#you didn't make the art

[candiedcolloquium]

"ai is making it so everyone can make art" Everyone can make art dipshit it came free with your fucking humanity

[stil-lindigo]

lead balloon (the tumblr post that saved me)

if this comic resonated with you, it would mean the world to me if you donated to this palestinian family's escape fund.

--

no creative notes because this isn't that kind of comic.

I know I don’t owe any of you anything but I still felt compelled to write about my long term absence. And I feel far enough away from the dangerous spot I was in to be able to make this comic. I have a therapist now, and she agreed that making this could be a very cathartic gesture, and the start of properly leaving these thoughts behind me. I am still, at seemingly random times, blindsided by fleeting desires to kill myself. They’re always passing urges, but it’s disarming, and uncomfortable. I worry sometimes that my brain’s spent so long thinking only about suicide that it’s forgotten how to think about anything else. Like, now that I've opened that door for myself, I'll never be able to fully shut it again. But I’m trying my best to encourage my mind in other directions. We'll see how that goes.

I am still donating all proceeds from my store to Palestinian causes. So far, I've donated over $15K, not including donations coming from my own pocket or the fundraising streams which jointly raised around $10K. In the time since I made my initial post about where this money would be going, the focus has shifted from aid organisations to directly donating to escape funds.

If you'd like to do the same, you can look at Operation Olive Branch, which hosts hundreds of Palestinian escape funds or donate to Safebow, which has helped facilitate the safe crossing and securing of important medical procedures for over 150 at-risk palestinians since the beginning of the genocide.

[magentasnail]

long distance

[what-am-i-doing-in-this-fandom]

vampires age in your halloween au? (vampire old man gucket is fun! just curious about the logistics)

old wolf stanley.. so awesome. tail betrays him by wagging when hes trying to pretend hes not a sap

Vampires don't usually age by getting grey hair and wrinkles, but Fidds hurries his aging process by using the memory gun!!

Stan helps him outta the habit, but it still takes it's toll, y'know?

And, I totally love the idea of Old Stan not being able to hide his fondness because he just can't stop wagging his tail when he's with the people he loves 🙏 So cute 🥹

Previous!!

Next!!

First!!

[inkskinned]

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

[sir-camelot]

Zmarqa is one of my absolute favorite Hualian artists that I found on Twitter and this is just a taste of some of her more recent work.

She writes and draws her own comics of AUs involving them that have so much thought put into them. Her pieces in general are so detailed and you're almost always rewarded for taking the time to really look at them.

Since she's not active here on Tumblr, I would highly recommend following her on Twitter (zmarqa), Twitch (Zmarqaa), or, if you have the spare funds, Patreon (Zmarqa). Her Patreon Discord is full of great folks and she pretty frequently streams on there for patrons, so it is well worth the cost.

I did get permission from her before making this post with her artwork.

[off-mozzarella]

Please read by opening each image, otherwise it makes no sense lol

This is the most stupid thing I've done all year but I was already too far into it when I started regretting it XD

I don't usually do this kind of thing but the concept had been rotating in my mind for a few weeks and I needed to get it out

I have a few ideas but this was already long enough and it felt like a good spot to cut it off, buut I want to see if people like it so 👉👈 hope you enjoyed it

Sorry if it feels a bit weird, I may be able to draw but not write lol, this is my first actual attempt at making a comic

[forgettable-au]

FORGETTABLE-AU (page 82-85)

THAT LAZYBONES!!

[BEGINNING] [PREVIOUS] [CONTINUE]

[datcravat]

pe ru so na

[paintedcrows]

Thief

[demaparbat-hp]

Golden Boy (and Silver Girl) for the Kintsugi AU.

[hurlyburlytopsyturvy]

when you get engulfed by a space-time anomaly and it forces you into therapy for the greater good

[bigfatbreak]

dad villain au: did emilie just. not consider at all that adrien was literally dying at the time. wow

she's in the habit of deciding when Adrien's suffering is acceptable, and if it is, she'll just fix it later.

[joneevarts]

I just want to be happy but rusty quill said no.

Elias' version

Edit: y'all this is Peter Lukas not Martin lmaooo (tho they do look alike, plus I didn't made his white hair strands visible enough so my bad)

[cherryfennec]

Summer Times

Hi! I'm finally back from my two week abroad trip!

[longlostlorian]

fellas who's up strokin their snake