#the colours were a bit brighter on my drawing tablet -_-

[organised-disaster]

Sucked it up and drew the Snowbird girlies myself

Based on this comment under a youtube video

[yanderespamton78]

OC :D !!

CW : mild body horror (mushrooms growing through skin, not gorey and not the focus of the image but kinda eugh)

WOW!! AN OC!!! WOH

(ugh the colours look so much brighter on my drawing tablet like theyre meant to be desaturated but she is practically black and white uuughghghhh :(((( sidenote the pupils were an afterthought because you couldnt tell she was looking down at the snail)

okokok now im gonna ramble about this oc

Willow

She/Her

Aroace

i actually made her right when i first got into art and she was very dear to me for a while, but i kinda forgot about her and i havent drawn her in over a year. i have some older drawings of her at the end of the post (not letting you skip my ramblings).

So Willow lives in the forest by herself, and has done for as long as she remembers (dont ask how she got there (i havent thought of that yet)) which also means she has never had any need for communication so is completely mute. And im not sure what exactly Willow is?? but she is immortal. BUT!! you see those mushrooms growing through her skin on her cheek, neck, eye and hand? they are the only thing that limits her lifetime. she has this disease thingy that causes mushrooms to grow in her body and occasionally through her skin. She lives until the disease kills her, which takes a few hundred years. i actually made a diagram of all the places where the mushrooms grow a bit ago (down below with the old art). the mushrooms on her neck nearly killed her, the mushroom in her left eye means shes blind, and the one on her finger can make it harder to grip and use her hand in general. she has an animal companion, though this companion has changed throughout the years. it started off being a frog, then it became a swarm of butterflies, now its a snail? its probably going to stay a snail tho. I honestly cant remember why she is in the forest alone, i feel like she did have some reason but i forgot it. Prolly something basic like keeping the animals happy by feeding them mushrooms or smth idk. also she moves kinda weird?? i cant describe exactly what im thinking but almost kinda jerky and doll like. like Cyn from murder drones kinda. the same weird loose doll feel.

old drawings VVV (from 2022-ish oh god theyre so bad)

the one on the left is the first ever drawing of her (it was just a sketch to practise and art style and then uh. smth happened)

the one on the left is the first proper design i had of her and the one on the right is the aforementioned frog companion (he was called wizzy)

that image ^^^ was drawn in 2023. i was trying to get back into art and i wanted to make willow again because i thought she was cool. theres some writing that you cant read but its not too important. mostly diagrams

[woodenela]

My only wishes/ resolutions for 2023 are being healthier and more free & goofy with my art💪😤

Thanks for sticking with me despite my lack of art lately, y'all are peaches💕 (Personal ramblings under the cut).

So you might've noticed the lack of art from my side for the last months. Reason is that my health isn't very good. The last two months especially were hard cause I couldn't really eat much and therefore had next to no energy. I pretty much spent my time in bed, only ever dragging my body to doctors if need be.

I have a desktop setup with a tablet, so no real means of drawing in bed, and I doubt even that would've worked since I just felt so weak all the time.

I've tried to funnel my love into reblogs, comments and twitter for the time being - I hope I'm not annoying you all too much, the love's gotta go somewhere haha💕

Things are hopefully looking up though. Left another 100 bucks at the doctor's today to get me on a three month medication plan to stabilize my innards, basically :') (gotta love "free" healthcare huh, if you ever want things to move forward, you gotta pay anyway)

Another appointment in two weeks with another doctor that'll cost me quite a penny too... I usually don't wanna nag and whine about this stuff but I really feel like whining right now, being sick is fucking expensive y'all!! I just hope that I'll get back my footing this year, be able to go outside again without having to fear getting sick and all. Maybe even be able to get a job again, that would be pretty dope.

Another resolution is being more free with my art. I'm always so pressed to make everything I draw neat and tidy and pretty; and while that is fun sometimes, it also really slows everything down and I lose interest in so many concepts. I also really wanna draw a Lawsan comic idea I have. These months in bed have given me ample time to dream stories up✨

I also just wanna draw more goofy things, not just One Piece stuff, but in general. Branch out a bit, have fun, make awful colour choices and get dirty with textures and effects :) Don't know if I'm gonna post non-fandom stuff here, probably not but we'll see.

For now I'm gonna take my disgusting-tasting medicine and look forward to brighter days, thanks for sticking around✌️

[sylleboi]

𝕬𝖚𝖙𝖔𝖒𝖆𝖙𝖎𝖈 𝖊𝖓𝖈𝖔𝖚𝖓𝖙𝖊𝖗𝖘 | 30/03/20

For this week, we have a new workshop to do, tying into the first brief (Pick & Mix), focusing on surrealism and the theories linked with this by psychologist Sigmund Freud. 

Attached was the following text written by our teacher to introduce this workshop and the tasks that come with it;

“After a successful week with the post it note comic, and some excellent write ups that are really well documented, this week's task revisits some of the work from Term 1 (as we started in our drawing sessions) with some of the ideas stemming from Surrealism, dada and the psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud.

This task is presented by Bristol based artist & animator Will Barras who will be offering commentary on your work at the end of the week. Follow the PDF attached and work through the tasks at your own pace. You have all week so take your time and experiment as much as possible.

We have more challenges to come, so try to put time into these as they will form the main body of your experimental work.

Upload your results and be as creative and imaginative as possible, but most importantly let go and embrace the ride.

Good luck peoples!”

Consider the primary objectives of a Final Project:

Collect information (Research) 

Recall knowledge (Use learning)

Apply understanding through application and review (Propose & make exciting work and evaluate it)

I find that the above points refer to a simplified process of working through meet the final goal that is set by the FMP, althought this also applies to workshops and side projects that gets documented on this blog, as well as the productionfile.

Question: Are you doing these things and how can we improve and develop this?

I feel that I already do these, althought I yet have to further improve on evaluating the things I do, asking “Why” more often.

Answer: Experimentation - (The action or process of trying out new or revisiting ideas, method and activities)

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This weeks aims & objectives:

To review basic principles of automatic practice in relation to a specific artist

To experiment with working from abstract starting points

Be generate experimental work that shows progression of learning

To compare your work to the work of others

The surrealist/dada movement was an art movement, as well as a literary movement, that began around 1915 - 1917. Some of the key artists leading this movement was Hannah Höch, André Breton & Max Ernst. The movement aimed to break free from the chains that weighed down everyone during the great depression- The artistic field had now begun to evolve into a playground for ones’ imagination, challenging what used to not be acceptable in common culture.

Accident & chance

Embracing Improvisation (What does improvisation mean to you?)

BEING AUTOMATIC!

Surrealist automatism is a method of art-making in which the artist suppresses conscious control over the making process, allowing the unconscious mind to have great sway

Unlocking the unconscious mind.

In Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory of personality, theunconscious mind is a reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories that are outside of our conscious awareness.

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𝕽𝖊𝖘𝖊𝖆𝖗𝖈𝖍:

This weeks challenge for experimentation is bought to you by Bristol based urban artist and animator Will Barras. Your task is to analyse his work, considering the effect of the visual language (how he uses line and tone for example). Find out about him and considering the aforementioned surrealist principles write a short statement to suggest how he uses those principles in his own work. 

Will Barras

Illustrator, artist and animation director, Will Barras, currently lives and works in London, althought he grew up in Birmingham and later moved to Bristol to study graphic design. He quickly became known for being part of a group of young artists, working within Bristol’s street art scene. This then led to him appearing in a book titled “Scrawl”, alongside the artists Steff Plaetx and Duncan Jago, becoming a core and founding member of the Scrawl collective. “Scrawl”, originally published in 1999, was an influencial book made to document a new movement in street art, graphics and illustration. 

Barras was selected to be one of the original artists for this collective. He was selected due to being renouned for his methods of portraying fluidity in movement. He also worked closely with creating pieces that were more narrativly driven compositions, incorperating such narratives into his line work. Barras’s unique composition of these three key elements, made his mark as an artist all the more inspiring, pushing new ideas against the grain of classic art. All of this has led his work to become staple pieces in many galleries across the globe. This includes Asia, Europe and the U.S.

He has painted a variety of different murals around the world, within this mix is one that he did with the members of his Bristol group at Tate Modern’s tubine hall, as well as one that he did for Pow!Wow! Festival in Taipei. In the studio Th1ng, located in central London, he worked as the head of animation.

Visual analysis and study:

His artwork has a very recongnizable style and feel to it. It has an urban flare to it, making it feel very fitting within the scene of street art.

“A big barn I painted in Dumfries with Amy Winstanley for the Spring Fling festival and Recoat gallery based in Glasgow.

http://www.amywinstanley.com

http://www.spring-fling.co.uk

http://www.recoatdesign.com”

The painting below has little information about it, as for what I can find, but somehow the piece almost speaks for itself. The play on perspective, composition and values is very eyecathing. It impresses me how he is able to convey motion to such an extend that you can almost just imagine it moving before your eyes, but perhaps that’s just me.

“#divinestyler #defmask #gammaproforma #kallenbachgallery”

I attemped to do some simple continuous warping animation to convey what I mean a little better:

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𝖁𝖎𝖘𝖚𝖆𝖑 𝖆𝖈𝖙𝖎𝖛𝖎𝖙𝖞:

01: Using a wide brush create a large sheet of accidental/automatic/ unconscious blots & splatters, organics shapes and curvaceous marks using a range of coloured ink/paint. The brighter and more acidic the better!

Because of the fact that I don’t have paper made for paints/ink, I decided to try doing this task digitally- simulating the analogue look of watercolour or watered down ink, or even arcrylics.

I did this by using a variety of different watercolour brushes, made to emulate the look of the analogue mediums. I used them as randomly as I possibly could, trying not to plan where I would put the next brush stroke.

Once I had put down all the paint stokes, I then went over it while the layer was locked with a big soft edged brush, layering up different colours until I was happy with how it looked.

02: Make 3-4 sheets of these and then let them dry.

Digital 01:

Digital 02:

03: Then using fineliner develop these marks into faces/characters/scenes by adding details/features and developing these into detail illustrations that are spontaneous and free flowing.

For the linework, I primarily used one single brush; hard edged and circular. (The one selected in the picture below)

I chose this for the reason being that I have found it to be very responsive to the use of a drawing tablet & pen. It does a good job at making expressive lines with its tilt sensitivity, making it a pleasure to use; It reminds me of how brush pens work and feel.

Here are a few tests on some of the lines I can create with it;

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Digital 01: 

Digital 02:

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Digital 02: Process

1. I have always found that beginning these blob doodles are the most diffucult for me. Perhaps because it takes me a little while to really get into the flow of continously seeing images in the randomness.

2. I began from the left, slowly working my way to the right and the top, since I felt that I had more clear lines to go from being around the edge of the paint.

3. Eventually I braved it and went right for the middle of the piece. This was the turning point for me in the process of doing this. It enabled me to truly let get, have fun, and not feel intimidated and nervous to do the next doodle.

4. This is when I began drawing creatures of the sea, slowly building up a story/narrative.

5. I don’t actually remember what I was even thinking at this point anylonger- I was simply just letting the pen guide me around the canvas; letting it all flow together however it felt as to do so.

6. I began to delve into the little details. I felt as if they would add to the general flow of the piece; being busy, yet in a manner that lets your eyes wander with curiosity.

7. I was now moving on to doing the right side of the piece. I had a little more trouble visualising the top right corner, so I did that last.

8. At this point I felt a little stuck as to what to do, hence it being, yet again, dedicated for adding some more little details here and there.

9. Eventually I overcame the frustration I had built up and took to do the right side of the artwork.

10. I tried to convey motion and flow by the way the animals are positioned and posed, trying to make it calm in the middle where the girl is, and then busy/chaotic the further away you get from her.

11. This second to last step was, again, for adding detail. I wanted to fill up any bits that I felt appeared too empty and spaced out, so to no disrupt the feeling of flow in the painting.

12. With the inking done and rendered to my satisfaction, the last step was to play around with colours.

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Digital 01: Colour variations

Digital 02: Colour variations

04: Scan/photograph and upload to Moodle.

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𝕱𝖎𝖓𝖆𝖑 𝖗𝖊𝖛𝖎𝖊𝖜 𝖆𝖓𝖉 𝖗𝖊𝖋𝖑𝖊𝖈𝖙𝖎𝖔𝖓:

Which of these words would you use when discussing the work of Will Barras and your own art pieces:

I would most definitly use;

Organic/Fluid

Figurative

Automatic

On top of these I would probably add;

Harmonic

Dynamic

Epochal

Visionary

Can you construct a comparative sentence/paragraph using at least 5 of these words. What are the differences and similarities between the works you have created. What conclusions did you make about this experimentation?

[frequencied]

GAMMA FACTOR, OR: WHAT IT MEANS TO BE OLDER

matt is eight years, eleven months, and twenty three days older than pidge.

"so you take the reciprocal of the square root of one minus the speed over..."

"matt," pidge protests, pen clattering loudly against the desk.

"you wanna be in the garrison someday, right? you're going to be doing these kinds of equations all the time."

pidge looks at him with brows furrowed (skepticism), lips knotted tight like she's bit into a lemon (distrust). this wouldn't be the first time matt's led her on for a joke. but his tone now conveys nothing but honesty (not the first time) and simple patience, tapping the tablet's screen. a couple small equations are scribbled in pidge's hand: here, the distance to kerberos. there, the speed of the ship matt and sam will take to get there. the proposed time of the journey. pidge may have only just started learning algebra in class but there's no way in hell matt's sister is going into middle school without a grasp of the fundamentals of calculus. she's a holt.

"just trust me, okay? it'll be worth it. so you take the speed— in kilometers per second, of course— over c and square that..."

pidge follows obediently, writing out two long trails of digits.

"that's a lot of zeroes," she says.

"it's a fast ship. okay, now plug it into your calculator..."

there's the soft clacking of pidge's fingers typing the equation into her calculator. 

"wait," she squints. "why is it off?"

"why is what off?" he asks, though he can't hide his grin— the one that says I know why, I'm just not telling you.

"the time. it should be ten million. it's ten million and thirty."

lights dance behind matt's eyes like fireflies. "because of special relativity. you remember how I told you about the twins paradox? how if one twin shoots off into space, when they come back, the earthbound twin will be older?"

a second passes. another. when it finally clicks, pidge nearly jumps from her seat.

"we're the twins!"

matt is eight years, eleven months, and twenty three days older than pidge. minus thirty seconds.

they make it to kerberos. matt wonders as the ship reaches its approach velocity if those fifteen seconds come all at once, if pidge back on earth isn't running through a class like an emulator set to double speed. or maybe it happens when they slow down, he thinks maybe he can hear shiro's stretched-out tones as they run through landing procedures as they have a thousand times before. relativity is just that, after all: relative.

they make it to kerberos. they don't make it home.

he tries to keep track of the dilation with the rebels. lose a minute. lose a second. everything becomes twisty with FTL, the mathematical twisting of his equation far easier than the mental twisting he has to do to accomodate to the new circumstances and new allies. but he doesn't spend all his time in his own ship where he can rely on sub-second engine logs; some days he spends aboard vessels that aren't his, stolen from this outpost or that galra cruiser he doesn't entirely understand the nuance of. olia tells him he spent three weeks in a cryopod while his sinews stitched themselves back together after a bad mission, and no one had bothered to log the time or distance of their FTL hops while he was under. he took the average of his weekly time dilation and used that, though the answer always left him unsatisfied. inexact.

he knows this relies on pidge having a consistent velocity. he picks earth, telling himself she must be safe there. it's a comforting thought when the enemy is spotted in the same system as his listening outpost and he flips the switch he prays he never has to flip, the one that shuts off everything but the barest life support; the outpost may be positioned at the far end of a dead system, but it bleeds radiation and rebel transmissions in a way that makes it shine brighter than its pale dwarf star to anyone looking to root out these kinds of stations.

and believe him, there are a lot of people trying to root out these stations.

but the calculus is relaxing. it's relaxing, and more importantly, it serves to keep his mind sharp through the mundanity of a listening outpost. he finds new ways to entertain himself with numbers. he can see the sun from here, so he starts with that— measure the distance from the parallax. use his rebel-provided star charts to find constellations he recognizes on earth, and link them back together to see their strange, malformed shapes from a totally different perspective. orion becomes a giraffe, with an elongated neck and four lopsided limbs. cygnus? now it's a beetle.

he does the math again and again. he tries to lose himself in the numbers. he tries to not think about the fact that for however long it feels like matt's been up here, from earth, it's been longer.

matt is eight years, eleven months, and twenty three days older than pidge. minus seven days, twenty-one hours, and sixteen minutes. he thinks.

matt keeps an eye on voltron.

it's half pragmatism; the rebels need eyes on the defenders of the universe to make sure troops are deployed as necessary, either with or without voltron's backing— sometimes they need cover. sometimes it's about striking somewhere while voltron draws away firepower somewhere else. and while this war has made him a soldier, it's not something that's ever been at his core; matt's rebellion comes at the end of encrypted messages, with colour-coded maps and logs; he compiles data, he watches, he looks for patterns. a war is a puzzle.

pidge tells him they're going after lotor. pidge tells him about the fight. pidge tells him, in an overconfident tone that has become surprisingly like her— the pidge who finds matt is a far cry from the pidge who he knew on earth, but the change isn't an unwelcome one. quite the contrary. he's glad to see her so sure, full of their mother's fire and their father's good judgement— that they're going to stop him, because they're heroes. they have to, right? defenders of the universe.

matt tells her to be careful, because like him, you can never tell pidge not to do something.

voltron goes to fight lotor. voltron does not come back.

matt scrambles with shaking hands and panic screaming up his spine, fighting to keep his tone calm as he outputs for days on all frequencies: where is voltron? has anyone received confirmation from voltron? is voltron still alive?

is my sister okay?

days stretch to weeks.

did I fail her?

weeks stretch to months.

did I fail our parents?

the galra sense this absence and hammer the rebels hard. they're stronger, more voracious now; like an animal with its back to the wall, the empire senses its impending doom and only fights with the sick kind of desperation that can only be found with something coming undone. every line the coalition built is burnt to cinders by sendak and the empire. the blades fall. the rebels do, too. matt's crew of two dozen is reduced to six, and they hide away with the lights off like scared children from the boogeymen.

months stretch to years.

but while he knows the what, he refuses to acknowledge the why. pidge didn't leave a trail. but it's not because she's dead. pidge can't be dead. voltron can't be gone. they need them— they need the defenders of the universe. they're going to lose this war otherwise. she's just busy. she has other priorities. pidge isn't kind enough to leave a trail like matt had because she doesn't have time. he doesn't blame her— can't blame her. pidge doesn't understand what it is to be a big brother, doesn't understand what it is to have your entire being, your beating heart exist to protect another. even when matt was taking his tentative steps into real, tangible rebellion, his every action was guided by a single thought: find me. if shiro is out there, if his dad is out there, if pidge is out there, they'll find him. he hid the clues well, disguised them in math and tricks so deeply ingrained in the holts that only the holts could find them. they had to. they had to.

he looks for them instead in what's missing. places where things should be. the universe is now defined by her absence; so, too, is matt. every instant not spent on the run is spent looking for her.

they find her, eventually. or: she finds them. because of course she does. she always finds them.

when matt sees her again, she's in the hospital, with bae bae giving two loud thumps of her tail as matt approaches. matt pulls his limbs around her and hugs her as gently as he can, fighting every part of him that screams to squeeze and never let go. he lets her talk about the journey through the void, the road trip (he laughs at the name, but it's an expulsion of air, all reflex with no humour), the battle that saved them all. he watches transfixed at her excitement, how even in her darkest moments when they were sure they would die, she burns with the knowledge that they couldn’t. he clenches his fists well below her line of sight until four half-crescents bleed in his palms and tries to not cry.

sitting in this room, watching her body slowly heal beneath sheets and gauze, he wipes away all those calculations of fractional seconds snatched by special relativity. because minutes and days mean nothing when compared to telling their parents that pidge might be dead, to watching his friends and loved ones be taken one by one by the empire in the face of the gaping maw of their absence. 

matt is eight years, eleven months, and twenty three days older than pidge. plus four years.