#scrawl

[bfleuter]

Woah hey! My second 24 page sketchbook is now available in print for just $8! Please check it out.

[kachinga12]

I present! Scrawl!! One of my oc's

More under the cut

[cetitan]

I need to return to this one I don't think I was quite finished with this one. I need to curb my make new sonas and abandon them habit. It feels less like a constant and changing exploration of self expression and more of a lack of confidence in what I make. I can be fluid and experimental without abandoning things like used toys. She's cute

[miss-scrawl]

⛓Quick sketch of my gf idk idk idk ⛓

[voice-of-illogical-sense]

Also, with moving house, there has been the need to reorganise how I display stuff on my shelves. This will be my backdrop when on a call (once I have [again] unboxed my gaming PC).

I have lots to get through and no time to do it. I also have been encouraged not to (which is killing me) because they will need to do some demolition to fix "whatever is going on in the walls".

[sweetdreamsjeff]

Reading Festival, Melody Maker Stage

Dave Simpson, Melody Maker, 3 September 1994

SO HERE I am, it's 12.15pm, the f***ing cab driver's turfed me out onto the street. I've got miles to walk to the flamin' festival and it's started to pour down. The last thing I need in my life right now is a bunch of Pearl Jam wannabes fronted by Ian Astbury's dustman, but, lo and behold, CANDLEBOX are here with their low-rent Marquee metal, guitar solos that seem to last several centuries and a "love song" that includes the words "f***in'" and "bullshit". No, really.

What quirk of fate or nature has brought these people together with us? Did they actually sit down and arrange to produce the most appalling, indulgent fret-wanking cover of 'Voodoo Chile' imaginable? "We are from Seattle, Washington," they chirp. In the real world, this gross display of geographical misfortune and mind-boggling cheesiness would be met with a firm "Get outta here" and a handful of shotguns, but this is not the real world. This is Reading. People clap more forcefully, they pogo harder, they do everything they can to do my bleedin' head in.

I need a break already but instead I get Andrew Mueller ranting on about the Chelsea result (while it lasts, mate, while it lasts). Oh and DIG, whose punky-spirited rock metal comes as a refreshing surprise after all the posturing of the previous act. Mueller, that is. Lordy, they've even got some Good Songs. Dig, that is. But hold on... those rousing chords, those earnest political lyrics, that walloping drumbeat. They've turned into Simple Minds! Which makes the fact that they have a "song about loving relationships" called, impeccably, "F*** You" all the more confusing.

Hardly anybody watches SCRAWL, probably cos they coincide with a rare burst of sunshine and the appearance of Whitesnake or somebody on the Main Stage. A shame, cos their delicate but punchy blend of Muses, Au Pairs, tight red mini-skirts and way, way soulful vocals is most palatable. Something's gotta give and JEFF BUCKLEY gives it loads. 'Grace' is much rawer than usual, 'Kangaroo' is simply lust-crazed. "When I first saw you" — he sounds almost disgusted with himself — "you had on blue jeans". He spits out the line as if blue jeans were the utmost in degradation. I swear the sky's turning red and molten electricity is swirling around our ears. And is that really Liz Fraser jumping up and down in the front row or am I finally succumbing to Festivalitis? I dunno, my hangover's turned into nervous exhaustion, someone's given me a strange pill and there's a champagne cork popping inside my stomach.

Now here come MORPHINE with their dark and haunting "lo-rock". Outside, the sun's shining and a girl has some kind of metal ring in her arse. But in here we're in a late-night bar. Orson Welles fronts an avant-jazz, two-string-bass Birthday Party, Sherlock Holmes sips quietly in a corner and the smells are of fast sex and slow Gauloises. 'Thursday' plagiarises 'TV Eye' (cool) and the melancholy vibe of 'Candy' suggests they've got more strings to their bow. If not their bass.

About now I fall asleep. I dream that THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS are onstage and that Carl Puttnam has left the floundering CUD and embarked on a solo career as a Las Vegas entertainer and is being taken seriously but I am dreaming. Aren't I?!

There's a delay before ECHOBELLY cos they've forgotten the chords to 'There Is A Light...' When they finally appear, there are two Echobellys. (That's just the echo — Sonics Ed) The first are great. They have a warm, charismatic singer and stirring, intelligent songs about drugs and abortions and ego. But the second, f***. Scrape away the veneer of the first and you get a hoary rock beast with interminable solos and boots on monitors and meetings with poets forsaken in favour of lunches with A&R men. Songs that could be written by Battle Of The Bands entrants from say, Derby, but seem destined for America and a vocalist like Toyah Wilcox on helium. They're muso but they can't play 'Bellyache'. They're popular but a section of the crowd thins. I wait patiently for the reappearance of the first Echobelly of the first four numbers. They never return.

Instead, Mark Eitzel of AMERICAN MUSIC CLUB gives the most committed performance of the festival. His songs are peppered with words like "phony" and "charade" and they cut through rock's pretensions like a knife through shit. The intensity of Eitzel's performance is remarkable. One minute he's all deadpan, the next joking with the crowd, the next hurling down his guitar lead and exiting the stage because some security guy looked at him funny. Psychiatrists call them mood swings; I call it the sincere temperament of a genius. 'Firefly' fizzes and crackles, 'Western Sky' is gorgeously poised and they do this odd punk song that could be Johnny Thunders. I could die listening to this group.

But here we are, light years away from the bad HM of the opening acts and listening to TINDERSTICKS: music played by men in suits which owes as much to old music hall, working men's clubs, Scott Walker and Jacques Brel as it does to rock music. Sadly, no 'City Sickness', no 'Marbles', but still I marvel at Stuart Staples' voice, which sounds like the last 10 per cent of all his syllables have been surgically removed, giving him an intoxicating, clipped croon. Of course, some of the time he does sound worryingly like Steve Wright's Pub Singer and has an awkward, hunchback posture that certainly wasn't the result of a childhood footballing injury, but what the heck. A new ballad called 'No More Affairs' (right!) is well storming and although they bore me by playing too long, they bore me with style...

Can I go to bed now?

© Dave Simpson, 1994

[bmbrice]

Sonic fusions ft. AuntyMoira

Here's my semi-annual Sonic thing. I wasn't intending on doing this today but I found @MoiraAunty's prompt and got distracted by it lol

[elolaillustrator]

Sketchbook 02

Random sketches for fun

[mywifeleftme]

331: V/A // International Pop Underground Convention

International Pop Underground Convention Various Artists 1992, K Records

My entrée to basically every art scene I’ve ever been involved in was basically just going to whatever extremely DIY festival that scene threw in my city and hoping. You see what seems like an unfathomable number of artists good and terrible (and very occasionally great), hit most of the venues, bars, and spaces worth knowing about, and sometimes even strike up some conversations with people who eventually become your friends. 1991’s International Pop Underground Convention in Olympia, organized by Candice Pedersen and Calvin Johnson of K Records, was the indie model for these fests as I’ve known them, and so it’s as directly responsible for a lot of the good stuff in my life as any musical event I can think of. Everything I’ve heard about it sounds like absolute paradise—the platonic ideal of all the times I’ve picked through mountains of sick screenprinted t-shirts by bands I’ve never heard of, eaten some weird and great food by a tattooed baker, and then ridden my bike on shrooms to catch bits of four shows on the same night, all on a dime.

The lineup on this double-live compilation is all over the place musically, but it does a beautiful job of summarizing the thing indie/alternative music of the era shared despite its sonic diversity: a sense that the music you liked and what it represented could be a space of legitimate opposition to corporatism; that there was something worthwhile in wearing that belief on your sleeveless t-shirt; that the notion of “selling out” had some real conceptual worth; that we’re in this thing together. So, the International Pop Underground Convention LP serves up first-wave riot grrl (Mecca Normal, Bratmobile); DC post-hardcore (Nation of Ulysses, Fugazi); twee indie pop (Beat Happening; Spinanes); noise rock (Melvins; Unwound); grunge-y stuff, primitive singer-songwriter folk, surf rock, plunderphonic DJ sets, and more and more besides, all recorded live and kinda badly but “real.” As individual performances, few are essential, but collectively they are a powerful document of the alternative scene as it existed in the moment right before Nevermind changed everything.

I always think about how crazy it must be for someone like Nikki McClure, an Olympia visual artist who designed a bunch of early K Records sleeves and released a handful of EPs on the label, to have a performance preserved on the same disc as all these icons. On the one hand, it's not like she sits around in awe of like Beat Happening in the same way a fan would—they were friends and part of the same community, and probably still are to this day. But on the other hand, I’m sure when she comes across a copy of this LP there’s sometimes a dazed moment when it seems like that young Nikki singing her funny little a cappella song must be someone else entirely, the record itself an object manifested from a dream. But the International Pop Underground Conventional was real, and in its way, it carries on to this day.

331/365

[unknownbirds]

[wordsforyourwip]

Identify

Scrawl

Agitate

Night

[gryphon1911]

Urban Scrawl 2024

Background A 2-Day arts festival organized by the Franklinton Arts District.  Urban Scrawl has been an annual event since 2007, featuring art murals from over 60 local artists.  This is one of central Ohio’s largest urban renewal projects. VisualOhio returned to cover this event after the fun we had last year! Check out the images and impressions below! Please note that a lot of the pieces…

[michaelwoodruffnectarmotion]

battle series no.5 - inspired by Paris Texas

[cetitan]

It's less that Yuzu was asking for donations at all, there's a lot of emulator projects like PCSX2 that take donations through GitHub's Sponsorship system, but I feel like Patreon is an inappropriate place to set up shop. Using such a public-facing website to collect funds and including telemetry in your emulator (something I've never seen another emulator do and I've used a lot of them) feel like two really "Well we're gonna get sued anyway!" narrow-minded decisions to make. The Switch is current gen. You could've given yourselves at least a bit of a chance in court

[miss-scrawl]

✨️🌷 starcrossed lovers 🌷✨️

[liminalweirdo]

guys, in regards to reading comprehension, if it's something you struggle with — read the whole thing. If it's something you don't struggle with, yes you do — read the whole thing.

don't respond or comment or whatever before you have read the whole thing.

The number of times I've gotten responses from people who clearly didn't read beyond the first few sentences of what I wrote is genuinely staggering. Think about it: if you don't have time to read someone else's thoughts, why should anyone take time to read yours? Communication is a two-way street.

Take your time reading. It's okay if you have to take time. You don't need to be 100% ready with a response right away, ever, in real life convos or online. You are allowed to take the time you need to absorb information and develop a response. Anyone who says otherwise is an asshole.

If you have a physical copy of something, highlighting or underlining is extremely helpful. There's even studies that show that you take in more information if you're holding a pen in your hand, as if to take notes. Also, TAKE NOTES! It's fun and extremely helpful.

If you don't have a physical copy, try highlighting with your mouse or your keyboard as you read. It makes you slow down and absorb what you're reading. Highlight a sentence at a time, and move forward sentence to sentence. There are even programs that allow you to do this with any running text. It's usually called focus mode.

TL;DR read the whole text before you respond to something, for the love of spiders georg