#this is honestly a bit of a mess sorry

[georgieluz]

sheriff luz | modern au | 'dearly departed'

george luz lives a quiet life as a local sheriff, but everyone knows that hiding from your past in a small town never ends well

you and i both know that the house is haunted, and you and i both know that the ghost is me

cowboy collab: #easy ranch #easy company cowboys

[mistinajar]

iceland, circa 1200

my personal thought process and analysis under cut

iceland has always been an extremely isolated island, experiencing very little cultural change in its first few hundred years of inhabitance, and even then it was quite small.

in the canon comics portraying young iceland it was shown that he did not even know there were other nations like him out there, adding to how extremely isolating being an immortal on an island with just yourself and your bird friend would be.

visiting iceland for the other nations would be like travelling for weeks to have a babysitting gig. who would want to do that?

iceland only became a developed country in about the 20th century with industrialisation, population booms following the world wars, and the marshall plans economic benefits. there’s a lot of reason to believe he stayed as a young child for a very very long time.

the picture i draw features a very young iceland looking at an arctic tern chick. a migration of arctic terns are seen in the sky leaving without this chick.

arctic birds breed in the northern nations such as iceland and travel as far south as antartica for the summer.

hws iceland looks at the chick who will surely die young as he continues to live as a child for hundreds of years. like the chick, his family dont return for him even when he’s struggling and needs help and instead carry on without him.

the nothingness of the space above him is more representation of isolation as is how far up the migrating arctic terns are, illustrating the distance between him and all other nations.

he stands with his only friend, his puffin, as they watch a chick that both contrasts what he is yet resembles too much of himself and he envies the death that will become on it.

(close up)

[the-insouciant-scientist]

if you're looking for fursonas for FL OCs, could i request the apologist as a red deer?

Here you go!

[squarebracketsmileyface]

I love TMA and I love the slenderverse, so I kinda mixed them together? We have a Habit in our system, and he has lots of eyes, So i thought, huh, what if i made this drawing of him into a TMA thing? Then I added myself how I look in IW and our boyfriend's sona as avatars too, because why not.

Anyway, Full WIP sketch with Habit included under the thingy because his eyes are so many and all grouped together so they could trigger trypophobia? They do for Vin, so

also the fear of eyes? What's that called? Scopophobia

yeah, anyway

Currently a very rough sketch, but I'm so proud of it and oh my god it's taken me HOURS. Literally 11 hours of actually working on the drawing lmao, it's so much

Habit is an avatar of the Hunt that got taken over by the Eye

Vin's sona is an avatar of the Stranger and the Lonely

Mine is an avatar of the Dark and maybe something else but idk (my initial idea for me was Dark and End, but im not really sure about that anymore? There's not much that's End-y about the design for me lol, I'll have to do some more thinking for that). Maybe the Vast, because space. I love space and the moon and space is dark so it goes well with the Dark. I'm just rambling now lmao)

[dandyshucks]

coming on here just to teehee over an encounter today bc im too embarrassed to on my main account DBFJDKL but ... I'll call this guy Jay, he's a very chill nice guy and he goes to the centre that i go to (mental health activity centre lol) and i think he's in his late 30s? last week he had a pair of pants that he bought but didn't fit him and he couldn't return them bc it was from a store out of town that the centre had gone to on a day trip, so he offered to give them to me maybe bc they might fit me. and i took them and they're SUCH nice pants, i unfortunately dont have any money to give him and feel a little bad abt that but he didnt ask for any so fhdksl nice new pants for me i guess

anyways so today I was walking to the centre from the hospital and saw him walking too, so i joined him and we chatted a little as we walked, and i was wearing the pants today and he asked if they fit well and i was like yeah! and he asked if i needed to use a belt or anything on them, and i was like oh haha yeah im wearing one, and he goes "yeah cuz you're so small, huh?" and i said "yeahhh i have to use a belt on most pants i own haha" bc i didnt want him like. thinking the pants didnt fit or smth. and then he goes "aw thats really cute" before moving onto another topic AND I'M... FLUSTERED AT THAT POINT. idk if that was flirting or if I'm just insane but SBDHFJDKSL.... 🧍

[t4tvglow]

it happened so early in the morning and i am STILL frothing with rage over this text my boss sent me

[nebulouscoffee]

... well it's that time of the year already. If anyone's got a Star Trek ask I'd love a distraction <3

[motherforthefamicom]

trying to find some oldass drawings of one of my first sonas i havent been able to find em yet but instead ive just been unearthing all these old notes an ex friend and i would pass to each other back in middle school

[regardingjenmish]

Grief really is a bitch because while I fully expected to be a crying mess (and i have moments where I am). Instead it decided to attack my body with either lack of sleep/shitty sleep, my skin breaking out or my new favorite one, stomach pain that’s been going on for 3 days mixed with migraines. Love this for me

[makerofmadness]

Gotta say being Persian is funny because you're too white for progressives to care about your representation but not white enough to not get called camel-riders

[yvoi]

i carded and spun yarn and made bofur's gloves from the hobbit movie. if u even care

[loregoddess]

Ok I'm curious, could you elaborate on art school education when you have the time?

Mainly because my friend went to art high school and feels she wasted all the years there while I've been self-teaching myself for a few months by just messing around, so I was wondering just how different the two approaches are :0

Oh, I have lots and lots of thoughts on art education. I do feel that I need to preface this with the whole "my experience is not universal", bc all my feelings about art and art education stem from my own experiences of being self-taught and then getting actual formal college degrees in art.

The shortest version of my long rant, under the cut, is that there isn't a superior way to learn art. With art education, you run the risk of getting bad teachers who don't teach the subject well, and you can also run into teachers who aren't open-minded about approaches to art that differ too much from their own--the flipside, of course, is that there are sometimes amazing teachers who can challenge you to try new things you'd never had thought of on your own, or who have already made a lot of mistakes that they can tell you about so you don't have to make them yourself. With being self-taught, you have to figure out everything on your own, and sifting through online tutorials or reading books can be difficult to find "actually useful and well-explained" advice, but you do also get the freedom of doing literally whatever you want and really focusing what you learn based on what you're actually interested in. Each has it's pros and cons, but neither is technically better or worse, per se, although education of any sort comes down a lot to each person's situation in life, as not everyone has access to education or even the tools for making art.

For the long, long expansion of my thoughts and some of my personal experiences with art education specifically...

In short, I'm technically entirely self-taught, despite holding two different art degrees. Aside from some feedback I got from my 8th grade art teacher (who had agreed to look at my hobby art in her own spare time outside of class), I basically taught myself to draw entirely on my own, using various "how to draw" books, online tutorials, and just a lot of general experimentation and continued drawing on my own. Which meant I made a lot of mistakes, or didn't try out certain things, or got frustrated bc I couldn't figure out how to do something, but overall I had a lot of fun. The actual art classes I took in middle and high school? Well, I took a life drawing class in high school that taught me how to draw from life, a skill I never would have acquired on my own bc the process for learning that skill requires a lot of patience, and personally, I find life drawing to be extremely boring. My high school art teacher was also allowing blatant copyright infringements to occur in her class, which was something I learned years later when taking a media law class in college to learn about copyright law specifically, so I guess I learned what to not do as a teacher if I manage to become one, but I didn't learn a whole lot of actual art skills or even really improve my art in any significant way. I never actually learned anything like the elements of art and how to use them, or color theory, or any of that, in class or even on my own, but because I was constantly looking at lots of art online, and making art on my own and experimenting with new things, I ended up learning all of the "essentials of art" intuitively, sort of like how children learn the grammar of whichever language(s) they grow up speaking without learning the actual formal grammar of the language. Which I think a lot of artists actually do as they continue to make art, even if they don't realize it.

Anyhow, moving on. I personally really enjoyed my undergrad illustration degree. Now, to be fair, if someone was willing to pay me to attend college for the rest of my life as my actual career, that is what I would do bc I love learning, and I love the challenge presented by college courses. But do I feel like I learned anything new about art in those classes? Yes and no. I took a lot of art history classes bc I had never had any art history before college, and found I loved the topic a lot. The life drawing classes I was required to take felt like a waste of time bc I already had that skill from the one high school class, and I spent most of those classes fighting the teachers about why we should have less nude models (bc nudes are super easy to draw from life, but clothing is very, very difficult, and I wanted to learn how to draw clothing as a challenge bc I was bored in those classes). I spent one class teaching the entire class how to use Photoshop bc the teacher's method was absolute BS and I could do everything faster and easier than what we were being taught bc I had been using the program for years (the teacher even joked about how I had hijacked the class, to which I'm still not sure was meant to be friendly or malicious). The "Anatomy for the Artist" class I took was one of the most useful classes I've ever taken, and really helped me with drawing not only humans, but anything with a skeleton and muscles, since the teacher's approach made it so I learned the skill of using actual real-life anatomy as a means of creating art from the knowledge of anatomy (and I lucked out for this class bc I had an adjunct who was there to cover the actual teacher who was on sabbatical, and from what I heard from classmates I would have learned nothing from the usual teacher's approach to the class; I hope the teacher I did have found a good stable job bc she was amazing). Most of the actual core illustration classes helped me improve my art a great deal, but not bc they taught me anything--more so, it was that I had to create a lot of art for them, and find creative solutions to the challenges the projects would present (there were lots of "illustrate this abstract concept without using x, y, or z imagery" or "create an illustration within these specific parameters" which really required me to think about how to plan and go about completing the final project). Somehow, the actual "foundations classes" that I took--where I was supposed to learn things like design theory, the elements and principles of art, color theory, etc.--well, let's just say the teacher was on his way to retirement, and didn't teach any of that really well, so I still ended up going through my undergrad more or less on intuition and the art skills I had cultivated on my own. Mostly, college art classes were useful in helping me to improve my art, not because I learned new things (although I did learn some new things), but rather because I needed to make lots and lots of art in a relatively short time, and making art constantly is the fastest way to improve.

That all said, I still never really got the point of things that I kept seeing or hearing as common art advice. For example: "Use references." Okay? What does that mean? What does that look like? How do I do that? I was never taught that once, and it was only partway through college that I figured out that people meant "look at a photo of a real person to figure out a pose or something" and not "learn about the subject you're trying to draw so you have an understanding of that subject that allows you to draw it from your imagination how you want". And honestly the former advice is useful but...only useful to a point, so I'm kinda glad I never learned it bc it would have stunted my development and presented a roadblock. In either case, I was never taught how to use a ref or what "use a ref" meant in my formal art education, and by the time I figured it out on my own, my repertoire of art skills made the advice moot.

So what's all the long and short of this? Is art education a sham and useless? Well, not entirely, but maybe sort of. It really comes down to which teachers are teaching the subject, and how they do it. I only had a handful of art teachers who were really able to get me to think about art differently and push me to learn more and improve. But I also had a friend in my undergrad class who had never drawn in his life and he found most of the classes super useful bc he wasn't coming in being self-taught and already drawing. We were at different places in our art journeys, and so we got different things out of the college classes.

I do feel overall that the focus of my college classes was more productive than the lack of focus from my high school classes. Would I tell everyone who wants to get better at art to go to art school? Hell no. I got a degree in art because I love it, and because I had hoped to work as a video game concept artist (for which one does need at least a BFA to get hired by most companies). Of course, by the end of my degree I had figured out the video game industry in America was absolutely not a place I wanted to be working for my own health, but my frustrations with how my art education had been structured, paired with the fact that I spent a few classes actually teaching my classmates things, made me think I might make an okay art teacher. But even my wanting to be an art teacher still comes from a place of deep love for art. For those who just want to take up art as a hobby, self-taught is fine, and sometimes it will be better than getting stuck with a bad teacher who'll crush the enjoyment of art. Yes, I think a well-structured art course could help someone learn art and become confident in their art, which is part of the reason I want to try teaching it (esp. bc it took me years to learn some things that a good teacher would have just like, covered in a core class), but like...self-taught or school-taught, there isn't a superior way to learn art. They're both just very different approaches.

[lunardeao3]

I started to work on Rainy Days from the start. I don't know yet when I'll post the first chapter but just know that I didn't give up on it. I'll upload it eventually ☺️

[dandyshucks]

head in my hands helpppp my brother didn't even talk to our parents before hauling a bunch of his stuff over here 😭😭😭 texting w my mother now and I think she's pissed and I'm so scared she's going to get mad at ME even though I've been hassling my brother to text the parents since he first phoned me oh my goddd I've been nauseous from anxiety all day 😭😭😭

[babysdrivers]

hey keeley just here to say I enjoy your posts, the little life updates, tea parties, aesthetic journaling I love it :)

here's a birb for u (he's helping! (throwing everything back out that I just put in))

fran this means so much to me, honestly. sometimes it truly feels like i'm yelling into the void on here and it's just nice to be seen 🩷 and what a handsome birb he is!!

[femmefaggot]

genuinely very very happy about maya still Do Not get me wrong. I simply wish... the world was better and less cruel. and that I was not complicit in that cruelty. and that honorspren in shadesmar werent such hypocrites.