#Anyways I have so much more art that I simply have not posted but my space is limited by the confines of technology

[sideblogdotjpeg]

well. see. ive been thinking about them again if you can believe it.

[starsandnoodles]

Surprise chat I did doodles of Magolor Chompers

[lesliemeyers]

digging through old discord convos and i just found a handful of stankyle sketches from like 2020 tht i never finished... ohh i know what my next few drawings are gonna beeee

[lucalicatteart]

Poll adventure (paventure? lol) Day 3: read the small story tidbit below the poll for more details, OR just vote based on initial impression

(✦ see past poll results + further information HERE (link) ✦)

The winning option of yesterday's poll was that the adventurer should throw a coin into the mysterious well ….

"After nearly ten minutes rummaging through the disorganization at the bottom of his backpack, he finally approaches the well once again, meager coin pouch in hand. He meticulously balances a little golden coin on the tip of his thumb, positioning it just so for an elegant coin flip… With a flick of his hand, the coin wobbles off, anticlimactically dropping into the darkness.. He pouts, leaning in to listen for a plonk as the coin hits the water but… nothing…. silence.. A few minutes pass and he shrugs, moving to pick up his bag and just continue his journey elsewhere, when suddenly a faint noise echoes from the well.. an almost cartoonish plopping sound, like wet feet slapping against stone..? The pitter patter grows closer and closer…then stops abruptly. The adventurer cautiously slinks over to the well, only to find.. a creature of some sort, clinging to the walls, staring up at him blankly. - What should he do next?"

[fluffs-n-stuffs]

this goes out to my fellow girlies who missed out on enjoying the spooky season to the fullest because of work responsibilities (it's me I'm the girlie) 🚶‍♀️🚶‍♀️🚶‍♀️

original image under the cut >>>

[triglycercule]

brooo these fucking TIME DIFFERENCES are PISSING ME OFF 😭😭😭 i took a nap here and checked the clock app to see what time it was in America and i saw 12 and i was like oh alright sure i can post because im past my usual time anyways. and then i wake up from anothe nap and check the time in america and it turns it was actually 12 AM when i checked. AM. not PM. because im not there and my usual schedule is messed up!!!!!! i hate leaving the country it ruins me. and also i dont have universal service so everywhere sucks just keep me in my state ill be satisified

[sl33by-gh0st]

I haven't posted in so long

but i know at least a few people have followed me for my art, so I'm gonna try to post more of it now

Here's a few recent pieces, eat up my childer

Anatomy study

My oc, Bellatrix, riding her horse, who is either named Ganymede or Andromeda and i cannot remember for the life of me which one

My clown oc, Joanne, swinging a hammer that i forgot to color in at the viewer

Joanne in normal clothes and without the makeup

My vampire oc, Evelyn, enjoying a day at the beach (from under an umbrella, of course)

My eldritch horror oc, Ecnaaggde, and my eeny weeny clown thing, Nim, going on a walk

Ecnaaggde and Nim again

Anyways thanks for looking at my stuff i love y'all

[shirogane-oushirou]

[cw vent: chronic illness, general world politics mention w no detail)

"man. i'm so tired. i feel like i can't do anything selfship related. is it because my energy's been sapped from family visiting and everyone wanting to do ~summer activities~ nonstop? am i so in my head about "getting ren's story right without stepping over any lines" that i've backed myself into a perfectionist corner? is the world just going to shit so hard that i can't have one (1) minute of escape on this blog before going back to working through the political hellscape we're in? god even trying to make this plushie pattern is killing me even though i want to hold my guy So Badly AUGH."

/finishes the plushie pattern after trying multiple body bases and literally buying a japanese ebook about plushie face and hair design/

"actually what if i lived forever and spent all of that time making an army of these fuckers to swim in? what then?"

[righteous-pines]

The last living relative of the great Pinestar. As his granddaughter, and as an extremely talented young warrior, in her own right, great things are expected of Alpineknoll. Only time will tell if she will fulfill this presumed destiny, but thanks to the careful rearing and training of her grandmother, Graypelt, she shows great promise towards her destiny.

[narmothewraith]

You're just in denial Lucius /jk

[crossbackpoke-check]

wait you got me so invested in the stammer & heddy tailor au....

this is my standard disclaimer that i have never posted a fic on ao3* and for however much i say “au” i truly mean that it’s a universe that lives in my head & i am absolutely delighted to tell you all about, all the time <3 if it helps i ALSO got me so invested in the heddy & stammer tailor au

ok now that the author’s note is out of the way here’s some notes about the not!fic heddy & stammer tailor au:

stammer as the tailor from gent’s playbook, very reserved, quiet, with an excellent eye for details (honestly the evidence i have for his style sense is just that he’s best friends with pk subban so it has to be there somewhere if only by proxy irl) is hired by victor hedman, star of the tampa bay lightning who is every other tailor’s nightmare to dress (huge, opinionated, fashionable)

heddy is decently well-known throughout the league for being very well-dressed & becomes quietly well known for also being one of his new tailor’s favorite loyal customers [heddy has the nicest fabrics. he has his suits the first day a new collection drops & e v e r y o n e is jealous]

stammer’s business booms after heddy takes a chance on him as his first big client & promotes him, heddy sees him grow in popularity & get more clients

heddy also moonlights as a model for stammer’s suits on instagram, initially to help him grow his business because then he won’t have to pay for a model and then because he’s over there all the time anyway because they’re dating (that’s why the model’s face is never in the pictures)

there’s not really a plot to this besides the vague idea of a plot where stammer makes heddy his lucky suit that he wins the cup in & sews a special little tag into the lining of his jacket that says i love you

because love sometimes is picking out the perfect right color pocket square to match your husband’s beautiful suit that you fitted like a kiss to the curves of his huge body

& also sometimes love is making your beautiful husband who makes you beautiful clothing enjoy nice things for himself once in a while, like the fancy watch you bought him or the nice suit you custom-ordered for him (from him) just so you could take it off of him

[chaotictomtom]

SCREAMS what do you mean that old brba/bcs fanarts dump post i did a few weeks ago has over 500 notes..........

[ceilidhtransing]

I've cropped out the username because I have absolutely no desire to start drama or make a personal “callout” or have people go harass someone or anything like that (and if you take this kind of thing as an opportunity to go and be horrible to another Tumblr user then that is terrible and you should stop), but wow, I have never seen such a clanging example of amatonormativity. I don't think OP necessarily meant it this way, I don't think they meant any harm, I don't think they're consciously arophobic or something - it's far more likely that they're simply unfamiliar with aspec issues, and I always prefer to assume good faith - but I want to talk about this post anyway because it provides a really good and explicit example of the way society just sort of... asserts the centrality of romantic attraction and entirely forgets aromantic people exist.

I do want to first say that I actually agree with the initial point this post is making. Romance as a genre is unfairly derided as some kind of “lesser” form of art, and this derision very frequently comes with generous helpings of misogyny. I totally agree that romance is not at all an unintellectual or superficial thing to write about, and it's bad that it gets treated that way and that readers and writers of romance get so often mocked and condemned. Romance is a totally valid genre and enjoying it doesn't make you vain or stupid or superficial.

HOWEVER. As an aromantic person I find the rest of the post just... I don't know, it's just so perfect as a probably unwitting expression of baked-in cultural amatonormativity. It's brilliant. It's so funny to me. I can almost do a line-by-line breakdown of the way it so completely forgets the existence of aromantic people. In fact, let's do that.

It is so fundamental to us. The issue here should be pretty obvious. The assumption that romance is some integral part of The Human Experience and that it's fundamental to All People is pretty much amatonormativity 101. It reinforces the idea that people who don't experience romantic attraction are “lacking”, forever sitting apart from The Human Experience, and possibly in some way not quite fully human, since we don't experience the thing that is apparently so fundamental to humans.

To want to love and be loved. The post seems to be incorrectly equating “romance” with “loving and being loved”, when in fact there are many people who don't experience romantic attraction yet absolutely love and want to be loved. (And of course loveless aros, aplatonic people, various folks who don't “want to love and be loved” also exist, and it's important to emphasise that this desire, just like romantic attraction, is also not necessarily integral to all people.) “Love” is not automatically “romantic love”, but this post seems to imply that romance is the only, or default, form in which love can exist.

If you don't think every great work of literature. philosophy. metaphysics. was ultimately about romance. I don't think you were paying enough attention. OK this is the line that elevated this post from “sigh, more casual amatonormativity to scroll past” to “I just have to respond to this”. Where to even begin with this assertion. This is a level of “assuming romance is central to everything humans ever do and ever create” that I've almost never encountered before. It feels like a manifestation of the tendency for alloromantic people to declare that, because romance is very central for them, it is thus central to Everything. And I'm homing in on “romance” because the post doesn't say “ultimately about love” - which would still be a reach, but less of a reach - it specifically says “ultimately about romance”. As an aromantic person who is an academic at heart and highly educated in the humanities and social sciences, the idea that my ability to understand literature and philosophy and metaphysics is somehow greatly hampered by the fact that I don't experience or relate to romantic attraction is just... what??? This idea is really very funny to me but also genuinely pretty insulting, even though I'm sure it wasn't meant that way. Not only does it feel like the summation of every patronising “oh, you couldn't possibly understand” directed to aromantic adults who are, in fact, entirely capable of understanding, but it also flattens the incredible breadth of human intellectual experience into “being about romance”. I sometimes find myself wishing that alloromantic people would peak outside the bubble of amatonormativity and realise that actually, there is an enormous swathe of human experience and intellect and creativity and expression that has nothing at all to do with romantic attraction and romantic relationships. And no, stating that, I don't know, the Book of Job is not actually about romance has nothing to do with our society's misogynistic denigration of romance as a genre; it has everything to do with the fact that the Book of Job is not actually about romance. (And if you aren't familiar with Job or for some reason don't consider it a “great work of literature”, replace with whatever other example you can think of; there are many.) It's insulting to imply that aro-spec and/or ace-spec people are somehow less able to participate in art and literature and philosophy etc because we might bring a perspective that doesn't include romance or sex at all and we're just not capable of understanding that Actually Romance And/Or Sex Is Central To Everything. It's genuinely absurd to argue that all the pinnacles of human intellectual achievement really, at their core, come back to romance, and it speaks to our very blinkered society's tendency to declare things like “everything is really about sex” or “everything is really about romance” or “everything is really about breakups” or whatever and then look at aro-spec and ace-spec people like we're aliens and go “but like... how do you even live?” Newsflash, there is so much more to life than romance and love and sex. You can live an entire, very fulfilling, very meaningful, very thoughtful life without these things being at all relevant to you. That's not to dismiss those things as minor or unimportant - they are indeed very central to a lot of people's lives, and they're not “dumb” or “shallow” or whatever - but they're not central to everyone's lives, and they're hardly The Only Things In The World.

And if your response is something along the lines of “well OK there's a tiny minority of people who don't engage with romance and/or sex, or relate to it in the same way most people do, but that doesn't mean that romance isn't still at the core of humanity, or that all the most important things don't still have romance at their heart”, imagine telling a woman that “well, you can focus on a career if you want, but what's really fundamental to being a woman is being a wife and mother - in fact, motherhood is the most important thing in the world, it's fundamental to women, it's what all women's literature is about”. Or, hell, telling a person of any gender that “parenthood” is the central pillar of all of humanity and that every great work of art ever produced is ultimately about parenthood and obviously parenthood is fundamental to everyone's being - forgetting that actually some people will never be parents, and implying that their childlessness makes them less able to understand The Human Experience. That might give you some small idea of what it's like to be an aspec person and be repeatedly told that feelings you don't experience and relationships you don't have and attractions you don't relate to and acts you don't engage in are somehow Fundamental To Humanity and are what lie at The Core Of Everything: how excluding that is, how alienating that is, how oppressively stifling that is.

Feeling that love and/or romance and/or sex are very important to your own life is totally valid, but I wish alloromantics and allosexuals could be more capable of opening their minds and imagining and empathising with an existence for which these things aren't central. Our lives aren't lesser, or emptier, or sadder, or shallower for lack of romance or sex. Our experiences are part of The Human Experience. Our perspectives on art and life and relationships and philosophy and humanity and everything else are just as valid. We are just as capable of profundity, of creativity, of insight - because romance and sex aren't “at the core” of any of these things. We are here, and we're tired of being forgotten, ignored, sidelined, dismissed, erased, talked over, talked past. It would be great if society at large actually remembered we exist once in a while, and that our lives are just as beautiful and important as anyone else's.

[beanytuesday]

Hey, I love your art -- I was wondering if you ever posted your illustration for Kafka's "A Hunger Artist" on here? It's really evocative and gorgeously framed, and I find myself thinking of it frequently!!

Thank you for the kind words. A Hunger Artist by Franz Kafka is one of my favorite short stories of all time, and it’s a very quick read. You can read it right here:

https://www.kafka-online.info/a-hunger-artist.html

Go ahead, I’ll wait here.

I’d like to take us opportunity to talk a little bit about the story, if I may.

Although there are a couple different interpretations of the story's meaning, it unambiguously read to me as an allegory for the plight of the creative, likely drawing from Kafka’s own experience. The ‘starving artist’ comparison is obvious, but there’s much more to it than that. In a departure from most other depictions in media, the plight of the artist is not depicted as something noble or redemptive, but as a sort of self-destructive madness. The hunger artist dies alone and in obscurity, his impact on the world ultimately being completely marginal and insubstantial. When questioned about why he chose a life like this, he reveals that he doesn’t even enjoy fasting, he simply couldn’t find any food he liked. That is to say, a true creative does not select this kind of self destructive lifestyle because they enjoy it; rather, it is because they cannot possibly bear to do anything else. Kafka himself, It should be mentioned, supposedly despised pretty much every job he ever had.

As some of you may know, I developed severe tendinitis a couple months ago. Mentally, September was probably the worst months of my entire life. I reflected on this story a lot –I had wrought my own self destruction, and for what? A couple of bucks? A few comics that i’ll become embarrassed of in a year’s time anyway? Unsure about my prospects for recovery, I became incredibly depressed.

But having been starved of the ability to write or draw, I had a genuine epiphany. Standing at the corner of Boston liquors in Allston, I resolved that I would muster the strength to endure this, regardless of how long it took, because what awaited me at the end was nothing short of the greatest prize a person could ask for: That very thing derided by Kafka –the life of an artist.

There is no greater pleasure than making art. I mean that genuinely, I mean that literally. No, it isn’t noble, no, it isn’t redemptive, but in a totally hedonistic and self-serving way it is simply the greatest thing that life can offer, ambrosia in the mouth, better than sex, better than drugs, better than anything that money can buy, and I feel pity for anyone unable to experience it. I am not being hyperbolic, I am not being metaphorical. I am stating this in the plainest of terms, having lived a life without it for the last couple of months.

So although my personal relationship to the story has changed in the past couple months, Kafka was right about one thing; nothing else tastes good, at least not by comparison. We must imagine the hunger artist happy.

[livelaughpeg]

I'm writing this from a throwaway account, because you know...Scientology.

I want to preface this post by saying I am not one of those "I knew it all along!" people. I can't stand that attitude. I was pretty ambivelant towards Neil Gaiman. Prior to the allegations, I didn't hate him but I wasn't that interested in him as a person either. I don't think you can always tell when someone is a bad or good person simply by the topics they write about. If that was the case we'd be arresting every horror writer on earth.

But one thing that did always rub me up the wrong way was the way he talked about getting work.

I borrowed and read "Make Good Art" (a small book based on a speech he gave to graduates at the University of the Arts) at a time in my life that I was really struggling to get by (I still am to some extent, but in a different way). I expected to see some practical advice. Instead it was a bunch of glib shit like:

I got out into the world, I wrote, and I became a better writer the more I wrote, and I wrote some more, and nobody ever seemed to mind that I was making it up as I went along, they just read what I wrote and they paid for it, or they didn’t, and often they commissioned me to write something else for them. Looking back, I’ve had a remarkable ride. I’m not sure I can call it a career, because a career implies that I had some kind of career plan, and I never did. The nearest thing I had was a list I made when I was 15 of everything I wanted to do: to write an adult novel, a children’s book, a comic, a movie, record an audiobook, write an episode of Doctor Who… and so on. I didn’t have a career. I just did the next thing on the list.

Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do. Make good art. I’m serious. Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Somebody on the Internet thinks what you do is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before? Make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, and eventually time will take the sting away, but that doesn’t matter. Do what only you do best. Make good art.

Yeah, well, no shit. If you're a writer or artist you probably do anyway. Whether you get paid for it or not, whether you draw fan art or original art. But the point of Gaiman's speech was to give advice to people who wanted to be paid for their art. To make a career of it. Making art every day isn't always enough. You have to pay the damn rent, you have to eat, you have to network and do social media and promote yourself, and you have to do it while thousands of other people are doing the same thing in a massive crowd of people who want the same thing. Practical advice is much more valuable than platitudes and theory.

I am not a writer, I'm an illustrator, and let me tell you that for most people, 'getting your foot in the door' isn't a one time thing. Quite often you have to work at getting your foot in the door again and again until you become established, and it's very easy to be forgotten. I still feel like I'm in that stage now.

I watched my peers, and my friends, and the ones who were older than me and watch how miserable some of them were: I’d listen to them telling me that they couldn’t envisage a world where they did what they had always wanted to do any more, because now they had to earn a certain amount every month just to keep where they were. They couldn’t go and do the things that mattered, and that they had really wanted to do; and that seemed as a big a tragedy as any problem of failure.

The implication was that he was successful because he wrote every day and his friends weren't because they didn't, because you know, working a second job is tiring. He called this a tragedy, but there was something very glib about the way he narrated this.

I think someone had more financial cushion that he was letting on.

And yes, sometimes it does work that way, (some people are very lucky and make all the right connections) but Gaiman was getting Big Jobs right off the bat and something about that never smelt right to me after the way he talked about it.

And then I saw Jeff's tweets. Oh, that's why...

I suspect the truth is he was living off his family's money and connections, and while I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that if you're a struggling artist, his family are Scientologists, and I don't think he ever struggled.

I suspect it's all a lie.

[petday]

I make fandom art I make porn I make stuff that makes me miserable and I make stuff that makes me happy and I follow all the advice online but still nobody likes my art. I know it's good art and im not insecure about my talent level but no matter what I post or where I post it, nobody wants to like or interact with my art at all. I know people see it I know people are scrolling past without acknowledging what I make and it fucking sucks. I don't have friends to share stuff I make with and nobody online cares clearly. What do you do when nobody likes you or what you offer.

Good question. This response involves some of my history. I try to talk about my experiences at a comfortable distance. But please skip to the 'Solutions' part if you're bored.

My thoughts below:

It's painful. I have a lot of memories of high intensity pain due to no one engaging with me, at school and online. 'If I live in the same world as others, but it still feels like I am in a world with just myself, what is the point of trying to make things? Sure, I will feel better about myself as I grow, but I've still got no one to grow with, so I am just talking to myself. Amusing myself is fine, but I want to reach a level of fun above amusement, a level that others seem to reach so naturally.' 

In fact, maybe you are less 'outward' with your emotions, but as a child and teenager and young adult, there was a lot of screaming and crying and thrashing about 'not being granted the ability to make things others will seriously engage with me about.' 

(The pain remained after making a few friends during teenage years. The pain's attitude shifted slightly to accommodate this new life change of gaining friends. Much later, even after I became an artist with a large visible number of 'followers/people interested in something you make', the pain shifted its shape around this life change again. "People make bad assumptions of me because I have a big visible number in my profile and most websites do not give me the ability to hide that number." Summary: If your pain/frustration still remains after you gain a friend or find people who engage you, don't beat yourself up. Emotions don't work in such a way that the outcomes you desire are only guaranteed to make you happy and no other emotions will rise.)

Although I loved to look at art on websites since I was a child, one may assume I enjoyed the community aspect. I did, but only as a spectator for the vast majority of the time, since age restrictions and the harsh attitudes that exist to 'prevent the weak from touching the strong' was present in many of the sites I visited. Similar to how children get frustrated when another child cannot keep up with their play, but the child that is 'left out' can still enjoy watching other kids play from afar. It makes perfect sense to me these feelings will always exist in the world no matter what 'social media' websites people invent.

Anyway, two solution attempts in succession I tried over long-term:

1. My first attempt at a solution was immersing myself in a fantasy world I created in my mind and I held my imagination in high esteem. "I know my imagination takes influence from the things I read and admire, so it's not such a lonely world anyway." Creating episode lists of imaginary cartoon episodes and such, so dedicated to something I hardly told anyone about. It felt good. But my friends had original characters too, and they could describe their personalities and dynamics to others naturally and quickly, likely due to their earlier experiences with 'communicating ideas to others.' I was quiet and envious. Although it was fun to play with the imaginary characters in my head, I decided to take another step. Of course I could not simply go back in time to gain the similar social experiences my friends had. But I could use that desire to 'go back in time' to 'go forward in time' and gain the experience.

2. Engage in others first. Because I spent a long time in my imagination, I felt more secure about myself, so I wanted to extend the feeling of 'caring about my own work' to 'caring about others' work on an equal level.' The internet allows you to assess people before engaging to see if your compatibility might be okay. If someone had posts that resonated with me, I tried to say 'hello, I like what you posted/I like your drawing because [...]' Even if the contact ended there, it was a good practice. Gently communicate with people over time. Especially since I am sure there are people who rarely receive questions about their artworks who would love someone to engage with them as well. Of course do not do this in a 'pity' sense – you have to genuinely find something that 'touches your heart' and if the artist seems to not get much curiosity in regards to their art, you can go ahead and try to express your curiosity to them. Keep posting whatever you like, but if you engage with others, you may find someone engaging with you without even expecting it, and that is fun.

(I think society should practice finding genuine value in things they like even if they see nobody has touched it. Not pity, but removing the "does anyone else like this? If I see no one else liking this, it must be a bad thing to like, so I won't engage" attitude. Some of my favourite artwork has maybe 5 visible 'bookmarks/favorites' on an art-focused website.)