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It's pride month, which means you're legally obligated to read my queer trans graphic novel about a boy who gains the ability to manifest his dreams in real life, including the high school crush who got away, STRANGE BEDFELLOWS!

Bedfellows has been praised for its art, humour, portrayal of mental illness, and of casual queerness in a semi-utopic socialist future. I am told it has made at least 10 people cry.

see where to buy it here: www.arielries.com/books/

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more previews...

a few of the completed illustrations from the game i'm working on - "crowned in vermilion", coming out on june 30th :)

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mom always told not to look out the window at night.

the sheriff is hunting

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Matthew Wong aka 王俊傑 (Canadian-Chinese, 1984-2019, b. Toronto, Ontario, Canada, d. Edmonton, Alberta, Canada) - The Sun, 2016, Paintings: Acrylic on Canvas

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Relistening to the Hadestown soundtrack a lot recently and you know what. I think one of the biggest things that ultimately doomed Orpheus is he changed the shape of his song and his resistance to please Hades. He's "working on a song" that "isn't finished yet", but when he DOES finish it, who is the audience for that song? Not the people he's trying to free, but the God he's trying to take his lover back from.

Epic I is mostly about setting the scene if like, any audience members happened to NOT know the story of Orpheus/Euridyce, but it's still directly critical of Hades. Hades saw her, he wanted her, he fell in love with her because of how she moved in the sun, and the shape of his wanting necessities someone else's deprivation. So he took her where "the sun never shone on anyone", and the world was worse off until she won her 6 months of freedom.

Epic II is the most directly critical of Hades. He is "king of silver, king of gold", king of "everything glithering under the earth", and his capitalist hunger means that will never be enough. Epic II emphasizes Hades' jealousy that someone he wants could ever want to be somewhere else, even temporarily, his exploitation of workers, how the riches that he violently guards only exist because of "a million hands that are not his own".

But Epic III? Epic III is the story defanged. Hades fell in love. It takes away his agency and his responsibility in his own cruelty. It pays deference to him as king put quickly pivots to framing him as just "a poor boy", "afraid", versus a God. but he was always a God! Orpheus tries to reach him by appealing to Hades' view of himself -- a hard worker, laboring thanklessly for the woman he adores, the woman he fights for. He tries to reach him by helping Hades remember love. And it... doesn't work. It can't work.

Hades will never let him go. He will "let them try", but he rigs the game and lays the stakes, and more importantly by capitulating to Hades' rules and agreeing to play the game on Hades' terms and reshaping his song to please the very God he is trying to outsmart, Orpheus loses himself, and he loses the strength and resiliance needed to take Euridyce (and the other Workers!) home.

Something something about how art can be people power and resistance and revolution, but it is also so easy for that resistance to be taken and twisted away from us. It's so easy for that power to be freely given, by us, in some hopeful-hopeless attempt to win over people who will never, ever simply allow us to leave. And how that process systematically removes any real power our art and voices once had because when you play by their rules, you lose. "It's an old tale, it's a tragedy".

And I say all of this knowing that Hadestown itself is has now become a comercial product. Sure we sing it again and again and again, but can we take it back? Once we give it away. Can we take it back?

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a few of the completed illustrations from the game i'm working on - "crowned in vermilion", coming out on june 30th :)

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Bro, we are cooked. The knight that dogs the prince's shadow like a dark and silent wraith just knelt to press his forehead to the prince's hand. Yeah, now he's uttering a prayer whose recipient is ostensibly God but in reality is the deified version of the prince that exists only in his mind. Aaand the prince just caressed his cheek to preemptively grant him absolution. I gotta... I gotta get out of here.

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Aragorn, the Chieftain of the Dúnedain

I based the Northern Dúnedain dress mainly on ancient Turkic peoples of the Eurasian Steppe and Late Romans, since I see Arnor as the Western Rome to Gondor's Eastern Rome, but the Northern Dúnedain have long been nomads in a cold climate. There's also a bit of medieval Egyptian and Iron Age Baltic influences.

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uncles

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artfight coming up soon... 👀 i'm seventhsea on there if yall would like to fight with art this july! as usual i am insane and have a billion characters up

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some things i can control but drawing fitz and the fool isnt one of them</3 so i colored the last sketch of them i made (im at the start of assassin's quest btw wish me luck)

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little sketches of some of my favs from the farseer trilogy doodles are the only things keeping me alive during finals season 🙏 anyways im halfway through the second book wish me luck

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molly nosebleed

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> THE JESTER

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we are much alike

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my hair is Curly and Beautiful but it was wasted on a Nasty faggot like me i just look like an Arch Angel sometimes

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Butch 'Olympia' c. 1863 by Édouard Manet