matchasartcha

[matchasartcha]

This is a work that is still in its early stages - as you can see, there are still a lot of blank areas!

A long-time friend put this idea of a "paisley dragon" into my head about 10 years ago. I've had to wait to let my skill catch up with the idea, and I finally felt ready to give it a go in early March (2024).

The drawing is 16x20 inches - larger than I've worked in quite some time, so I've really been able to let my love of details off the leash. I referenced Thai dragon tattoos, Bali dragons and other sculptural creatures, and a big Dover Publications resource book for paisleys used in the textiles of India, so this dragon is an absolute mashup of all sorts of visual inspiration.

I will later ink it (because you better believe this is going into the coloring book series), then lay in watercolor to harmonize the color scheme (it shall be ORANGE - my friend insists), and then I will tackle it with Prismacolor pencils and gel pens. After that, I will cut it out and mount it on a separate background, and add all sorts of bling. Shiny bits, semiprecious stones, and whatever else seems fun.

More to come!

[matchasartcha]

literally most things that people write off as just ‘textures’ to use in graphics are stolen & unsourced material created by artists or photographers NOT meant to be used as elements in projects without royalty payments. you can say ‘it’s just random tumblr posts they don’t care’ but you wouldn’t want someone to take your work and edit into their work so they can be praised for their beautiful style and creativity even if they just post it on social media w/o profit, would you?? so maybe if you browse pinterest or google images for pictures without finding the original source, you’re using images that you’re not allowed to use without realizing it.

you see it on here a lot especially in (i won’t link anything but i’m sure you know what i mean) those album track ‘aesthetics’ posts, au ‘aesthetic’ posts (you see these less in kpop, but where people use non-royalty free images to kinda craft a visual au), and even just rather typical graphics that have a lot of ‘texture’ elements. and texture packs too!! that’s often where the problem starts; people just collect images (often literal art), compile them in a folder w/o sources, then insist no one can repost those images w/o crediting the person who compiled them. what???

SO may i suggest some of my fave places you can get FREE, ROYALTY-FREE elements that are totally legal to use

creativemarket has 6 free high-quality resources (textures, brushes, fonts, etc), different every week! wow awesome i check it every week

search ‘freebie’ on behance. awesome stuff!!! lots of v nice templates textures and fonts

mockup zone freebies

unsplash: tons of very nice free photographs, not shitty stock photos

pexels: same idea. + they have an adobe plugin so you can get photos without closing your editor damn nice

pixelsquid is a super cool free program (again w a ps plugin that i love) with lottts of super cool hq 3d elements!

as to not make this too long: spoongraphics, lostandtaken (textures galore), pixeden, freebiesbug.

[matchasartcha]

I've started sketching again.

Melody is in a donut right now because she has an ear infection and scratched her ears. She thinks she has a neck pillow and now she sleeps like a king 👑

[matchasartcha]

Content Disclaimer: grief, pet loss, brief mentions of self harm. This is just a long form story about the unexpected, traumatic loss of my soul cat.

The first day you left was in retrospect the easiest day.

There is no room left for introspection when it is loud — so loud — and there are voices coming from five different directions — and each minute feels like an hour — and — … There are just layers upon layers upon layers of noise and not a single syllable can be lost, every single word must be responded to, and like a faint drumbeat there is a tick, tock. Tick tock. Time only moves mercilessly forward.

That day is like a hot iron brand pressed into the mind. There is no forgetting that day, not even if someone wanted to. It is the sort of memory that rears its ugly head in the depths of the night, when there is no one else around to stifle them, and with it the flood of emotions that had been suppressed that day because god, there had been so much happening and it didn’t feel real and

there it is again. That hopeless, futile wish for that day to have been literally any other kind of day. Anything but this, the sight of a crash cart the moment the door opened and the doctor looked inside the carrier and saw you, gone. The five pairs of hands working frantically even though it was inevitable that the moment you entered the car and were whisked away, that you would never be coming back home until you arrived in a polished, wooden urn.

Tests. So many tests. Money and time thrown, begging, pleading for there to be something that could be cured. Each ambiguous result, each quiet voice with those sad eyes, one less reason that could be used to pretend that this would all be okay, that you would wake up, that you would recognize the one who loved you the most as trembling hands stroked your soft fur where you liked it.

Each minute passing as slowly more and more hands leave to attend to the other people in the emergency room, and the last, desperate wish to just be able to say goodbye hears no answers and is thrown to the wayside to dissolve not nothing.

The words finally run out and the silence feels heavier than the noise. Louder, somehow. But if hands pressed against ears, nothing would change, because silence cannot be muted — only filled — but with what? With a limp, unmoving form that would not and would never respond again?

Tick tock. Tick tock.

There were constants in life. Things that didn’t change, and so could be relied upon. Even when nothing else would stay the same, the world is full of things that remain. The sun rises and sets. An object dropped falls to the ground. The night sky is full of stars. And you are the most brilliant star of them all.

The sun’s warmth sustains all life. You always find your way back to the one who loved you most. The ocean is blue.

In deep space, stars and planets orbit each other. Your purr is the hum of the universe. Space time warps with gravity.

These are the things that never change.

But you are not here anymore. Here, where the sun is supposed to rise each morning and set each night, where the night sky is supposed to be full of stars, where the clouds bring rain and the sun brings warmth, where the entire universe is a sprawling web of galaxies and stars, you will never find your way back to the one who loved you most.

There is nothing that can be done. You are gone. You were gone the moment you were found with your broken, unresponsive body. The only anchor left is that you don’t know anything. You felt no pain. One moment you were here, probably sleeping, and the next moment you…

Just a fleeting, torn shred of regret that you would never wake up again to hear the things that hadn’t been said to you yet.

That was the easiest day.

And then it hurts.

You were the anchor. Affixed to everything was you. You held everything together, even when the together wanted nothing more than to fall apart into the void. Without even a moment to say goodbye, the threads were slashed and now there is nothing but the sense of falling, disoriented. Tumbling past knives that slash through flesh, cleaving and cutting away at all the pieces of you that had been kept tightly.

There is anger. How predictable. Indulge too long, and the thoughts spiral. Predictably. This is so unfair. Only five years together. There was supposed to still be time left. It plays out like a tired, cliche sort of story, and it feels pathetic but it turns out humans really are just that and the white hot rage careens and writhes because there is no one to be angry at, there is nothing to blame, there is nothing…

The birds fly with their feathered wings. The fish swim with their scaled tails. And you were supposed to still be here.

The anger at the injustice — except there is no injustice. It just is, life just is, but thinking it over and over again only hurts worse. The mind so desperately wants to find a pattern, or a purpose, or meaning, to this meaningless, arbitrary trauma, but to look up at the stars and ask is to receive nothing. Cut it out. It is a waste of energy. It won’t change anything. Nothing can change anything. But still the anger drives forward, disoriented and directionless. Just looking for something. Anything.

Then the anger festers and begins to turn into guilt. Searching for answers only makes it worse. Because there is no reason for life to be straightforward or explain itself. It just happened, because it did, is the only fact and it is wholly inadequate to cling to. So the anger that needs meaning begins to look for signs that were missed. What if a little bit more attention had been paid? What if you had someone else with better eyes and ears to love you more than anyone else? Then perhaps you wouldn’t have been failed.

It hurts.

It hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts and you would never have wanted to cause sadness and hurt and you would have wanted to be the comforting, grounding anchor that you always were but you aren’t here and it hurts.

A bargain. Anything, if you could come back. Any cost, if it would have saved you. But you were beyond saving. Nothing can change what happened. What was is.

Knives, plunging down between the shoulder blades, gouging crimson lines downwards as they leave behind two bloody gashes. As if there were wings once, and they were forcibly extracted. You were those wings. The agony burns. And then it is punctuated with torturous agony that makes throwing this pathetic, stupid life away seem worth the exchange of relief from the hurting. Or perhaps it would be only appropriate to make visible these wounds that nobody can see. The image of smooth, clean skin criss crossed with bloody red lines catches and lingers.

It had been years since the last relapse, this cannot cycle now. Digging fingernails into the palms to try and keep it under control.

It is the new normal, an undercurrent of stabbing pain that never leaves, not even during those insomniac nights, when sleep is fleeting. The days are meaningless and the hollow you left behind feels sharp and bitter. It is the kind of hollow that the body will try to curve around to cover, but instead it just feels ever more empty. There ceases to be a reason to sleep because there ceases to be a reason to think about tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the next. When the mind is not preoccupied with the stabbing pain of that hollowness, thoughts of how wonderful it would be to sleep and never wake again are the only pleasant thoughts that exist.

There are things in the world that do not change. The sun rises and sets. The night sky is full of stars. You are gone because the one who loved you failed you. The cosmos dances around itself.

The memories of you count time and the only thought of the future is of a time where more time will have passed between now and when you left, than the time that you were here. Now you only exist inside of these shattered thoughts, and there will come a day where even that can no longer be put back together and then will you have ever existed at all?

Or maybe it would be better to forget, forget everything about you, forget that you were loved and loved in a way that can never love again, forget the feeling of your warmth, forget the sound of your voice, forget the stars in your eyes, forget the way you were found, forget the way you were let go, forget forget forget. Then maybe the emptiness that causes even more pain than the knives ever could would cease to exist and could be filled with meaninglessness and that which shouldn’t have changed but did could never have existed at all.

The pain is suffocating. Like drowning. 

It is a waste of resources to be angry, so the anger is shoved away. Life is unfair, deal with it, so the injustice is brushed under the rug. But the guilt gnaws away.

It hurts.

…

…

…

Lost in the abyss that is the anger, the hurt, the guilt — consumed by the infernal rage that every morning must be registered to memory without you — your stars in your eyes.

The eyes that can never be looked upon again. The eyes that never opened, not once, not ever.

But they were — are — beautiful, brilliant, and bright. They contained the entire world that was you and your love and everything else that made you the one who will never exist again. The blue crystalline hues, as if the entire sky could be contained within them, and with it the entirety of the universe as it rotated slowly. And they did, they did, they were — are — the indisputable proof of the bond that was — is — shared. They are brighter than a thousand suns. They sparkle and dance and inside of them is all of the love that the world has ever had.

When did those memories of your eyes become so dim?

The anger, the hurt, the guilt.

You were — are — beautiful, brilliant, and bright. The memories left of you deserve to be bright. The memories of you as you, the memories that are funny and soft and sweet and obnoxious and stupid. Your love ought to be crystallized, so that it will never erode or tarnish. When your memory passes by like a breeze, the whisper of air ought to be crisp and cool. Your visage should steal the breath away, because that is how beautiful you are. You were — are — loyal and warm and soft and annoying in a way that you showed nobody else. Even with hands that can no longer hold you, the low vibrations of your purr radiate through muscle and bone, and it is a sound that sounds like the galaxy turning.

The anger, the hurt, the guilt. They are felt intensely. It is not the kind of guilt that could be convinced by facts, no matter how many alternate timelines are spun, no matter who is doing the spinning, no matter their clinical experience or not. It is a stubborn, self-destructive guilt that exists only because there is no meaning to what happened but there has to be meaning, the mind cannot rest without seeing a pattern, and the only pattern that exists is that you were failed. It is the kind of guilt that casts a blackened haze over those sacred memories. To think upon those memories is to think about the guilt, and to think about the guilt is to open another wound upon the body.

To think upon those memories is to hold you like you never left. To think upon those memories is to see the stars uninterrupted as they slowly spin above the earth. To think upon those memories is to cut flesh open.

Your soft warmth wraps around those wounds.

Perhaps there is no way to ever debate that poisonous, polluting guilt. There is nothing that could ever be said, even if it was logical, rational, factual, that could convince an illogical, irrational conclusion that exists in the space where a lack of meaning is like nails on a chalkboard. No, there was nothing that could be done to persuade that which was not persuaded. After all, it had simply appeared, creating its own meaning where there was none, trying to make sense of life as it was and why things couldn’t be that way anymore.

But there was one other truth that remained constant. You would have never wanted it this way. Drowning in the narrative that something could have prevented this and deciding that it was only right that the suffocation be completed as punishment. You, who loved in a way that will never exist again, simply purr gently against the heart and your low hum is all of the life that has ever lived.

For you.

The guilt will be burned. The toxins that bleed dripping cracks into those memories of you will be cleansed.

And left remaining — you, the brilliant, bright guiding light. You, everything.

There are signs of you everywhere. You did not cover your tracks when you left. Somehow, even the deepest tracks that gouge canyons across the heart are the most precious. There is a whisker in the bed you always slept in. There is your scent in the blankets. There is your fur from when you had to be brushed and you didn’t like it. When the kitten looks for company, your protege envelopes them into their bodies, and you are there as they echo your sweetness and your protection. You would have loved this. You might not have liked that. You are nowhere but you are everywhere. Right at the moment that you could be taken and held in the palm of a hand, you dissipate and flit elsewhere.

Time stops for no one. The day you left was the easiest of them all.

The nights are heavy and cold and sleep does not come, because the thought of continuing into tomorrow and leaving you further and further behind is blasphemous and violates the things that should have never changed. One day, there will come a time when you have been gone longer than you were here. One day, that time you burned bright like the brightest star will become nothing more than a flash, and then like the brightest stars at the early hums of the universe, you will have blazed and then died and stars like you never could form again.

You are so bright. You are dazzling. You are warm. You are perfect. You are everything that could have been, and you were.

Some days, there are fleeting reasons to be less angry about waking up again. Some days, the morning arrives and it doesn’t feel as wrong as it once did.

Some days, it hurts.

If I try, I can reach to you from the abyss and you are the most beautiful soul to have ever entered my orbit, and the only reason it hurts so much is because you loved like nobody else can or will ever love again and caught by you I could not help but to let the heart of you replace parts of mine. Now these fragmented pieces of you are the most precious things and even though they are like shards of glass, cutting into me, sometimes they are soft and for one fleeting moment, I wonder if someday your heart will replace mine and I will become as bright and warm as you are.

It hurts.

[matchasartcha]

Finished kitty commission :) I have a few more to share as well, slow year but I'm glad I was able to output something. I will formally open for commissions in 2024 with an actual price list and etc, so stay tuned.

[matchasartcha]

I've been gone for a while due to health issues and an overwhelming number of personal emergencies that caused said health issues 😵‍💫 But I am back working on commissions again. I'll post a formal price list soon. Currently working on a British shorthair! They have the BEST cheeks

[matchasartcha]

I have just recently learned I've been suffering from gender dysphoria my whole life and it makes so many things make way too much sense. I am seeing a new and utterly fantastic LGBTQ affirming therapist who specializes in ADHD/autism/neurodiversity as well as gender identity therapy and I am feeling so optimistic about my future °˖✧◝(⁰▿⁰)◜✧˖°

I struggled for almost two years to try and make a fursona back in 2020 and eventually gave up because I just could never get it right. Something about all my ideas just felt so fundamentally WRONG and I could never pinpoint why, even with my best friend, an amazing professional furry artist, helping me! Eventually I gave up.

I am trying again but this time without the feeling that my fursona has to match the body I was born in, because it's the wrong body for me. And I am enthralled, and more than that, I actually love this sketch and feel really proud of it, something I haven't been able to say about any of my art for over a decade. While of course I am sure that design school, untreated ADHD/autism, bullying, unstable childhood etc have also contributed to my drawing anxiety, it has been really interesting to think about how gender dysphoria might very well be the underpinnings of all of this, affecting even my ability to create art.

I will be buying a chest binder soon, and once I have been in therapy for at least six months I am seriously considering seeing if I am eligible for top surgery & hip/glute liposuction to achieve the androgynous look that I have always envied in video game and anime characters.

I do think the art content on my page will change a lot as I begin to draw things that happily affirm my gender identity and aren't me trying to force myself to draw it because I feel that's what an AFAB like me should draw. If you no longer find it your cup of tea, I promise I won't be offended if you unfollow. I totally understand!

I still love cute things, I love cats, sanrio etc, but I need to think about how to draw cute things in the way that I like to instead of constantly trying to mimic styles of what I perceived as successful cis women artists.

[matchasartcha]

Personal update --

I was out of town and currently I'm extremely debilitated by COVID induced POTS. It turns out I had mild POTS since a teenager and now it's become very difficult to deal with.

I was hoping this would be my year after a year out of endometriosis surgery but it appears my youth is to be wasted on shit like this.

I do need to reopen for commissions soon, meds bills ain't cheap in the great olde US of A. Hopefully I can get it up by the end of this month. And maybe reopen my Etsy shop in the summer/fall.

[matchasartcha]

Hey I was wondering if you do commissions ? If so how much do you charge 🙂🌺❤️

I do! I've been unable to make a new commission sheet due to personal life occupying my entire January but prices start at $45

[matchasartcha]

I heard kitten was trending so here is my son

[matchasartcha]

Re-re-re-reeeeeeepost!

Still one of my old favorites!

I am out of town will be back soon 🔜

[matchasartcha]

Doing my bit! Everyone please if you have time at least block!!! 90% of my new followers last two weeks were bots which is really disheartening to have to block them all I know our reptile brains like to see but numbers but if we all ignore them then we can continue to have the engagement we want here ❤️❤️❤️❤️

What happens when you don't report pornbots

What you can see here are among the most popular posts of the last month for the convin (Connor/Gavin Detroit Become Human) tag for the last month. And presumably popular in lollipop, cityscape, rick day, eva long, dostoyevsky, and all the other random, unrelated tags added to these posts.

You can see two identical posts made by separate bots that feature a bit.ly (so, disguised, you don't know whether the address is safe/where you're going) link to a website that contains an image of a pretty young women (but who knows what else).

Each post is liked by about a dozen other bots, and only bots. (I reported them all, so can confirm their profiles were obviously those of bots/porn bots.) Some of them even use the same image in the pfp. Some are developed blogs full of porn images, some are clearly newer and don't even have a pfp yet. They are all gaining legitimacy from each other by the likes which act as links to their Tumblrs, and adding legitimacy to the post they have liked, which links to their ultimate goal: the site where they make money in undoubtedly dodgy ways.

They are doing this to legitimise their websites for search engines like Google, but if you don't care about that, it has the same effect in your Tumblr tags.

If we don't stop them, ALL your favourite hashtags are going to be full of meaningless posts like this, and probably porn you don't want to see (very different from porn you DO want to see).

This is why we report and block, lads. Not just because they are annoying and irrelevant to us, but because if we don't stop them they will take over this hellsite, and they very clearly do not understand the nature of the hell in which we live.

[matchasartcha]

So many spam scam bot accounts following me like I'm glad you're a hottie with hot private pics to share but leave me alone lmao

[matchasartcha]

pet commission for a client on discord! i love when people tell me the little quirks about their pets because it lets me really customize the illustration to something funny and personal :3

[matchasartcha]

wishing good fortune for the new year :3

[matchasartcha]

I really enjoy Tumblr especially because of the first point ☝️

THESIS: the real reason that people stay on this hellsite is not “chronological order” or “the drama” or whatever (per se), but is instead linked to how tumblr, unlike most social media, is not optimised to give content as short of a half-life as possible, but instead is optimised to let content continue to cycle for months, years, even decades. this has in turn led to a more consistent centralised site “culture” in which there is more coherent linkage among different areas of the site, thus also explaining why its content permeates so thoroughly throughout the internet.

[matchasartcha]

it's almost lunar new year!

art done in 2021