlist would kill me everyday of my pathetic life.

[crystallinegazer]

Do you think that shadow sometimes just flips a coin, to see whenever or not he should punch or kick some poor sap across the face once per week?

[quote-the-pooh]

"If I had a nickel for every time Pooh was accused of murdering me, I'd have five nickels, which isn't a lot, but you'd think he'd act less suspicious by now."

— 'Piglet'

[skwtches]

ive never seen any winnie the pooh related media but im so in love w the way u draw tigger an that rabbit character that i now wanna see it

AWW THANK YOUU I’m so flattered omg <333

[touch-me-unscientifically]

lawrence arabia live...

source

[winnie-the-monster]

Paper

Winnie the Pooh, always

[cephalopadre]

mechtober day 22: the second day of tfcon! during the idw artists panel, alex milne was asked how ultra magnus and prowl look down and he jokingly answered "well maybe he has cameras installed on his lower body and display the captured video on a screen on his chest". and yeah, i'll incorporate that into my worldview LMAO

the panel was lovely, very glad i got to go :)

[salemoleander]

solving counting sheep webweave

MCYTblr AU Fest Summer 2023 // sources under readmore

Created as a treat for the absolutely stunning fic by @theminecraftbee!

What is a webweave? Previous art: Third Life | Void Falling | Attempt 33 | Martyn | Limited Life | Nightingale Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | singing songs to the secrets behind my eye | A Hundred Things We Had Not Dreamed Of

Pt. 1: The Specialist’s Hat, Stranger Things Happen p.63  / Kelly Link ◆ Requiem Angel / Daniele Valeriani via @satanasaeternus ◆ Maschera Venetian Joker Mask / Atelier Marega Mask ◆ Macbeth 1.5.57-61 / Shakespeare ◆ Watch / Carol Milne ◆ Excerpt from Salt Is For Curing / Sonia Vatomsky via @geryone ◆ Carved Damascus Steel Bird Knife / Robert Mayo ◆ Excerpt from STOP ME IF YOU’VE HEARD THIS ONE BEFORE, Calling a Wolf a Wolf / Kaveh Akbar ◆ off to finish it at the source / @catcrumb ◆ Excerpt from The War of Vaslav Nijinsky / Frank Bidart ◆ Having a cat is great tweet / @premeesaurus ◆ Secrete / Kate MccGwire via @snailspng

Pt. 2: I am asking you to endure it. / @intactics (Deactivated 12.31.21) ◆ Hi! You have great eyes / @illness (Deactivated 3.25.18) ◆ Taste for Independence Cat / @alisonzai ◆ Support Mental Health pin / @snailspng ◆ A Barn at Kronetorp, Skåne / Gustaf Rydberg ◆ Living: There is a period when it is clear... / Jenny Holzer via @funeral ◆ Neighborhood Plague, Fjords I / Zachary Schomburg ◆ Ugly, Bitter, and True / Suzanne Rivecca ◆ It just keeps happening / @mothcub ◆ Shepherd with Flock of Sheep / Anton Mauve ◆ No Longer Evil cat / @b0nkcreat ◆ Excerpt from All Our Futures / Jody Chan via @geryone ◆ Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stitch / Carol Milne via @knithacker ◆ Deep Dark Fear (9.29.2013) / Fran Krause @deep-dark-fears

Pt. 3: Read more pop-up / @screenshotsofdespair ◆ Combination of Painter Javier Palacios and Enoch 18:14 /  @mountainqoats ◆ Wandering Albatross ◆ Diomedes ◆ Forgive dead players: OFF / @screenshotsofdespair ◆ Inktober52 Angel / @lastmousequeen-blog ◆ The Heavenly Host / Violet Oakley ◆ Excerpt from No Rush / Todd Dillard ◆ I will not go gentle magnets / @carpethedamndiem ◆ Excerpt from cain / José Saramago via @ilumark (Deactivated 2.5.22) ◆ Excerpt from Salt Is For Curing / Sonya Vatomsky via @geryone ◆ Purple / @ungfio via @sosuperawesome ◆ Excerpt from Lessons on Expulsion / Erika Sánchez via @geryone ◆ The Practical Companion to the Work-Table, Containing Directions for Knitting, Netting, & Crochet Work / Elizabeth Jackson via @knittinghistory

Pt. 4: Excerpt from A Ghost is a Memory / GennaRose Nethercott via @tolerateit ◆ What’s done is done / @thatsbelievable ◆ Excerpt from Ante body / Marwa Helal via @geryone ◆ Minor Resurrections / Elisa Gonzalez ◆ Mirror ◆ Coming back / @ungfio ◆ Candlestick ◆ Flame

[soberscientistlife]

It occurred to Pooh and Piglet that they hadn't heard from Eeyore for several days, so they put on their hats and coats and trotted across the Hundred Acre Wood to Eeyore's house. Inside the house was Eeyore. "Hello Eeyore," said Pooh. "Hello Pooh. Hello Piglet" said Eeyore, in a Glum sounding voice. "We just thought we'd check on you," said Piglet, "because we hadn't heard from you, and so we wanted to know if you were okay." Eeyore was silent for a moment. "Am I okay?" he asked, eventually. "Well, I don't know, to be honest. Are any of us really okay? That's what I ask myself. All I can tell you, Pooh and Piglet, is that right now I feel really rather Sad, and Alone, and Not Much Fun To Be Around At All. Which is why I haven't bothered you. Because you wouldn't want to waste your time hanging out with someone who is Sad, and Alone, and Not Much Fun To Be Around At All, would you now." Pooh looked at Piglet, and Piglet looked at Pooh, and they both sat down, one on either side of Eeyore in his stick house. Eeyore looked at them in surprise. "What are you doing?" "We're sitting here with you," said Pooh, "because we are your friends. And true friends don't care if someone is feeling Sad, or Alone, or Not Much Fun To Be Around At All. True friends are there for you anyway. And so here we are." "Oh," said Eeyore. "Oh." And the three of them sat there in silence, and while Pooh and Piglet said nothing at all; somehow, almost imperceptibly, Eeyore started to feel a very tiny little bit better. Because Pooh and Piglet were There. No more; no less. Author - AA Milne Illustration - EH Shepard

[novafire-is-thinking]

Thoughts On Pharma’s Design

A little while ago, I was chatting with a friend (hi Sparrow) about Pharma’s design, and she made an observation that made me realize something interesting. It might be a stretch, but it’s a really cool stretch.

Here’s Alex Milne’s original Pharma concept design next to the new/current one:

When I first saw these side-by-side, I immediately noticed how the new one looks so much better, but I couldn’t put my finger on the why right away. There are plenty of other TF jet designs that look similar to the old design, and they look good.

Why does Pharma in particular look better with the downward-pointing armor?

In my conversation with Sparrow, she said something like, “the sharper points of him point downward,” and then it hit me:

The Angel of Death

(Or Grim Reaper)

The way Pharma’s wings attach high on his shoulders and point downward so that they look like the Angel’s…the scythe-like shape of Pharma’s arms + wings…the way his eyes go wide during his murderous medic arc in a way that resembles the hollow sockets of the Reaper’s skull…

EVERYTHING.

It’s poetic to me how Pharma’s design aligns with the tragedy of his life: how a guy who was supposed to save lives and bring healing descended so far into madness that he became a twisted Angel of Death instead.

Someday, I want to ask Alex Milne if this was intentional, but even if it wasn’t, he’s a genius.

[ask-team-geode]

milne, if you could travel back in time, what advice would you give to your v1 self?

[decepti-thots]

it is SO noticeable when you read through MTMTE paying a lot of attention to the colour work in it (which i have done, because i really like burcham's work in particular) just how rarely it relies on "scary or menacing scene = Dark And Spooky" visual shorthand. a lot of early MTMTE stuff is pretty explicitly drawing on horror as a secondary genre- everything from the sparkeater mini-arc kicking things off to delphi to the overlord stuff. but you will pretty much never see those scenes fall back on "this will be Dark so it is Spooky", and often it's completely the opposite. the delphi stuff takes place in brightly lit snowy environments outside or uniformly lit medical interiors. that doesn't really change until e.g the later arc slaughterhouse, for example. the early stuff in particular is overwhelmingly bright no matter what.

what often gets used instead is unnatural contrast and startling colour combinations. for example, here are two scenes i think a lot of people might default to making dark for the sake of dramatic effect and tone setting if asked how to make them menacing:

both of these instead use a kind of "overexposed" look and contrasting colour choices which feel kind of strange and jarring. (the bottom right Whirl panel has those odd purple shadows contrasting with the bleached out yellowish walls, the red and green contrast on the sparkeater). it almost has this effect not of the moment in a horror movie where it's dark and you can't quite see whatever it is that is all Spooky TM, but when suddenly the flashlight falls on it and illuminates it all at once and makes you jump.

(i would imagine some of this relates to keeping milne's very densely detailed work readable, especially on pages that have so many small panels in them; bright and contrasting choices on the colour side will keep those busy details distinguishable even when those panels do not have a lot of 'breathing room'. if nothing else, the colour work in MTMTE does a lot of work to keep those smaller panels and dense crowd scenes readable, lol.)

[settledthingsstrange]

One does not argue about The Wind in the Willows. The young man gives it to the girl with whom he is in love, and, if she does not like it, asks her to return his letters. The older man tries it on his nephew, and alters his will accordingly. The book is a test of character. We can’t criticize it, because it is criticizing us. But I must give you one word of warning. When you sit down to it, don’t be so ridiculous as to suppose that you are sitting in judgement on my taste, or on the art of Kenneth Grahame. You are merely sitting in judgment on yourself. You may be worth: I don’t know, but it is you who are on trial.

A.A. Milne

[ckret2]

Decided to shake up the constant Gravity Falls asks on the blog (even though I adore them). What is your favorite transformers continuity? And what's your favorite character from that continuity?

Tough call, but probably IDW1. The comics had room to get expansive in ways the show-based continuities couldn't, and I like that feeling of bigness to the universe. It introduced a lot of my favorite Transformers lore: forged vs cold constructed bots, Functionism (especially as a critique of marrying religion to conservative politics), empurata, really creative uses of holoforms, conjunx endura & amica endura (and queer bots, let's give it up for queer bots!!), the complex network of lost colonies, the idea that the gods definitely officially existed BUT they were just guys, the DJD...

All the work that went into immediate pre-war culture with the turbulent corrupt senate and the corrupt Primes was terrific. LSOTW and SOTW are just so damn good, MTMTE up through Remain In Light was brilliant, and Getaway's coup was great. I'm thrilled we got a look at Cybertron's relationships with the rest of the galaxy and it turns out they're hated, because that makes perfect sense but we never really see that. The post-war politics on Cybertron were really fun. I was skeptical IDW could pull off writing about a post-war Cybertron—I assumed within a year they'd default back to restarting the war—and then that ended up being when the whole series really started to shine.

Introduced some characters I love—Drift, Tarn, Stardrive, Windblade, and Pharma stand out off the top of my head. Amazing artwork, especially whenever Milne had the pen. ABSOLUTELY LOVED seeing Starscream get to rule Cybertron. Even though they had trouble committing to it, I appreciate that they had the balls to make Optimus morph into a well-intentioned villain. Love the tragic former senator Shockwave characterization. Love the lonely logical Prowl who can see the Autobots' flaws too clearly for his own good and in his desperation to compensate for the rest of the army morally compromised his way into becoming the villain. Love horrible amoral Tarantulas with his small shining moments of love and tenderness.

Although by the end it was getting really bloated with other Hasbro property crossovers, I did like some of the crossovers they introduced: GI Joe slid in pretty seamlessly—probably helps that TF & GI Joe crossovers have an established history—and I was surprised a how much I liked Rom. And even though the sheer quantity of crossovers got tedious, the concept of going "they've all been dragged into this story because they were all affected by Cybertron's past colonialism" is GREAT.

Love that they ended the story by swinging from "yay look at all these fun new colonies for us to play with!" to "oh my god the Autobots are colonizers." LOVE that they ended with Unicron—every longform Transformers series could end with Unicron and I probably wouldn't complain—and that they let him eat some planets, let him eat half the cast, LET HIM EAT CYBERTRON... and characterized him not as some random bogeyman but specifically as the karmic vengeance for Cybertron's past colonial crimes. Love that the only way to stop him was not by killing him, but by acknowledging that Cybertron was wrong and showing him compassion.

IDW didn't always get things right with their attempted grand messages about politics and injustice and oppression and colonization—but, hell, even when they didn't quite hit the bullseye I love that they were playing with that dartboard.

Favorite character from IDW is Prowl (albeit not without stiff competition). I'm a gleeful Prowl apologist. Yeah he did those terrible things but he was right tho. I started picking up RID & MTMTE right when Prowl got Devastatored, and that was both the thing that made me go "oh hold on the comics are doing something interesting" and the thing that made me take notice of Prowl as a character for the first time in my life lmao. BIG fan of his messy lovelife. (Personally I go "he's too good for Chromedome" and then ship him with the Constructicons and Tarantulas, who are objectively far worse than Chromedome.) He's endlessly fascinating to me, one of my favorite characters to read and one of my favorite characters to write.

Right up there is Starscream—averaged out across all continuities, Starscream's probably my #1 favorite Transformers character, and IDW Starscream is my favorite Starscream, a perfect blend of the bombastic G1 campy villain and the wary, competent, resilient TFP schemer. And Tarantulas rounds out my top 3, I loved him in Beast Wars and then SOTW 3 happened and I had to stop at nearly every panel Tarantulas was in to go "oh my god, this is canon? They got away with that??" Read like a fanfic in the best possible way. "We were each the muse to the other" still has an iron grip on my heart. "I want YOU. I want US." God. SOTW 3 is a masterpiece of literature. Here, do you want a 130k no-war AU where Prowl and Tarantulas are paranormal investigators together? You can have it. For free.

I just spent a lot of time singing the praises of IDW but shoutout to Armada and Energon/Super Link (I preferred the fansub over the dub) for getting me into Transformers, wouldn't be in this fandom today if not for Starscream's beautifully melodramatic redemption arc in Armada. I'm not saying they're good. I'm saying I love them. Totally different thing.

[howgalling]

I met Alex Milne!! He was incredible, watching him sketch out the character sketch pages off of the top of his head, without having to even GLANCE at a reference was so cool. I asked for pipes, first aid and tailgate in my copies of hot motor oil LOL ^^

[skyacya]

Hello! I got into transformers recently and I've been scrolling through Tumblr for awhile to find TF related content. I happen to come across your blog and dare I say your illustrations are stunning!🧡 The color choices and the line work is absolutely amazing.

You can say I'm a little motivated to draw some robots now—but as someone who only drew humans in the past and someone who just joined the fandom. I've come to the realization that drawing robots is much harder than it looks🤲..

If it's not too much to ask, would you mind sharing some tips or experiences on how you started drawing them? Thank you🦐

Man, you have no idea how much seeing this made my day (〃´∀｀)! But sure!

The general idea I use is to break down characters into their most basic shapes, fx Transformers Prime and Animated has super strong shape language especially compared to G1 where everyone are squares

Before drawing a new character, I like to practice my muscle memory by isolating these basic shapes on top of a reference image. To get that proper giant alien robot feel it's especially helpful to practice big, squareish shapes (though depends on the character, some have more fluid shapes similar to humans).

With the overall shapes you can draw your desired pose much easier because you don't need to think about details yet.

When you have the pose down, you can continue on with the details. These are also just shapes broken down into smaller shapes. You just continue to break everything into shapes until you have achieved the level of detail that you want. Everything is shapes

When adding details, it's a good idea to have a bunch of references ready. I usually just go through an episode/chapter with the character I want and take a shit ton of screenshots

⊹⊹⊹⊹Some general tips I have are:⊹⊹⊹⊹

Find inspiration from different artists you like and see how they break down the characters (and try doing the shape practicing to get used to the feeling of drawing bigger shapes)

This is a strange addon tip but hear me out, a lot of R18 tf artists are insanely talented, like to an unlawful degree. Welcome to the rust sea of sin, I would add recommendations but I am a coward

Varying lineweight is especially useful to separate bigger shapes from details, otherwise it can quickly look busy and messy (look at Alex Milnes art before coloring, there it is very visible)

Alex Milne also uses full black in certain less visible/high contrast areas to create focus on the more important details. It helps to create a more balanced drawing. Also helps to hide areas you aren't confident about such as joints lol

Don't be afraid to exaggerate the lines, robots have a tendency to look stiff

Do not fear the shapes, the shapes mean no harm.

And lastly, thank you for your kind ask! There are many ways to begin drawing robots and I hope this may help in your journey down the rabbithole of giant sexy gay alien robots (ʃƪ˶˘ ﻬ ˘˶)♥♥