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helliontherapscallion · 3 years

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A Surrealistic Life (Adrenaline Junkie Part 17)

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10 Part 11 Part 12 Part 13 Part 14 Part 15 Part 16

Spotify Playlist (collaborative)

Warnings: swearing, derealization, depression, grief, blood, mentions of death, nightmares, panic attacks

Word count: 3,385

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You cried in Philza’s arms for hours on end until you couldn’t cry anymore. Your head was left pounding and your throat scratchy from the loud crying, but you didn’t care. Nothing mattered anymore, without Arthur you were nothing. The past two and a half years just- just didn’t exist. Your mind was still reeling, the words ‘will you always be with me?’ echoing through your mind constantly filling you with guilt.

With one last shuddering inhale, you separated yourself from Philza and wiped at the tears that had long since dried on your face. His eyes, vigilant as ever, scanned your form looking for any sign of distress. In his eyes, you saw pity and grief. This angered you, you didn’t need his pity; you were long past the point of pitiful glances. Well, you were, he wasn’t.

You purse your lips as you watch his eyes flick between your wing and where your other wing was supposed to be. Sorrow flashes in his eyes before he looks back at you with a small, painfully fake smile. With one hand, he gently pushes your shoulder down back onto the bed and stands up.

“I’ll be back, you get some rest.”

With the slightest hint of a nod, you watched as he lingered in the doorway before hesitantly walking out of your room. After he left your room, you locked the door behind him. That door remained locked for weeks on end, every knock or attempt at conversation was never answered by you. Their words were nothing but background noise in the back of your mind.

Instead of responding, you would lay in bed staring at the ceiling with unfocused eyes thinking about nothing but everything you’ve lost. Only occasionally you would leave your room to attend to your most basic needs when you were sure that everybody was asleep or out of the house.

The days meshed together as your thoughts consume you in a whirlwind of unorganized messes. Several times, you’ve worked yourself into panic attacks and paranoia filled spiraling because you didn’t know what was real anymore.

Being left alone with your thoughts was something that you always avoided by constantly tinkering with contraptions, your thoughts wandered off to places that greatly disturbed you. But now, you let those thoughts wash over you without a care. Your dreams reflected this; they were plagued with images of Arthur looking up at you with large puppy dog eyes and a large smile before he would be sucked into darkness screaming for you to help him, to do anything, but you were always glued in place leaving you to watch helplessly as he left you over and over again.

Another common one you would have is Arthur getting lost in a bellowing snowstorm in the dead of night. You would be wandering through thick snow calling his name until you would come across a small, pale hand peeking out of an abnormal lump of snow; dread would always fill you during those dreams, it was a parent’s worst nightmare to lose their child.

Other dreams, though very rare, would be pleasant; whether they were about you and Arthur whistling a small tune as you both invented something or a small picnic on the cliff laughing freely into the air, you would always wake up in the mornings prepared to greet him and cook breakfast with him. It wasn’t until you moved your right arm and found that it had limited mobility that you realized that everything was a dream.

You hated those dreams, they always gave you a false sense of hope that everything was okay. Nothing is okay, absolutely nothing.

You refused to believe that… whatever was going on didn’t happen; Philza had said that the last few years had been fake, something that your mind had made up as some form of coping mechanism, but who’s to say that this isn’t a hallucination as well? Both your experiences felt completely different from each other, this reality could be the hallucination for all you knew.

The only thing on your mind was how you needed to get back to Arthur in any possible way you could. If Arthur didn’t exist in this reality, you didn’t want to be in it. You need him and he needs you, you didn’t want to imagine a reality without him. If you got yourself into this by dying, perhaps that was your ticket back to him. Perhaps there was a way to reverse this.

You were going to get your son back, and you were going to die trying.

Until then, you just have to wait out your family. They’d just stop you in the end and you couldn’t have that. You’d have to put on an act that you were perfectly fine and that would entail inventing everything over again, but you were fine with that; if you made it once, you can make it again.

With a newfound sense of purpose, you searched your closet for your old cloak but then you remembered you got your cloak weeks after your first death. Groaning to yourself, you settled for your old bomber jacket. The slits in the back of it wouldn’t cover your nub, so you awkwardly tucked it underneath the fabric of the cloth. It shot pain down your spine, but you shook it off; the pain was something you could handle, you’ve had worse.

Without another thought, you quietly left your room with only one destination in mind.

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You softly padded down the basement stairs towards your workshop. When you arrived at the bottom of the stairs, you paused and looked around. The walls that were once covered with sloppy sketches and words written in two different handwritings, both equally as messy and rushed, were barren for the most part; you forgot that the walls were painted an off white color. Your filing cabinets were gone, replaced with cardboard boxes containing old clothes and toys with thick layers of dust sitting peacefully on top of them. The crafting table sat in the corner of the room wasn’t worn, in fact it looked brand new, not a scratch could be seen on the surface.

Everything was wrong.

You numbly walked over to your desk and picked up the paper that laid on it, holding it up to the light. It was the first draft to your TNT launcher. The sight of the crude, minimal sketches made you cringe, it was far too messy; you had no idea how you could make out what your sloppy handwriting pointed to or what materials were supposed to go where.

You dropped the paper and let it flutter to the floor without a care. Your eyes flickered over the desk and eyed the notebook sitting on top of a stack of spare papers. A spark of hope ignited inside of you, this was the notebook Arthur so often doodled in with different ideas of what could be invented.

You snatched it and flipped the front cover over with haste. A wide smile stretched your lips when you caught sight of the small handwriting that littered the page. It was yours, but you had given it to Arthur so that he could learn and copy from your early years. It was perfect for a blueprint template, neat and organized.

However as you flipped through the book, your smile dropped and the little hope that flared in your chest was snuffed out. You stared at the blank page as frustration built up inside of you. Before you knew it, you threw the notebook at the opposite wall as hard as you could. You were left standing in the middle of the cold basement with your chest heaving and your teeth gritted.

Everything was so wrong. So, so wrong.

You heard footsteps thunder down the stairs before they came to a stop behind you. Hesitant footsteps made their way over to you, you didn’t even have to turn around to know who it was.

“(Y/n)? Is everything-”

“Nothing is okay, Tommy,” you gritted out, “absolutely nothing about this is okay.”

He said nothing as he walked around you and put his hand on your clenched fist, his fingers curling around yours and opening your hand. Your palm stung slightly as you glanced down at it. Four small, crescent shaped cuts were imprinted on your skin slowly starting to glisten with blood.

Huffing, you ripped your hand out of his grasp and glanced at his face. You caught yourself doing a double take as you saw just how innocent he looked. No sign of hidden pain in his shining blue eyes, no scars littering his skin, and the bags that once made him look years older was nonexistent. He was your annoying, gremlin of a little brother again. He was Tommy again.

You watched as his eyebrows furrowed and his head tilted slightly, “why are you looking at me like that?”

“No reason,” you breathed out before you shook your head trying to rid your mind of your frustrations, “no reason at all…”

He awkwardly coughed and nodded slightly, “right…”

You cleared your throat and glanced off to the side at the book laying on the floor. Tommy’s eyes followed where you were looking and went to pick it up. You felt a twinge in your heart as he started to flip through it much like you did earlier. He looked up at you with furrowed brows, “why’d you throw this? What’d the book do to you?” He jokingly asked you.

“It didn’t do anything and that’s the problem,” you mumbled out before you snatched the book out of his hands and tossed it into the trash can.

“Why are you acting so weird? I know you just died and all, but you never let that notebook out of your sight and now you’re just tossing it into the bin!” Tommy fished it out of the trash can and haphazardly placed it back onto your desk on top of the stack of unused paper. You could feel your eye twitch at it’s placement before you threw it away again.

“Leave it there, I don’t want it. I won’t need it anymore anyways,” you murmured under your breath.

“Why wouldn’t you need it- wait, don’t tell me you’re quitting working with redstone. Cuz I’ll have you know that you’re going to be the best goddamned inventor this gods forsaken world has ever known and-”

“I’m not going to quit,” you interrupted him, “trust me, I’ll need whatever I can make. I just… don’t need it anymore, I already know exactly what I need to make.” I can’t stand the sight of Arthur’s notebook so empty and blank your mind supplied yourself.

He tilted his head slightly, “even without the bluepri-”

“Even without the blueprints,” you curtly nodded and automatically turned to look at the bulletin board hanging above your desk only to sigh when you once again saw that it was barren. “I made these things thousands of times before, I know what I’m doing,” your gaze zeroed in on the half finished blueprint for your automatic crossbow, “I’ll just make them again.”

Tommy once again looked at you with furrowed brows and inquisitive eyes, you could just see the curiosity and confusion swimming around in his baby blue orbs, “what do you mean, you literally only have one prototype of everything on here.”

“You wouldn’t believe me even if I told you, so just drop it.” You hadn’t meant to snap at him like that, but the frustration was just too overwhelming to ignore. Just as you could see him start to get dejected from the corner of your eye, you made quick work of changing the subject.

“You know, I could hear what you said when I wasn’t awake. I really appreciated the music, it was a nice change of pace.”

He tensed before his eyes were drawn to the empty space over your shoulder. His breath hitched slightly as a sorrowful look appeared in his eyes. Looking back at you, he grabbed your shoulder and pulled you into a tight hug. You didn’t struggle against him despite your frustrations, you knew he needed you right now. You could still remember how broken he was when you were unconscious. The way his lip wobbled slightly before he hugged you reminded you of Arthur.

You gently hugged him back and wrapped your wing around him. He gripped you tighter, his breath shuddering as wetness started to hit your head. You said nothing as you started to hum and run your fingers along his back tracing out patterns without a particular one in mind.

Eventually, he pulled away from you and chuckled sardonically, wiping his tears away with a fist, “you’re the one who died and I’m the one being comforted. Gods, it’s pathetic.”

“It’s okay to feel emotions, Tommy. You should never bottle them up, it sounded like you needed a good hug anyways. I’m happy to give you that,” you softly told him.

He said nothing as he crossed his arms and shifted on his feet, avoiding your gaze. For a moment, your tall brother was replaced by a short, red haired boy wearing that same expression. You purse your lips in thought, your previous frustrations completely gone and replaced with an urge to comfort him or at least distract him. Though a deep sadness dragged your body down at the thought of Arthur, Tommy just reminded you too much of him. It was eerily uncanny in your opinion.

Ideas swarmed your head as you thought back to how you comforted Arthur when he fell down. Besides talking to him, you would always teach him something; knowledge to Arthur is- was like a sponge absorbing water. It gave him a distraction to whatever got him down, maybe that would work for Tommy as well.

Wordlessly, you walked over to your desk and gestured for him to follow you. You plopped him into your office chair and pulled one of the cardboard boxes up to the desk. In the process, you grabbed your gloves, goggles, and everything you would need to set up a simple timed piston. The smallest spark of happiness flashed inside you as you saw that your resources were fully stocked.

“What are you doing?”

“Well, Tommy, I’m going to show you how to set up one of my favorite redstone mechanisms. Put these on,” you handed him the gloves and goggles and watched as he put them on. The goggles were a bit small on him, but besides that, everything fit him.

“Now, you’re going to want to…”

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Hours passed as you both worked together on the contraption. Slowly, you could see Tommy loosening up and making more jokes, successfully distracted. However, you didn’t expect yourself to follow suit. Laughter came easier to you whenever Tommy would joke around, your troubles long forgotten.

It took a little longer than you were used to, but eventually Tommy started to follow along with the precision you’d expect from a beginner. Slowly but surely, with many mistakes along the way, there was a working piston system sitting on the desk.

Tommy triumphantly laughed into the air as he watched the pistons work in tandem with one another. You laughed alongside him and ruffled his hair, “nice job, Artie! I knew you could do it!”

Tommy completely stopped and looked at you in confusion, “‘Artie’? Who’s that?”

You completely froze in place, you hadn’t meant to call him Artie. He was Tommy, he was your blond little brother, not your ginger son. Tommy was his own person, he was Tommy, not Arthur. You mentally scolded yourself for constantly mixing the two up.

“Artie is- well, he’s just… Arthur is my old friend,” you stammered out after tripping over your words clumsily. Tommy couldn’t find out about Arthur, nobody could. That’d just ruin your plan.

He snorted, “sure, ‘old friend’. You know, if Dad finds out that you’re dating someone he’d ground you for life.”

“I’d never date anybody, you know that,” you scolded him with your nose wrinkled in disgust. “He’s just an old friend and you remind me of him.”

“Well, old friend or not, he sounds amazing if I remind you of him!”

You smiled sadly as your mind flashed to images of Arthur at various points in his life, “he really was, you would’ve loved him, Tommy. He might’ve been the best person I’ve ever met.”

“Why don’t you tell me about him? I can preen your wings-” Tommy abruptly stopped himself and looked like he’d just accidentally kicked a puppy, looking at you with wide eyes and red tinted cheeks.

Just as he started opening and closing his mouth like a fish out of water, you chuckled at his expression, “you’re fine, Tommy. It’s just going to take some time for you to get used to this,” you shifted your wing and cringed at the uncomfortable feeling. You haven’t preened your wings since before you left for the cave nearly two months ago, and your wing was a mess of bent and loose feathers. “I’d… actually like a good preening, are you sure you know how to do it?”

“Please,” he scoffed before pushing you to sit down in your desk chair, “I’ve seen you and Dad do it to each other thousands of times, I think I know what I’m doing.”

“That isn’t how that- you know what? Just go ahead. Make sure you get any loose feathers and straighten them out,” you stretched your wing out and hoped for the best. Tommy surprisingly did a decent job of straightening out feathers, he just had to work on distinguishing loose feathers from intact feathers (you were now missing a couple of smaller feathers).

The entire time, you were telling him how amazing your boy was. Sure, you might’ve overexaggerated just a little bit, but Arthur was certainly someone that deserved the praise. That kid was something else, truly a prodigy at both redstone and compassion. Leaving out the fact that Arthur was your adopted son and that he was ten years old was a little hard, but you managed to avoid that.

You could tell that Tommy knew something was different about you, but you guessed that he just assumed the changes were because of your death and not because you were technically two and a half years older than you physically are.

When he was done, you looked at your wing and you were pleasantly surprised at how well he did; sure there were a few loose feathers and they were partially crooked, but you could tell that Tommy did his best with them.

“Thanks, Toms,” you smiled at him after you tucked your wing back in, “I really appreciate you doing that, it was starting to bother me.”

“It’s no problem,” he puffed out his chest in pride, “I told you I knew what I was doing.”

“And I’m sorry for ever doubting you. Who knows, maybe Dad’ll let you do his wings next.”

“Oh gods no,” Tommy shuddered slightly, “his are massive and he has two of them! If doing yours took me an hour and a half, I’d hate to see how long it’d take me to do his.”

You cringed, remembering the last time you preened his wings. Though you were experienced, it had taken you two full hours for each wing. “Yeah, his wings are huge. Gods, I hope my wing doesn’t get to be that size.” Though they grew to be nowhere near Philza’s wingspan when you were in that reality, you weren’t sure if yours was going to be larger or smaller than what they were.

Just as Tommy was about to open his mouth to respond to you, Wilbur’s voice echoed down the stairwell, “Tommy, dinnertime!”

“Well c’mon then, let’s go. I’ll race you there,” was all Tommy said to you before he bolted up the stairs with a booming laugh, skipping every third step. You could feel your heart stop when he almost tripped on one of the stairs because he skipped too many. Rushing after him, you shouted at him, “Tommy, walk! You’re going to break your neck if you keep running up and down the stairs!”

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ravensbug · 4 years

Text

Beautiful

Fandom: Legend of Korra

Ship: Lin Beifong x reader

Request: No

Prompt: “It’s beautiful”

Summary: You’ve been stuck at home ever since you broke your leg. Lin refused to even let you go to the precinct to work at your desk. Seeing as you had nothing to do at home you decide to paint, seeing as it has been years since you’ve done so. Lin comes to visit to see how you're doing and admires your paintings. She visits more often to see how they’re going.

You picked up the two-inch brush and primed your canvas with turpentine. You decided you were going to use oil paints today, rather than the watercolor you’d been using for the past week. It was a change of pace since oil paint took much longer to dry. It allowed for more complex ideas and significantly more details.

You were always fond of painting animals, either from memory or when they would sit outside your window. You mostly painted birds, but there were a few cats and dogs scattered throughout your list of paintings.

Switching to a different brush, you situated yourself in a more comfortable position in your chair. Painting was much easier when you were standing, but your broken leg didn’t allow you to do that. It was more like Lin wouldn’t allow you to. She would scold you if she came over to find you standing while painting.

You really wished you two could spend more time together, but being a cop was a time consuming job for the both of you. More so for Lin, being the Police Chief and all.

Her visits were always nice. She would usually come with food, knowing you spend all day painting without a break. Of course she wouldn’t have eaten either, so she couldn’t judge you too harshly.

Today you decided to paint a raven, by far your favorite bird. Even though it’s feathers were all black, you were able to put so much color and detail into them. Of course feathers were still a pain in the ass to paint. If even one was off by size, color, or even shading you had to repaint it.

But that’s what made oil paint so much better than watercolor for this. If it didn’t look right then you could fix it. The paint didn’t dry right away. It was a nice ‘cheat’ as you would call it, even though it wasn’t cheating.

The downside was that the paint didn’t dry right away. Kind of redundant, but you couldn’t do too much work all in one day. The paint had to dry so you could add some details without the colors mixing. Things like eyes would be done last to avoid any chance of the paint getting wet.

You took a small amount of the general paint colors and painted over your sketch. You could still see the sketch, but there was a light layer of colored turpentine now covering it.

Turpentine was very important for oil paints. The paint refuses to attach itself to the canvas without it. It also serves as the cleaning agent, as water only moves the paint around everywhere.

You took some of the grey and began with the beak of the bird. Starting at the top was important to avoid smudging. You also had the background to worry about, but that would come last. You would rather be able to remove the excess paint covering the raven than paint over the background and have layering issues.

Once you were satisfied with the color and shading of the beak you moved on to the head. Black paint would be what you used for the most part. The eye, and the shading around it would come last, but it was still black.

You painted the small feathers that stick out from its head as well as the ones that cover some of the beak. The paint was nice and smooth, so you could get fine lines out of it when you needed to.

You painted down the neck and stopped before the wings began. It’s important to know that with oil paint you work from dark to light, rather than from light to dark. Lighter oil paints, like white, can never truly be covered once added. You avoid this by always adding less white until you get the desired shade.

Once you added the small details to add definition to the head and neck you began work on the wings. The most painstaking part of the painting. You started with the left wing first, which was at an angle. Less feathers to paint and it allowed you to get a technique figured out for this painting.

Because of the background you had chosen, a cherry blossom tree, you decided that the highlights on the feathers would include some green and even a hint of blue. It created a contrast that was noticeable, but wasn’t ugly.

The top of the wing was much easier to deal with as it was made up of smaller feathers. Since the wings were both tucked in you could get away with only using vague highlights to show off the small feathers. You knew you would come back to them eventually, either later while painting or when you finally decided you needed to fix it. For now it looked fine.

Moving down to the individual feathers you painted them one by one. Not just plain black either. Full shading on each feather before you moved onto the next. And if the previous feather didn’t look right after you finished another you would go back until it looked right. This was tedious and sometimes annoyed the hell out of you, but making these feathers look right was your main priority.

About halfway through the first wing you threatened to rip the canvas in half. The feathers weren’t cooperating like you wanted and there was the nagging voice in the back of your head telling you that you could never get them right.

Oh the perks of being able to paint. On one hand it relaxed you and kept you from thinking about being stuck in your apartment all day. On the other it pissed you off to no end when you couldn’t get something exactly right.

You eventually gave into your frustration when you threw the brush at the painting. It didn’t ruin anything thankfully, but it made you feel better.

Sitting back in your chair you couldn’t help but scold yourself for being stuck in this situation. You were always careful when it came to using your cables and zipping around the city or down from one of the blimps. But as life would have it you still weren’t careful enough.

Your fall wasn’t life threatening in any way, thankfully. Lin wouldn’t have known what to do if it had been. It was maybe fifteen or twenty feet from the ground when your cable suddenly snapped. There was training for these instances and you knew what to do.

You had used your other cable and attached it to a nearby building. It helped angle your descent to not have as much of impact which was the key to why you weren’t injured anymore. But you still managed to land awkwardly, catching your foot on a small hole in the street and breaking plenty of bones.

The adrenaline of the whole situation caused you to not feel anything, which was for the better. You tried standing up, but when your leg refused to hold your weight you knew something had happened.

Lin ignored whatever they had come to do in the first place and ran over to you. You weren’t crying, but there was a sense of sadness or disappointment around you.

No matter how many times you and the doctor told Lin you were going to be ok she never really believed it until you got home. You would have a cast on for six months or more if you tried to use the leg. You knew it would be more because you were stubborn as hell.

You didn’t want this to stop you from working, even if you were stuck at your desk for those six plus months. Lin, however, refused to let you come to work. She personally walked with you back to your apartment after you had come to the station the day after getting injured.

Lin would rather you be in a wheelchair than crutches, but she knows she can’t control everything you do. She remembers that you can handle yourself even if you’re more vulnerable now. She spends more time with you because of that, but neither of you complain.

Once you were done reminiscing about how you got to where you were right now you took a deep breath. Art wasn’t easy, you knew that. Being out of practice wasn’t much help either.

You picked up the brush from its spot on the floor and cleaned it off. The floor had some paint on it, but it was nothing a rag couldn’t clean up. At least it wasn’t a spill.

After another deep breath you went back to the feathers. Taking that short break to let out your frustration worked well. Whatever was stopping you from figuring out had left your mind. You could see that it was simply how wide the feather was. A stupid mistake that you scolded yourself for.

Finishing the wing became much easier now. It wasn’t faster because even though there were less feathers as you went down they also got longer.

You noted that you might have to change the shading after getting an idea. It was only a maybe though. Making it seem like there were flowers above the bird and out of view was hard, but not impossible. You would come back to that idea later.

The body in between the wings was left unshaded. Plain black was enough since your light source would make it shadowed anyway.

Now came the second wing. It would have to take much more time and patience for you to do this one, as you could see more of it than the other wing. Thinking you had plenty of time left in the day to finish the painting you started on the wing. You only stopped when you heard the lock of your door turn.

Were you startled by it? Yes, you definitely were. But it could be argued that Lin was more startled by having a knife floating inches from her face as she opened the door.

“Lin! Spirits you scared me!” you guided the knife back to the counter.

“I’m glad you’re prepared for intruders,” She seemed unphased even though you knew better than to think that.

“C’mon. You don’t need to be the high and mighty Chief of Police here,” you smirked. That was one of the things she had started to do around you. Let down her guard. It was rare for her to do that and you felt appreciated knowing she did that around you.

“I brought you dinner.” she lifted the bag of food in her hand. It was for both of you, but she wouldn’t say that out loud.

“You’ve been working on that all day haven’t you?” she placed the food down on the counter and walked over to you. She studied the painting while waiting for you to respond.

“Apparently I have,” you sighed. “I don’t even know the time.” You leaned over and looked at the clock. Seven in the evening.

“Well you got off early,” you smiled at Lin. It was rare for her to get off anytime before eight.

“Wanted to see how you were doing, that’s all,” there was a small grin that showed on her lips. You wondered if she left early on purpose just to see you.

“So what did you get us this time?” You added the us last second. You two had eaten dinner together so much in the past few weeks that it was the new normal for you two.

“Kwong’s,” she answered.

“No way! You didn’t?” You got up out of your chair and hobbled over, without your crutches. You were excited, who could blame you?

Kwong’s was something you had only a few times in your childhood, saved for ultra rare occasions, like your graduation.

When you made it over to the counter you saw that Lin had indeed gotten you two Kowng’s.

“How the hell did you get Kowng’s? They’ve been filled with customers for months.” Lin turned when she saw that you were now next to her. You knew your question wouldn’t be answered because of the scowl on her face.

“You have crutches, please use them. I’d like you back in the station as soon as possible,” she scolded you. It wasn’t her usual tone that she gave newbies at the station or even vets who were on her nerves. There was worry rooted deep in her voice. She cared about you, you knew that.

Lin walked over to where your crutches rested and grabbed them for you. She handed them to you and you reluctantly took them and put them under your arms.

“I’ll get the food ready, you go sit down. Use your crutches this time,” she told you.

You stuck your tongue out at her as you made your way to the table. If anyone else had done that, they would have been dead. But you weren’t anyone and you figured that out when you got injured.

You had speculated that Lin had liked you after the fourth day of her bringing dinner, as an excuse to see you. She would always say she was checking in, lying to herself about why she came to see you every time.

Once you had confirmed it, which was hard to do, you tried to get her to admit it for a while. You knew nothing could make Lin blush, let alone laugh, so when you were able to do both, that was the confirmation. That happened almost a week ago. Her hesitation to tell you frustrated you to no end, much like the feathers on your raven had.

Lin placed the take out boxes on the table and grabbed plates from your cabinets. Once they were on the table you both served yourselves some food.

Talk was usually minimal when you two were eating. You occasionally asked about what was happening at the station and Lin would usually tell you. She would grumble about it of course, because everyone there seemed to think her advice or orders didn’t matter to them. You would always listen, only sometimes saying things back to her about whatever she was grumbling about.

Today there was a strange call in and Lin couldn’t even finish telling you what happened before you were laughing your head off. You laughing brought a smile to her face because it was the first good thing that happened to her today.

When you two finish eating Lin is the one to clean everything up. You protest by trying to get up, but your leg seems to have a mind of its own and sends a wave of pain up your spine. You winced and sat back down in defeat.

Lin gave you another glare, but it was still soft. No anger was present, she couldn’t be angry at you. She would have done the same thing if it was her with the injury. Nothing would have stopped her from continuing to work in the station. Well you probably would and Lin would listen to you.

That was another thing that Lin would let only you do, argue. She would shut everyone else down immediately. Of course when she had tried to do that to you, you didn’t cower away like everyone else. You stood your ground against her and she admired that about you.

When she finished cleaning up dinner she moved to grab her coat and leave. You didn’t want her to. It was always what she did. Come in, eat dinner, and leave. It was nice and all, but you felt lonely cooped up all day.

“Could you stay? At least for a little while?” you asked. You sounded more desperate than you wanted, but it was how you felt.

Lin had stopped putting her coat on and looked at you. You felt like you made a mistake, but it was too late to go back now.

“We don’t have to talk or anything, I just don’t want to be alone.” You really sounded desperate now. You scolded yourself in your head for it.

“Sure,” she hesitated. “Of course.” She didn’t know why she hesitated to answer. Of course she wanted to spend time with you, that’s why she came over with dinner all the time. Bringing dinner was just the excuse though.

“You can continue painting if you want,” she suggested. You thought about it and then shrugged.

“I think I’m done working on that for today. It’s already made me frustrated enough,” you glared at the painting like that would do something.

“Are you having trouble?” she asked in disbelief. She was walking closer to the painting again, looking it over for a second time.

“Yeah, feathers are a lot harder than you think. It still doesn’t look perfect.” you had come over to the painting, on your crutches, and stood next to Lin.

“It doesn’t have to be perfect,” she told you. “It’s beautiful.”

It was your turn to blush for the first time. You didn’t know if Lin wanted you to blush or not, but that wasn’t important. What she said was. She had always complimented your art when she came over, but it was always “This looks nice,” or a simple “Wow”. Her calling your art beautiful was like her holding your heart in her hands. Surprisingly soft for someone compared so closely to the element she could bend.

“T-Thanks,” you muttered.

“It’s been awhile since someone’s seen my art let alone compliment it,” you explained. Like that was the only reason for you to be flustered.

“I don’t understand why you ever stopped.” She looked at some of your finished watercolor paintings that were hanging by clips in front of your window.

“I never had the time when I was always at the station. I tried for a few months, but it just became stressful rather than relaxing,” you explained.

She had stopped and looked at one particular painting that stood out from the rest. It was the only non-animal painting you had. Still watercolor of course, which made it even more brilliant in Lin’s opinion.

She recognized it in a second. It was the view of the city from her office. You had painted her office. She smiled as she looked over the picture. She couldn’t see any mistakes. You truly strived for perfection in this painting.

“Oh,” you realized which painting she was looking at. “I was really missing the station that day. It made me feel better having some part of it here, even if it was a painting.”

Lin felt honored that you had chosen the view from her office as the part of the station you wanted to paint. She felt so gullible right now. Both of you felt that way.

“Thank you for always coming over,” you had said this a few times before over the past weeks.

“I honestly don’t know what I would do if you didn’t. I’d probably go crazy,” you laughed. That wasn’t entirely true. You would have found something to do, it wouldn’t have been as nice as having dinner with Lin, but it would be something.

“I’m sure you could’ve managed. Plus, there’s no one else checking up on you, so how am I supposed to know how you’re doing?” she raised an eyebrow at you.

“You could let me work at my desk,” you suggested.

“That’s not happening as long as you have that on your leg.” She pointed to the cast on your leg.

“I am perfectly capable of handling myself,” you argued.

You shouldn’t have argued. You knew that as soon as a sly smirk appeared on Lin’s face.

You had been leaning on your crutches while Lin had been talking to you. She knew that’s what you were doing and took advantage of that. She simply kicked one of the crutches out from underneath you and sent you falling to the ground.

“Shi-” You couldn’t react in enough time to find something to stop you from falling. You didn’t need to find anything because Lin wasn’t actually going to let you hit the ground.

You felt the wire wrap around your waist and hold you in your almost fallen position. You looked up at Lin who still had that smirk on her face.

“Y’know you really are mean,” you said jokingly. She grabbed your arm and pulled you back up. You leaned on her for support since you had dropped your other crutch while falling.

“I try,” she smiles. “Comes with the job.”

“Yet you rarely are to me.” you continued to lean on her.

“Because I don’t need to be with you. You actually listen to what I say,” she told you. You weren’t the only person who listens to her, Mako occasionally does, but that’s only after she scolds him.

“One, you’re my boss and two its kind of hard to ignore what you say,” you explained. Was this you admitting how you sometimes got lost in whatever she was saying? Yes it was.

“Everyone else has a pretty easy time ignoring me,” Lin counters. She took what you said as a compliment, in a way. She wasn’t sure what you were trying to say, so she couldn’t tell herself that it was really a compliment.

Your words were caught in your throat. How exactly could you tell her that you got lost in her voice. That sometimes your heart flutters around her the same way you know hers does around you. You really couldn’t explain in words. So you didn’t.

Did you regret moving in to kiss her? No, not one bit. Hell you were glad you finally did it because you knew Lin had been dodging around her feelings for weeks.

Her arms snaked around to hold you by the waist and you wrapped your arms around her neck. It felt so good, it felt perfect. You wanted to stay like that forever. But unfortunately both of you still need air to breath so you have to stop.

“You…” Lin began before pausing.

“Oh don’t act coy with me. You don’t think I’ve figured out why you come here so often?” You watched embarrassment flood her face.

“Not that I would have wanted it any differently,” you smiled. That made her feel better.

“Am I not allowed to worry?” She asked. She looked at you and the shell, the armor, that she wore to keep her emotions hidden was off. She was out in the open, her heart in your hands.

“You are. I’m glad you do,” you were still smiling. Of course you wanted her to worry, it made you feel loved.

“I still want to go back to my desk though,” you complained.

“What am I going to do with you?” she sighed.

“Love me?” you gave her a cheesy grin.

She rolled her eyes and kissed you again. Mostly to make sure you weren’t going to ask to go back to the station. You were hers to protect and she was going to make sure that you stayed here until your leg healed. Even if she didn’t bring dinner every night.

#lin beifong #lin beifong x reader #fluff #writing #legend of korra

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lulendrea · 3 years

Text

Process pictures for the previous piece (I'm really glad people liked it. I appreciate all the sweet comments people left in the tags ☺)

This was my first time actually doing the whole thing from start to finish digitally. I was always afraid of doing the sketch on the tablet, because it felt awkward and I had no patience for it. I always felt like I was a worse artist on a computer than with pencil and paper. But I'm glad I did this. It taught me that I can make a good piece if I just give myself the time and keep at it.

1 - Thumbnail.

I had actually done one more thumbnail before this one in my sketchbook, but it's basically the same thing, just really tiny, messier and just generally incomprehensible.

2 - First sketch

Building upon the thumbnail, I tried to get a better idea down and clear up some things. No reference at this point.

Between step 2 and step 3 there were a LOT more sketches done. I flipped the canvas a lot, made a lot of passes, and looked up references for the characters. Some of the characters came out really easily, like Jinbei (surprisingly), and others like Robin and Zoro just wouldn't come out how I wanted them to. Right now the only one I'm not happy with is Zoro (he just doesn't feel right to me).

I tried to also focus a lot on the composition. I made sure that the biggest lines and the eyes of the characters all lead back to Luffy. I also tried to make a clear path that would take the gaze of the viewer from Usopp all the way to Sanji, then from Sanji to Brook, then from Brook to Franky and then back to Luffy. I don't know if it really worked as I intended, but I hope so.

3 - Lineart (before clean-up)

I put in this step just because I wanted to show how much time I wasted making lineart for things that would ultimately get covered up. The problem is, I did every character separately. So I would first do a quick sketch of the character to get down the general position and composition in relation to the ones that were already made. And then I hid the layers of the rest of the characters and worked on the current one individually. Then once it was finished, I just moved it into place. This created quite a few tangents that I had no more energy to fix.

4 - Clean lineart

Nothing much to say here. I just erased all the lines that would be behind another character.

5 - Picking the colors from reference

I wanted to be mostly accurate to the source material, so I got a bunch of references and color picked the colors and then I just chose the average between those.

6 - Flats

Self-explanatory. Once I was done I had to adjust all the colors one by one, so they wouldn't clash against each other. Jinbei's skin especially didn't fit in with the rest of the colors. (Unfortunately I don't have the comparison of what it looked like before I adjusted the colors).

At the end the colors all looked different from the chart I made in step 5.

7 - Lights and shadows

Here I was really focusing on trying to make pleasant and clear shapes with my lights, which is why I'm showing it now without the lineart and the flat colors. So, I tried not to draw exactly where the light might realistically have been, but instead where it would show best the form and shape of the characters.

I set the lights layer (which I painted with a dark blue color) on divide and the shadows on multiply. (This was made in Krita, so I don't know how the layer modes might differ in other drawing softwares).

8 - End result

Final touches and details.

Also, I should say it took me roughly a month to make. (I'm extremely slow in general and me doing time-consuming things that I knew would not show up on the final piece did not help),

#process

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cozycryptidcorner · 5 years

Photo

Chapter One

Sweat glues your hair against your forehead, droplets running down your temples and down onto your shirt. Your arms protest against the pressure as you lift a rather heavy vase, one painted in tiny, intricate blue details, and stand on the very tips of your toes to push it on top of an old oak cabinet without running the risk of chipping the base. You let out a little wheeze once you manage to wiggle it right into place, taking a moment to crack your knuckles to release some tension, then step back to take one last look to make sure it appears fine. Satisfied, you turn around as your phone begins to chirp, the screen announcing the caller as one of your few employees.

You pick it up, hitting the accept call button and lifting the phone to your ear. “What’s up, Jill?”

“Just giving you an update, boss,” the child-like voice offers, though the owner is well into her late twenties, “the equipment arrived at the next location, Boomer and the others are about to start gutting the kitchen.”

��Sounds good,” you say, clicking the pen lying on a nearby table to help you focus. You try to bring up your memory of the room, having visited for a full day before heading back to the current job at hand, trying to picture just what you plan on doing with it once you get there. “Don’t forget that I want the exposed brick to stay put. The owner said she liked ‘rustic,’ so that’s what we’re going to give her.”

“Yes, ma’am,” there’s not too much respect in the voice, more like Jillian is poking fun at your authoritative stance. “Anything else? Getting lonely?”

You let out a loud snort. “Not yet, can’t say I miss Boomer’s constant arguments with Steph and Jack.”

“Okay, Lemme know if you need any help, I could use a break from the bickering too.”

“Will do, talk to you later.”

The castle isn’t the worst place you’ve had to turn into a liveable space, but it’s not without its challenges, that’s for sure. A crew of people from the local electric plant has had to wire up the entire place, a septic system had to be installed, oh, and also pipes for running water had to be dug. Working around people all trying to do their own jobs without any attempts to stay out of each other’s way has tested your patience to the very most thinnest line you didn’t even know you could take, but at least it’s over.

Your speakers blare music loud enough to be heard on the other end of the castle as you hold out strips of sample colors from the nearest hardware store, comparing and contrasting the two until you come up with a couple of possibilities for the room. The sun shines in through the freshly bought glass panes, warming the room to a comfortable temperature without the need to turn on the newly installed heating system. Carefully and thoroughly, you write down the exact serial numbers of the colors you’re deciding on, and tuck the notebook in your back pocket. You’ll head over to the hardware store tomorrow, but for now, you’re probably good to prime the walls.

The castle isn’t gigantic, it’s not like the kind you’d see in Disney movies that can seemingly house an entire city within its walls, but it’s definitely mansion-sized. A couple dozen rooms, enough to make a decently sized inn, which is exactly the plan you’re running with under the instruction of the castle’s new owner. Oh, speaking of which, they’re visiting the day after tomorrow, so you better have a good report to give to them. You open up one of the cans of primer, the scent of artificial wrongness causing your eyes to water, but you continue working like you aren’t in danger of choking on some wack fumes.

The first layer doesn’t take too much work, the roller sponge reaching all those tough places on the ceiling you wouldn’t manage to get to without the tall ass handle. Your people did a decent job making sure the plaster on the walls is smooth as silk when they painted the stuff on, so you don’t have to sand anything down before the second layer. Since this is supposed to be the ‘renaissance room,’ you’re stuck painting frescos on the walls like the many geniuses did a few millennia ago, and hoo boy do you have your work cut out. The owner seems fine with the outrageous price you named when you heard what they wanted, but a part of you regrets making such a time-consuming decision.

You have a couple of sketches on hand, pre-approved by the person in question, but still, you tap a bit of willow charcoal against the side of the paper as you try to come up with some different options that might be a little more fun for you to paint. But you need to stretch- and get some fresh air before you start feeling lightheaded from the primer fumes. Still trying to filter some sort of decent idea through your head, you wander through the halls, marveling at how your people managed to string up some modern chandeliers in the short amount of time they had. There’s a rather large and curving staircase that connects the first and second floors, one that you just had to keep in all its glory, though now it’s polished within an inch of its life.

There are several exits you can use, but you decide on the one that spits you right out into the garden, which is pretty darn dead for the most part. You know that an army of landscapers is coming to start planting things sometime in the near future. Still, you neither know what company it is or when they will be here, so you untangle the sweater from around your waist and somehow get it on without having to put your sketchbook and charcoal down. There’s a large fountain that hasn’t seen water in probably a hundred or so years, dead leaves collecting in its nooks and crannies, but at the center of the empty pool is a rather incredible statue.

It’s up on a pedestal, body in a suave contrapposto pose. The hair is carved in a mop of unbelievably gorgeous curls, you can almost imagine yourself running your fingers through it despite knowing very well that all you’ll feel is solid rock. Its face is a perfect example of what’ bedroom eyes’ means, its gaze staring directly towards an invisible partner, mouth in a sultry, inviting smile. Whoever carved it, though, definitely outdid themselves with the butt because good god the careful balance between curve and firmness is extraordinarily executed. The thighs, too, look like they could crush a melon between them, but there’s just something about the butt that always makes you stop for a minute to admire it in all its glory, no matter what you’re doing at the moment. Jillian’s mocked you a few times for ogling it perhaps a little too intently, but you know what?

You get your phone out, already formulating a dumb little stunt to put on your Instagram page. Oh, Jillian is the only one on your crew who is going to think it’s hilarious, but maybe your followers will also find it funny. Cautiously, you step over the wall of the fountain, avoiding the pipes that at one time pumped water into the knee-deep pool, and then take a moment to look over the inscription at the statue’s base. It strikes you as rather odd, mainly because you would think that a plaque would instead belong on the outside wall of the fountain, rather than right at the feet of the statue. It’s in ancient greek, or at least, that’s what the owner of the property told you when you asked some time before.

Trying your best not to use the statue’s available limbs for balance, you step up onto the pedestal, getting rather cozy with those lovingly carved abs. You have to stand on the tips of your toes to get your mouth anywhere near his, and yes, up close, those lips look even more inviting than usual. After a moment of fiddling with your phone’s camera filters and trying to find a good angle to show off your jawline and chin, you press your mouth up against the statues, glancing up only briefly to make sure the camera’s got everything. Then you close your eyes and pretend like this is the most magical moment you’ve ever experienced, finger clicking the shutter button. You take a moment to look over what you’ve got, your arm still around the statue’s neck, biting your lip as you pick which one is going to go online.

It doesn’t take you long to pick out two or three. The angle and lighting in those are a bit off from the others, not in a bad way, though, but it kind of almost looks like the statue isn’t just the recipient of the kiss. Actually, now that you really look at it… the shadows make it look almost like it’s leaning into your mouth, which you suppose is going to sell the picture even more. Neat. You hop off the pedestal and step over the wall of the fountain. Enough break time, you decide, picking up your sketchbook where you mindlessly tossed it, and head back into the castle.

You didn’t have any wild inspirations while you were making out with the stone, so you decide instead to start working on something that doesn’t take as much brain juice as, say, designing an original fresco that’s supposed to rival Raphael’s Philosophy. At the moment, you’re probably better off painting the freshly stripped and primed walls of the library, something that doesn’t require intricate thought. The paints for the library have already been purchased and delivered, courtesy of Steph, so buckets of baby blue wait for you on the protective layer of plastic taped to the floor. Turning on some loud music, you begin, stirring up one of the paint buckets and pouring some into a container long enough for the roller brushes.

Throwing yourself into the work is easy, so long as you try to keep yourself entertained. After the music loses your interest, you take a quick break, flipping through podcasts while sipping water. Wiping some sweat from your face, you happen to look through the window and into the garden to see that... Wait- the statue- the statue is missing? You frantically walk over to the glass and look out, your heated breath fogging your view. Your first impression is correct; the statue isn’t on the pedestal, which is fucking impossible? That thing has to weigh almost a ton, it’s a slab of rock, no one can just walk away with it.

You’re outside before you can even register the shock of your feet hitting the cobblestone of the path, your lungs wheezing from the sudden strain of exercise and nerves. There’s no fucking way you lost a whole ass statue after being alone for just three days, but, oh, that’s precisely the kind of stuff you would expect to happen to you. Of course your dumb ass would somehow lose the most valuable thing on this property, oh, god, you’re going to be so fired. This is going to destroy your company’s reputation, you’re never going to be able to get another job again and then you’ll have to dissolve it all once the owner decides to sue and you’ll never be able to so much as breathe in the direction of interior design again-

“Fuck!” You shout, kicking uselessly at the pavement. It’s gone. The whole thing’s fucking up and gone, and you’re doomed.

“What’s wrong?” A new voice says, too close to your body for your liking, so you do what anyone else in your position might and punch the source of the sound on reflex, letting out a loud shriek.

Instead of some rando’s face, you end up striking something stone-like as hard as you can muster, your knuckles exploding with a rush of pain. Your muscles twitch, and then you can’t feel anything but a heated throb pulsing through your fingers, but you don’t pay any attention to your ruined hand. Rather, you’re eyes are glued to the quite literal stony features of a man’s face, a face that would be on kissing level if you stood on the very tips of your toes.

“No,” you say, because, between the pain and the shock, you can’t think of anything else that would entirely summarize what you’re feeling at the moment.

Its smile is radiant despite the fact you had just struck it with the intent to knock a couple of teeth out, eyes somehow wild with an emotion you can’t place, and then it sets a well-sculpted hand on the side of your face. A split second later, you realize that it is leaning forward with the intent to kiss you again, so you do what anyone else might do in the moment.

“No,” you yelp, placing a hand on his mouth, and then repeat, “no.”

Confusion settles on his features, his brows furrowing, his mouth still in an inviting curve. “What’s wrong?”

Oh, dear god. Its voice... is like it was made for sex, melodic, soft, yet also firm. There’s a singer that you love to turn on and kick back in relaxation, the lyrics smooth and accented, running over you like a gentle stream of water, and that’s the only way you can think to describe the way that- that statue speaks, without sounding like an insane person. In fact, you’re so focused on trying to place which foreign singer that he sounds like that you forget that your hand is still firmly on his mouth, pushing his face away.

“I’m going to get fired.” That’s all you can think about. The owner of the property is going to take one look at the living, breathing statue and have a goddamn conniption.

“There is no need to fret, darling-”

“No need to fret?” You’re about to start screaming. “This is supposed to make my fucking career, and now the most priceless part of the fucking property somehow gained sentience is, um, walking around? I’m going to get scalped, no one else is going to hire me-”

“I have naught an idea of what you speak of,” it brushes some baby hairs away from your sweaty forehead, “but all shall be well, so long as you stay with me.”

You’re choking on the air because your body doesn’t know what else to do with itself. Still, somehow, you manage to pull yourself from its arms, needing a moment to breathe in an environment that didn’t involve something trying insistently to make out with you. Deep, deep breath, you coach yourself, dusting your sweaty hands on the front of your shirt, remembering suddenly that you might have accidentally fractured a couple of fingers when a sharp pain runs up the length of your forearm. “Shit.”

“Would-”

“Stop talking!” You need to think, and you need to tend to the already swelling knuckles on your hand. Hopefully, you won’t need a trip to the hospital. Angrily, you pace, two steps to the side, then three steps back, looking at the pedestal, then at the statue, and finally on the castle. “Fuck, just- just follow me, I guess.”

You storm back into the common room, frantically looking for wherever the hell the first aid kit ended up getting stashed. It’s not with the paperwork or folders keeping track of the tabs you’re racking up at the local hardware store, so you run over into the kitchen where the brand new industrial stoves and ovens are and start rifling through the cabinets until you finally find the white tin box. The statue follows you, thankfully, because you aren’t about to allow a potentially million-dollar statue to start wandering the cliffside without adult supervision.

After a minute of fiddling the sides of the locks with one hand, the statue makes a reach for the box just as you manage to open it. Quickly, you shoot it a chilling glare and pull the medical supplies closer, rifling through the contents until you find something for the spots on your fingers where the skin broke open. Okay, yes, it’s a little awkward to be doing this all with one hand, but you’re not going to let that… thing anywhere near you, much less your bloodied hand. Speaking of which, despite the substantial damage done to you, the statue doesn’t seem at all bothered by the strike which would have at least knocked an average person off their rhythm, but…

You reach over and take his jaw into your good hand, moving his head to the side to check for any damage. The stone is still in place, not a single chip flew off, which might be expected because this thing is a fucking rock. Though even now, a part of you wants to believe that this is some kind of ridiculously elaborate prank the owner is pulling for a publicity stunt, and this is a man in really convincing makeup. To call attention to the inn, you know, get some national headlines. Pull in more customers. Haha, look, it’s the stupidly handsome statue that scared the everloving shit out of the poor contractor. But if this were a man, there would be swelling puffing out that ridiculously beautiful jawline because you hit hard.

Angry that you aren’t able to come to the conclusion you want, you let go, returning back to sloppily wrap your wounded hand in some gauze and tape. Tea, you need some goddamn tea, you think, rummaging through the sparse pantry full of some random items you bought while in town, after all, you can’t get takeout for every meal three months straight. Not unless you want to take your bank account to a back alley and shoot it like a diseased dog. Urgh, finally, something relatively strong that might help cool your nerves down a notch or two.

“Do you… like, drink or anything?” You ask as an afterthought, filling a kettle with water from the sink.

“I don’t know.” He regards the kettle with curiosity, eyes following your movement with close precision.

“You don’t know,” you say in your best imitation of someone who is just positively stoked. “Awesome.”

“I have a rather interesting feeling that this is an unexpected happening,” the statue posits, placing its arms on the counter, an action that sends a shot of panic through your chest.

“Get off the granite, get off-” you half push, half lift him away, bending over and running your fingers over the countertop to look for scratches. A bit of relief breaks off into your chest, and then another, once you find no damage to speak of. Angrily, you wave your hands in the direction of a small, nondescript wooden table that’s already stained and pummeled within an inch of its life. “Just…. Take a seat over there, m’kay?”

The statue, thankfully, seems fine with listening to you, moving over to the bench and sitting while you find two mugs to use. There are dishes, at least, which wasn’t the case when your crew first started working on this project, but it’s nice to not have to eat out of styrofoam to-go boxes and drink out of travel tumblers anymore. The statue watches you intently while you work, eyes following every movement like you might offer up the secret to the universe in passing, and as the kettle shrieks, you decide that you’re just about over <em<that. You don’t care to give him any tea options, so you toss halfheartedly bag into both mugs after filling them with near-boiling water.

You set the cup in front of him, your teeth gritted, as you try to wrack your brain for where to start with your questioning because you have thousands of them rattling around in your head. After a moment, though, you decide to start with something easy. “Do you have a name?”

“I don’t know,” he says, too cheerfully for you to deal with.

“Where do you come from?” You try again.

His eyes grow distant for a moment, then suddenly snap back to reality. “I don’t know.”

You let out a frustrated breath. “Is there anything you do know?”

“I do know that you’re the one who brought me here,” he says, looking at you once more like you’re… like you’re a god or something.

“No I didn’t,” you say, as bluntly as you can muster, letting out a dry laugh.

He doesn’t say anything in response, only offers you a sly smile, tapping on his lips with two fingers.

You catch on immediately, a thrill of panic running down your spine. “No.”

His smile widens, and he nods. “Yes.”

“I did not-”

“You did.” He reaches over and gently takes your injured hand, looking over the hasty bindings with interest. “A kiss of someone with love in their heart. That’s what I know.”

You want to throw up. “I don’t- like I’m sure you’re a decent statue person, but I don’t-”

“Love me?” He finishes innocently. “Perhaps not now, but I’m sure you will be… convinced.”

You gently take back your hand, all the nerves in your body running on overdrive, and oh boy, if you weren’t sweating before, you’re sweating now. “The only thing I want to be convinced of right now is that you aren’t going to get in the way of me and my job.”

“What would that be?”

“Making this into an acceptable place to live or whatever,” you take a shaky sip of tea, “and the thing about that is that you’re supposed to be the main attraction.”

To your dismay, he seems absolutely thrilled by that statement. “Am I that handsome that people flock from neighboring villages to see me?”

”No, you fucking-” you take a deep, shaking breath to try calming yourself down before you finish that sentence, and start again. “No. You’re a prized relic. The guy who owned the property before the current one was an art collector, and you are kind of a big deal. Um,” you tap your fingers against the table as you try to recall what the new owner said, “you’re one of the oldest statues that have been pulled from Greek ruins,intact, so that’s kind of a big deal.”

That seems to catch his attention. “Greek… ruins?”

“A temple or something, I don’t really remember, she mentioned in it passing.” You cover your face with your hands, trying to get your fucking shit together before a full-blown meltdown happens. “There was an art historian who estimated your value to be in the millions. If the owner stops by and sees that her block of gold is no longer where it’s supposed to be, she’s going to assume theft. And do you know who the only person with unmonitored access to the entire property is? Do you know who is going to get blamed?”

“So tell her of this miracle.” He reaches over and covers your hands, gently peeling them back from your face. God, that smile is awful, mostly because it’s flawless and makes your insides want to melt. “Surely, she will understand that this love is a gift from the gods themselves.”

You don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. “I don’t think that’s going to work.”

“It will,” he promises, “surely anyone, even those with the heads of asses, will see that a miracle is present.” He’s about to say even more, you can tell by the way he tilts his head and takes a breath, but then your phone rings.

You wriggle out of his grasp and pull it out of your pocket. Oh, good god, speak of the devil. How the hell are you supposed to explain this? Can you even try? Should you? You swallow thickly, your good hand shaking as you hit the button to receive the call. Holding up your hand in the universal gesture for shut the fuck up, you answer, praying your voice doesn’t sound like sandpaper. “Hello, Marge! How’re things going?”

#exophilia #statue #living statue #statue boyfriend #monster boyfriend #monster/reader #statue/reader #living statue/reader

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himb0i · 7 years

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!!!HEY!!! Someone asked for a hair tutorial, so I took some screencaps of the process while I worked on one of my commissions and wrote up my thoughts to go with it! If that’s something that interests you, click through the readmore!

Step 1: Lose the screencaps you took of your actual sketch, starting the tutorial off on a great note!

Whoops. I ended up drawing over my partially-rendered piece to reproduce it. (My actual sketch was much messier. You’ll be able to see a little bit of it later!) The actual Step 1 is: Draw head. Sketch hair. I rough in the shape of the skull, the facial features, and whatever part of the body is in-frame first. Then, I sketch in the hairline, highlighted in red. Hairlines come in all shapes, from rounded to square to widow’s peaks! Next, I draw in a part coming back from the hairline, following the curvature of the skull. From there I start drawing in “chunks” of hair, working front to back and from the part, out, in sweeping curves. All hair has at least little bit of lift- It grows up and out from the skull, then “droops” downwards. Depending on the texture, it may have more or less lift. This hair is fairly fine, so it falls down not far from the root, but even that little bit of volume makes it look more three dimensional. :v Pay attention to anywhere it parts around 3d objects and be mindful of which pieces go in front of your character’s shoulders (if any) and which pieces go behind (if any). Hair overlaps itself, too- Consider having pieces cross in front of and behind each other, or spiral together. This step can be messy and fairly imprecise, you just want a general shape to guide you later.

Next come the flat base colors. I choose and fill in my background color in a new layer beneath my sketch. On a layer above that (but still beneath the sketch!), I fill in behind my sketch with flat colors and a hard brush. I like to work from dark to light, so I pick a dark midtone or shadow color for this step- Since the character is going to be blonde, I went with a milk chocolate sort of color for the hair. You can see pieces of my original sketch here (everywhere but the face)- There are some bits showing through where they shouldn’t, like the jaw through the hair, but that’s fine. I lock my sketch opacity and change the color, usually to a brown, and set it to multiply, so I can blend it into the figure later. Then I merge it down onto my flat colors.

Like magic, the face appears!!! I neglect the hair for a while and do a rough render of the face. This isn’t quite what the final product will look like, but it’s a start. I’ve also pushed the hair around a little to reshape the face and removed the jaw lines in the hair. Around her shoulders I painted over some hair bits, but that’s going to be all covered later anyway. You can see how my rendering gets lighter than my base colors here, too.

For my darkest darks, mostly around the face, I colorpicked the bits of the sketch that were in the hair and filled in a little bit, mostly on the far side of the face where i felt like the edge was getting lost.

Keeping in mind what color the hair is going to be in the end, I pick a lighter midtone and start layering it over top of the base color. I’m using Clip Studio’s default oil brush here, since it picks up underlying colors and blends but preserves a fairly hard edge. You could get a similar effect with other low-opacity brushes. Keeping my hand light and my wrist loose, I start making quick strokes out from the roots, following the direction of the hair every time! My brush is just a little bit smaller than whatever “chunk” I’‘m working on to start..

...but as I start to build up more color, I progress to smaller and smaller brushes. Keeping your strokes really quick and messy creates a natural, organic streakiness that forms the beginning of your hair texture, and since the oil brush picks up a little bit of the underlying color on each stroke, the area you’re coloring gets closer and closer to your selected color every time you go over it. In this case, it’s getting brighter. So, keeping my brights concentrated towards my light source, I build up layers, and where I see those streaks starting to form I emphasize them and start dividing the chunks in my sketch into smaller segments. Since the sketch is on the same layer and a darker shade of brown, it almost immediately starts to blend away.

More texture! Also, roots. With a small brush I sharpened her hairline, and you can see the texture I’m emphasizing as I go, using a small brush to pick out pieces of hair. I’ve also swapped back to a darker brown for a few seconds to add furrows between pieces of hair that were solid beige from the last step.

This is what the whole head looks like at this point. That streaky swatch in the upper right corner is what I’m using next- it’s the “Painterly Sparse Bristle” brush from Frenden. It comes in a third party brush pack you can find with a quick Google, and I do love it- But you could get the same effect with a small brush and a few more strokes.I picked a lighter color for the next layer- I tried the color of the x on the left at first, and it was a little too grey, so I went with the one on the right.

Light hand, loose wrist, following the direction of the hair and avoiding the shadows with the sparse bristle brush to lighten the hair overall and add texture. The shape of the brush gives me more strands per stroke and cuts down on time. It’s a little patchy where my strokes begin and end, which is fine- It’s also still too grey, as it turns out.

I picked a soft yellow, a soft brush, and set a new layer to “soft light”, then shaded over the hair to brighten it up. Not a super standard step but it does explain the shift in hue. Then I merged it down. It’s a little bit blotchy, but that will blend away as I work.

Up close, the edges of that sparse bristle brush look kind of square and chunky. Yuck.

It’s fixable, though! I’m done adding new colors for a while. Instead, I zoom in closer and move around the piece, colorpicking off different parts of the hair and going in with the default oil brush at a tiny tiny size. I’m doing two things: Blending out the less appealing parts of those “sparse bristle” brush strokes, and emphasizing shadows and highlights to suit my taste. The orange section is untouched- The white section has been worked on a bit. Loose wrist, fast strokes, always in the direction of the hair! This is where I start making a lot of conscious decisions about my shading, refining a lot of the haphazard streaks into coherent shadows and highlights. Remember that the chunks of hair are objects in a three dimensional space that cast shadows on each other.

While I’m zoomed in close, smoothing things out, I tend to start picking out areas where loose or flyaway strands would work well. The idea here is to break outside of the boundaries of your sections with finer pieces and individual hairs. Disrupting the edges of the smooth shapes in a few places makes the hair look less like a sculpted helmet and more like..hair. You don’t have to do this everywhere- Just a few flyaway pieces can be enough to establish the illusion of a head of individual strands. I tend to go a little bit overboard for stylistic reasons, adding a few more than I strictly need to, and separating them a little bit further from the body of the hair than they might realistically be, almost like the flyaway pieces are being buoyed upwards by water or a breeze. This is just a matter of taste, though. :v

Something to remember: Whenever you’re working on details / zoomed in to a piece, you should zoom out and look at the piece as a whole, often. Otherwise you might find that something that looked good while you were really close to it looks out of place in the context of your painting as a whole!

Moving around the hair at a high zoom means you’re going to run into the ends of the hair, and if you’ve been working with blendy brushes they probably look like this.

This is another great place to put some loose strands. I use the default “darker pencil” tool at a small size and sharpen the edges up, then blend a little bit on top with the oil brush if I need to. A little bit of a sharper curve at the ends of the hair, where there’s less weight pulling it down, can add some life- I tend to go exaggerate here, too, making the ends a little bit floaty, or a lot floaty, or swirling the ends of straight hair into spirals. It adds a little bit of magic to an otherwise static portrait.

Do the whole head! This is the most time-consuming part, but it can be really soothing, too. Take your time and work steadily, section by section. :> Speaking of exaggerated swirls, that piece starting to twist up on the (viewer’s) far right is a good example- That hair probably wouldn’t twirl up that way, but it DOES add a little bit of visual interest! I don’t have any loose hairs on the outside of the outermost edges of the hair here, though.

And now I do. I like to add the loose hair on the outside edges on a layer beneath the figure- That way, I don’t have to worry about blending the ends into the rest of the hair. When I’m done, I merge the two layers together.

Anddd highlights! I picked the lighest coor I’d put down, made a new layer above the figure, set it to “Add-Glow”, and used light, short strokes with the sparse bristle brush. Avoiding the shadows, I arranged the highlights in horizontal bands, keeping them dense towards the light source and fading them out as they moved back.

At this point, I still have some work to do, especially on the face, and I’m guaranteed to do more with the hair along the way. But anything I do from here on out is going to be a repeat of one of the above steps- More blending, more flyaway hair, etc. :> I change things around a LOT as I work, so no part of a piece, hair included, is for sure done until the whole piece is polished up and saved! If you want to see how the finalized painting came out, hair and all, you can click here!

I hope this is helpful to someone! If there’s anything else you’d like me to break down, let me know, and I’ll see about documenting my process the next time it comes up.

#tutorial #art tutorial #art process #digital painting

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rayj-drash · 4 years

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Berlin Sketches pt. 2

By T. Frank

On week three, I looked up two friends I know from Berkeley, Heidi and Asa, who’ve lived for six months in Berlin. They proposed a trip to Cologne to join the protests at Hambacher Forest, where coal companies were threatening to level the trees and mine for coal. We would take the six-hour train ride overnight, then head to Hambacher for a Sunday forest walk.

Green flags printed with the iconic Hambacher tree waved in the air over a dry dirt field. “Hambie Bleibt”--the Hambacher forest stays! Polizei allowed us to enter one area of the forest, but they blocked off the main path. We saw broken glass, ropes tied to beech trees. These woods were sparsely populated, so we re-entered Hambacher around the cops, and greeted the site anew. There was a central tree-sit atop a very tall tree and protesters everywhere hauled logs for a barricade. Heidi jumped right in, Asa went to rest, and I gathered a few branches before deciding, I'll paint instead. Several pairs of feet stopped to watch, and someone asked in German, "Can I take a photo of your palette?" With my head down, focused on my watercolors, I heard a brass band playing, "The Saints Go Marching In". The rest of the day was a mix of sun, shade, apples and communal efforts.

My two companions and I reached Hambacher's edge to emerge into a scene we dreaded. We climbed a mound of sand before the vast swath of barren land, the 'digger' machines looming like an invasive species. Security forces trotted in on horseback; a neon-vested journalist snapped dozens of shots. Soon, we heard an amplified voice, emphasizing that no one was to leave the limits of Hambacher. Asa remarked, that's just a display of power. And we are each reminded by the 'harsh' intonations of German, what a set of negative-sounding instructions can become.

~~~~~

Each week, the residency screened a film. The first was Tarnation (2003), featuring the documentarian who highlighted his mother's struggles with mental illness. The second was called A Film Unfinished (2010), a riveting, intense documentary in multiple languages, which we watched with malfunctioning subtitles. The Israeli director took found footage from Nazi propaganda stored underground for fifty years. When the footage was restored, it's shown to Jewish Holocaust survivors, who are filmed watching the horrific storylines, primarily depicting the wealthy at extreme odds with the hordes dying in controlled poverty, then corralled and dumped into open graves.

When the lights went up, my studiomates shared their reactions. One of the ladies expressed sympathy towards me as the only Jew in the room. Without thinking, I shrugged it off, refraining from the spotlight. After, I ran outside over a bridge and looked down at the river below. I ran until I felt my heart beating, and then I walked back in order to shake off the shock. Here I was, in Germany, a Jewish descendant of Eastern Europeans who immigrated to America thirty years before the unforgivable Holocaust. I saw the people of Berlin as similar to Americans, immigrants and settlers alike. I did not wish to blame a country's people for it's government's atrocities. Instead, I wanted to process. That would take time.

~~~~~~

About halfway through the residency, my hostess Amelia set me up with her friend Ivan, an American graduate student. Amelia meant well, but sometimes I felt like I gave her the wrong impression. She assumed that I was a traveling psychologist with a dark and troubled Jewish past, and she lamented her religious Christian upbringing often. She was overly hospitable, leaving money for groceries and even gave me her room for the majority of my visit; but the times that she came home, we talked from our mattresses about romance.

At dusk, Ivan and I started our tour at the iconic Brandenberg Gate, which divided West and East Germany through the Cold War. We then went inside three public memorials in the Tiergarten. First, a testament to the Roma Gypsies targeted during Hitler's regime. The space contained a shallow reflecting pool. Haunting string music played from secret speakers in the secluded square. Next, we viewed the Queer memorial, a pyramid with a small window through which we saw a looped video. Footage of gays and lesbians embraced, kissed, and held hands, spliced with shots of police tormenting lovers.

Finally, we went through the Holocaust Memorial, where tall, symmetrical granite planks rose higher and higher the farther in you walked, until you're completely enveloped in darkness and solid walls. I grew afraid in the middle of the labyrinth. Ivan’s solid grasp was there. We discussed the importance of history in this very place, where a few blocks away was a parking lot, the former bunker where Hitler spent his last moments with family and comrades before they all consumed poison. Ivan and I said goodbye, and boarded different trains as I reflect on the solemnity of the memorials.

~~~~~~

For the residency project, I wished to experiment with one of my favorite pastimes, origami or the art of Japanese paper folding. I asked Daniel, who displays his origami creations hung from tree branches by the Canal, for a quick tutorial. At the studio, I made a mockup of two round paper forms connected by a strip of felt rope. The forms hung next to each other, supported only by a strand of invisible plastic wire threaded through the base. With a stiff piece of construction paper, the result was about the size of a grapefruit. I tied four knots in the rope to represent the tumors found in Annika’s breast.

Concurrently, I play around with paper cutouts of words. I've had a vision inspired by a window display: a thick hardcover book, folded and carved as to resemble a woman. When I brought my drafts to my mentor, he latched onto the origami prototype, but discouraged my cut-outs. The work felt exciting, but without my mentor's approval, I grew dejected. We had one week left to finish our projects before the exhibition.

On Monday morning, I took a walk to Tempelhof Field, sitting in one of the community gardens to stress-out to my journal. I still felt stuck, but I walked to a new path amongst a grove of yellow-leafed trees. It was here, suddenly, that I recognized I had something. When I arrived in the studio, I constructed two remaining pairs of inflated paper-orbs. The first, with the knots, will represent the cancer invading; the second, at a larger size, will represent the breast implants; and the third, shown with red silk paper, will represent the final stage when the foreign breasts become aligned with her body.

~~~~~

Three pairs of paper orbs hung from the ceiling. In this room, Jasmine has pulled all-nighters to construct her powerful body of work with poetry, mirror fragments, and dance captured on video. Gwen’s paintings were layered with transcriptions of reflections on grief, and Linda sewed fabric in Victorian mourning colors over paving stones, emblematic of feeling like a stranger in a strange land. Sara’s installation covered the room with hospital visitor passes, recreating an experience she faced as a teenager when she lost her best friend. Sarah has a collection of satirical, solemn ruminations. At ten to six, we were still installing the show, and Aleksandar locked out potential guests. I ran over to the cafè for a bundle of sandwiches to save us. When I return, I’m able to take in the show as if I was a guest to the process. Are we processing a collective grief, or are we still locked in our own worlds?

~~~~~~

The residents and I go our separate ways shortly after the exhibition. I tried to hawk my bicycle by Hermannplatz station, but at the Canal I met Tash, who sold polymer-clay jewelry depicting vulvas. She was delightful to be around, taking pride and joy in her work with a loud belly laugh. Presently, her friends Jen and Ezra arrived. Ezra shares his sack of unshelled walnuts from the Turkish farmer’s market. Try as I might, I only crack one or two by the next morning. Jen realizes she needs a bike, and we arrange to meet at the gallery that weekend for the trade-off. I'm relieved, inspired, and happy to meet these lovely people.

I took the S-bahn to see Annika one last time. Over tea and cappuccino, I shared photos from the exhibition, which she missed because her friends threw her an end-of-radiation party. This is wonderful news, and Annika was as radiant as ever. She left me a good deal of wisdom for the subject matter I chose to study: “Grief is a thing inside of you. It doesn’t leave, but you find a place for it until you heal”.

When I walked back to Neukölln, I ran into the origami master by the Canal. He gave me a warm hug and mentioned he's flying to Mexico for the winter--migrating like the colorful parrots he folds. Presently, Ezra arrives for an origami lesson. While the master was called away, I sat down on the bench and taught Ezra what Daniel taught me. I made him a tiny blue crane, and he gave me his tiny red dragon in thanks.

"We're good friends already," Ezra remarked.

"It's called kinship,” I respond. “Relating to people who you feel warm about, like your family, your ‘kin’. Will I find people like you guys when I return home?"

"Wherever there are similar vibrations that you feel initially, you'll find them again."

~~~~~~

As I prepared my suitcase that night, I saw some horrifying news reach my inbox. Back in the States, a mass murder has just been committed at a Pittsburg synagogue. The shooter killed eleven senior citizens and wounded six Jewish congregants. I lowered myself onto the kitchen couch, and called everyone I knew from Pennsylvania; no one answered, but I called my brother in San Francisco. He heard the news, but sounds calm. Reaching my “kin” was reasurring in that heartbreaking time.

The next morning, I awoke early to make the connecting flight to France. I took in the boulevards of Paris from a chilly city park, with an endless parade of joggers in tight sportswear. I felt very different here, and I don’t speak the language--but I did know the language of bus transfers, and I rode a crowded shuttle back to the airport. When I reached San Francisco thirteen hours later, my father and brother were there to take me home. Looking out the window at the night, everything seemed familiar, yet I have already changed so much. My roots are strong, and the wanderlust has begun.

Talia Frank lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She contributes to the Donut Club, an East Bay writer’s group. Visiting Berlin in 2018 inspired a love of community gardens and allowed her to re-examine Judiasm within a global context.

Reach the author: [email protected]

Visual art: www.cargocollective.com/taliafrank

Blog: https://wanderlustblumen.wordpress.com

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sarahburness · 5 years

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8 Ways Creativity Helps Us Connect with Ourselves and Get What We Need

“A creative life is an amplified life.” ~Elizabeth Gilbert

When I look back at my life, I recognize that some of the most pivotal moments revolved around creativity and self-expression.

As a kid, that meant community theater. My first solo was “Part of Your World,” from The Little Mermaid. Though I felt incredibly insecure in my green spandex pant-fins as a fairly thick twelve-year old, I was able to tune that out when I made my way center stage.

It was just me, my heart, my voice, and the spotlight. And that song felt written for me, as I felt like an outsider pretty much everywhere at that time in my life.

Around the same time I found my passion for writing—my first foray into the world of self-help, actually. To deal with bullying at school and a difficult home life, I began writing myself a series of motivational essays, little things to boost my self-esteem in a world that seemed to want to tear it down.

It was fairly mortifying when I noticed the boys huddled in the cafeteria, reading from my well-worn spiral notebook, which they had stolen from my backpack. But in retrospect, I wonder if maybe one of them secretly benefitted from something I had written. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who felt lost and insecure.

Then there was the time after college, more accurately when I should have been finishing my final semester, but instead was in a three-month residential program for people with eating disorders.

My favorite part of the program was art therapy. Though I drew myself, on day one, as a skeletal body curled up in a trash bag of vomit, I left that program with a life-size painting of my healthier self, standing tall and proud, with expansive wings. My art literally reflected my internal transformation.

I have countless stories like these—times when creativity and self-expression helped me make sense of the world, process feelings that might have otherwise festered within, and heal from pains that could easily have consumed me.

I imagine we all do, if not in recent years, then from childhood and adolescence, before the stresses and responsibilities of adulthood began consuming our thoughts and our lives.

Maybe you felt free and alive in a garage band, surrounded by a tribe of misfits, just like you, who came to feel like home. Or perhaps you made jewelry and found a meditative state of bliss that deepened with each bead strung.

You might think you’ve never been creative, perhaps because you never done anything artsy. But odds are, if you look back, you’ll find something you once brought into the world that couldn’t have been there without you—a well-constructed debate in a class that excited you, a detailed pitch for a business idea that inspired you, or even something far simpler, like a particularly clever Halloween costume.

But if you’re anything like me, you haven’t always prioritized creating and expressing yourself. These things may seem like luxuries in a world full of deadlines, debt, and ever-mounting obligations.

Or, perhaps they just don’t seem like appealing options when you could far more easily zone out with Netflix, mindless Facebook scrolling, or a six-pack that’s been calling from your fridge.

I totally get that. I can’t tell you how many nights I distracted or numbed myself because I felt far too wound up to sketch, or color, or write.

Anything creative would have required me to connect with myself, and many times I’ve preferred to escape myself. So I wouldn’t have to listen to what my inner voice was saying and then either act on it or acknowledge I was too scared.

But we need to connect with ourselves. We need to hear the faint voice that’s screaming inside, trying to get our attention and tell us what we need. Otherwise we’re not really living. We’re just dragging our bodies from one place we don’t want to be to the next, waiting for moments when we can dull the pain of our frustration and discontent.

Creativity is the gateway to self-connection, and it’s the path to giving ourselves what we really need. Here’s how it can help us do just that.

1. Creativity can help pull us into the moment.

We have to be present to connect with ourselves, but often we’re caught up in a mental web of worries, regrets, and obsessive thoughts. Creativity has a way of cutting through all that.

Psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi popularized the idea of “flow” in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. It’s that space when we’re fully immersed in the task at hand, the rest of the world somewhat blurred around us. That’s often what creativity does for us.

I think it’s no coincidence that I first learned how to crochet afghans in that residential treatment center for eating disorders I mentioned before. We weren’t just trying to keep our weakened, fragile bodies warm, though that was a pleasant side effect. We were finding freedom from our thoughts with the meditative experience of looping yarn, row by row.

Whether you’re writing, painting, cooking, or doing something I don’t even know to reference, creativity often pulls you into the now, where you come to face to face with your truest self.

2. Creativity helps us access, process, and express feelings we may otherwise have stuffed down.

When you’re truly dialed in to your present moment experience, creating something from that space of awareness, illusions have a way of melting away. You’re not just creating something pretty or interesting; you’re connecting with a piece of your heart.

This might mean literally writing about your feelings, or it might mean giving visual form to something you couldn’t put into words—a color or scribble that represents an emotion, for example.

I suspect this is why the Wreck This Journal series has been so popular. It’s creation through destruction, and an outlet for the “negative” emotions so many us have been taught to label as bad. Those feelings don’t just go away because we resist them. They need to be somehow processed.

It’s only when we process and express our feelings that we’re able to fully understand what’s going on inside of ourselves, and create space to discover what we need—whether that pertains to our work, our relationships, or any other aspect of our lives.

3. Creativity can help us heal from the past.

I recently found a study that made a correlation between having survived a difficult childhood and being intensely creative. The researchers wondered why mental health disorders were so common in the performing arts, and they conducted this research to better understand the link.

This study was fairly limited in scope, but still, it aligns with what I’ve long suspected: When we’ve experienced neglect, abuse, or trauma, and carry intense shame or anxiety, we may feel a strong pull toward the arts, since this gives us a space to “express all that is human,” as psychologist Paula Thompson put it.

In other words, expressive arts can help us make sense of and make peace with our pain.

As a writer, I can vouch for this, as it’s incredibly cathartic to create a character who’s known a pain you’ve felt before, and not only express what it felt like for you, but also explore what it might have felt like for the person who hurt you. This was certainly my experience in writing my first screenplay.

Creating these kinds of worlds, characters, and scenes can help us empathize with people who’ve wronged us, better understand what shaped them, and ultimately, heal and move on.

4. Creativity is fueled by curiosity—and curiosity is the key to developing self-awareness.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love and Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear defines creativity as “choosing the path of curiosity instead of fear.”

When we explore something though our creative work—an idea, a feeling, a topic—that’s really what we’re doing. We’re identifying something that interests us, following our curiosity, and creating something based on what we’ve discovered.

Strengthening this muscle of following curiosity can help us develop a greater sense of self-awareness. We start to ask ourselves the right questions (as opposed to ones that never yield useful or empowering answers), like: Why do I hold this belief? Where did it come from? How does it serve me? What would serve me better?

And simply through the process of creating, we learn about ourselves. I believe we essentially recreate ourselves with everything we create.

5. Creativity is just for us, at least to start.

The world requires a lot from us. Not only do other people have expectations and needs, they also have ideas of who we are or who we should be. This can make it awfully challenging to connect with what feels true and right for us—especially since who we are is always evolving.

For a long time, I felt a pang of inner conflict whenever I thought about evolving beyond my role here on the site. I felt a deeply embedded sense of identity—I’m Lori, a self-help author—and I almost felt afraid of allowing myself to see who else I could be.

I was most scared of exploring possibilities publicly, since that would open me to other peoples’ opinions and judgments. And given that I was in a confusing, uncertain space, I felt highly susceptible to outside influence.

But creativity was just for me. When I was coloring in one of my many adult coloring books, sketching, and working on my screenplay, I could tune everyone and everything else out, and simply focus on my own experience and inner voice.

I think we all need that, especially in a culture that compels us to constantly seek external validation and third-party opinions on our every move, through social media.

We need those moments of self-reflection and self-discovery that no one else can weigh in on or judge. This is how we learn who want to be and what really need to do for our happiness and well-being.

6. Creativity helps peel away layers of stress and anxiety to reveal the peace underneath.

We often say, “I have anxiety” or “I’m so stressed,” as if those things are actually part of who we are. But the truth is we experience anxiety and stress, and underneath there is a calm clarity, like the stillness below raging waves in the sea.

Creative practices give us a positive outlet for our energy and attention. When we’re doodling or woodworking or doing anything with our hands, we’re focusing on something aside from what’s wrong in our life or what might go wrong in the future. We’re essentially giving our brain a break from reliving pain or trying to avoid it.

When we create that relief for ourselves, we’re able to connect with who we truly are, underneath all the layers of fear and conditioning. It’s only by accessing this space of calm clarity that we can make choices that feel right for us.

7. Creativity can help boost our confidence, which is essential to communicating what we need.

It’s all good and well to connect with ourselves and ascertain what we need, but we also need to be able to communicate that to other people—whether that means setting boundaries in our personal life or asking for a more challenging project at work.

When we work on creative projects—particularly when we complete them—we naturally boost our confidence. And that bleeds into other areas of our lives.

An old friend of mine changed careers a few years back and now works as a baker. She posts pictures of these amazing cakes on Facebook, and I’m always blown away to see her artistic talent. These are literally edible works of art.

For a long time she only posted pictures, but she recently started posting videos showing her process. And it seems to me that this experience of creating, being seen, and feeling proud of her work has given her the boost necessary to share even more of herself.

Sharing ourselves, sharing our thoughts, sharing our wants and needs—it all goes hand in hand.

8. Creativity reminds us we’re more than what we accomplish.

We live in a world that sends a pretty conflicting message—it’s all about the journey, but hurry up and do something important so you can prove you matter and make a name for yourself.

We understand, intellectually, that life is always a path, not simply a destination, but it’s hard to escape the nagging suspicion that we haven’t arrived at enough places. That we need to do more, accomplish more, earn more, be more. Because who we are isn’t enough.

Creativity is, by definition, about the process. Sure, it’s great to create something that sells and see that your work impacts other people. But the squeeze isn’t just about the juice.

We gain so much through the act of creating—presence, self-expression, healing, self-awareness, time to ourselves, clarity, and confidence. But perhaps most importantly, we gain the ability to meet in ourselves in a moment, with the sole intention of expressing what’s in our hearts.

There’s something immensely freeing about knowing that this alone is a worthy goal. That we truly can create for the fun of it, for the love of it, because it makes us feel passionate and alive.

And when we feel passionate and alive, we forget for a moment that there’s anywhere else to get to—because for that time, there’s nothing to escape.

Perhaps that is the ultimate goal of connecting with ourselves. We meet ourselves so we can fully meet the present moment, and all the other people who inhabit it. So we can not just get through our days but really live them, and be available to give and receive love. A life fully lived, a self fully expressed, a heart fully open—I don’t know about you, but that’s all I really need.

About Lori Deschene

Lori Deschene is the founder of Tiny Buddha. She’s also the author of Tiny Buddha’s Gratitude Journal and other books and co-founder of Recreate Your Life Story, an online course that helps you let go of the past and redefine yourself. An avid film lover, she recently finished writing her first feature screenplay and would appreciate advice from anyone in the industry to help get this made. You can reach her at email (at) tinybuddha.com.

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from Tiny Buddha https://tinybuddha.com/blog/8-ways-creativity-helps-us-connect-with-ourselves-and-get-what-we-need/

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helenpattersoon · 6 years

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How to mock-up your designs

So you’ve created a knockout design—now it’s time to present it to your client. This is where mockups come in handy. A mockup is a full rendering of your design on one or more of the client’s products like labels, business cards, stationery and signage. A more complex mockup might show the client’s book on a bookshelf or in a reader’s hands, showing the world the product will inhabit.

Design by MartisLupus

All in all, it’s a first look at how the design will work for the client and their customers, and a realization of your brand vision.

Making an accurate mockup is important because it shows the client exactly what they can expect from the final product—provided the mockup’s done well. When a designer showcases an overly stylized mockup, the client gets a design deliverable that’s wildly different from what they expected. And if your mockup doesn’t accurately communicate the brand, it’s not planned out well enough.

All of this is why we’ve created this guide to help you understand the concept, technicalities and pitfalls associated with designing mockups.

Start your mockup early on in the design process —

It all starts the minute you sit down to design. Illustration by Asael Varas

You should start designing your mockup the moment you start working on your design. By thinking about your design as an actual product in the real world through each draft, you save yourself the work of having to translate it to a functional product later.

If you’re designing a t-shirt, sketch it out on a human figure so you can see how your design will cling and stretch and drape on an actual human body. Now go a step further—what else are they wearing? Where are they wearing it? Why are they wearing it—is it part of a work uniform or is it something its wearer might dress up a bit for a night out?

The same principle applies for something like packaging: think about the materials that will be used in the packaging and how it will actually be structured. Who’s buying the product? Why did they choose it over a competitor’s product? What’s their lifestyle like, what do they care about, why are they loyal to this brand?

There’s a lot of information here. You see when you use the app, how you use it and that it’s something you can enjoy with a friend. App design by ufoface.

Not only will these questions help you make an effective design, they will give you a head start on envisioning your design in a real world context—important when it comes to curating images to use for the mockup later. Getting to know a product’s consumer demographic will answer most of your questions for you. After all, a brand that uses hemp packaging and natural dyes caters to a much different demographic than one that uses bright-colored plastic packaging. Get yourself into the consumer’s head. Your client is already in their consumer’s head, so meet them there with your mockup.

Choose the best tools to make your mockup —

From a software perspective, there are several ways to make mockups. The most common is to make them from scratch using Photoshop, where you can manipulate images you own to show how your design will look on certain objects.

To get started, a rough overlay, using the Skew option (Edit > Transform > Skew) to fit the design over a 3D object, can be useful for a first pass at making sure the design works, that the text is readable and the image isn’t distorted by the product’s shape. With the basics out of the way, you can move on to more complex tools to build out a convincing mockup.

Before you start building scenes in your mockups, use software to format a design onto a 3D rendering of the finished product. This will give you a rough idea of how well the design reads on an object. Product label by Javier Milla.

The techniques for creating mockup templates vary depending on the type of object (whether it is a flat surface, curved, wrinkled, etc), but for the most part, they all come to down to transform tools, blend modes and smart objects.

Make your design a smart object first (Layer > Smart Objects > Convert to Smart Object). This will preserve your original image’s source content, allowing you to easily substitute one design for another and reuse your mockup template for future projects. Learn more about Smart Objects here.

Use transform tools to rotate, skew and position your design correctly over the desired image.

Select a blend mode from the upper left dropdown menu in the Layers Panel to mimic lighting and texture (which one you select will depend on the image in your particular document—Multiply and Overlay are generally good bets).

Additional techniques such as painting, adjustment filters, and Photoshop effects like Liquify will make your mockup more convincing depending on the type of mockup you are designing. Check out this video for an in-depth tutorial for some of the extra tools available!

by Stan Kurkula

You can also use Photoshop Actions to speed up your workflow. With Photoshop Actions, you can record yourself creating the mockup step by step. After saving the steps into an action, you can apply them to new images over and over again to make new mockups at the click of a button. If you want to learn more about working with Photoshop Actions, check out this tutorial.

The simplest way to create a mockup is to use a mockup generator website. With these generators, you just load up your design and drag and drop it onto the object you want to mockup. As you probably expected, you have a lot fewer options when you make a mockup this way and your mockups are gonna look pretty generic. But that is a solution if you are looking for something extra quick.

Always make sure the photograph or Photoshop action you use is licensed for commercial projects. Otherwise, you’re committing copyright infringement. Learn more about how to use stock photography here.

Make presentation the focus of your mockup —

Don’t mockup to mislead

Start by showing off the flat design and then move onto more creative mockups. Design by dalibor πych

It’s important to show a design in a variety of ways, but start with a flat image of the design so that the client knows what the actual design file will look like. Once you’ve nailed that, feel free to move on to a 3D rendering of a final product bearing the design.

You’re making the mockup to demonstrate exactly where your design fits into the client’s brand. Or if your mockup is their brand identity, how they’ll look in it. With that said, the underlying purposing of the mockup is to create an impression on the viewer, to showcase your full vision to the client without their having to take your word for it. Ultimately, you’re selling a design. But you’re not selling it directly; you’re showing the client what their future could be if they buy the design.

Make the mockup specific

It’s so important that you customize your mockup to the client as much as possible. Generic mockups look, well, generic:

These mockups are serving the purpose of making the designs look 3D, but they aren’t communicating much else to their prospective clients, besides a lack of brand thinking. It’s very easy to trade out one design for another, one company for another. There’s no depth here, only designs slapped onto walls that could be in any building, anywhere. Every company has a rich, unique culture, and an effective mockup extends that culture’s reach by showing where a new design fits into it. When your client looks at your mockup, they should say, “That’s us. That’s who we are. That’s what we need.”

A well-designed mockup looks like a vision of the future. Logo design by goopanic.

Compare these with the design for Lalu Academia Des Artes on the right, and notice how much more effectively a customized mockup communicates what a design will look like on the client’s wall.

Although it’s another wall design mockup, it goes beyond generic mockups by placing the design into a specific and realistic environment. It shows students like the ones who attend the school and puts them in real-life scenes that play out everyday on campus: chatting in the hallway while others work in labs and leaning against the building’s exterior, watching the cars go by.

The ingredients of a great mockup presentation

An effective mockup doesn’t just make a design three dimensional—it brings a design to life. When you’re working on a mockup, keep the following tips in mind:

Show the product in action. Think of it as a diorama featuring the product in its natural habitat.

Keep the mockup focused. If you’re showing a building interior with your design on banners and signage, don’t distract the viewer with lots of clashing elements. Yes, your mockup can be populated with consumers, but they shouldn’t detract from the design you’re showcasing.

Stay away from stock photos. They are not customized to your client and as a result rarely communicate designs effectively.

Consider how the design might adapt to different settings throughout the brand design. Can you make a pattern out of it? Can the colors change?

Showcase multiple, well thought-out mockup “scenes” featuring the design. This will flesh out your vision for the client.

A mockup can make a boring design look more interesting than it actually is. When you’re reviewing a mockup, make sure you look carefully at the flat design first to see if it really meets your expectations. This way, the actual design is anchored in your mind instead of the mockup, which can keep you from mentally excusing away poor design choices and elements that aren’t on brand because you’re excited about the mockup.

Mockup design is the start of a conversation, not the end —

Design by Teo Decu.

Hopefully by now you’ve upped your mockup game, but that doesn’t mean your work is done. No matter how great your mockup is, at the end of the day it is mainly a presentation tool. Your client might continue to have revision requests for the design itself or for how it looks in the renderings. This is why you share a file with the flat design along with your mockups.

A mockup is a way for everybody involved in a project to see where it’s headed and redirect it if necessary. The goal isn’t necessarily to deliver something the client will enthusiastically approve with no changes (though it’s nice when this happens!) but to get a conversation started that’ll lead you to a version of the design that fits what they’re looking for. Strong mockups make productive conversation possible.

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The post How to mock-up your designs appeared first on 99designs.

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pamelahetrick · 6 years

Text

How to mock-up your designs

Design by MartisLupus

All in all, it’s a first look at how the design will work for the client and their customers, and a realization of your brand vision.

All of this is why we’ve created this guide to help you understand the concept, technicalities and pitfalls associated with designing mockups.

Start your mockup early on in the design process —

It all starts the minute you sit down to design. Illustration by Asael Varas

There’s a lot of information here. You see when you use the app, how you use it and that it’s something you can enjoy with a friend. App design by ufoface.

Choose the best tools to make your mockup —

Use transform tools to rotate, skew and position your design correctly over the desired image.

by Stan Kurkula

Make presentation the focus of your mockup —

Don’t mockup to mislead

Start by showing off the flat design and then move onto more creative mockups. Design by dalibor πych

Make the mockup specific

It’s so important that you customize your mockup to the client as much as possible. Generic mockups look, well, generic:

A well-designed mockup looks like a vision of the future. Logo design by goopanic.

Compare these with the design for Lalu Academia Des Artes on the right, and notice how much more effectively a customized mockup communicates what a design will look like on the client’s wall.

The ingredients of a great mockup presentation

An effective mockup doesn’t just make a design three dimensional—it brings a design to life. When you’re working on a mockup, keep the following tips in mind:

Show the product in action. Think of it as a diorama featuring the product in its natural habitat.

Stay away from stock photos. They are not customized to your client and as a result rarely communicate designs effectively.

Consider how the design might adapt to different settings throughout the brand design. Can you make a pattern out of it? Can the colors change?

Showcase multiple, well thought-out mockup “scenes” featuring the design. This will flesh out your vision for the client.

Mockup design is the start of a conversation, not the end —

Design by Teo Decu.

Graphic design is your jam?

Tell me more

The post How to mock-up your designs appeared first on 99designs.

via 99designs https://99designs.co.uk/blog/tips-en-gb/mockup-design/

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