sketchbook from the past couple days
Sometimes I open Ao3 as one would a fridge in the middle of the night. Hungry, but not willing to commit to anything that is in there and hopping a miracle will make something new and appetising appear out of thin air if only I close it and open again.
come on gimme things to sort. i'm so fucking good at sorting come on lemme sort
was originally gonna color and post this for pride month but i lost the original file
testing some brushes on procreate… guys dsmp has so many good characters
you have seen, many times, the phrase love your body! and every time, like rainwater, it glides off you. not because you cannot love it - you mostly, like, tolerate it - but because of the word "your".
is this your body? when you were 11 you had to start shaving your legs because other girls found it gross you were hairy. when you were 12, you had to stop wearing v-necks because of your chest - people were staring. your mother didn't let you dye your hair. your first boyfriend makes you dress up in skimpy clothes for him, then hated when other people coveted you. what you wear and how you present determine whether or not people find you funny or annoying or arrogant. other people get to determine if you are pretty, a court of opinion so loud it blots any good intent.
when is the body yours? magazines and instagram and tiktok endlessly advising you to "take care of" (starve) your body as if it is a weed. you must hack and slash at it, defend yourself from its wanton desires. it is a shameful, greedy thing. it is more like an art piece. you are keeping it or being kept-in-it.
you try to language it to your therapist - it's not that you don't recognize yourself in the mirror, it's more just that the thing that is in the mirror - it isn't you. that's why it's so easy to take apart: you're vaguely aware of the shape, but it feels like you are an animal hiding in the back of this cavern, snarling.
obviously you're like stuck in it. it often hurts a lot, buzzes with pain and a strange numbness. so it is your body when it's painful. that makes sense. otherwise - how many times have you been told to save yourself (your body) for marriage. for someone else. you are just borrowing it.
love your body! is so funny. somehow, without meaning to, the phrase reminds you - it isn't you. you're just inside it.
when a character i love and care for has to face the consequences of their previous actions
adjacent advice: if you need more confidence, get a cool jacket or a haircut or something and think about how cool it makes you. this is loser advice, but we're all losers here. swallow your pride and roleplay as a cool guy and you'll become a cool guy.
My current read is a critique of gender norms from the pov of an alien, and 25 pages in i feel that it is probably more revolutionary to people who havent already pondered these things as much as i have. Besides gender norms and expectations of beauty, there are moments of distress about having a body altogether im really curious to dive more into, especially if we interpret the alien through a disability lens, as seen in scenes where it's fighting with the very gravitation of earth and struggling to walk on stairs, ignored by others, turned away from, left to crawl alone
Here’s a video on why I only use a pen to sketch ✅ Hope you try it out, it has helped me tremendously to streamline my process and improve faster ☺️💕
One should always have at least 2 craft projects going. That way, when one of them is messed up and misbehaving, you can switch to another, and let the first one sit there and think about what it's done.