#repeating shapes

[bellflowermini]

[nikoco11]

I love the way you draw bodies sm! They're always so fluid and unique!! Do you have any tips?? (other than the super obvious look at a reference lol)

hi thank u!! rather than just looking at refs, i explained how i actually use them here in a big old post, and how i keep those poses fluid!

another tip tho, and a more recent thing i’ve been doing, is that i use a ref just to decide a general idea for a pose and then pick my favorite lines either within the reference already or i make up my own

^^ for above, i very loosely used the reference at all. it just gave me an idea to start with for a pose and then i picked dramatic curves i really wanted to do and pushed the pose to show those lines.

a lot of my fluidity comes from caring more about those lines showing in the pose than the pose or anatomy actually making sense LOL

this is a more direct reference !! i liked the angle and the point of the knees, so i started there and then exaggerated what i wanted to draw more swoopy :3

additionally helps line confidence to use as few lines as possible.

it makes a lot of organic swishes and pretty lines if u try to keep each section of a limb or whatever to just a few strokes. 2-3 if ur really wanting to push it!

[saintaviator]

moar hl scraps…. does a pose

[longlivethewildernessyet]

Caramel is gorgeous. A classic example of how Sleep Token play with genre, how they weave intense, metaphorically (and plainly) eloquent, emotionally evocative lyrics into lighter music before plunging into heavy tunes. The lyrics are so straightforward yet laden with Vessel's usual artistry.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Vessel and II's ability to craft a story within a song that is both complete in and of itself whilst contributing to the greater narrative that they're building is admirable to the highest degree. They are masters of their craft through and through.

I just love the way Caramel takes our hand and starts us off dancing and leaves us at a standstill. I'm smiling, I'm crying, I'm shimmying, I'm staring at the wall. I'm having so many emotions. It doesn't surprise me how emotive Sleep Token's music is, we know that already, but it still sweeps me off of my feet every damn time.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Poorly Drawn Cats 2: The Squeakwail

(Part 1)

[merethessc]

totally not a thing im getting into

[simandy]

Every time any of you reblog AI art a fairy dies.

[identifying-cellphones-in-posts]

Gotta get my act together cause there's no way that reply is gonna work twice

[whyamiherewhosummonedme]

There are ten undiscovered deadly (you dont know to what entity) viruses in ten shot glasses in front of you. There is also a taller glass and a mixing utensil. What do you do?

awh fuck. my commitment to the bit versus my burning need for science and that requires not becoming a viral bartender since that would cross-contaminate the samples.

The answer? use the samples for SCIENCE. and then. when the amount leftover that i carefully calculated before the sciencing remains.

i will discover if different viruses taste different.

[unwavering-devotion]

how do i get such a slutty girl waist like you

What.

[wild-magic-oops]

Rook embarrassing himself a bit on the 2nd conversation with his crush but still shooting his shot

[xxplastic-cubexx]

not to be myself on main but im still here

[hotcinnamonsunset]

rabbit heart (raise it up) but make it fashion❣️🐇

[akkivee]

this pic is frying me so bad LOL 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

[voidmetal-alloy]

I know I said this before in tags but- your designs/redesigns are really cool and in depth

Thank you!! I really pride myself on thinking out as many details as possible when I’m making them, I really should make a post detailing some of my favourite things I’ve included at some point. It makes me really happy that people notice that stuff (even though I’m already rambling about it constantly)

[nanomooselet]

Visual Motifs: Tesla

So, one of the benefits of an adaptation like Stampede - a retelling, rather than just lifting from the page - is that they know where it's leading, and they can add context or foreshadowing. For some characters, they can even add presence. In addition, Stampede is required by the limits of the medium to do some streamlining. From all I've heard about their consultations with Nightow, their concern was with themes first.

But there an issue arises in Tesla. What is there to say or do for her? She isn't a presence; she's an absence. There's not much you can add without undermining the gutwrenching horror and thus the thematic impact of her character.

But Orange found a way. In fact, they found multiple ways.

Tesla can never let anyone know what she wanted because she was so thoroughly stripped of action or speech. While she lived no one cared to listen to what she had to say, and she's forever silenced by death. Nightow had to bend the rules to give her a last, ambiguous word.* Memories and assumptions are all that's left. Those are all undoubtedly themes in Trigun. I think it's all still true in Stampede, with an obvious exception.

After all, silence is a statement.

Congratulations to Orange on making it even more horrifying. Though I'm at least reasonably sure that she wasn't conscious in suspension... I hope she wasn't. I suppose it adds to the argument to suggest her fate in the manga was kinder.

It also opens the question of what happened to her in the Fall, but helpfully (?), Nightow had already introduced a means of resolving it. It tidily both suggests a possible future plot point and further characterises Knives in the way he protects what he loves. He says her discovery was to him "but one grain of sand", and he's a fucking liar. (Also, note Dr. Conrad in the picture on Tesla's file. Nai had to learn he was involved somehow.)

My trash boy never disappoints.

Personally I do believe it's jumping the gun to assume Knives actually bears her consciousness, but she had a profound effect on him, much as red geranium petals are now foundational to Vash's identity. While the icon of the Eye of Michael represents a number of things (I'm gonna talk about them too, if I ever get around to it), the variation on it used in the Windmill Village isn't so ambiguous. The arrangement turns up over and over.

Behold the single most obvious way Tesla's made more "present" in Trigun Stampede. (It's sure beholding you.) The motif of Tesla's eye is as central a symbol in Knives as geranium flowers are in Vash. Tesla might not literally be a ghost, but she haunts Knives anyway. He's determined that she'll haunt everyone else too, though they may not know it's her. In his mind, he's her avenging angel.

But he isn't the only one who holds onto her.

And a certain panel in Maximum...

Though those particular eyes actually represent the eyes of humans. Eyes weren't prominently linked to Tesla in the manga, but this may have been the inspiration.

Speaking of the manga... what about Rem? Though we know it or something like it occurred, in Stampede we don't see the confrontation with Vash where she confessed to her anguish over failing their sister, and how far she was willing to go ensuring he wouldn't be hurt. I understand feeling that it flattens her. The narrative is being dictated by Knives in that moment, who wasn't there to witness it and had a vested interest in removing Rem from the story.

That doesn't mean there's no sign Tesla haunted Rem. If Tesla hadn't suffered what she suffered, maybe Rem would have served an uneventful term as Navigation Officer before going back into cryosleep, while the SEEDS fleet peacefully continued on its journey. It was still because she failed Tesla that Rem adopted and raised the twins. Knives's anger/fear at the perceived betrayal by both Rem and Vash still led to him crashing the fleet, Rem's death, and all that happened in its wake.

It's an interaction we never witness - it may not even have been a direct encounter - and yet Tesla, through Rem, instigated the plot. And that's also still true.

Comparing the discovery scenes in Stampede and the manga directly, there's a change. The flower Rem left as a memorial for Tesla in the manga (looks like a white lily, which represents innocence and purity in the Japanese language of flowers and is often used for funerals) is instead a red geranium.

I'd chalk it up to reinforcing Rem's connection with the flower and minimizing the 2D background painting budget, except...

Almost every time the twins as children are together on the screen with Rem, a geranium in a glass dome is there too. The only time it's not present somehow is when they're visiting the Plant room at the start of ep twelve.

And when they find Tesla, there's a shot where this happens:

The red petals are almost invisible in the darkness... and then pop out when she's revealed, like a wound. As if they emerged along with her.

The geranium, to Rem, represents Tesla. When she can, she has it accompanying the twins. The presence of this small, red, glass-bound thing - suspended, mute, so easily stripped of its petals - is perhaps an inadequate gesture, just as Tesla herself never grew to be what she could have been, and adopting the twins may not make a difference. But Tesla can be with her family in spirit and her baby brothers will get a chance to grow. That's all that Rem can do for her now, a regret she bore until the end of her life.

In Stampede, Rem and her successors are positioned as Knives's most direct ideological opposition in a number of ways, and I think one of them is in how they honour the memory of Tesla. Would the twins' older sister have wanted the vengeance Knives wreaked in her name? Or would she have had the grace to hope the humans would learn better? Would she have been happy those who came after her were given the love and the choices that she wasn't?

She can no longer choose. No one will ever know.

And that brings me, finally, to how Tesla haunts Vash.

Unlike the manga, in Stampede it's not as though Vash has any reason to fear being abused, or dismembered, or consumed, or exploited. In the manga he very much feared all those things, and accused Rem of raising them to continue the experiments. He was very angry and frightened to realise he was surrounded by humans and he was "not like them". But in Stampede Vash might as well be a human.

That's definitely a way Stampede thematically diverged from the manga. Nai's the one who's perfect and more like a Plant, because of his powers. Right?

It's Vash who tends to be physically closest to the geranium.

In the SEEDS database, Vash and Tesla are in the same folder, while Nai has his own. There are all sorts of potential reasons, but in my mind it'd be because their colouring matches (yellow-blonde hair, blue eyes). It's Vash (his hands on the left) who notices there's an extra file and starts scrolling through them. He unlocked the database, and he caused the jars of what was left of Tesla to be revealed.

He wears red. Specifically his outfit is red over black - his shirt and pants. And his eyes are the first ones in which Plant patterns are highlighted.

Ever noticed that Tesla's missing both arms?

But it's hardly as though Vash is in any position to understand what Tesla felt, or what she wanted.

And it's not as though Knives, in his loneliness and fear and denial of responsibility, would puppet his sibling for the power to take revenge.

Right?

* Don't get me wrong. Nightow's relaxed approach to worldbuilding could have made her reveal in Maximum a plot hole, but it's not. Plants really are weird enough that just about anything seems possible. Nightow created the impression that discovering her remains was so painful for the twins they came to a mutual, unspoken agreement to avoid mentioning it, let alone using her fate as a rhetorical tool. When Knives finally does bring her up, it's just before trying to meld with and then imprisoning his brother aboard the Ark. To me, it feels like his declaration of total war.