#imagine this happening in an art school

[inkskinned]

the thing about art is that it was always supposed to be about us, about the human-ness of us, the impossible and beautiful reality that we (for centuries) have stood still, transfixed by music. that we can close our eyes and cry about the same book passage; the events of which aren't real and never happened. theatre in shakespeare's time was as real as it is now; we all laugh at the same cue (pursued by bear), separated hundreds of years apart.

three years ago my housemates were jamming outdoors, just messing around with their instruments, mostly just making noise. our neighbors - shy, cautious, a little sheepish - sat down and started playing. i don't really know how it happened; i was somehow in charge of dancing, barefoot and laughing - but i looked up, and our yard was full of people. kids stacked on the shoulders of parents. old couples holding hands. someone had brought sidewalk chalk; our front walk became a riot of color. someone ran in with a flute and played the most astounding solo i've ever heard in my life, upright and wiggling, skipping as she did so. she only paused because the violin player was kicking his heels up and she was laughing too hard to continue.

two weeks ago my friend and i met in the basement of her apartment complex so she could work out a piece of choreography. we have a language barrier - i'm not as good at ASL as i'd like to be (i'm still learning!) so we communicate mostly through the notes app and this strange secret language of dancers - we have the same movement vocabulary. the two of us cracking jokes at each other, giggling. there were kids in the basement too, who had been playing soccer until we took up the far corner of the room. one by one they made their slow way over like feral cats - they laid down, belly-flat against the floor, just watching. my friend and i were not in tutus - we were in slouchy shirts and leggings and socks. nothing fancy. but when i asked the kids would you like to dance too? they were immediately on their feet and spinning. i love when people dance with abandon, the wild and leggy fervor of childhood. i think it is gorgeous.

their adults showed up eventually, and a few of them said hey, let's not bother the nice ladies. but they weren't bothering us, they were just having fun - so. a few of the adults started dancing awkwardly along, and then most of the adults. someone brought down a better sound system. someone opened a watermelon and started handing out slices. it was 8 PM on a tuesday and nothing about that day was particularly special; we might as well party.

one time i hosted a free "paint along party" and about 20 adults worked quietly while i taught them how to paint nessie. one time i taught community dance classes and so many people showed up we had to move the whole thing outside. we used chairs and coatracks to balance. one time i showed up to a random band playing in a random location, and the whole thing got packed so quickly we had to open every door and window in the place.

i don't think i can tell you how much people want to be making art and engaging with art. they want to, desperately. so many people would be stunning artists, but they are lied to and told from a very young age that art only matters if it is planned, purposeful, beautiful. that if you have an idea, you need to be able to express it perfectly. this is not true. you don't get only 1 chance to communicate. you can spend a lifetime trying to display exactly 1 thing you can never quite language. you can just express the "!!??!!!"-ing-ness of being alive; that is something none of us really have a full grasp on creating. and even when we can't make what we want - god, it feels fucking good to try. and even just enjoying other artists - art inherently rewards the act of participating.

i wasn't raised wealthy. whenever i make a post about art, someone inevitably says something along the lines of well some of us aren't that lucky. i am not lucky; i am dedicated. i have a chronic condition, my hands are constantly in pain. i am not neurotypical, nor was i raised safe. i worked 5-7 jobs while some of these memories happened. i chose art because it mattered to me more than anything on this fucking planet - i would work 80 hours a week just so i could afford to write in 3 of them.

and i am still telling you - if you are called to make art, you are called to the part of you that is human. you do not have to be good at it. you do not have to have enormous amounts of privilege. you can just... give yourself permission. you can just say i'm going to make something now and then - go out and make it. raquel it won't be good though that is okay, i don't make good things every time either. besides. who decides what good even is?

you weren't called to make something because you wanted it to be good, you were called to make something because it is a basic instinct. you were taught to judge its worth and over-value perfection. you are doing something impossible. a god's ability: from nothing springs creation.

a few months ago i found a piece of sidewalk chalk and started drawing. within an hour i had somehow collected a small classroom of young children. their adults often brought their own chalk. i looked up and about fifteen families had joined me from around the block. we drew scrangly unicorns and messed up flowers and one girl asked me to draw charizard. i am not good at drawing. i basically drew an orb with wings. you would have thought i drew her the mona lisa. she dragged her mother over and pointed and said look! look what she drew for me and, in the moment, i admit i flinched (sorry, i don't -). but the mother just grinned at me. he's beautiful. and then she sat down and started drawing.

someone took a picture of it. it was in the local newspaper. the summary underneath said joyful and spontaneous artwork from local artists springs up in public gallery. in the picture, a little girl covered in chalk dust has her head thrown back, delighted. laughing.

[juustozzi]

a pile of goofballs!!

(clara ver / iruma ver)

[incorrect-riordanverse]

im so mad that this is a side blog account and not a main account. i started this blog when i was still relatively new to tumblr and i think i was… like. fourteen years old or something. i never thought i would continue for this long, and i never knew so many people would like the content i put out here (i have over 9k followers which is literally mind-blowing, like wow….).

because this isnt a main account, i cant respond to replies left on my posts, i cant really reply to anyone unless i reblog !! i cant even follow people with this blog, it just comes up as my main blog (which is not pjo-related… rip my failed attempts at organising my fandoms to different blogs). so my avenues of interaction with a lot of you are seriously impeded.

so i just want to say i am so thankful for all of you, i read every single person’s tags who reblog my stuff, i read all of your replies and every time im crying screaming rolling around on the ground in agony over the fact i CANT REPLY!!

i know my posts are super inconsistent these days, im glad so many are still here! i think i may change some of my content eventually (never gonna get rid of the incorrect quote stuff, i’ll just be adding some other things like pjo headcanons or analyses or something), just to spice some stuff up on here.

[thegreatyin]

completely normal roommates bonding over completely normal things like *flips through notes* murdering each other and having complicated opinions on giant alien bats

[noctlas332]

the way my schools printers work is that if youre printing a document, and the printer runs out of paper, your unprinted pages will print before those of whoever comes to print next

i tried printing some things today but the printer ran out of paper

i came back half an hour later to a stack of printed images

someone had to wait for my 28 pages vocal synth yuri to print before they could do their work

[ghostcond]

malorn pokemon doodle that maybe spawned from me seeing my pokemon rarepair again. hes a professors assistant and he gave up being a trainer to do that [ok sign]

[happy10thousandyears]

Many such cases !

[lemedstudent2021]

some gems i found (turns out im occasionally funny)

will continue to update as i rake through the wonder that is my blog :)

[allthepandasintheworld]

I just realized I can’t say Rene and Alois live in my head rent free. Like, they do pay rent.

The rent is emotional support

[puppyeared]

just realized i forgot to make a page for sleight on my artfight, so i decided to update his ref while im at it

[amsterdamhotelroom]

maybe i'm just thinking this bc bret easton ellis and donna tartt are friends but. secret history film/tv adaptation in the style of american psycho

[numericalbridge]

It would have been cool, i think, if Darius and his mentor had met while the Emperor's Coven was investigating the Owl Beast after Eda's first transformation. Like, Raine asks Darius to cause a distraction and he impresses the Golden Guard so much. Maybe the Guard even realizes he is going against a child (Eda) and calls off the search.

Doesn't really make sense if you imagine it as an episode of a series since it would need to be focused on Eda and most likely Lilith and probably Raine, so it would be a weirdly distracting b-plot, but... umm... AU?

[opens-up-4-nobody]

...

[unimportant-ramblings]

I'm so sorry guys I know that everyone knows this here but the rhetoric of "alw is closing Phantom Broadway for Bad Cinderella" will in fact kill me

[giantkillerjack]

I am so so happy that the Dear Evan Hansen movie was laughably bad. I hated that show so fucking much, and the world would absolutely be a worse place if that movie was successful and inspired even MORE productions of the stage show. I mean I would have been seeing FAN ART of the movie if it had been competently made, and thank FUCK that didn't happen.

Here's the Jenny Nicholson review that I am currently watching for a second time, if you wanna see the one good thing to come from this horrible musical:

[hoardlikegoldenirises]

in an effort to rest my left hand from typing and also my usual exercises in doing random shit I don't have a lot of experience with, I have exported some .bmps and used the auto-tracer in inkscape (which i have done before for other things) so that i can turn this logo into an svg file with consistent angles and, you know, resizeability and sleekness.

The main thing I'm doing here is cleaning it up (fixing the angles in particular) and then I have to figure out how I want to do the shapes for the flame colors, which I'll probably do manually cause the color quantization tracing mode doesn't quite do what I need it to do lol

I don't even know if Seth is going to definitely be called Scratch (have been spitballing a variety of vigilante-friendly names in my notes) so I probably shouldn't be putting the effort into this on the off chance they end up called something like Aetherflame instead (lol) (like actually that's one of the names in my list) but this is the logo I have, so, you know.

anyway, practice, right? :P