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Edgar Meelow

I've finally drawn my favorite boy! Edgar is my oldest and most beloved OC, and i used to draw him all the time. I've never drawn him from this angle - but I'm super proud of how it turned out! i used alcohol markers, ink pen, and colored pencils.

my first digital drawing of Edgar (from 2020) as a comparison. this piece was made before i had decided much about his story, so all the royal details were undecided and unused since. this was also during my early days of digital art - when i first started looking at programs outside of MS Paint, but i still had a screenless drawing tablet.

this is super helpful!! I've been trying to figure out how to stay on top of the news without getting facebook or twitter.

If you live in the US and want a way to follow good non-right wing news for free, consider:

Subscribing to PBS News on YouTube (they have a news hour every night/half hour on weekends, broken up into smaller consumable segments. Sometimes they live stream national events like the inauguration. You don't have to watch it all, but pick and choose what to watch & when. Like, say, only watching the half hour weekend segments).

Subscribing to NPR News on whatever podcast app you have (they do 5-minute news updates throughout the day; you usually only need to listen to it 1x/day to get highlights).

Subscribe to nonprofit investigative online news source ProPublica; you can sign up for either daily, weekly, or top news stories sent to your email. You can also follow them on sm.

Okay this one isn't free, but if you have any extra money, don't underestimate how important or endangered local newspapers are. Subscribe if you can. Some papers will also send you short summaries if you're a subscriber, and you can also follow local papers on social media.

Remember that just generally getting deluged with news on social media is not good for your mental health, and is much more susceptible to misinformation or propaganda. Getting news online works best when it's supplemental to verified news sources; usually as grassroots, on-the-ground info from people you know and trust who are living out a certain experience.

You can keep a particular online space "safe" from politics without hurting anything, provided you make routine space for good, responsible news in your schedule.

AND that you make sure to follow a diverse group of people and support their inclusion in that space, even if you're online for a niche interest (in almost any online hobby, there are lots of people who are not at all the same class, race, ethnicity, gender identity, from the same place, etc, etc). Honor, protect, and value a wide variety of voices even in your online hobbyist spaces, while also making regular time for real news? You'll find yourself with a decent snapshot of information from both the top down and the bottom up about how the world works and is impacting a wide variety of people.

Without feeling like you have to absorb/respond to everything happening every single moment of every day. For the next 4 years

vest update

there's a few patches that I've temporarily removed to make room for the blue jay piece i added, but I'll probably reattach those to the back

here's a close up of the blue jay, which i made out of clothing scraps and embroidery thread

drew this on an airplane

ART PROGRESS:

alcohol marker coloring improvement from September 2023 to April 2024 (6 month difference)

i now have a better understanding of how alcohol markers work and how to build up the color slowly to create depth and texture, and to prevent losing the lineart. i am once again more patient in lineart, shading, background art, AND coloring

i used lineart only for the subject - the dragon - allowing the background to consist of shapes to not be distracting. i used the texture of the markers to my advantage, creating a scaley appearance on the dragon and a cloudy one for the sky. i also used a white gel pen to add bright highlights and even more texture

from left to right, Thomas Baldwin, Oliver Lee, and Dominic Brodie from the YA fantasy story I'm writing

the plan is to have the three enter a poly trio relationship at some point. so far, I'm only on chapter 6/7, so we'll see how it plays out.

i am not a writer - i am primarily an artist - however i do enjoy writing little short stories and poems. a couple months ago i went back to a short poem i had written and became inspired, eventually building a bigger plot around the original paragraph, and now here i am!

I'm very excited for where this sorry is going. i have only a vague idea of where to take it. I'm not sure if I'll post it online anywhere until it's finished, but i am going to include illustrations in the book, which I'll post here. this drawing isn't one of them - I'm just using it as a way to better figure out my boys' designs.

and most importantly, stay safe out there and keep on surviving. we're in this together, no matter how much they try to pit us against each other.

Okay, so I try hard to cover global queer history, and this isn't marking a stop to that, but I am aware that most of my audience is American, and I want to address them very directly right now.

Google Removed Pride Month From Its Calendar App, and Stonewall National Monument's "LGBTQ" status was changed to "LGB" on the government website. This is the beginning of the erasure of queer history, not the end. I don't know what the future of the United States looks like, as someone who studies queer history and has done so for many years, I want to share some tools with you.

Now is a good time to prioritize local queer history, Making Gay History is a great project, so is the Digital Transgender Archive, but also check your city and see what resources there are.

Read and buy books about queer history. I have an affiliate list with some of the books I personally recommend.

If you use Google Calendar, repopulate that resource with so much queer history with a free queer history calendar plug-in, it has names from queer history that you can also learn more about for free when they come up. As the author of these articles, feel free to save them, print them off, whatever makes them freely accessible as suppression get's worse.

Use your local library. Email the board about book bans, request banned books, request queer books, and make your voice heard.

Make queer art. Share queer art. Protect queer art. Here is some public-domain queer art to use as you wish.

Keep up with queer news, THEM and Pink News are both great resources.

All of these tools are currently freely accessible with an internet connection. Queer history is a community responsibility, do your part.

i got these knockoff boots online and instead of the brand name on the tag they have the name of an apparently nonexistent martin scorsese movie??? what the fuck

just a reminder that my art commissions are open! message me anywhere for more info - but if you're interested in OC sheets, D&D character designs, cityscapes, monster art, etc., I'm happy to provide!

here are some of my pieces as a reference: