#enclosure design

[rosalind2013]

Attention Zookeepers / Zoologists / Botanists / Ornithologists / Other Experts:

Could you please tell me of some trees that are completely safe for parrots? (Leaves, bark, fruit, etc. are okay for them to ingest) I have a 1.8m x 1.8m (6ft x 6ft) outdoor aviary for my cockatoo that we sit in when the weather is nice, and I’d love to put a potted live tree or two in there for her to perch on (and probably chew on, as parrots do). I live in a humid subtropical climate, so plants that do well in that type of climate are preferred, though I’m not against bringing them indoors for the winter if I need to.

I’d love pictures of the plants as well as the names if possible, so I can be sure I have the correct tree!

Pictures of the my sweet girl in the aviary for cuteness tax:

[sunfish-exotics]

Finally got the last layer of grout done, gonna paint today and install the glass tracks and lights once it dries. Tomorrow I’ll do at least one layer of sealant, unsure how long it’s gonna take to cure between layers, it’s my first time using polycrylic! If all goes according to plan I can get the lids to the hides done this week and get the glass ordered too! Finally making some quick progress.

These are my main inspo pics for the paint job, I’ll take pics and maybe video as I go?

Really mostly excited to get plants ordered if I’m being honest haha- im doing a biotope and everything. Elaborate and extra but idc

[azvhaalk]

Hecate, my beloved.

[sabworks]

I see blouses, I draw Nureyev wearing them. I don’t make the rules.

[aliennopossumm]

seeing life series lineup fanart can be so hit and miss. either you see the most amazingly accurate designs that perfectly encapsulate both their personality and irl looks whilst still making it clear that the art is of the character. or you see 14 twinks and 3 thin, curvy women.

[howgalling]

second half of @small-witch-big-hat 's comm!! :D lovely miss Slagheap. As per her Lore, she's a failed clone of Grimlock, so I wanted to keep aspects of his design while making her unique too. She's a follow up to her humanformer design!

[canisalbus]

just wanted to say i've been following your art on & off for years (in the way that i am online on & off, and especially on art sites on & off, lol) and i feel like machete has been an artistic cornerstone in my brain forever. im not sure when you created him, but it feels like his imagery and spirit have been in your art for the decade or so that i've loved it. i barely post my own anymore, but you are still a huge inspiration <3

Aw dang, thank you so much! I'm honored!

Machete predates my entire online presence actually, I first started posting my work on deviantart in late 2010 and Machete was already several years old at that point (my best guess is he's from 2007 or 2008 but it's hard to say for sure). He's been around since the beginning, he's one of my oldest surviving OCs and I've been drawing him at least semi-regularly throughout the years. I didn't mean to make him a mascot for my art but that's essentially what he is.

[random-lil-illing]

player appreciation week day 3: homeschool!!

okay so i know it was said in the last post that player doesnt get homework, but that was not what i meant to say haha. i wanted to say they didnt have homework that week, but usually their mom does give them (very little) homework. also player is bad at maths and hates triangles bc i hate triangles too and its MY comfort caharcter so i get to project my struggles onto them

[kyuziipon]

The prettiest sisters in the male idol industry! 🫧🖤

ID: [a digital drawing of Hajime shino and bishoujo-senpai from ensemble stars. Bishoujo-senpai is drawn with light skin, a small androgynous build, long straight blonde hair, and pink eyes. They are slightly taller than Hajime. Both are wearing girly kei outfits, with Hajime in sweet girly and bishoujo-senpai in a more mature French girly. Hajime’s outfit is pale blue, and bishoujo-senpais is in black and white. The background is a faded blue and pink, with barely visible white accents, and behind Hajime is a light pink pair of angel wings and a halo, and behind bishoujo-senpai is a light blue pair of devil horns and a tail.] /End ID

[cthulhusstepmom]

Weeping wailing gnashing my teeth when people say that aquariums smell bad. cause you just know that they're talking about a bowl with three goldfish in it and of course it smells rank that's sewer water. But real, balanced, well stocked, cycled aquariums? Now that's a beautiful smell. It's not a good smell mind, it's pretty neutral and you can only really get it if you have your nose right down next to the water. But that's what life smells like, that's living water.

[interstate35south]

i get that the tgcf donghua had to make a lot of design changes bc GOD knows the manhua style (while gorgeous) would be hell to animate BUT to this day the most grievous offense is ke mo. like i watched the first season before i started the novels so when i first saw him i was like oh cool design he’s so tall and ghosty. and then i saw his manhua design. and i had to take a lap. all my respect to the donghua but these are not the same person

[subzeroparade]

What's a ballet with real snazzy costume work, in your humble and/or professional opinion? c:

Oh, you’ve activated my trap card - asking about costume design and ballet and not expecting me to barf up the entirety of my PhD. I’ve also done work on the ballet blancs costumes (Giselle and La Sylphide specifically) but they are interesting on a theoretical level and not so much visually, so I’ll skip that.

So here are some personal favs of mine - the highlights, if you will. Caveat: long post, and mostly limited to the work of the Ballets Russes, because they are my longtime obsession and I think (and have argued) for their role in fundamentally changing stage and costume design (to say nothing of dance, and George Balanchine can sit the fuck down). I didn’t put that in my thesis but I wanted to.

Anyway tldr in the first decade of the 20th century a troupe of dancers from the Russian Imperial Ballet (later the Mariinsky) travelled through Europe under impresario Serge Diaghilev, for what became known as the Saisons Russes, or Russian Seasons. They performed both opera and ballet, and are probably best remembered today (if at all) as the troupe that danced the premier of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and caused a riot at the Theatre des Champs Elysées. The eminent artists that worked with them include Debussy, Cocteau, Picasso, Chanel - and these are only a few recognisable names. But my focus was primarily on the Russian roots of the ballet, in their visual language and presentation of gender and nationality, more precisely around the work of artist Leon Bakst and dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. 

Second image of Nijinsky from Le Dieu Bleu, and Bakst’s set design from Scheherazade (1911). These are mainly photos and scans I have from the year I spent in the archives of the Palais Garnier (the Paris Opera) where all the good stuff is.

The crux of why these costumes are insanely interesting to me is because they are very specific to their time - they are a product of a resurgence in nationalist interests in Russian art (Diaghilev ran Mir Isskustva and worked with Savva Mamontov before he organised the BR) as well as a carefully crafted, highly artificial presentation of Otherness, expressly destined for export to the west. French audiences in the first decade of the 20th century (because there is a stark cut-off at the beginning of WW1) still had an appetite for Orientalism, despite their flagging colonial power. What the Russians brought them was compelling mix of performative Orientalism just vague enough to be appealing and fantastical, visually intriguing, and refreshing to a society that had otherwise come to recognise itself as decadent, fallen “victim” to modernity. In the athletic virtuosity of Russian bodies, Bakst’s exotic visual language and the soaring music of Rimsky-Korsakov and Stravinsky, the French devoured what they deemed a sort of noble savagery (yes, that kind). Despite the oversaturation of Orientalism in painting throughout the 19th century, the French identified a kind of masculine vigour and freedom in these live performances they found they themselves lacked, and longed for. Primitivism, as demonstrated in myriad ways by the BR, was for them a way to reconnect with a virility that they felt modernity had stolen, or at the very least, weakened. If you think this sounds eerily akin to the discourse around mounting desire for war to “cleanse” or “reset” Europe during that same period, you are right. 

A few of Bakst’s lesser known designs from the archive, for context (including a reprod by Barbier which I don’t have the OG of but is saved in my Bakst folder so please take my word for it). I have a thousand more of these but tumblr has an image limit per post 😤

Tamara Karsavina, who often performed with Nijinsky, and one of my most beloved historical figures. The existence of a strong classical ballet cirruculumin the UK today is in part thanks to her. 

One of her most famous roles, as the Firebird:

Nijinsky is by far the most interesting figure to come out of the BR. He combined virtuosity and strength (that most audiences identified as masculine) with a glittering, joyful, and expressive queerness on stage (and off). Some of his greatest roles are expressly feminine in their costume design: Le Spectre de La Rose, for example.

There’s a colorised version of this out there where you can see every pink rose petal on him.

While others are much more decorative but still markedly Orientalist (or Russian-Orientalist): Le Dieu Bleu, La Peri, Les Orientales, L’Oiseaux de Feu. 

This last image above is not, the last I saw it, in a private collection. It hangs above the vestibule of the Palais Garnier archives (also Napoleon’s private hangout room) where it faces the sort of “diptych” version that features Karsavina, and on occasion I would stand below them and weep quietly).

Either way, there is an argument to be made about Nijinsky’s physicality and, more importantly nationality as a kind of avenue of permission through which the French could admire both his beauty and athleticism and even, to a degree, imagine themselves in his place while still maintaining that safe distance of Otherness.  

But I would argue that his greatest role was the Golden Slave in Scheherazade, a wild, erotic orientalist fantasy that has little to nothing to do with the actual tale of Scheherazade. In it, Nijinsky - bejewelled, wild, ecstatic, (and yeah often in blackface) - cavorts with Zobeide, the Sultan’s favourite, in a very sexually explicit storyline. Both characters are equally decorative in their costumes, and both, in real life, were recognisably queer(ed) figures. It’s Scheherazade in particular that helped accelerate an obsessive trend in fashion (Paul Poiret was at the centre) for Orientalist design. Bakst himself did some silhouettes that are hard to distinguish from his costume design, and through the remarkable illustrations by Paul Iribe, Georges Lepape and Georges Barbier, we can see some of the blatant repetition of motif and silhouette in these ensembles that are designed, among other things, to be worn to the theatre. 

3rd and 5th are depictions of costumes of the Firebird and Zobeide respectively; the rest are fashion plates. This doesn’t even include the lampshade dress - which I don’t have a handy picture of, but have seen in real life - that is a pretty blatant melange of the Firebird and Zobeide, as designed by Poiret. Below is one of my favourite examples: A woman in a lampshade-style dress, standing against a backdrop not unlike Bakst’s set design above, attended by a archetypal oriental servant wearing Nijinsky’s Golden Slave costume.

These motifs also proliferated in advertisements and in all kinds of other consumer products (perfumes, for example, and decorative objects). Thus, there’s a performative aim in wearing these designs that I read as a sort of pseudo-kinetic empathy (and can funnnily enough probably be compared to cosplay). There is an attempt here to channel what is being presented onstage, to reenact it, to physically embody it, in the way that fashion is, at its core, a tool through which to construct identity. That the French pulled inspiration from an openly queer man leaping across the stage dripping in jewels, and from femme fatal-style odalisques, says a lot about the visual and cultural impact the BR had on the theatre-going public at the time.

You can see in these fan designs by Paquin some pretty obvious references to the BR aesthetic: L’apres-midi d’un faune, Daphnis et Chloe, Scheherazade, even a little Le Pavillon d’Armide in that first one. 

Nijinsky was not the only one to queer the stage: despite not being a dancer trained to the level of the BR troupe, Ida Rubinstein, no doubt purposefully channelling Sarah Bernhardt, was also a beloved stage presence, whether as the sly harem favourite Zobeide or as the strikingly androgynous St Sebastian, gayest of saints. 

This is not to say there haven’t been wonderful and brilliant costume designs since - and quite a few known fashion designers working alongside dance companies, to great success or otherwise. I will, however, shoutout my favourite contemporary work: Akram Khan’s Giselle, which has everything and yet nothing to do with Adolph Adam’s 1842 piece. I don’t even want to post pictures because the costumes of the nobles (the landowners, in this very apocalyptically late-stage capitalist version) are so fucking breathtaking in relation to the overall design, and their entrance itself is probably one of the most spectacular parts of the ballet, that all I can say is just see it. Or buy the dvd. What Khan does gesturally is beyond words, what Vincenzo Lamagna does with Adam’s original score is visceral and haunting and churns my insides. I make a point to see it live at least once a season when it’s touring with the ENB, and I will do so until it leaves the repertory or until I die. It’s my contemporary Scheherazade. It’s a gesamtkunstwerk. 

Tldr Leon Bakst is one of the greatest costume designers of the 19th and 20th century and criminally underrated. 

It’s not ballet, and it’s not the sumptuous costumes from Boris Godunov, but as a bonus here’s my favourite image of opera star Fedor Chaliapine as Ivan the Terrible.

[angelkissedface]

rizza sketches. i can't get over him im obsessed

[winepresswrath]

Challengers is wild because the happy threesome ending is so obvious. Tashi embodies tennis and also loves it best. Those dudes only play good tennis together. They love her because they love tennis and they love tennis because they love each other. She feels something for them individually but they can't bring the magic on their own. Isolated, they're not giving her what she craves, what she's been denied from taking for herself. However none of them will do anything about it because the competition and homewrecking is what makes it hot. Like they can't get off if they're not competing. Sick & compelling.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

How do you think Andalites in human morph deal with the human instinct to pet fluffy creatures that may or may not kill them?

I assume it'd depend on the area. In the U.S. and Europe we've killed off 99.9% of the critters who wouldn't run away and would kill a human who runs at them yelling "fluffy!!!!!" So like, I'm guessing the worst would be minor injuries or rabies from a raccoon or deer who feels cornered by this human. Anything fuzzy and venomous (tarantula, some bats, etc.) couldn't do more than cause moderate pain for a bitten human.

The issue with threatening a bear or buffalo enough that one kills you is that that doesn't happen incidentally. The human has to go into the other critter's territory, and most of the time has to repeatedly walk at the critter while ignoring threat displays in order to get killed. It's entirely possible andalites have no idea what Earth threat displays look like (considering most involve "make loud noise" and andalites don't make noise) and so might interpret a roar or growl as a form of greeting. If the morpher specifically targets the smallest and cutest critters (the babies) for attempted pets, then that'd end in death. It'd just take a lot of doing to get from an urban spaceport to a bear encounter.

If andalites can't interpret threat displays, then I'll vote for domestic dogs as posing the greatest danger. Dogs kill more humans each year than any animal except humans, largely because the two species are so interdependent. Dogs and humans are excellent at reading each other's body language, because we're both pack animals with an affinity for non-species friends, and because we've had tons of exposure to one another. So if a human who acts wrong in a way that tips off the dog's NOPE radar (walking as if used to four legs, looking around as if used to four eyes, etc.) comes at a dog and is unaware that the loud vocalizations and bared teeth mean "heck off"... yeah, that could end in tragedy.

[wraithsoutlaws]

if. nothing else grabs my attention today...i might. at some point attempt to make the tentative corpo boyo in game...