squidthechaotickid

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SEMI-FINALS

and the universe said; lets cause problems on purpose - @ghostenluvs

Off Colors AU - @sibillascribbles08

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Give a man a leaf and he will eat it. Teach a man to leaf and he will go away

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courage the cowardly dog is not cowardly because that poor dog will be facing the flayed corpse of god or some shit every episode. courage the reasonably horrified dog

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Slug Jax

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Newest addition to my Spidersona AU o7

MJ (she/her) was Ceres's best friend when they were children. She was heartbroken when Ceres disappeared when they were 10, but only years later did she begin to look into their disappearing.

Too many facts didnt add up, and the more MJ learned, the more her heart sank. Now, she has moved to NYC for collaege and is trying to piece together what happened all those years ago, so that her best friend might have some justice.

(She's trans btw :] )

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love how tumblr staff has time to censor words like “paint mixing” and “my face” and yet they can’t get rid of ssexsophie8127 thats been liking my posts from 2017

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Yo to any Black followers I have: do beads in hair usually go in braids? Im mostly seeing braids but a few tutorials Im looking at are also saying u can do it in twists and locs. Is it more common in one hair style or is google only showing me braids?

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Beads in hair looks so coollllll this is so awesome <3

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Welcome!

I'm going to update this list as I post more. So make sure to check periodically!

Anon Office Hours: Wed 12:30pm - Friday 6:30pm. (EST)

I DELETE ASKS THAT DO NOT CAPITALIZE THE IDENTITY OF "BLACK" ☺️

Try #commonly asked questions in the search bar, case you need extra guidance 👍🏾

"Your posts are too long"- Teacher's Note

Feedback Rules

FAQs!

Please take the time to review the one relevant to your questions! They are long- some longer than others- but they likely have a link contained within that can better guide your research!

📝Syllabus📝

Lesson 1: "White Man Painted Black"?

Lesson 1.5: "Hair for Thought"- how visualizing affects your writing

Lesson 2: “That One Hairstyle? RETIRE IT!” Black Hair is an Art (pt.1)

Lesson 2.1: Addendum to Hair pt 1

Lesson 2: "It Takes HOW LONG?" Black Hair is an Art (pt.2)

Application! Examples of Protective Hair Coverings

Application! Ice's Lazy Loc Wash Routine

Application! How to: Simplified Braid

Application! Daisy E's Simplified Hair Drawing

Lesson 3: "Defying the Default"- Skin Tones and the Presence of Black Characters

Application! What are Black fans looking for in Commissions?

Lesson 4: "Do Black People Blush?" Bringing brown complexions to life

Application! Humanæ- Resource for Skin Palettes!

Lesson 5: "The Same Place As the Music" Lighting & Color

Lesson 6: "Let's Have A Talk, First" Stereotypes, pt 1

Lesson 6: “Why’s she so rude?” (She’s Not)- Stereotypes, pt 2

Lesson 6: "Is He the Threat (Or Are You?)"- Stereotypes, pt 3

Application! How to Spot a Stereotype: An Example

Lesson 7: "That's the Black one!"- Imagery and "Black-Coded" Characters

Lesson 8: “Across cultures, darker people suffer most. Why?” Multiethnic and Multicultural Blackness

Lesson 9: “Romance Will Not Solve Racism”- Interracial/Biracial/Blended Black and White Relationships and Families

Lesson 10: “The Ambiguously Brown Character™”- The Attachment to Eurocentric Beauty Standards

Lesson 11: “No, That’s Not ‘How Color Works’.” - Whitewashing

Lesson 12: “The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth” - Violence, Violent Imagery & Black Horror

Lesson 13: “It’s Giving” AAVE, and the Denied Yet Undeniable Impact of Black Culture

Lesson 14: “On Human Dignity.”  Blackness, Gender & Sexuality

Lesson 15: How To Guide Your Research

Lesson 16: "Make Your Peace With The Chaos..." Childhood While Black

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Hi!! Do you have any references on how to draw twists? I’ve been trying to for my character, but all the tutorials I find are quite vague. Thank you so much!!

Okay, so since multiple folks have asked me something like this, I decided to do a little draw up. There are plenty of wonderful Black artists that can do this far better, and you all should follow them and STUDY them!

USE YOUR REFERENCES! Just to break down and draw this little sheet took me multiple references and about an hour of drawing and redrawing to really do it properly. It took practice! It's going to take practice, and well-drawn Black hair deserves practice! Commit to your Black characters!

Okay. Here's the simplified way, i.e., the way Ice does it:

Twists:

Step 1: Draw two curly lines.

Step 2: Draw curved lines from one 'corner' of one line to the next 'corner' of the other line. It should be moving down, as hair is twisted downward! 👍🏾

Cornrows (on scalp!)/Braids:

Step 1: draw a zigzag

Step 2: draw two curly lines, slightly off-center to one another. You want each 'point' of the zigzag to correspond with a corner of the curly lines.

Step 3: Draw straight lines between the point of the zigzag and the corner of the curved lines. They're gonna look like pentagons. The 'butts' of each pentagon should be curved, since that's the braid. 👍🏾

Tbh, what makes Black hair really shine is the depth and LIGHTING (‼️‼️‼️) that goes onto it. Also, my partner has asked/demanded everyone to remember that when drawing cornrows there should be HAIR connecting it to the scalp!! The hair is attached to the root! It's not just bald in between each cornrow!!!

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“That One Hairstyle? RETIRE IT!” Black Hair is an Art (pt.1)

(This is part one of two lessons, with this one focusing on how our hair itself! The next lesson will encompass how to incorporate its existence into your writing. It'd be a massively long post otherwise.)

So! Black hair. Black hair is a CENTRAL, ESSENTIAL part of our culture and identity. Writing and drawing it means understanding the vulnerability and trust that comes with access to it, and yes, it is racist to suggest that ‘it’s just hair’ when our hair serves such an important role in our history and art. I already wrote a mini-lesson and ask on the topic, but being aware of what our hair looks like, and what means to us, will help you to understand why we care that you put in the effort to get it right.

Hair Textures

We are not a genetic monolith! However, for the sake of this series, we are focusing on 3C-4C, because 1) it's most likely to be seen in life and 2) least likely to be seen in popular art! When you are creating your characters, consider the style and care for THESE textures. I will get more into this next lesson.

Let's get into SOME of the hairstyles!

Afros (36 Afro Hairstyles)

“So, what’s the phenomenon behind the Afro? Well, it’s our hair in its most natural form, but that’s only part of the phenomenon. It’s a way to fight the status quo without saying a word.”

-Ebony Magazine, The History of the Afro

When nonBlack society hears ‘afro’, they think completely picked out, Black power imagery, political statement. And it was, and is! But in actuality, afros are just the natural hair growing out of a Black person's head. The same way your hair grows out of your head. Our texture. Even my hair is not allowed to be ‘hair’, it has to ‘assign’ my Blackness; my distance from whiteness. Imagine, the hair growing out of your head being automatically associated with how you should be perceived. Just by existing, it is making a statement in a Eurocentric society.

Braids (31 Braid Styles)

There are SO MANY TYPES of braids and ways to wear them. If you can imagine a design, I bet there's a Black braider that can do it!

CORNROWS ARE NOT AUTOMATICALLY BRAIDS! Internalize this! They may be used in the same style, but they are NOT INTERCHANGEABLE TERMS!

Braids are considered a protective style; that is, a hairstyle designed to let our hair 'rest' and grow without having to manipulate it. If you have a Black character that's constantly on the go and/or doesn't have time to focus on their hair, and you want an accurate, more true-to-life experience for them, braids can be a crucial part of character design.

Locs

(Yes, while that link has plenty of examples, it was also self-indulgent. Locs are gorgeous, Black men with locs are gorgeous!)

"Locs vs Dreads": As someone in the loc community, there’s been a push to refer to the style as ‘locs’, rather than ‘dreadlocks’. Some people with the style will not care, but others take it very seriously, so it’s something to keep in mind. There’s a societal stigma behind having locs, that they’re ‘dirty’ or ‘unkempt’ or ‘lazy’ and that is NOT true. Locs are beautiful, and they take far more effort than people seem to want to believe lmao.

Locs, though there is currently a positive revival, are still highly discriminated against. Kids have been expelled from school and even have had their hair forcibly cut off to be allowed to participate in sports. Many places won't hire you if they think your hair is 'unprofessional' or 'dirty', especially if you're a Black woman. To consider yet another example of the hair that grows out of my head 'dirty' is extremely racist.

LOCS ARE NOT BRAIDS!!!!

Locs are also a protective style, albeit a much more permanent one, and one that comes with a long history and culture behind it. Many Black people consider the biblical story of Samson to be a man with locs, and that our locs hold power within them. That not just anyone should be allowed to touch your locs. So, if you're interested in mythology and powers, that might be an intriguing way to go, that would be possible if you had a Black character with locs!

In Professional Media

The lack of awareness and concern about our hair isn't just a fan or amateur creator experience. It is ubiquitous in the professional media world. Black actors, actresses, and models have discussed having to do their own hair when working, because no one would properly care for it on set if it wasn't familiarly white. It’s admittedly grown better- however! After decades of not having options other than ‘stereotypical afro’, ‘box cut’, and ‘white people hair’, it is LONG PAST TIME to stop settling for the bare minimum in Black character design. We can tell when "one of us" (with some sense, at least) wasn't in the room to make decisions in popular media.

If you were curious about the lesson title, here's a current example of what I'm talking about in video games. Tell me if you see a pattern:

This style? The Killmonger? We seent it!!!! It has become the “hairstyle to show I understand the exaggerated swagger of a young Black teen” option, the "I know the Black people!" go-to, and frankly, we are all tired of it. Okay it was cute on Ekko. The Black Delegation DEMANDS the professional video game industry pick something else! We have SO MANY DIFFERENT HAIRSTYLES!

I'll give you an example on the other end (not trying at all; refer to Lesson 1) from one of my favorite games, Hades:

This is my blorbo. My favoritest guy. I’ll fight for Patroclus being Black til the day I die. While I begrudgingly settled in my excitement, I can tell you no one Black with any voting power was in the room at Supergiant when they approved this design. Why? His texture! Locs were such an easy option if they wanted long hair! Locs existed BEFORE Ancient Greece! The man did not have a flat iron while fighting in a war! A good Black designer would have considered that!

To give him a more accurate design, some artists (myself included) lean into giving him locs (one of my favorites is @karshmallow 's Pat; a phenomenal example in caring about your Black characters). It’s something Black fans find themselves doing- redesigning Black characters. That's not something we should have to do at all, especially in media we pay for!

But if you REALLY want your Black character to have straight hair, that leads into the last style of this lesson:

Straight Hair

We do have straight hair. But it’s not straight because it grew out that way! It will still look and be thicker! It might be a wig or a sew-in (human or synthetic), it might be flat-ironed (while relaxed? While natural?) It takes effort to get and maintain straight hair.

'I think it looks better good this way!'

If you catch yourself thinking this, this is a racist statement. Whether you’re aware of it our not, there is a bias towards Eurocentric/white features in our society, and that includes in our media. When you think “I only drew [this Eurocentric hair texture and style] because I think it looks good on them!” I want you to PAUSE and think about the WHY. WHY do you think that this Black person’s natural features are unattractive in comparison to the white hair texture you gave them? And how hurt might a Black peer of yours would feel hearing that you find their natural features not worth drawing because they’re “not attractive”. It requires approaching your own internal biases, recognizing them, and then working to unlearn them. And that means practice! Using references to draw our hair and styles, and growing used to using OUR features on US!

Doing it in Art

Me personally, I think if you think drawing thinner hair textures is easy, thicker hair textures should be a BREEZE. I was curious, so I challenged myself and-

(it took me about thirteen minutes total to do ol boy's hair and it's still not right. I'm sick fr y'all don't even know 🤢)

@ackee has a really good art lesson on the how-tos of drawing Black hairstyles. I highly recommend checking it out, as well as following and supporting a fellow Black artist (who is far better than I!)

Hair Brushes

Finally, an option you can use for painting is downloading Black hair brushes! Vegalia has an amazing array of brushes with different types of curls, locs, and braids at her Etsy store! You can also follow her on social media to see how she applies them, and support yet another amazing Black creative!

I know this was a long one, but you made it! Just keep going. Remember, it's the thought that counts, but the action that delivers!

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all-timer

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normal

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there’s this extremely kind soul of a woman on instagram that makes accessible recipes that don’t require standing, chopping, or a stove and she might just have a permanent place in my heart

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Kris I Got Stuck In The N64 Lmao

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Listen they're doing their best

Sequel to this