#I’m gonna try my best to keep on posting though because the tf2 community really brings me joy! Really love it here :]

[ruthytwoshakes]

sketch dump babayeyeg B)) (Going through it right now so no finshed art for a while.)

Miss Pauling and her epicc girlfriends (she IS hoarding all the bad bitches thank you to whoever said that on my last Pauling post) this time they are cats animallsms. swag. I was confused on what animal admin should be and then @stangeranfanficion said cougar and I lost my mind a little. so true and so funny .hejrjrhjhe

alright so while I was thinking about Miss Pauling I had this vivid image pop into my head of her getting pampered!! She deserves a rest day I thijnk ,, pyro knitted her the sweater and socks teehee. this turned out a lot more affectionate and sweet then what I planned ewwwww grooss hiss bleeehehhhhheh whateevvvverr. I’ll save it for valentines week.

RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH ZHANNNA,,!!!!!!!!!!!!!! LETS FUCKIGJGN GOOOOOOOO oh and her husband yippee!!!!!!!!!!!! Love u too soldier. 2nd pic is an outfit swap!! Soldier wears booty jorts idk what to tell you. .also I forgor how leg muscles work hjhhh

More soldier posting. My man. Love his dumbass. I would love to throw various vegetables at him ,,like trying to scare off a wild deer that’s eatinf your flowers and various plants.

Hello spy ,,nic,,e to see you . First one is sheep in wolves clothing. Dutch is a wolf !but yes. Second one is scouts ma because as soon as I see big tall women I instantly die . And third is silly mode!!!!!! Silly fortress two !!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Very Piemations coded or whateverrvev .

Some more sketches with not too good anatomy,, oopsies I will have to fix!! Also Tadc. They’re lesbians to me. Exceeptp for Caine he’s kinda a boy toy ,. what why did I say that

I gave miss pauling a cat and turned soldier into one merrry chriirtms

[antagonistchanremade]

So, Sensei Dare, my animesque Doctor Who AU, is a complete reboot of Doctor Who canon, but when I first started it in 2012, it was actually continued from what was at that point the most recent episode, the series 7 episode The Angels Take Manhattan (though I later retconned it so that it actually continued from the series 6 finale, The Wedding of River Song, and other events happened to result in the Doctor splitting off from the Ponds). The AU started with the eleventh Doctor dying and regenerating into the twelfth; but since Peter Capaldi hadn’t been announced yet at that point, I had to come up with my own.

And, like, here’s the thing; I didn’t know that Sensei Dare was gonna end up as some big AU that I’d care for yet at that point. I was just starting a new RP blog. And my theme for RP blogs until that point, out of a desire to stay unique (what was the point in playing a character that someone else was already playing?), had been crossover blogs- my initial RP blog when I joined Tumblr was a Doctor Who/My Little Pony AU, with Rory Williams as a cartoon horse; then, it was a Homestuck/TF2 crossover, where for some reason or another The Condesce basically became the Administrator and so Aradia became the RED Spy; then, my next character was not a crossover AU, but since the series was so obscure (and kinda crossover-y on its own), I figured it was still unique- Kaoru Matsubara, AKA Powered Buttercup, from PowerPuff Girls Z; and then finally, I did a TF2/Pokemon crossover where TF2 took place in the Pokemon universe and so the Mercs were having Pokemon battles, and I played Soldier (my url was “soldierjanedoewantstobattle”, which I’m still kinda proud of).

Anyways, Sensei Dare started with my next crossover idea: Doctor Who/Homestuck.

Namely, the Doctor can regenerate, and each regeneration looks and acts different... so there’s no reason that incarnation’s appearance and personality can’t be identical to a pre-existing character. Like, by doing that, I can essentially play two characters at once, by mixing the core personality traits that stay the same with every incarnation of the Doctor with the more fluid personality traits of the pre-existing character, as well as that character’s appearance.

So, the twelfth Doctor... was just Dave Strider.

And honestly? I stuck with this idea for a long time- where the Doctor would regenerate into a body and personality identical to a pre-existing character- but Dave was always one of my best choices, because A) he’s already heavily associated with time travel and stuff, B) I’d already been a Homestuck fan for about a year and this was when Homestuck was at the height of its popularity so I had plenty of material to work with, C) interacting with other Homestuck blogs gave me plenty of worldbuilding to work with for this early version of Sensei Dare, and finally, D) Dave Strider has very distinctive mannerisms, so it was really easy to communicate this idea of “The character looks and acts like Dave, but make no mistake, this isn’t Dave, it’s the Doctor“.

Initially, I was gonna stick with this idea for 3-4 months before moving on to my next idea, like I’d been doing before, but then I realized that, hey, the Doctor can regenerate multiple times, so why not try this idea with a new character? So after 3-4 months of playing the Dave Doctor, I decided to have the Doctor regenerate again, into a new character.

And here’s a new, equally key thing.

While I was playing the Dave Doctor, I basically had my Anime Awakening. If you’d asked me before if I liked anime, I’d have said yes, but I only knew the really popular stuff like Pokemon and Digimon and a few obscure niche shows like PowerPuff Girls Z; but when I was playing Dave Doctor, I ran into a Haruhi Suzumiya RP blog, and that inspired me to watch it, and then from there everything spiraled out. Before, anime was an interest of mine; now, it was my preferred style of storytelling. And you can bet your ass I was gonna start incorporating it.

The thirteenth Doctor ended up being Ritsu Tainaka from K-On! (when the canon thirteenth Doctor was announced, I was kinda amused to realize that my thirteenth Doctor was also the first female one, funny how that works). I decided to do the regeneration in a series of “Story” posts, and in the first one, I foreshadowed my character choice by having the Doctor encounter a pair of drumsticks in the snow (since Ritsu’s a drummer). Then, the Doctor died and regenerated into the new incarnation. From that point onwards, in both that version of Sensei Dare and the next reboot, every Doctor was an anime girl (with one minor exception; with 17, I experimented with a split timeline where in one timeline, 17 was an anime girl, but in the other, 17 was an anime boy; but I scrapped this idea, and when 18 rolled around, I made the anime girl timeline the canon one).

However, then I ran into a problem. Canon Who states pretty specifically and consistently that a Timelord can only regenerate 12 times for a total of 13 lives. I was on the thirteenth life. And that’s when I remembered the drumsticks. For one, they kinda had just initially existed to tease Ritsu; it seemed a little strange for them to be that noticeable for just some vague symbolism. Also, in canon, the Master managed to exceed the 13 life limit... and the Master was also strongly associated with a drum beat.

So I decided that the drumsticks were a sort of Regeneration-Enabling Tool developed by the Master. Like, if a Timelord that was out of regenerations was dying, the drumsticks would activate and give them the energy they needed to regenerate. And so, I had the Doctor realize this (it wasn’t that implausible that the Doctor would eventually figure this out from a single innocuous encounter, since the Doctor did notice them, and Timelords are regularly shown to have some psychic ability to recognize each other and their tech) and go on a quest to track down those drumsticks. And she found them! So, for the rest of this incarnation of Sensei Dare, the Doctor just carried these drumsticks around at all times so she could keep living.

I’m also just remembering some of the ways the Doctor died in that version of the story. 12 fell off a building because he was chasing someone and it was all icy and slippery. 18 locked herself in the TARDIS and starved to death (that one was, in retrospect, really dumb; but it’s dumb enough to be noteworthy). 16, in a Timelord Victorious moment of fury and recklessness, tried to attack a totalitarian government, but they shot a missile at the TARDIS, and the Doctor, out of said recklessness, had the door open, so the missile exploded in the console room. 14 got shot by a nazi (not even a neo-nazi, a normal nazi, since she was in 1940 Germany at the time).

19 and 20, the last two, were particularly fun; for the 21st Doctor, I decided to go with a Kantai Collection character, and I decided to lean super hard into the crossover, and so I decided to have the Kancolle Doctor come into existence via the Doctor fusing with the actual ship during regeneration. Like, the Doctor was Nenohi, so the 20th Doctor drowned in the middle of the ocean and encountered the remains of the IJN Nenohi, and because Shintoism (or at least my vague understanding of Shintoism), the ship had a sort of “spirit”, and that spirit reacted to the Doctor’s regeneration by integrating itself into her, resulting in her being both the 21st incarnation of the Timelord hero known as the Doctor, and being the living personification of an old warship.

Meanwhile, with the 19th, well... the Doctor died by getting hit on the head really hard. But while the cause of death was in hindsight kinda boring, the circumstances of her death were less so. I actually kinda jumped right from the 19th Doctor to the 21st, because I wanted the 20th to exist primarily for one storyline: Sensei Dare: The Movie (or rather, Sensei Dare Ka: The Movie, since I was calling it Sensei Dare Ka at that point). SDK:TM was a huge event; it was a huge RP with multiple RP partners of mine being involved in the story. I had multiple SDK:TM threads, for different parts of the story.

The plot of SDK:TM? The Timelords were returning. Since I split off from canon before the 50th anniversary special, I also decided that the 50th special wasn’t canon to Sensei Dare, so Gallifrey was still somehow locked off from the rest of the universe and still didn’t want to be. The Doctor realized this, and recruited allies to help suppress the scenario; but she failed, and even died and regenerated again during the whole mess. She was, however, at least able to stop the worst-case scenario (the Timelords just conquer the universe) from happening.

[noxiim]

(1/3)Okayyyy so i mightve sent a few asks abt this before but this topic is really now bugging me cuz i have depression and im sensitive to like everything. Im starting to take this "not getting notes on my art" thing really personally and i know it sounds childish (and i laugh at myself for it) but i cant help but get upset when i spend so much time and effort and get like no feedback. And i know people say not to draw what u love and not for attention but honestly i dont even know what

and i dont even know if im drawing what ilike sometimes. Yeah i love bts but i dont know if i like what im drawing or ifim just doing it for notes???? And i have a lot of anxiety too and thats wherei feel like im taking this too personally. Cuz im starting to think that my artdoesnt get notes cuz its straight up not good which leads me to think ishouldnt even try to pursue a career in art anymore. But im not good atanything else so wtf am i gonna do if i dont succeed in art???? Like i said i laugh at myself for thinking like this and iprobably sound like a fuckin child but i cant help it???? Like i think my artis decent???? But maybe its not???? Idk like this was really hitting me todaycuz i feel like im wasting so much time and im probably gonna be one of thosepoor college students cuz i decided to focus on art more rather than taking ajob cuz i thought i could make money off of my art but yknow clearly its notgoing so well and im scared for my future U dont have to give advice to all of that i just needed tolet that all out 

Aw dude don’t worry I get what you mean,I actually experienced something similar when I first started posting my art totumblr, and even recently when I first started posting bts fanart. It’sperfectly normal to want recognition (in this case in the form of notes) forsomething you worked so hard on!! I think one of the major issues with postingto such a big fandom such as bts though is that there’s so many peopleproducing content at any given time, that it’s incredibly easy to get drownedout. Especially since tumblr changed how search and track tagging worked, itmade it that much harder for people to get noticed for their content.

When I first switched to drawing for bts,I found it hard because I also focused a lot on my note count. For someone whowas originally well established in a previous fandom, the move to bts was quitea jarring experience. I had built my following on tf2 art, and used toconsistently get a couple hundred notes, but one of main reasons why I left wasbecause of the dwindling of note counts. When I first left, overwatch had justcome out and a lot of attention shifted towards that game away from tf2, andalthough I still love the game, the dramatic decrease in notes on my art fortf2 really made me sad and I ended up deciding to leave the fandom after 3years of drawing tf2 art. I hopped around a bit, before eventually getting intobts. Even then, my first few pieces (they’re not on my #bts fanart tag so mostpeople wouldn’t have ever seen them) either got no notes at all or only two orthree. It was easier for me to establish myself in a fandom such as tf2 back inthe day since it was such a small, tight knit community with limited contentcreators, but now with bts there are so many more people and it just seemedhopeless for a while and I lost motivation in my art. I stopped wanting todraw, since it felt like nobody cared. Art is the biggest hobby I have, solosing my confidence in my art was crushing.

Now you might be wondering how I got towhere I am today. I’ll be completely honest with you. For me, I highly doubt Iwould be anywhere near where I am if it weren’t for networks. I had neverjoined a network before, but decided to join armiesnet and jimin network one daywhen I saw that applications were open. I got accepted, and I joined theirrespective group chats too. I met lots of great people on those chats, and madea lot of new friends which was nice after having moved fandoms and lost touchwith many previous mutuals. I’m so glad I joined networks, because not only doyou have the chance to make mutuals who will support you and your art, thenetwork blog itself also reblogs all its members’ content which gives youexposure to members of the network through both the network tag and through thedashboard. It’s a perfect way to get started, rather than hoping that somebodywith a decent following will happen to stumble across your work in the tags oneday and reblog it.

That being said, unless you’re like somesort of godly human being I don’t think we can ever get over how note countsfeel as an artist. We need something to gauge people’s response to our art, andthat tends to default to note counts. I can assure you that the feeling of disappointmentwhen your post doesn’t get as many notes as you want/expected it to is a thingpretty much all artists on this site shares. People always say “you should drawfor yourself, not for other people” but that’s the equivalent of like say themona lisa being painted and then left to rot in Da Vinci’s closet or something.The whole point of art is sharing your ideas/love for something through yourdrawings with other people, and so it’s perfectly normal to want therecognition you deserve for working so hard and putting so much love into yourcraft. When it feels like you’re all alone, you have to remember not to giveup. Creating art in such a big fandom can be unforgiving, but just rememberthat your art is never the one at fault. It’s all about finding that littlegolden window of exposure, whether it be through one big blog or a couplesmaller blogs reblogging your work. Those kind few people will be what helpsyou grow, and you have to keep posting for that to happen. If you water a plantbut it doesn’t bloom the next day, abandoning it will get you nowhere. If youjust keep going, keep watering it, results will come. Keep reminding yourselfthat you’re doing well, and you can compare older art to your current art tosee the progress and keep you motivated. Don’t force yourself to draw if youaren’t feeling it – art is something that should make you happy. I used to drawbecause I felt the pressure to put out content, but that just resulted in mefalling into a negative spiral of art block, limited motivation and generalunhappiness with my art as a result. Remember that there’s no such thing as adeadline when it comes to posting art on tumblr – work at whatever pace suitsyou and if anybody tries to rush you, shut them down. You’re the artist, youget to choose what you do with your art, how you do it, and how long you spendon it.

If you truly have your sights set onbecoming an artist full time, then by all means go for it! I can’t give muchadvice in that area since I only plan on keeping art as a hobby, but justremember that art school is always optional. In the end, working as an artistis all about the portfolio, not where you graduated from. It’s more importantto work on your art than it is to get in to an amazing art school. Sure, artschools can be useful, but in the end they are simply tools, sort of like atutorial rather than something that will magically turn you into an amazing artistwith amazing job offers. At the end of the day, it’s all up to yourself to workhard and promote yourself. Since art is all about reaching different audienceswith your work, promoting yourself is essential, even if it’s just casualfanart on tumblr. Feedback can’t come without exposure, and exposure can’t comewithout self-promotion.

Lastly, remind yourself that there’s nosuch thing as ‘bad art’. That might sound like a stupid statement, but inreality art is a constantly changing thing. There is no pinnacle of perfection,no model artwork that represents the most perfect drawing out there. Everyonehas different styles, everyone has different approaches, and most importantly,everyone is still improving. I’m still learning and trying to improve my ownart, and there’s no shame in that. It’s easy to perceive someone else’s art asbetter than yours which would lead to some self-critical thoughts, but you haveto remember that the other artist is probably looking at their own art andpicking it apart, thinking “aw man there are so many mistakes here.” It’s fineto make mistakes, after all, that’s how we learn. Just because we see mistakesin our own art doesn’t mean that everyone else will too – nobody looks at artand their first thought is to list all of the mistakes present. As long as youare aware of what you are less confident in and actively work to improve it,you can quickly surpass even the people you look up to.

So yeah, sorry that this is hella longlol, but in all honestly I can understand what you’re going through. It’seasier said than done, but even though it might feel hard - don’t give up. Youmight feel like you’re not getting anywhere at the moment but I assure you thatif you just keep going, things will only get better. That’s the thing abouttumblr, if you keep posting art your audience can only grow. For now, I would definitelyrecommend joining some networks, and making some friends. It’s not uncommon forpeople to promo their own work in the network chat occasionally, as long as youdon’t spam haha

Anywho, I wish you the best of luck withyour art journey. If you need me you know where to find me 💕💕💕