#so right now i'm trying to be more efficient about my art

[bill-gates-hate-blog]

definitely not my best work but i can forgive myself after being away from my drawing tablet for so long

[loverboybrightsideghost]

it's always good to have a break. i don't know how non-music college compares, but music school is A Lot Of Work, constantly practicing, rehearsing, playing. lots of homework. there's also the mental and emotional aspect; being an artist you need to separate your art from your sense of self and self worth, and it's pretty difficult sometimes. not to mention, it is a competitive field, so there's always wondering about how you measure up to others, auditioning, if you'll even get the job or into the festival or whatever.

the past two semesters have been rough for me, even though i had a great summer in between, it was a lot of change (not just bc of first/second year of school) in a short amount of time and a lot of that change was bc i wanted it and it was on my shoulders to work to practice to prove i can do it. and i did! i can! i still have a long way to go, but i can do it. i often think or worry i don't deserve to be here, but it's reassuring to know that 1) lots of other people, even people i look up, feel that way too and 2) i AM here, so enough people who know what they're doing think i can do it, and who am i to argue?

however, to my original point, it is good to have a break. i love music, and i would not be doing this if i didn't. but i think i really burned myself out this semester, and as soon as i was on break, i stopped practicing at all for like a week and a half, and then after that i practiced only a bit at the end of the day just to play my instrument.

what i've been doing instead is sleeping in a lot, watching a lot of tv and reading lots of comics, and also just Reading and listening to music. i've also been drawing a lot.

it's good to take a break. i am a musician, and always will be, but i am also a person who likes to sleep and eat and who is obsessed with superman and likes hanging out with my friends.

[vajrapoet]

realities, maximalism,and the need for big book™️

some gubat banwa design thoughts vomit: since the beginning of its development i've kind of been enraptured with trying to really go for "fiction-first" storytelling because PbtA games really are peak roleplaying for me, but as i wrote and realized that a lot of "fiction first" doesn't work without a proper sort of fictional foundation that everyone agrees on. this is good: this is why there are grounding principles, genre pillars, and other such things in many PbtA games--to guide that.

broken worlds is one of my favs bc of sheer vibes

Gubat Banwa didn't have much in that sense: sure, I use wuxia and xianxia as kind of guideposts, but they're not foundational, they're not pillars of the kind of fiction Gubat Banwa wants to raise up. there wasn't a lot in the sense of genre emulation or in the sense of grounding principles because so much of Gubat Banwa is built on stuff most TTRPG players haven't heard about. hell, it's stuff squirreled away in still being researched academic and anthropological circles, and thanks to the violence of colonialism, even fellow filipinos and seasians don't know about them

this is what brought me back to my ancient hyperfixations, the worlds of Exalted, Glorantha, Artesia, Fading Suns... all of them have these huge tomes of books that existed to put down this vast sprawling fantasy world, right? on top of that are the D&D campaign settings, the Dark Suns and the Eberrons. they were preoccupied in putting down setting, giving ways for people to interact with the world, and making the world alive as much as possible.

one of my main problems with gubat banwa was trying to convey this world that i've seen, glimpsed, dreamed of. this martial fantasy world of rajas and lakans, sailendras and tuns, satariyas and senapatis and panglimas and laksamanas and pandai... its a world that didn't really exist yet, and most references are steeped in either nationalism or lack of resources (slowly changing, now)

i didn't want to fall back into the whole gazeteer tourist kind of shit when it came to writing GB, but it necessitated that the primary guidelines of Gubat Banwa were set down. my approach to it was trying to instill every aspect of the text, from the systems to the fluff text to the way i wrote to the way things were phrased, with the essence of this world i'm trying to put forward. while i wrote GB mainly for me and fellow SEAsian people, economically my main market were those in the first world countries that could afford to buy the book. grokking the book was always going to be severely difficult for someone that didn't have similar cultures, or are uninterested in the complexities of human culture. thus why GB had to be a big book.

in contemporary indie ttrpg spaces (where I mostly float in, though i must admit i pay more attention to SEAsia spaces than the usual US spaces) the common opinion is that big books like Exalted 3e are old hat, or are somewhat inferior to games that can cram their text into short books. i used to be part of that camp--in capitalism, i never have enough time, after all. however, the books that do go big, that have no choice to go big, like Lancer RPG, Runequest, Mage, Exalted are usually the ones that have something really big it needs to tell you, and they might be able to perform the same amount of text-efficient bursting at the seams flavor writing but its still not enough.

thats what happened to GB, which I wanted to be, essentially, a PbtA+4e kind of experience, mechanically speaking. i very soon abandoned those titles when i delved deeper into research, incorporated actual 15th century divination tools in the mechanics, injected everything with Martial Arts flavor as we found our niche

all of this preamble to say that no matter how light i wanted to go with the game, i couldnt go too light or else people won't get it, or i might end up writing 1000 page long tome books explaining every detail of the setting so people get it right. this is why i went heavy on the vibes: its a ttrpg after all. its never gonna be finished.

i couldnt go too light because Gubat Banwa inherently exists on a different reality. think: to many 3 meals a day is the norm and the reality. you have to eat 3 meals a day to function properly. but this might just be a cultural norm of the majority culture, eventually co opted by capitalism to make it so that it can keep selling you things that are "breakfast food" or "dinner food" and whatnot. so its reality to some, while its not reality to others. of course, a lot of this reality-talk pertains mostly to social--there is often a singular shared physical reality we can usually experience*

Gubat Banwa has a different fabric of reality. it inherently has a different flow of things. water doesn't go down because of gravity, but because of the gods that make it move, for example. bad things happen to you because you weren't pious or you didn't do your rituals enough and now your whole community has to suffer. atoms aren't a thing in gb, thermodynamics isn't a real thing. the Laws of Gubat Banwa aren't these physical empirical things but these karmic consequent things

much of the fiction-first movement has a sort of "follow your common sense" mood to it. common sense (something also debatable among philosophers but i dont want to get into that) is mostly however tied to our physical and social realities. but GB is a fantasy world that inherently doesn't center those realities, it centers realities found in myth epics and folk tales and the margins of colonized "civilization", where lightnings can be summoned by oils and you will always get lost in the woods because you don't belong there.

so Gubat Banwa does almost triple duty: it must establish the world, it must establish the intended fiction that arises from that world, and then it must grant ways to enforce that fiction to retain immersion--these three are important to GB's game design because I believe that that game--if it is to not be a settler tourist bonanza--must force the player to contend with it and play with it within its own terms and its own rules. for SEAsians, there's not a lot of friction: we lived these terms and rules forever. don't whistle at night on a thursday, don't eat meat on Good Friday, clap your hands thrice after lighting an incense stick, don't make loud noise in the forests. we're born into that [social] reality

this is why fantasy is so important to me, it allows us to imagine a different reality. the reality (most of us) know right now (i say most of us because the reality in the provinces, the mountains, they're kinda different) is inherently informed by capitalist structures. many people that are angry at capitalist structures cannot fathom a world outside capitalist structures, there are even some leftists and communists that approach leftism and revolution through capitalism, which is inherently destructive (its what leads to reactionaries and liberalism after all). fantasy requires that you imagine something outside of right now. in essence read Ursula K Le Guin

i tweeted out recently that you could pretty easily play 15-16th century Luzon or Visayas with an OSR mechanic setting and William Henry Scott's BARANGAY: SIXTEENTH CENTURY PHILIPPINE CULTURE AND SOCIETY, and I think that's purely because barebones OSR mechanics stuff fits well with the raiding and adventuring that many did in 15-16th century Luzon/Visayas, but a lot of the mechanics wont be comign from OSR, but from Barangay, where you learn about the complicated marriage customs, the debt mechanics, the social classes and stratum...

so thats why GB needs to be a (relatively) big book, and why I can contend that some books need to be big as well--even if their mechanics are relatively easy and dont need more than that, the book, the game, might be trying to relay something even more, might be trying to convey something even more than that. artesia, for example, has its advancements inherently tied to its Tarot Cards, enforcing that the Arcana guides your destiny. runquest has its runes magic, mythras (which is kinda generic) has pretty specific kinds of magic systems that immediately inform the setting. this is why everything is informed by something (this is a common Buddhist principle, dependent arising). even the most generic D&D OSR game will have the trappings of the culture and norms of the one that wrote and worked on it. its written from their reality which might not necessarily be the one others experience. that's what lived experience is, after all

*live in the provinces for a while and you'll doubt this too!

[tomlinfonda]

"Why are artists so butthurt about AI art? Horse carriage drivers didn't complain when they invented the car, they were just grateful that the technology evolved and made it easier to get around."

Art is not a carriage, it's not a vehicle. Its purpose is not to be efficient, to do a practical job with as little effort as possible. Art is not something that can be automated, because its artistry lies in the humanity of its creator. Art is wonderful, from a baby's first drawing, inexperienced and unskilled, to the paintings adorning the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

If you consider yourself an AI artist, I ask you: are you proud of yourself when the computer has completed another image that you will claim as yours? Do you look at it and feel the joy of having created something?

Does the generative process teach you how to see the world better? With every image created, do you evolve? Do you understand the planes of the face better now than 1000 images ago? Do you know what rim light is, and where to put it? Do you understand light sources? Tones? Could you take a piece of paper and shade a portrait by yourself?

"AI software is just like Photoshop or Blender, the next step in artistic technology".

It's not though, is it? A digital artist uses a pen to put colors on screen, chooses where to put each brush stroke, when to smudge or use the liquify tool. A 3D sculptor manipulates basic shapes into characters just like a traditional artist molds clay. An AI "artist" doesn't make any of the thousands of choices that lead to the creation of a real piece of art.

"But art is hard, and I'm not good enough."

Neither am I! Man, I'm not the worst artist in the world, but I'm not great, still not at the level I would like to be. Sometimes I draw something and I look at it and realize that it sucks ass! Sometimes I post a drawing online and realize that I drew a character out of proportion, that the light source is not consistent, that I've shaded outside the lines! And you know what's great? That I get to have an understanding of what I did wrong! I get to evolve! I redraw something from 5 years ago and realize that my composition is much better, my shading more believable. And I know that in 5 more years, I might redraw it again and pride myself in how much I've evolved.

I've been drawing since I was a baby, and I still have a long way to go. And that is also fine, because art is a lifelong pursuit, growing, changing, just as I am.

It's okay to not be good. Hell, it's okay if you don't even try to get better. By drawing, you WILL. It's inevitable that, by practicing, you'll learn.

You know what will not make you a better artist? Software that will generate your "art" for you. The result might look more complex than what your skill level allows you to create right now. But it doesn't look better. You could draw a crooked circle on xerox paper and it will look better than all the AI art in the world. Because you made it. Have some faith in yourself. Your vision has more artistic value than what that computer generated.

"If you're afraid that AI will steal your job, learn to draw better!"

I'm trying. Are you?

[genericpuff]

As someone who can't afford to go to animation school n adores your work- are there any advice or tips they taught you could share that transfer to art or comics? I know you talked about learning how to properly reference things which I admit I think I and a lot of other artists struggle with knowing how to do

Ironically enough, as much as I learned that I do NOT have the patience for animating (which is... ironic, considering all the patience that's required to make a comic LMAO) I did still learn a lot from it that I was able to take into comics. Storyboarding was one of the more obvious ones, as storyboards are basically just the "still versions" of an animation before it's been animated, with establishing shots, camera pans, dialogue shots, etc. all of which you'd find utilized in a comic.

Alongside that was learning how to draw consistently. Turnaround sheets are a shared practice in both animation and comics, they're necessary to creating an ongoing project that features the same core cast of characters. Learning how to draw the same characters the exact same way every time in a way that's both consistent and efficient is crucial.

That said, aside from those little starting tips, I do hope that some day you're able to find the means to go to school for animation or whatever it is that you're desiring to go into and learn. Yes, post-secondary schooling is expensive, and there are a lot of risks in pursuing a diploma/degree that can affect your future. That said, as someone who went to a school that literally no longer exists (like fr I don't even know if I can get my transcript anymore so for all I know, the year I spent in animation college only exists in the student loans that I'm still paying off, rip) I still learned and gained so much that I simply wouldn't have in high school or on Youtube. The biggest of which was the environment - being put into an actual dedicated space for learning art, with peers and teachers who were all unified in that space working towards the same goal, made so much more of a difference in my learning than I initially anticipated. I got so much feedback and guidance thanks to my instructors, and it really put me into a space where I was forced to try new things, I couldn't keep relying on the same tricks and comfort zones anymore. If it weren't for my instructors pushing me to step outside of that comfort zone, I never would have learned how to draw from life or use other mediums that subsequently became the foundations of the stuff I make today.

And while a lot of the things they taught I could have learned on Youtube or CTRL+Paint or Draw-a-Box, being in an actual classroom with grades and a schedule to abide by actually kept me moving in a forward direction and gave me so much more help on a personal level than some guy on Youtube could have given me reading from a script or, in this case, some rando on Tumblr responding to anonymous asks LMAO

Obviously, I'm never gonna recommend that anyone put themselves into financial ruin for post-secondary schooling, ESPECIALLY right now with the economy being what it is, but I do hope that if you genuinely want to go to school that you can find the means to do so, whether it's opting for community classes or applying for scholarships/bursaries/grants/etc or even just signing up for a local art class. Do your research on what's available and feasible to you - even art clubs can be super helpful in getting you out there and talking to people! As much as we may all be slaving away over our desks creating our next big piece, art is still a form of community and interpersonal communication - whether it's between you and an audience, or a peer with whom you exchange new ideas and feedback, or a mentor whose skills you hope to inherit and pass on to the next generation.

Until then though, keep creating and keep getting inspired. If you've never drawn from life before, set up a bowl of fruit and draw it as closely as you can to the real thing, or go to the food court and see how quickly you can sketch the people walking by before they're gone. If you've never tried storyboarding before, grab a piece of paper, find a scene from a live action movie you like, and storyboard it as if you were making an animated film. Try things! Fail at it! Try it again! See what happens!

[askthenewritoelder]

Afternoon, Teba. How are you handling your duties today? I see you have rather a lot of paperwork to read over regarding the newly implimented Zora Rito cuttlebone trade. I have a little free time while the storm clears up before I return to training, if you'd like a hand working through it.

While I'm here - though I usually dispise idle chatter; I was wondering perchance if I could gather your oppinion on something? It seems....Tulin might be experiencing his first infatuation. Poor boy is far too shy to come to you directly - you know how pre-adolecent fledglings are. However I admit I am not nearly as well versed in the art of romantic relationships as you, considering your happy marrage. I felt it would be more efficient to play as the middle man for you than to answer directly.

...Not that I couldn't offer advice myself - as you know, an unstoppable, brilliant, charming warrior such as me has near unlimitless options for romantic partners. I could court whomever I desired to, I know practically everything about the theoretics of romance. I simply don't have time for such nonsense with my busy schedual.

However - in the case of Tulin, of course - what advice would you perhaps give to a young man dealing with such a thing? Say for example; perhaps the boy feels somewhat unfamiliar with these sorts of overwhelming feelings and does not know exactly how to express them in a healthy manor. What might be a casual way to communicate his interest in the object of his desire without appearing too forwards? Furthermore, maybe...Tulin is finding himself behaving a little agressivelly towards the individual because he feels concerned over the possibility of rejection. How would he best overcome that malicious reflex? How did you first interact with Saki to get her to like you?

Oh- no need to mention this to Tulin. You wouldn't want to embaress the poor boy, would you? I'll pass along the information. It's best we keep this between us.

Greetings, Master Revali.

Apologies for the late response. Yesterday was a long day, and I still have a lot to catch up on. Other than that things are going well. The current state of affairs regarding the stranded Zora is a bit of a mess right now. I know you’ve had some encounters before, so I’d really appreciate it if you came with me when I leave to find them.

As for your-er…Tulin’s question, my objective opinion would be to try different methods of expressing your affection; spend more time with them, maybe try gifts, or perform acts of service they’d appreciate. I’d also recommend you study the courting practices of the person you’re interested in. I’m not too familiar with courting Hylians so it’s probably better to ask others.

Personally, I’d say tell them how you feel directly. You’ll never know if they’ll reject you without trying. Saki and I were spending a lot of time together, so it wasn’t too much of a surprise when I realized I liked her. I’m not the best with words, but I found myself confessing anyway. Everything just felt…right. This might be the case for you- I mean Tulin. Sometimes you’ll find a moment where everything fits together.

It can be challenging, but the person you’re interested in will never get the message otherwise. If the person cares about you as much as you care about them (and I’m certain they will return your feelings), then the relationship shouldn’t break even if they reject your confession. If that person doesn’t return your feelings, you’d respect that because you love them.

Hopefully I was able to provide some insight on the matter. Feel free to speak with me anytime; I’ll be more than happy to lend an ear.

[matrixbearer2024]

Modernity AU Main Four Lore Snips(1/?)

Sorry for the lack of art and content on my main and my blog guys, been really busy so far given the holiday. I plan on updating things asap but for now I'll try my best to answer any asks or entertain suggestions and comments regarding the modernity AU! For now, I offer some little lore snippets that I think should be more helpful context clues. I'm not entirely sure how to slot these into my askblog in the meantime so have at thee!

Fiddleford's family comes from a successful pigery which had eventually expanded and branched out. The corporation his family actively owns distributes and sells meat products all over the world.

It's something I don't really talk about much aside from saying it's old money, but I do generally think given the current world and all that meat products could either be a hit or miss. In this case, I wondered what it would be like if his family had been successfully rooted in the business for decades. Generally speaking, it's not a guarantee and oftentimes the food production industry can have it's ups and downs. Still, I figured with the convenience and efficiency of the modern day- why not try?

So yeah, when I say Fidds comes from old money in this AU— it's old money. Like, decades old at this point. Thankfully, the Mcgucket family is generally very smart about their riches despite the fact they could quite literally throw money at everything. It's also why sometimes Fidds doesn't realize his privilege borders on rude when he's just that accustomed to a lifestyle with insane amounts of money.

Bill's necklace isn't inanimate, not that anyone knows or notices even.

That actually has a lot to do with his backstory, the demon triangle actually still does exist in this AU but this human Bill is a completely separate entity from the Euclidean. His necklace works more like a window for that chaotic piece of geometry and it's why I constantly draw it emoting or reacting to certain things around.

What I will reveal about Bill's backstory is that his entire family is part of a weird cult that worships the triangle and his role to play in most of it is generally as a homunculus. Something "human-like" or a "humanoid puppet" in terms of alchemy. He is human, just born and created for some pretty screwed up reasons. He isn't even the first, nor the last. It just so happens his siblings either died from complications growing up or during childbirth.

It's why his aunt and uncle were able to get custody of him pretty early, taken away from his biological family at the age of three and the guardianship was legally transferred when he was five. Bill's fascination with triangles in this AU isn't really unfounded, he just doesn't know the real reason why. But the scars that his blood family left behind did stick, and it's why he has such an aversion to the occult or most religious regalia.

Ford having a general lack of interest or indifference to romantic relationships actually has a lot to do with his upbringing.

Personally, I don't think Stanford would be entirely keen on the concept of "love" given how he sees the bond between his parents. That and he doesn't see how someone could turn so irrational or blind with the right cocktail of hormones. He doesn't see the objectivity in most of it so he's generally just confused or doesn't care enough to try. It's actually why he didn't even entertain Cathy's confession letter, immediately assuming it had something to do with bullying or a chain instead of anything amiable or even romantic.

He's not disgusted or has an aversion to it like many of his peers assume, he's just indifferent and doesn't have it as a priority. Ford isn't actually sure if he's ever really even fallen for somebody before, the closest he's got and is painfully aware of is just caring for somebody to a detriment without even feeling "lovey-dovey". Do with that as you will.

Stanley loves musicals, he loves watching them and listening to the soundtracks. It's just not very known because he feels like he has a reputation and he'd rather leave the "geeky" thing to his twin.

This isn't to say that he has an aversion or general distaste for being labeled as nerdy or geeky, just that he loves to knock heads with his brother for being the "cool" Stan. He first watched Wicked on broadway and then everything else soon followed, Hamilton, The Greatest Showman, Six, Dear Evan Hansen, etc., things just snowballed from there and he's been hooked ever since. His favorite probably really has to be "Six" or "The Greatest Showman".

It helps that he knows how to sing and still does, he just doesn't do it often to avoid people from making requests or asking him to perform. Stanley doesn't have stage fright like his twin, he just gets tired very easily by it when it's non-stop performing tunes he doesn't even like or know.

That doesn't stop him or Ford from drunkenly singing "The Other Side" or "Defying Gravity" at three in the morning after a weekend of partying though.

The Stan Twins for the life of them will not stop debating on whether tea or coffee is better.

Ford is jittery because of the copious amounts of caffeine he ingests and Stan sometimes wonders if you could drop from too much caffeine. He's tried to stop and only ended up sleeping like a dead man for four full days. Fidds still often refers to it as a post-exam hibernation.

On the other hand, Stan is often too aware of the crash his brother gets and would rather sleep more often than end up shaking and twitching non-stop from caffeine. He does need the boost though, so he drinks tea.

Bill usually often thinks that it's like trying to watch oil and water mix while eating breakfast with the Stan twins given that most of the conversation is just swallowed by this debate. His guess is it has a lot to do with the fact Ford is not a morning person and he makes it everybody's problem.

Fiddleford loves horseback riding and it's a hobby he's had ever since he was a kid. He has a stable and field for his horses. Fidds both buys the horses and pays for their care with his own allocated allowance.

It's not really even because he's into cowboys and everything, he just finds them very sweet animals and genuinely interesting. They're basically bigger and faster dogs in his mind. Most of the horses Fidds buys aren't even wild, they're retired horses that most owners would already decide to get rid of because their either aged or far past their use(carriage horses, racehorses, etc.).

Fidds' favorite horse which he's had for around 15 years now is a retired deep brown racehorse named "Marlboro". That horse is already around 20 years old and was forced to retire after it slipped and fell on the racetrack. That horse belonged to a relative and was just given to Fidds as a gift for his 8th birthday.

Marlboro loves his person so much that every time Fidds returns home during breaks, the horse straight up starts walking out of the stable and stops for absolutely nobody.

It's something his family is slightly surprised and alarmed by sometimes because Fidds' horses do have designated caretakers and vets that do their job well. It just so happens that the horses really just remember Fidds and are more than happy to see him again.

Fidds doesn't always ride his horses whenever he's home but he never fails to visit all of them and check in. As of now, he has six horses and four are stallions(all gelded); the other two are mares. Fiddleford isn't really interested in breeding horses anyway so this doesn't give him any issue.

Bill has a slight obsession with the show squid game but doesn't really talk about it.

The concept and idea behind the show and the games genuinely interests him for reasons he isn't sure why. Though, he would sometimes think about it for a long while trying to figure it out. It also doesn't help that the games also tend to fixate on human desperation and greed, something that terrifies the blonde as much as it intrigues him.

It resonates with how he typically sees his own life, a pick your poison of: "you die now or die later". Even so, Bill is a bit irked with himself for gravitating towards something like this when he also finds himself nauseated by the amount of death and gore. His fixation generally merits mixed feelings on his end but it's a fixation nonetheless.

Stan and Ford throw things at each other almost daily, it doesn't even have to be for any specific reason other than they're screwing around.

Ford has thrown at thesaurus at Stanley before for the sake of a joke and consequently couldn't stop laughing at the sheer utter confusion his brother had because of it. He does debate on doing it more often though when Stan annoys the heck out of him by just murdering the English language.

On the flip side, Stan's also gotten hilariously good at sniping his twin with a pillow when the guy does or is about to do some really dumb shit. Like messing with rocket fuel that may or may not explode? Yeah Stan's chucking that flask out the window and hitting a bullseye to the face on a grumpy Stanford with a couch cushion.

It's all fun and games no matter what happens and both of them know when to take it seriously or when not to do this. Though so far, it's generally free game and the twins are just that chaotic even as adults.

[stars-over-ice-cream]

hello and happy holidays!!! my secret santa was (surprise surprise lmao) @klance-daydreams :)) kd i hope you're having a great time and that you enjoy reading my fic lololol this was so much fun it even has two parts!! ty for organisning this <3

part one | part two

For the record, Lance blames this entire situation on Keith. After all, it’s his fault that Lance’s tongue is positively burned to a crisp, and it’s his fault that around fifteen cups of hot chocolate are missing from the kitchen.

“You need to take a course for damage control,” Pidge mutters, handing him a mop. Lance stares at it, shuddering.

“Pidge. Please, don’t make me go out there.”

“Hunk’s an angel, I’m busy taking inventory, and no one else is here right now,” they count off their fingers.

“I’m an angel too and you know it,” Lance mutters.

“You burn kitchens. The only thing Hunk burns is a crème brûlée.”

Lance ignores the urge to fangirl over Hunk’s cooking—there are more pressing matters at stake, believe it or not, like who should be the one to face the chocolate war zone outside.

“What about Keith?” he asks. “He’d love to be sacrificed.”

“What if you two went out together?" Hunk proposes, clasping both his hands together.

Lance almost short-circuits, replying in what feels like a delayed reaction. "Ew!"

His voice comes out high-pitched and wavering. He’s all for blaming this on the mess outside, it’s probably making his brain lag more than usual.

“What?” Hunk asks innocently. “What I meant is, uh, you two would be very efficient cleaners out on the battlefield. Not as in went out, like, on a date. Obviously.”

Lance doesn't like that look in his eyes.

"I'm revoking your access to my Netflix," he threatens, as Keith’s voice just so happens to echo through the kitchen doorway.

“Lance, if you’re blaming me for your pathetic heat tolerance, I don’t want to hear it.”

“Speak of the devil." The brunette rolls his eyes as a slightly miffed Keith swings the door open.

Despite being inside for at least an hour, his nose is still red from the below freezing temperatures outside, and his whole face actually seems slightly flushed, the more Lance thinks about it. A scarf dangles from his shoulders like an afterthought.

Lance raises his eyebrows. “Shouldn’t you have taken that off, like, last century?”

It’s a low blow, but Keith set the bar when he decided to—what was it again?—oh, yeah. Chug three boiling hot chocolates in the span of two minutes. Then, with a stupidly pretty grin that Lance couldn’t say no to and eyes that seemed tipsy, challenge him to do the same. And because he’s such a trendsetter, which is a given, at least four other groups try the same task.

The result?

Altea Cafe, trashed. Hot beverages spilled on the floor, tables, even on the walls. Someone had the nerve to call it abstract art, as if they were doing Lance and his lot a favour.

“Very funny," Keith says.

“I do that sometimes.”

Giving him a signature scowl, Keith turns to Hunk and Pidge with a considerably nicer look on his face. “For the record, I’m sorry for the mess.”

“What?” Lance says. He does his best to ignore the curiously smug look on Pidge’s face—he knows that his mouth has been talking nonstop around Keith, but it doesn’t mean anything. Or at least nothing that Pidge and Hunk keep insinuating.

Keith stares at the blue-eyed boy, deadpan. “For the record, I’m sorry for the mess. I know an otorhinolaryngologist, if you want.”

Smartass.

Lance can’t deny that long words suit him, though. It just fits with the three piercings on his ears, the quick quips of his tongue, the sharp cut of his jaw. Long words are Keith’s thing, Lance decides. And it’s not because it makes his throat a little dry.

“Grab a mop and start cleaning, if you’re so sorry,” he says, suddenly fully aware that he’s probably been staring. Chucking an old mop over, it lands a metre from Keith’s feet.

“Impressive,” Keith says, sarcasm dripping off his tongue.

“As if you can say much!” Lance snaps. “Last time I checked, the mess outside is all because of you, so.”

Unaffected, Keith says flatly, “You were the one who dropped at least three cups from ‘adrenaline,’ and then proceeded to—”

“Nope! Sorry, I’m not fluent in lies and slander.”

Pidge snickers, exchanging looks with Hunk, who in turn clears his throat.

"Maybe you two would like taking this outside?" he offers, and if Lance hadn't known him for three years, he would've thought that Hunk was trying to be genuinely helpful.

Alas, he's actually playing the matchmaker card.

"No thanks," Lance says through gritted teeth. The last thing he needs is for his frankly embarrassing attempt at sweeping under tables to be seen by, well, him.

Him, at this moment, is a pain in the ass. But other times—when he’s not spouting libel against Lance like it’s his job—he can actually be quite nice. And pretty. And funny. And kind of hot.

Lance could go on about him for a while, really. It's a scientifically proven fact. Hunk once recorded a fifty minute swoon session for Lance so that he could realise just how far gone he is.

“Whipped,” Pidge snorted after Hunk texted them about it.

So, yeah. The severity of Lance’s romantic attraction is well known in his friend group, and yet he’s still subjected to knowing looks and waggling  eyebrows with no mercy.

It’s honestly ridiculous! One day, Lance is going to explode with embarrassment. How much can a guy take? High doses of Keith Kogane—aforementioned pain in the ass—and relentless teasing have probably been proven fatal, after all. It's a lethal combination.

Lance would know, seeing as sometimes, it actually does feel like he's fighting for his life. Even though he’s come to the conclusion that if he ignores Keith for long enough the crush will magically disappear. Despite what his friends think, it is a phase. Just like his thankfully short soft spot for Nyma, or Allura.

He just has to get over himself.

Interrupting his thoughts, Pidge says, "Lance, you must've got Keith really worked up if he's taken his hands out of his pockets."

"Hm?" he asks, neck craning to see the ever rare phenomenon.

"—anyways, all I'm saying is, if you weren't so loud about it, no one would've heard about the challenge, right?" Keith's saying to Hunk, hands widely gesturing.

Lance doesn’t find it cute. At all. But that's where he and Pidge disagree.

“Dude, you’re staring,” they mock whisper.

“No I’m not!” Lance shoots back, heated. Just to give himself something to do, he pulls himself up onto the counter.

Keith seems to have finished his recounting of the hot chocolate challenge, and he turns to Lance, eyes piercing, locking onto him with absolutely no precision—almost dazed, blurred. They’re so bright yet dark at the same time, nothing like what Lance has seen before, and the realness of the moment catches up to him in a heartbeat.

His throat is giving up on him, Lance is pretty sure. Go figure.

“What did I do now?” he asks defensively, forever on autopilot, preparing for another verbal jab. “Did I, like,—”

And that’s when it happens.

The voice crack.

Lance cringes so bad he nearly falls off the counter. He said goodbye, hell, he yelled goodbye to voice cracks in middle school. Hunk stifles a laugh, turning around to the cupboard, and Pidge closes their eyes, sighing as if to say you’re fucking kidding me.

And Keith?

He snorts, staring at Lance’s truly and deservedly red face, and starts giggling. Throwing his head back and laughing, the scarf almost unwinding  itself from him because he’s shaking that much.

What the fuck.

Keith turns around to face Hunk as if to say, you heard that too, right?, and the few seconds of silence dissolves into what Lance would officially clarify as hysterics. Great, lovely, absolutely perfect! At this rate, he’s going to have to give him back to Shiro with a no return policy: Lance cannot, and will not, look Keith in the eye again. Ever.

It’s a matter of respect and dignity, and Lance really doesn’t appreciate the Pidge inside his head doubting the fact that he has any left. Whatever. This entire day has been a shitstorm, and if he even glanced at the cafe it would only be physical evidence of that.  

But the worst part?

Mortifying as it is, Lance can’t find it in himself to look away from Keith’s face. The kitchen’s overhead lights catch a glint in his eyes, and all of a sudden Lance deems his laugh the best sound he’s ever heard, even if it’s an outcome from possibly the most embarrassing moment of his life.

As the seconds wear on, Keith’s laughter doesn’t really subside (which is a pro and con for Lance, the more he thinks about it) and soon he’s wheezing, doubled over. Honestly, it’s a wonder he hasn’t collapsed yet. Pidge has their phone whipped out—who needs paparazzi when you’ve got a gremlin with a penchant for blackmail?—and Hunk is batting his eyes at Lance, gesturing at his cheekbones, mockingly swooning.

“Shut up,” Lance would’ve hissed, if it weren’t for the fact that he doesn’t trust his own tongue anymore.

“It’s official,” Pidge says. “You’re a safety hazard. Look at Keith, Lance—” Lance wants to cry, that’s literally all he’s been doing—“you’ve broken him.”

“I think you should do something,” Hunk suggests. “To make up for his… malfunction.”

“I’ll apologise to Shiro when he comes around,” Lance replies, wondering if he should text him in advance. It might cause a little bit of whiplash, after all.

“Uh, no,” Hunk says, affronted. “You should make it up to Keith.”

“Maybe us, too,” Pidge says wryly, “we deserve financial compensation for listening to that voice crack.” Lance scoffs. “But seriously, Keith.”

“You guys are making this into such a big deal,” Lance says. “I didn’t even do anything!”

His two apparent ‘best friends’ give each other a Look, and it’s almost like clockwork, the way they subtly try to leave.

“Would you look at that?” Pidge yawns, staring at their watch. “God, I forgot. Me and Matt have to get dinner ready. Oops.”

“It’s four in the fucking afternoon, Pidge.”

“Dinner takes a lot of time to prepare, Lance,” Hunk reasons. Traitor. “And I have a date with Shay, too. Guess I’ve gotta go.”

“Guys, please,” Lance almost begs, “I can’t be alone with Keith! Not when he looks drunk off his ass!”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if he is,” Pidge mutters. “It’s, like, the only cure for crushing. Not that I would know.”

“What?”

That’s the second time—nope, scratch that, third time—today that Lance has nearly lost it. What do they mean, ‘only cure for crushing’? Is that the Pidge way of letting Lance know his crush on Keith is, well, unrequited? That he’s in love with someone else?

Christ. Well. Thanks, Pidge.

The door slams behind the two, a quick and cheery ‘bye!’ being Lance's only answer to the question.

He turns to Keith out of pure confusion, only to find the raven head slumped against one of the counters, sitting on the floor with his eyes closed.

Yeah, hands down, this is the weirdest day of Lance’s fucking life.

Keith hums, and Lance wonders whether he’s actually drunk—that would explain a lot, like his flushed face and skewed behaviour.

He doesn't really know what to say. Or do. It's awkward, and the silence only paves way for what Pidge said: it's, like, the only cure for crushing.

"Hi," Lance says, because if he thinks about it too much he will probably start crying, the tightness of his throat tells him that much. Hopefully he'll be blessed with Keith saying something dumb instead as a distraction.

"God, I sound like a loser," Lance mutters after a few moments of no reply. "What say you, Kogane?"

Nothing.

"You're dry as fuck."

Rinse and repeat.

"Practically burnt toast."

Once more with feeling, he supposes.

"But Keith, the thing is, expired bread grows mould, not ugly mullets."

The asshole doesn't stir at all—and no, Lance definitely isn't upset about it. He just thinks that it's too smart a line to be wasted on an unconscious Keith.

It's stupid that he's getting ghosted by him in real life. Embarrassingly stupid.

So, like a good Gen Z, he gets out his phone.

part one | part two

[t00thpasteface]

hey! i was just curious if i could use your art in an artist study? i looked over your faq and i didn't see any mention of it so i just wanted to ask. it's okay if the answer is now, no pressure :)

(⁠ ⁠ꈍ⁠ᴗ⁠ꈍ⁠) sure, if you credit me! i would be incredibly flattered!!

now that being said, i would also like to share with you some artists whose work i've enjoyed doing studies of! i find it's very useful to "follow the money" with artists you like, and go along the chain of inspiration to see how ideas and styles can change from person to person.

vincent van gogh is my BIGGEST inspiration in terms of color and composition! his unique style of brush work is what he's best known for, but i recommend looking at his works holistically too, and seeing where the eye is led and how he plays with light, color, and mood. if you want to go further, he was very inspired not only by prior impressionists, but also by japanese ukiyo-e artwork— try comparing "starry night" to "great wave off kanagawa" and seeing the similarities in the grand, sweeping movements they convey.

i'm sure i've said this a million times, but genndy tartakovsky has probably my favorite cartoonist style. it's at its peak in samurai jack— opinions are mixed about the narrative quality of season 5, but if nothing else, the art direction is absolutely jawdropping. one of my favorite scenes is the bit in the tomb, where jack is hiding in a sarcophagus, because the music and visuals are paying homage to a scene at the climax of "the good the bad and the ugly"!

in a totally different direction from those two... i'm a huge fan of gil elvgren's pinup girls! i've had a few different pinup calendars over the years, and at the end of the year, i like to cut up the pages individually for mini posters— i've covered pretty much all my available wall space in his illustrations. i love it when artists don't feel the need to sacrifice expressiveness for realism; his girls are SO DARN CUTE and they all look like they're having so much whimsical, cartoonish, flirty fun!

here's a post where i talk about more inspirations!

here's a post listing some other tumblr artists i like!

i'm also just very heavily inspired by 50s-60s print illustration... things like advertisements, "clip art" (which you had to physically clip out of a book and paste onto the page), and of course, tv cartoons. one big trend i love with that "googie" art style is how incredibly limited the palettes were, and how efficient the economy of line was. as much as i love the bold, blocky, dynamic shapes of styles like tartakovsky, who takes insp

also, please remember i'm entirely self taught and am NOT an expert, so just be aware of that if you see any weird stylistic choices in my work... i admire the work of a lot of professionally trained artists, but that doesn't mean i have any training or real right to go around teaching people stuff. i'm just some guy from a big crazy family full of artists, only some of whom went to school for it.

okay, that got way longer than i meant it to, SORRY! here's a pic of my cat Carmen as a thanks for reading this far ^_^

[astoundingbeyondbelief]

Kaiju Week in Review (March 3-9, 2024)

Shin Ultraman took an eternity to reach home video, but Godzilla Minus One will proceed as a more reasonable pace (by Japanese standards). Toho will release roughly one billion different editions on May 1, with Amazon- and Godzilla Store-exclusive physical bonuses both on offer. Godzilla Minus One/Minus Color is included with some of the pricier versions, or you can buy it as a standalone Blu-ray or DVD.

The black-and-white version of Shin Godzilla, SHIN GODZILLA:ORTHOchromatic, also hits Japanese home video on May 1. Like Minus Color, no 4K edition, just Blu-ray and DVD. A handful of new bonus features about ORTHOchromatic are included.

As is standard for Toho, none of these releases will be English-friendly. But given the films' popularity (and the lack of any legal way to watch Minus One since it left theaters), expect bootlegs to circulate at light speed.

Unsurprisingly, Godzilla Minus One cleaned up at the Japanese Academy Awards, with eight victories out of eleven nominations: Picture of the Year, Best Supporting Actress, Best Cinematography, Best Screenplay, Best Editing, Best Sound, Best Art Direction, and Best Lighting. That's one more than Shin Godzilla, and pretty much guarantees that the Toho Godzilla series will keep the prestige pictures coming. Strange times!

We'll see if Minus One can also capture Best Visual Effects at the American Academy Awards tonight. The Creator remains its biggest competition. The Gareth Edwards film is better-positioned by the usual metrics, with a second nomination for Best Sound and five wins at the Visual Effects Society Awards, but the enthusiasm gap for the films themselves may prove decisive. I'll be doing a much lengthier analysis during Wikizilla's Oscar stream tonight, which will start at about 6:00 PM ET, an hour before the ceremony begins.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire tickets may not be on sale yet, but Cinemark theaters have rolled out the above merch (much more efficiently than Target and Walmart have rolled out the toyline, if my local theater's any indication). I have a suspicion those plushies will be worth a mint a few years from now, small as they are; don't know about the other stuff. I bought the larger popcorn tin when I saw Dune: Part Two on Thursday. The promo image is deceptive, as the green area is transparent plastic and the Titan image is on the opposite wall of the tin, so that popcorn's either defying gravity or being held up by a hidden insert. There are Kong and Skar King variants as well, the latter revealing his height (318 feet). Poor Shimo; being the "secret" villain really narrows the amount of merch you get.

The other interesting GxK news this week (apart from the endless TV spot variants, which I'm not even trying to keep track of) is a collaboration with the American Red Cross, of all institutions. Donate blood, platelets, or AB Elite plasma from March 25 to April 7, get a free T-shirt. And for completion's sake, I'll mention the Roblox and Call of Duty cross-promos too.

Chibi Godzilla Raids Again, an unexpected delight last year, is getting a second season starting April 3. The official site revealed that Minilla is joining the cast, while those silhouettes to his right look like Titanosaurus (unjustly neglected in recent years), Gigan, and Gabara. Expect to follow the first season in being uploaded to the GODZILLA OFFICIAL by TOHO YouTube channel with English subtitles.

Here's another chance to watch Tsuburaya and Toei Animation's Kaiju Decode short, originally released in 2021. (It goes away at the end of the month, because every Japanese studio is apparently hellbent on making short films ephemeral, so download it now.) It's the basis for a recent mixed reality game for the Meta Quest 3 and Meta Quest Pro, hence its return to the spotlight.

UniVersus, a collectable card game predicated on pitting characters from various franchises against each other, is going all in on Godzilla after offering a couple of Minus One cards through highly convoluted means last year. They're releasing a couple of Godzilla Challenger Series (preconstructed decks) on June 21, one based around Godzilla and Mothra, the other around King Ghidorah and Rodan, with Mechagodzilla thrown into the mix for both. I've never played this game in my life, but the prospect of a shiny Godzilla card with James Stokoe art is sort of tempting.

[shelandsorcery]

Astronomics Game Art : Designing Mining Equipment!

Gonna talk this week about designing mining equipment for the sci-fi game Astronomics - demo on steam right now! - And I thought I'd start with a little conversation about research and process (...that doesn't really have on a much art in it but just stay with me) and maybe get to tap in a little bit into how someone like me who doesn't do a lot of technical design learned a lot about how to get excited about that whole field through the research stage of this game.

So when I say research I really do mean fairly old-school research — and this is probably gonna be a theme with a lot of the posts about this game in particular, because I don't think you can build sci-fi without some understanding of engineering systems and current scientific realities to then play with, you know?

As you may gather from the trailer, Astronomics is a game about asteroid mining, among other things. Which meant that we had a lot of need for legit industrial feeling props and tools for the player to use, things that felt functional and believable without feeling complicated or delicate. I really enjoy the challenge of adding appeal to something that maybe people don't always think about being appealing or fun or cute (this is never an absolute statement — there's always somebody already able to see more appeal in any given subject and I could ever imagine) so part of the research stage is going and looking for that appeal. So above you can see a sheet of loose rough sketches I did in clip studio paint from reference that I gathered with the rest of the team and by myself that seemed relevant to some of the designs we were pursuing.

If you've had the chance to play the demo, you'll know that it's not just surface mining but we are going to be letting you mind gases and liquids and underground mineral veins as well — these are all things that people do in the real world of course, so process one was taking a quick look at those actual industries and then figuring out how I could condense that activity down into a pretty simple and easy to understand machine.

So turned out what we needed was something that drilled and dug, something that pumped liquids, something that sucked air, and all of these things needed to then produce some sort of container to hold what they had collected.

In a videogame you really need to communicate to the player why each act they do is significant and different from the others, and as the art director it was my job to figure how to do that through visual design of the tools they're going to be using. So that meant that even though you could certainly store liquid and gas and solid resources in the same kind of box, I wanted to try and find ways to keep each thing feeling different. Best case scenario is that you're able to look at a prop we've designed and know in a split second which of these three states of matter it will be containing; in the research stage one of the things I'm looking for is any existing visual language that we have (in this Western English-speaking North American videogame audience culture) that already solves this problem.

The great thing about industrial design is that they indeed have very intentionally tackled this problem. Part of it is purely physics optimization that the field of engineering has been working towards for human history. For example, when you're storing liquid and you want to remove all of it from a container you probably don't want something with corners — that's how you end up with cylindrical liquid storage. When you're storing a gas you're likely keeping it under pressure, which means you need a shape that will withstand pressure evenly, which means you're looking for something with literally no corners or edges ideally — and that's how you end up with bubble-shaped gas storage like a propane canister. And then when you're storing something solid and you want to use the space most efficiently and be able to stack whatever it is that you have packed it into, you have a box.

Real good news is, a box and a cylinder and a sphere are all wonderfully visually distinct shapes in a fantastically strong place to start when it comes to solving the question of storage. So then we get into the challenge of the machines themselves — what distinguishes a drill from a pump from a vacuum?

So that's the beginning of some of the questions that you have to answer when you're designing props for a game — in the research stage is only one of bunch of different ways you start figuring out these answers. But I want to talk for just a second a little bit about how I personally wrangle my research, because I am definitely not telling you this is the only way to do it. It seems like it may be worth explaining what I get out of this process and see if anything here make sense for you!

One of the reasons that I have this huge page of sketches, big and detailed or tiny and loose, all laid out in one place for me to look at, is because I personally learn and remember things more strongly by taking notes. With my hand holding a pencil ideally. And when they're abstract concepts or verbal or numerical then I'll use writing and I won't have a problem with it, but my job at this stage was not to figure out abstract concepts or to find themes — my job was to solve visual problems. So my first order of business was visual research specifically. Now for me, that involves lots of things — I have a Pinterest board for any sort of subcategory of stuff I'm researching to just do enormous broad research with; then I probably bring most of those images into a huge working .PSD file and move them around to create groupings. And then I start drawing.

I really think that drawing is integral for me at this stage. I don't think I could do this without drawing as part of my research. There's so much that I just don't bother noticing if I'm not going to be drawing the thing that I'm looking at; even the worst, fastest, sketchy as drawing makes me pay infinitely more attention to something then I do when I am simply collecting information mentally. I'm phrasing this in a somewhat exaggerated, self-deprecating way, but I really can't exaggerate how much more I get out of things when I sit down and draw them. They talk about drawing is a way of seeing, and for me that's a practice I've intentionally pushed and explored in my life.

The other thing, though, is that visual problem that I need to solve. Sometimes solutions to the problem aren't obvious until they are visualized — it can be very easy to get distracted by things like surface details and miss the silhouette language, or vice versa, but when you are doing the drawing you have to wrestle with the silhouette and the details and make decisions about them. Visual trends appear way more clear when you are drawing something for the 10th time as opposed to simply seeing it for the 10th time. And all of the layers of cultural meaning and context that clutter up a photograph can be simply ignored as you transfer only what you need to a drawing, where you might discover something that everything else hid until then. Beyond that, one of the things you may notice about the sketches is that they are somewhat cartoony — I'm certainly trying to capture important details and be representational to a degree, but much like gesture drawing the human figure, researching this way lets me start finding out what the gestures are of these different sorts of subject matter. This is something that I knew about creature design, and about flora design, and one of the real joys of this game in particular was proving to myself that this gesture approach applied to industrial machines and technology as well.

I mean, I knew that there were cute trucks out there, but gosh.

I think if you are in need of something to reinvigorate a particular piece of subject matter for you — if you're designing something that you are just not that excited about, or if you don't feel challenged by the work in front of you — I really think sitting and sketching from reference can open up the complexities and help push you and your work farther. It certainly works for me and I know that the learning I did on this game is something I carry with me to future projects as well.

That seems like a pretty strong place to leave this post in particular, but I'll be back later this week with more breakdowns and screen caps of the actual design process of all of our adorable mining equipment!

I would really love to hear from folks if you also engage in similar research processes before going into full design mode — or if you have a completely different way to get your mind revved up and ready to go, I would really enjoy reading about it!

In the meantime, if you're curious about mining asteroids but it's cute please feel free to check out the Astronomics demo on steam, I made an awful lot of visdev art for this and handed it off to some incredible game creators who have done some really impressive stuff taking their ideas and my ideas and running to honestly some pretty new and exciting places with them.

[kkbardd]

hi! popping in quickly.

I absolutely adore your artstyle and your ocs. their personalities and stories are always so interesting, and I look forward to seeing any type of art you post.

If you take a break from drawing asurei, that's completely okay!! doing things with joy is more important than just doing them. I will enjoy whatever you draw regardless— in fact, I regularly go back to that drawing of the unnamed pink haired girlfailure OC and her "friend" daily. i am mayhaps their number one fan.

please continue sharing your stories and ideas!! I adore your characters and designs so much. I am very excited for your toxic yuri freeloader/assassin story.. they are very interesting!!

also saw you did some dialogue in japanese.. do you speak it ? im quite interested in any language so.. apologies if this is off topic ><!

In any case, thank you for continuing to create. I love your art and hope you continue to draw what makes you happy and what you feel motivated to do. I love all your art regardless of subject matter!! in fact it convinced me to to start watching madoka magica :}

best wishes !! hope you're well!!

wahhh isopod !! u always send me the nicest asks when i need them most!! i hope ur doing well ~ although my last post sounded pretty depressing im actually doing pretty well too! im going to the aquarium next week w some friends so im looking forward to that more than anything >:D

I've been reading a lot of short yuri stories by Toyo Totan & Iwami Kiyoko lately and I'm excited to use that inspiration to improve some of my own OC stuff too! (I recommend 'Last Summer Vacation' !)

And yes I'm fluent in Japanese !! I'm actually an officer in my college's JP language community & I used to translate manga on the side !! I'm completely self-taught through videos though, so while my listening and speaking are fluent I actually suck at reading LOL I'm so bad that when I translated manga I'd use my camera's text to speech to do everything...

I'm a huge language nerd too! I watch a bunch of scientific videos/TED-Talks on how our brain learns languages and tips to learn things more efficiently! For example, apparently when you first start learning a language you should never try to speak it right off! If you try speaking before listening for a very long time, your brain just kinda solidifies your verbal pronunciation and it can have long-term effects on not only how you sound, but also how you HEAR sounds! This is also why some think that children learn languages better, because they spend a long time exposed to it while being non-verbal. I love this fact bc I kinda experienced it myself!

I spent about 2 years just watching JP translated videos of people speaking naturally (not videos aimed at foreigners, nor shows that have acting, more like vlog-type stuff!) and only started speaking when exposed to others who could speak it too ! Especially during COVID, I think I was pretty much spending ~80% of my day listening and thinking in Japanese so I was very immersed! And because of that, I'm a little famous in my community for having the best pronunciation 😤 Going to on a trip to Japan & translating for the people who went with me also boosted my confidence a lot! I'll never forget this guy at an izakaya who asked how many years I've been living in Osaka LOL ("three days actually!")

I think the biggest downside though is that once u learn another language, ur first language skills get bad.. i often think up half-sentences and sayings/metaphors in Jap that just sound wrong when you try to translate it back into Eng ;;; i sometimes trail off when i speaking because i forget the english word for certain things, but my friends are now just used to my weird metaphors so!

I went on such a long tangent!! But anyways!! Thank u for always sending me the sweetest asks, I always save them to my phone and I'm pretty sure all my friends know abt u bc I always show them the nice things u say 😭!! And yes!!! Madoka is so good, especially the movie so im excited ur gonna watch it!! I hope u like it!

and finally for their #1 fan <3 :

[clarafyer]

MY PERSONAL ART TIPS! A big thread I'll be adding to

I too, was once a 10 year old gacha kid whose only drawings were a way too detailed catgirl persona and friends. I didn't have much in-person or online inspiration and help for a long time! So I'll help others earlier in their art journey (and perhaps the masters too, never not a good idea to try some advice!)

So let me spare some of you a few of the unnecessary mishaps during everyone's art life.

If you've never seen my blog before, hello! My name is Clara. I'm a neurodivergent teen artist, aspiring animator, and resident cat person. It's nice to meet you! If you'd like to know who you're taking advice from, here is some of my latest work!

Now without further ado, LET THE HELP COMMENCE!

STROKES: Fix stiffness in your poses!

To start off, a BIG thing I recommend for newish artists, is don't be afraid to draw loosely! The looser the lines, the less stiff the pose. And stiff poses are a very common issue within the community. Sure, your anatomy may look bad for the first while of drawing looser lines, but it will help you be more confident in strokes. The more confident the stroke, the more efficient an artist. The more efficient an artist, the faster you learn.

To practice loose lines, simply draw a long line as fast as you can. Over and over again. I know, that may seem boring, but it helps train your hand and arm to be faster. But if it's so much a hassle to do in your free time, then do it on the side of a worksheet if you're in school, or a sticky note if you're at work.

Speaking of practicing...

PRACTICE MAKES BETTER: Get over it!

I said the phrase wrong, didn't I? Oh wait, no I didn't. NO ONE IS PERFECT. And don't forget that! There will always be issues, problems, and mistakes in your art that you don't realize until the day after you've shared it with everyone you know. The artist is always their worst critic. So the best thing you can do is to keep at it. Practice your weak points to support the composition more, hone in your strong points to better make a focal point. Practice will always help, even if you don't see it. A slow pace is better than no pace!

"But Clara, what are my weak points? How do I know what I always mess up on!?" you may ask...

ANALYZING YOUR ART: Pros and cons!

Well, pick your latest finished piece and tear it apart (NO NOT LITERALLY OH GOD NO PLEASE-) I mean analyze it. Grab your pen and a separate paper, or just your notes app, and make a list of pros and cons in it. Doing this with multiple pieces is especially important, as with multiple examples, it's easier to find a pattern.

How about this, I'll give you an example!

Here we have a piece I made a few weeks ago. It's of my Western AU of my main cast of OCs. TIME TO NITPICK!

WEAK POINTS

- The clouds are too detailed compared to the rest of the composition

- The right horse seems very stiff (I already am aware I struggle with drawing animals nowadays)

- The funky hatching I did with the plateaus in the background just isn't working out as well as I thought it would anymore

- the god damn horse on the right

- The sky in the middle just seems far too empty. I could have added more indication of the sun at the top to add more noise

STRONG POINTS

- The color palette I chose blends well while having the colors still be sharp and clear against each other

- The entirety of the woman and her horse on the left

- The glitchy effect adds some zestiness to it that I love

- The whole thing looks quite cinematic, with a successful wide shot and the black bars imitating that of a movie's

- The inlines of the otherwise completely flat-colored silhouettes help define the overlapping shapes quite well

And there you have it, 5 pros and cons each I found in something you probably only noticed were little to none. No, I'm not bragging, it's an actual psychological phenomena where the artist notices so many more intricacies than the average outside viewer. Your mom isn't hanging up your art out of pity, GET THAT OUT OF YOUR HEAD! People love your art so much more than you do.

That's it for the first post. Don't worry, there'll still be more helpful tips coming! I just won't be able to fit everything in here with Tumblr's picture limit and all. Happy drawing!

[waywardstation]

I'm a little sad to see this blog mostly shares polls nowadays... I miss the AU talk and random chatter about ideas or headcanons, your opinions on things and the wip wednesdays I'm still happy to see your art in between all those polls. (before forgetting: you might have already lost but to me Train of Thought IS and WILL BE my favorite submas AU. No contest. Nope. Never.) But yeah, missing the old days here. Dearly. Verrrry much. Don't get this wrong, you're either probably still recovering, you're insanely busy or maybe even moved on... either way wishing you have fun with wherever tracks take you! I was happy to be on this blog in it's prime.

Hey Anon! I will be honest with you on this cause I do want to explain what has happened with this blog lately, and where I plan to go with it. (It’s not going anywhere, don’t worry!!)

There are a few reasons for the inactivity. Part of it is just me recovering from university work. I pushed myself way harder than I should have for way longer than I should have, and now I’m kinda trying to just recalibrate my brain and mental health. It’s really foggy and I struggle with concentration and comprehension a lot currently. (And this is also why I haven’t really answered asks, when I tried to answer Papa Ingo AU asks while like this, it really only led to getting confused and correctional asks in response, because I kept getting things wrong, and that made things really overwhelming.)

AND SECOND! Most of my free time right now is not being spent on this blog, because most of it is going into writing and editing. Concentration and comprehension issues are making it take a lot longer than I’d like it to right now, but I have a lot of content on the way!

- four new chapters of HFBE

- three chapters of IWLYB

- a five chapter, 25k+ word fic titled Rain Check

- another fic titled Entropy Syndrome

None of these are out yet because Entropy Syndrome’s narrative covers a concept that spans across all of these other fics and chapters, and it’s adjusted a lot of content that’s making me rewrite things several times over to ensure it’s properly written in and connected ^^;

And lastly, sadly a lot of it is just irrational anxiety. I stopped posting for a while for university, and anxiety makes me irrationally scared to start again because it always makes it hard to start back at something once I’ve stopped ^^; (I’m hoping dumping all these fics will alleviate this when I’m done with them though! Fic posting is what diminished my anxiety enough to start this blog in the first place!!)

BELIEVE ME I miss how this blog used to be as well, but my mentality is still sort of recovering from what I did to it for four years straight, and I can’t really force it to keep going more right now. It’s certainly a process, but I’m recovering!

Lots of stuff is coming soon! I have a few minutes drabbles on hand, I will attempt to start posting those while I keep working on these fics.

Thank you for the ask anon!! It means a lot that you liked this blog so much. I still love it, and I’m taking care of myself as best I can so that I can get back to running this blog at full efficiency!!

Thank you again Anon!!! ^^

[gamebunny-advance]

1010 Malt Shop - Green Plushie

It's done. It's finally done. 1 week of blood, sweat, and tears (mostly blood), and he's done.

But I don't have a good enough camera nor photography skills to really capture his true charm ;w;

(Boring self reflection + more pics under the cut)

Anyway, this is the project I've been working on lately. No particular thing really prompted this. Like most things I do, it was started on a whim and finished with will power. I don't really have much experience with plush making or sewing, so despite his obvious faults, I still think he turned out pretty nicely for an amateur.

As per usual, I didn't have enough foresight to document the process, but I can nonetheless talk about the experience and point out some details of it.

Firstly, he's a pretty large lad. Here he is compared to the official DJSS plush and one of the test prints I did of "Melon Float."

Counting his straw, he's about 16 inches tall. I wasn't counting on him being so big, so I don't really know what I'm gonna do with him now...

I say this took a week, but I probably could have quartered that time if I had a working sewing machine, but since I didn't, the majority of the time was spent just sewing the thing together. (Btw, pattern over here.) The only fabric details that weren't hand-sewn are the circle/stripe details on his pants and shoes, and the bow/buttons on his shirt, which were all glued on.

The base pattern didn't come with any clothes, so I just adapted the body patterns into clothes. Structurally, he's basically wearing a second skin~ I did think about making the gloves for the sake of accuracy, but at that point, the only skin he'd be showing is his face, and I wanted to keep some soft parts out since his clothes are so stiff. They're so stiff, they can stand on their own and be stacked on top of each other without falling over.

(The plush has a harder time standing than his clothes do...)

Speaking of the clothes, let me say right now that it bothers me more than anyone else that the paint details don't color-match his pants. I was so high on the euphoria of starting this project that when I was out getting supplies, I saw some glow-in-the-dark paint and thought it'd be a great idea since he's a robot and all. The color on the bottle looked close enough at the time, and the original plan was that only the face would be painted with the other details being felt, but on top of me forgetting that effects paint takes a long time to build up layers, the green also dried differently than I thought it would, so it threw everything off, but I didn't have the patience to suck it up and repaint everything with a better color match. I did try to add a light gradient with my pastels like in the original art work, but it turned out so light that it's barely perceivable and totally not worth the clamminess I get when I touch chalk.

I think the most time-consuming part was his hair. While sewing the body together took 2 days, the clothes 2 days, and painting 1 day, the hair took about 3 as I had to figure out essentially how to do it myself on the fly. The first day was mostly trial and error. I did find a couple of online tutorials about how to get this loopy yarn hair, but the ones that I found both required tools that I didn't have. Eventually, I figured out a way to make it work, but I feel like it was less than efficient:

Basically, his hair is made with chunks of yarn that are tied together, and each chunk is individually sewn into place. I didn't count, but I think there are 13-14 hair chunks total to give him a full head. I do like how I made his bangs uneven to mimick how I draw his hair, but I couldn't quite pull off having his distinct hair-part and I couldn't figure out how to give the illusion of half his hair being straight without it looking weird. (I did try cutting the loops to let the strands be straight, but I didn't like the look of it, so I kept them all loopy).

This is a weird thing to say out of context, but I'm especially proud of the back of his head. Originally I was just going to paint on his undercut (which I'm glad I didn't because this paint REALLY hardens the cotton), so I got the bright idea to sew on individual strands of yarn for it. I think the effect is great, but I would not wish it upon my worst enemy, because to get the effect, I had to sew on each. strand. individually. The day I made the face poll, and said that was going to be a break day? I wound up doing this instead, and it took just as long to sew in those 20+ strands of yarn as it did the rest of his hair.

To segway into that poll, as you can see, I went with option 2 with some slight edits. Just the white/green eyes looked a little plain to me, so I added my usual dark pupil and added a green-star glitter to the center. I'm the one that has to live with this thing for the foreseeable future, so I made some executive decisions. Unfortunately, there were a few errors while painting, which you can clearly see in the above pictures OTL. I did try to seal off my painting areas with tape, but it still bled and stained in a few places. I don't really know if it's possible to clean the stains without ruing the rest of the face, but if you have any ideas, I'd love to hear them.

There are a few extra details that I guess are worth pointing out: he's actually wired. I put in some armature wire so he'd be able to move his limbs despite the stiff felt but... I didn't secure them that well, and the wire for his arms got displaced, so I currently can't bend them ;3;. I'd have to open him up again to replace it, and I REALLY don't want to undress him again to get to his back. The worst thing about this plush is that his clothes are so stiff that he's actually very hard to dress.

The wire in his legs is mostly still in place, so he can at least (kinda) sit.

I think the last thing worth talking about is the ice cream accessory. It was really simple to make (it's just air dry clay over foil + extra pieces), but it's cute, so I wanted to point it out~

It's a hair clip, so it can be taken on and off. Theoretically, it could be worn by a person, but it's a little heavy to be wearing it all day~ The camera/lighting really blew out the colors, but I think it turned out to be a nice creamy french vanilla color like I really wanted~

Other details like the glitter on his eyes/cheeks can't really be captured on my shitty ipod camera, but rest assured that he is pleasantly sparkling~

I think my biggest takeaway from this project has been materials: I thought that using felt would be a great alternative to having to buy an entire yard of fabric for a one time project, but besides the paint, it was the hardest material to work with. If I have to pick and choose, next time I think the body will be felt, and the clothes will be cotton, or maybe I'll actually invest in some fleece, so it can be soft all the way~ Since the clothes are removable, I could theoretically make him his default sailor suit and just replace the straw with his proper hair loop to convert this into a "canon" design plush, but we'll see what the future holds. I did get the felt colors to make my *other* babygirl, but given this experience, I may hold off on making him until a much later date.

[solstrix]

Art log: My quest to try embracing being a slow, non-linear artist (2024.12.08)

I’ll get to the point: it’s still something I’m working on, and I haven’t really figured it out yet. And while these logs are always meant to be about my own experience with art, and my own feelings, this one may very well be only applicable to me.

All that to say, it seems as though this issue of mine is not one that is commonly talked about. So let's talk about it.

I'm a slow artist. There are very few pieces I've been able to complete in under an hour, and I'm sure it's easy to spot the ones I have. My piece for the upcoming Window to Worlds took me, according to Procreate's in-software timer, around *30 hours*. If you've ever watched my Twitch streams, you'll know I was working on the same piece for WEEKS. I have a webcomic I started in 2020, for which I am STILL working on the first chapter.

Whenever I’ve talked about this with other artists in the past, they immediately try suggesting tips and tricks to sketch faster, steps to skip, how to streamline…. And they mean well, I know, and I don’t begrudge them. But the truth is! I genuinely enjoy my process as it is! Every step of the way! And I enjoy the way those steps add up in the final product!

I like polishing my sketches until they look like clean lineart, erasing and adding until it looks right. I like to take my time pushing and pulling my shading, blending smooth in some places and sharpening planes in others. I enjoy experimenting with more complex lighting settings, different temperatures of light and shadows. Lately I've been having fun differentiating how I render different textures, which, again, means I'm spending more time on pieces. I like doing these things! I enjoy my process as it is, so of course I am resistant to changing any part of it!

To make art as efficiently as possible, to me, sacrifices a lot of its weight and meaning, and further takes the fun and pleasure out of it.

But at the same time... Yes, I do find frustration in the fact that I'm not faster. In part because I wish I could participate in those daily art challenges, but mostly, because the faster you are, the more you can make. I look at the amount of project ideas I have, and then I look at the amount of projects I've finished in the past couple months... I will never be able to execute every single idea I have ever thought of, and I have to learn to be alright with that.

To embrace my own pace, for me, has meant approaching my art with more intentionality, and by focusing on the long-term rather than the short-term. This means I'm pickier with the pieces I start and commit to, I establish clear goals for what I want to improve in each piece, I do more planning and iterating instead of jumping into it blindly, I keep track of what I'm working on and when... And I allow myself to take my time with each step, to dwell on it, to bask in it, to enjoy it, flaws and all. I allow myself to switch projects when I feel my motivation draining, so I may come back with fresh eyes later. I work in seasons, not in days, and I let my inspiration and motivation ebb and flow as it will.

Only time will tell how this approach will change my output. But all I can say for now, is that the pieces I've finished recently have made me happier and prouder of my art than ever before.

Our society emphasizes productivity and efficiency, short-term pleasure and immediate returns. This pace may works for some, but I would argue it harms many more, me included. I have given myself permission to quit the race, to go hiking instead. And I hope you can give yourself that permission too.