#megansoriginalart

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This is a painting of my dad's dog that I made as his birthday present! ^_^ He was the sweetest doggie. ^_^ Even though my family got him after I'd moved out of the house, he still felt like family to me too and I miss him (he passed away last year from old age). But I know my dad REALLY misses him and I thought that it'd make him happy to have a painting of him. And I was right because he was overjoyed and said it's the best present I've ever given him! ^_^ <3

[meganmaherstoryart]

Posting extremely late, but this is the Christmas card I made for one of my best friends from high school! ^_^ She and her husband just had their first child in December, so I painted their baby with a poinsettia flower crown based on a picture of her with a regular flower crown. ^_^ <3

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This is the Christmas card I made for one of my best friends from high school! ^_^ He loves the evil eyes and I thought they would work really well in snowflake patterns! ^_^ 

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It’s a llama shepherd Nutcracker! :D

I saw a bunch of those art year in review posts and realized that aside from my 5 min daily drawing from a ref pic drawing practice (still haven’t missed a single day in the entire 11+ years I’ve been doing it! :D It’s as much part of my nighttime routine as brushing my teeth at this point XD ) and birthday/holiday cards made for family and friends, I didn’t make any art this year. I usually don’t post the birthday/holiday cards on tumblr, but I love the Christmas card I made for my mom this year (and she super duper loved it <3 ). So I’m sharing that here! ^_^ Happy New Year, everyone! ^_^

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In class today we had to illustrate a common urban legend, so I did the Bunnyman Bridge. I normally hate my drawings for the in-class exercises because by the time I come up with an idea I only have about 10 min left to actually draw it. ^^; But I think in this case, the messy sketch that resulted from only having 12 minutes to draw it out helped make it seem extra spooky. XD 

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This is the Christmas card for one of my best friends from high school! :D He’s Greek and his favorite Christmas ornament is a Greek Christmas ship that his grandma gave to him. So I drew that ornament as if it were a real Christmas ship! ^_^

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This was an in-class exercise for the illustration class I took this semester where we had to create a deity of something from modern times. So I made a little god of manga! ^_^ I based it off of the traditional Japanese god statues, with a little influence of Osamu Tezuka since people often call him the god of manga. 

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This is the Christmas card I made for @missingrache! ^_^ It’s the Mari Lwyd, who is a creature that’s part of traditional Welsh Christmas celebrations! :D 

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, Rachel!! ^_^ I hope that you have a wonderful 2020!! ^_^ I didn’t get to check tumblr much this year, but when I was checking it I saw you posted a lot about the Mari Lwyd and how much you love her. So I hope she makes your Christmas season even more festive! ^_^ 

[meganmaherstoryart]

Happy Autism Acceptance Month! :D This is a very quick doodle of my autistic character Chiaki with the autism symbol of rainbow infinity! I’m currently working on her story because I feel it’s important for there to be more books about autism written by autistic people, such as myself, to show that autism has a ton of wonderful things about it! My favorite aspects are how it gives me special interests which are so much fun to squee about with others and learn more about and immerse myself in, and how it gives me a superpower of sorts when it comes to being able to observe little details and notice things that most people just ignore (such as the way the light makes the wings of bees shimmer as they sit on the flowers)! :D

This got long, but below is a bunch of info about autism and Autism Acceptance Month, so please read it if you have the chance! ^_^

You are probably going to see a lot of posts this month about “Autism Awareness” and “Light it up blue” and see symbols like puzzle pieces. All of these come from the hate group Autism Speaks, who is trying to drive the narrative that autism is a disease that needs to be eradicated. They spend their research money hoping they can find a way to test for it in the womb so the parents can abort the child or find a cure for it. They promote a type of therapy that tries to get autistic people to learn how to pass as “normal” by forcing them to act in a way that goes against everything that comes naturally to them. Ironically, they don’t have autistic people speaking in their organization. Everything is from the perspective of parents and siblings of autistic people, and it’s all with the narrative that dealing with an autistic person is a huge burden and that being autistic is a fate worse than death.

We in the autistic community do not like the idea of “awareness” as it has that connotation of something bad you’re trying to prevent from happening, such as “breast cancer awareness” and “sexual assault awareness.” Their color is blue because of the false notion autism is more prevalent in boys (it’s not, it’s simply that the autism stereotype is how it presents in young boys so thus they get tested as kids while girls like me often don’t get tested and diagnosed until we’re adults). Their symbol is a puzzle piece, which has a connotation that we don’t fit in. Please don’t support these things or anything from Autism Speaks. Instead, please support groups like ASAN (the Autistic Self Advocacy Network) and our April event of AutismAcceptance and RedInstead. If you see any autism awareness or light it up blue things in your workplace or schools, please be an ally and ask them to change it to Autism Acceptance.

We prefer Autism Acceptance because we just want to be accepted for who we are! Autism isn’t something separate from us, it IS who we are. We have RedInstead because red is the opposite of blue. But I like that choice because it’s also a color associated with being passionate, something most autistics are if you get them talking about their special interest. And our symbol is the rainbow infinity to represent neurodiversity in general and the diversity of autistic people. Autism presents itself differently in girls and boys, in different age groups, and in different individuals. It’s like how all ice cream has that base of being ice cream, but it comes in lots of different flavors. We all have the base of autistic traits, but how those traits present themselves can vary from autistic person to autistic person.

Which brings me to how the majority of autistic people prefer identity-first language (autistic people) instead of person-first language (people with autism). Person-first language separates the person from whatever the bad thing is in the sentence, such as, “person experiencing homelessness” or “person with cancer.” This means that whatever you’re separating IS bad and you’re trying to show that it’s something “other” than who they are and they’re dealing with or have. It is very important to use that in those cases. But with autism, we don’t see it as a bad thing in of itself. We don’t see it as separate from who we are. It IS who we are. It’s like how you don’t say “person whose job is making art” you say “artist” or you don’t say “person who experiences gay attraction” you say “gay person” or you don’t say “person who has children” you say “parent” Those are all aspects of who you are, and for us autistics, being autistic is as much being a part of who we are as those things.

Now, I’m not trying to invalidate the struggles that autistic people face. We do have a ton of those, but they are all very much society-based for whether or not they’re a problem. For instance, eye contact is painful and extremely difficult for most autistic people. In a society like America where if you’re not making eye contact constantly while in a conversation, it’s considered rude and makes people think you’re not paying attention to them or their expressions. It makes in-person conversations difficult for me if I have to actively think about making eye contact, because that takes so much effort that I end up not being able to pay attention to what the people are saying. But in a society like Japan, making constant eye contact is what is considered rude, so it’s not an issue. It’s also not an issue when I’m with friends who know that I am reading their hand expressions instead of their facial expressions and allow me to not make eye contact, or in situations where it’s normal to not be making eye contact, like talking with someone who is driving a car and I’m in the passenger seat, or taking a walk side-by-side so we’re not facing each other.

And that is why we want Autism Acceptance. Please accept us as we are. We do things differently, we think differently. It’s very much like being left or right-handed. In the past, left-handed people were forced to write with their right hands (myself included in kindergarten until my mom found out my teacher was making me do that and she demanded the teacher allow me to use my left-hand as I’d been very obviously left-handed since I was a baby). But now it’s perfectly acceptable for people to write with the hand their brain is wired to do. Autistic brains are wired differently, and we just want to be able to live our lives in the way that our brains are wired to do.

Thank you to all of my friends out there who do love and accept me just as I am! ^_^ I’ve very grateful for you! ^_^ <3

[meganmaherstoryart]

This is the Christmas card I made for one of my best friends from high school! ^_^ He’s Greek, so I made a Greek-themed Christmas tree this year! :D When I was researching Greek Christmas trees, decorations, and Christmas traditions, I kept coming across images of this pretty light sculpture tree in Syntagma Square, Athens. So I tried to make the ribbon on the tree mimic the shape of that. :D I had fun figuring out what to make all of the ornaments so that they’d be a mix of Greek Christmas traditions and general Greek symbols! :D 

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This is a wedding present I made for one of my best friends from high school and her husband! ^_^ 

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This is another wedding present I made for another of my best friends from high school and her husband! ^_^ For this one I had more creative freedom for how I did the composition (the other friend wanted a painting directly from the professional wedding photos), so I included the Mary statue that they prayed under during the wedding ceremony, the white roses from her bouquet, and the stained glass from the Church! :D 

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I’ve been working on developing and writing my next 2 children’s books lately, as well as these 2 wedding present pieces that I was asked to make. Aka there hasn’t been much to post here since these are taking a long time to paint and I can’t post writing. ^^; So I thought I’d post photos (they’re too big to scan with my small scanner) of the sketch stage of the wedding pieces as proof I’m still alive. :D 

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It’s the lantern festival in Hugo’s village where he’s showing Francis and Elliot how to release the lanterns along the river! ^_^ This is the last of the paintings for my children’s book!! :D Not the last story-wise, but the last one I had to do! I can now make my dummy book and start sending it off to publishers and agents!! :D Wooo!! :D

As I edited my story I had to cut and add scenes, and this was one of the added ones. But I’m so glad this scene is in there now because this is one of my favorite paintings of the whole book! ^_^ It was so much fun figuring out how to do the lanterns and the water (even if it did take me like a month of experimenting and even doing a practice version of this in fanart form ^^;)! :D 

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This is the cover for my children’s book! :D Or more accurately, temporary cover for the purposes of making a dummy book since my teacher said publishers almost always have the marketing people tell you do draw something very specific instead. Haha I realized when drawing this I shouldn’t have made the castle town so complicated--when I designed it I thought I’d only have to draw it once. ^^; But I love how it looks, so it was worth drawing it again even if it took forever! :D

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This is the little spot I made for the dedication page of my children’s book! ^_^ But I think it also works quite nicely as a Pride Month piece! :D