forest-sh

[forest-sh]

Omg i thought i was voting between 2 chicken breasts and stained glass.

The picture does NOT do pans justice

[forest-sh]

Dont act innocent everyone knows why were here

[forest-sh]

I GOTTA STAY TRUE TO MY ROOTS MAN

TMA AND WTNV IS LIKE A NEW BORN CHILD TO ME

I HATE BABYS.

[forest-sh]

Something I try to keep in mind when making art that looks vintage is keeping a limited color pallette. Digital art gives you a very wide, Crisp scope of colors, whereas traditional art-- especially older traditional art-- had a very limited and sometimes dulled use of color.

This is a modern riso ink swatch, but still you find a similar and limited selection of colors to mix with. (Mixing digitally as to emulate the layering of ink riso would be coloring on Multiply, and layering on top of eachother 👉)

If you find some old prints, take a closer look and see if you can tell what colors they used and which ones they layered... a lot of the time you'll find yellow as a base!

Misprints can really reveal what colors were used and where, I love misprints...

Something else I keep in the back of my mind is: how the human eye perceives color on paper vs. a screen. Ink and paint soaks into paper, it bleeds, stains, fades over time, smears, ect... the history of a piece can show in physical wear. What kind of history do you want to emulate? Misprinted? Stained? Kept as clean as possible, but unable to escape the bluing damages of the sun? It's one of my favorite things about making vintage art. Making it imperfect!

You can see the bleed, the wobble of the lines on the rug, the fading, the dirt... beautiful!!

Thinking in terms of traditional-method art while drawing digital can help open avenues to achieving that genuine, vintage look!

[forest-sh]

As someone who joined Tomarrymort Fandom last year, I am curious... what was it like when it was a very rare ship in the 2000s?

Well, it was a different context back then. A different internet. Mind you, I wrote in Portuguese (my native tongue) and posted on fanfiction.net. There was no ao3, only fanfic forums, livejournal and the big one, ff.net. Back in the 2000s, before tumblr exploded and concentrated fandom in its trenches, fanfic itself wasn’t a very known concept. In a way, the Harry Potter series really helped develop the genre and put it on the map in a way that previous fandoms — Buffy, LotR, Star Trek and others — hadn’t. The moment was very auspicious; HP was a global phenomenon and the internet was rising faster than ever. The months, years between the release of the final four books also helped: restless, hundreds of thousands of fans started writing their own versions of the story. I remember when a newspaper in my country published an article about Harry Potter fans and fanfics. They even mentioned Drarry! A breach between “fandom world” and the “real world”. Nowadays “fanfic” is used a slang in my culture (to mean lie, fabricated tale) by people who have no idea where the term came from. Fandom is a known thing and its members are taken seriously as consumers. Entertainment companies are aware of ships, of tropes, even of old men yaoi.

It was different back then. Even within that huge fandom Voldemort/Harry or TomHarry was a small, almost inexistent ship. We didn’t know yet that Harry was Voldemort’s Horcrux — although some fans had already come up with the theory. There was a lot of crack involving Voldemort. Noseless, bald, snake-like Voldy. He was far from the sex symbol he is today. I remember when Ralph Fiennes was cast to play him…

Tom Riddle, on the other hand, was a bit more palatable. If I remember correctly he was shipped mostly with Ginny. A lot of fans were intrigued by him. But many couldn’t see past the unsexy villain he’d become. A lack of handsomeness — that was unforgivable. Especially in an age where Japanese Animation was also a growing hype — compare Voldemort to the bishonen that treaded gracefully the western screens: Itachi, Sesshoumaru, Light Yagami, all those svelte, long-haired beauties. Even Orochimaru, Voldemort’s most obvious anime double, had more style.

I’ve always liked villains. I read the first Harry Potter when I was six or seven and I already liked Voldemort then. Even as a shade, a shape on the back of Quirrell’s head. When he was re-introduced as Tom Riddle in the Chamber of Secrets I knew he would be my favourite ever. Like many other kids I grew up with Harry. But Voldemort was my son, my love, my darling. I started reading fanfic when I was twelve but most of it was anime’s. When I came across Harry Potter fanfic my focus was the Marauders. We had a very thriving community writing in Brazilian Portuguese before we were all colonised by the internet’s Lingua Franca. Both in English (which I started to learn when I was ten) and Portuguese Voldemort/Tom Riddle was a usually side character. Ginny, Bellatrix, obvious self-inserts OCs, Lucius — those were his most common partners.

TomHarry/Harrymort started to appear more, I think, after the release of the fifth book. That connection, that dream sharing, is hard to ignore. I recall an author who’d put Harry through hell through Voldemort’s hands (he was quite the sadist in their depiction). Others wrote him as the tender violator. Some of the tropes that are now popular began to be formed: Dark!Harry, Dumbledore bashing, Light Bashing. A lot of fics depicted Voldemort “rescuing” Harry from the Dursleys, horrified by the abused he suffered.

Not many explored Harry and Tom, but some did. Time travel fics were almost unheard of. A few gems attempted that glorious hardship: Voldemort and Harry being together while staying true to their morals and beliefs. Those were very hard to find and I treasured them.

I think something shifted in the late 2000s/early 2010s. We now knew Harry was Voldemort’s Horcrux. And we had Flayu. Flayu was the first popular, Japanese fanartist to draw TomHarry/Harrymort. We didn’t have the incomparable @shelter-maki0 but we had drawings like this and this and this.

I stayed away from the fandom and from Voldemort/Harry for a long time. After Voldemort died in the seventh book I renounced Harry Potter……my baby was gone and I felt that he was done very dirty in the end. He went out like a Disney villain. No depth. So I don’t know how we moved from a very niche pairing with few fanfics and only one big fanartist to 16,120 fics as I’m writing this. I missed that bridge. The fandom annoys me nowadays because so many works are more of the same. I feel like we used to be more daring back in my day. But that could be just me being a 30+ old man yelling at a cloud. But also:

For all the annoyance the overuse of that trope (and others) causes me, I’m happy this fandom is so much bigger now and so many people enjoy this pairing. When I stumbled on them, many, many years ago, it was like a switch turned on in my brain. Voldemort/Harry makes so much sense it’s insane. I’m glad more people see it, write about it, love them like me.

Hope I didn’t bore you with my (old man’s…) reminiscences. This was a fun ask to answer. Thank you ❤️

[forest-sh]

what it says on the tin! I offered to throw together something on drawing raw meat (in a mouthwashing server, naturally) so here it is in case someone finds it useful

[forest-sh]

pssssst hey. hey. free and expansive database of folk and fairy tales. you can thank me later

[forest-sh]

To all my writers who have a tough time with smut terms and not knowing which ones to use, I have found the holy grail for us.

This reddit user took a poll of 3,500 people and went really in depth with asking their favorite terminology, along with actual pie charts on what the readers preferred to see in their smut.

Here's the direct link to the Google doc with all the info!

[forest-sh]

Voldemort @ harry

[forest-sh]

hi, a lot of you need a perspective reset

the average human lifespan globally is 70+ years

taking the threshold of adulthood as 18, you are likely to spend at least 52 years as a fully grown adult

at the age of 30 you have lived less than one quarter of your adult life (12/52 years)

'middle age' is typically considered to be between 45-65

it is extremely common to switch careers, start new relationships, emigrate, go to college for the first or second time, or make other life-changing decisions in middle age

it's wild that I even have to spell it out, but older adults (60+) still have social lives and hobbies and interests.

you can still date when you get old. you can still fuck. you can still learn new skills, be fashionable, be competitive. you can still gossip, you can still travel, you can still read. you can still transition. you can still come out.

young doesn't mean peaked. you're inexperienced in your 20s! you're still learning and practicing! you're developing social skills and muscle memory that will last decades!

there are a million things to do in the world, and they don't vanish overnight because an imaginary number gets too big

[forest-sh]

grief is so crazy like what if i forget what her laugh sounds like. does she know i loved her. i miss her so much. i catch myself doing things she used to do. i wish i could call her. i miss her so much. i do a crossword puzzle. i cry while washing the dishes. does she know i loved her? my heart feels like a hummingbird. i miss her so much. what if i forget what her laugh sounds like. what if i forget.

[forest-sh]

theyre having a conversation and john casually jokes that when he dies, sherlock can keep his skull so that sherlock now has two skulls lol

cut to sherlock frozen terrified and absolutely hating that idea and the casualness of discussing john's death because john can't die

[forest-sh]

i think the near-extinction of people making fun, deep and/or unique interactive text-based browser games, projects and stories is catastrophic to the internet. i'm talking pre-itch.io era, nothing against it.

there are a lot of fun ones listed here and here but for the most part, they were made years ago and are now a dying breed. i get why. there's no money in it. factoring in the cost of web hosting and servers, it probably costs money. it's just sad that it's a dying art form.

anyway, here's some of my favorite browser-based interactive projects and games, if you're into that kind of thing. 90% of them are on the lists that i linked above.

A Better World - create an alternate history timeline

Alter Ego - abandonware birth-to-death life simulator game

Seedship - text-based game about colonizing a new planet

Sandboxels or ThisIsSand - free-falling sand physics games

Little Alchemy 2 - combine various elements to make new ones

Infinite Craft - kind of the same as Little Alchemy

ZenGM - simulate sports

Tamajoji - browser-based tamagotchi

IFDB - interactive fiction database (text adventure games)

Written Realms - more text adventure games with a user interface

The Cafe & Diner - mystery game

The New Campaign Trail - US presidential campaign game

Money Simulator - simulate financial decisions

Genesis - text-based adventure/fantasy game

Level 13 - text-based science fiction adventure game

Miniconomy - player driven economy game

Checkbox Olympics - games involving clicking checkboxes

BrantSteele.net - game show and Hunger Games simulators

Murder Games - fight to the death simulator by Orteil

Cookie Clicker - different but felt weird not including it. by Orteil.

if you're ever thinking about making a niche project that only a select number of individuals will be nerdy enough to enjoy, keep in mind i've been playing some of these games off and on for 20~ years (Alter Ego, for example). quite literally a lifetime of replayability.

[forest-sh]

LISTEN UP MOTHER FUCKERS

SEE THIS WEBSITE? 

ITS CALLED WOLFRAM ALPHA

THIS IS THE BEST GODDAMN WEBSITE FOR ACADEMIC SHIT. FUCK GOOGLE. 

THIS MOTHERFUCKER WILL LET YOU SEARCH “HOSPITAL BEDS IN CHAD VS. IRAN” 

AND IT GIVES YOU A STRAIGHT GODDAMN ANSWER 

MAYBE YOU’RE NOT INTERESTED IN DOCTORNESS OF THIRD WORLD COUNTRIES COOL SHIT 

HAVING TROUBLE WITH MATH?

HOLY SHIT

OR MAYBE YOU WANNA DICK AROUND

WHATEVER THE FUCK YOU WANT

[forest-sh]

Please???? HELLO??

men I want the Gender from

(a thread)

David Tennant

[forest-sh]

GUYS I DID IT!

I DREW CROWLEY WITHOUT HIM LOOKING LIKE STEPPED ON PLAYDOUGH

YESSS!!!

WE WENT FROM THIS

TO THIS

TO THAT!! IM SO PROUD

[forest-sh]

When you know how to paint but dont know anatomy...

THE BLUE WAS A HAPPY LITTLE ACCIDENT OKAY

IT SPILLED AND I WENT ALONG WITH IT

DONT MIND AZIRAPHALES LEGO FACE

ITS INTENTIONAL