All of these are good and valid. Especially that last one on the bottom.
“No, i just dont want to.” You dont need a reason not to drink.
Fun fact about me
I had HORRIBLE handwriting my entire childhood. Consistently got failing grades on homework and tests because no one could read my writing.
And then I hit middle school. I saw the "popular girls" getting praised for their stupid cutesy heart over the I writing. I saw people I could run mental circles around without breaking a sweat getting good grades, because the teacher could read their writing easier.
So I started copying it.
And wouldn't you know, my grades improved!
But of course, if you know me, you already know....there's no WAY I was gonna stop there. Oh no.
As a ADHD/Autistic, I did what any self respecting nerd introvert would do- I hit the library. And I researched. The evolution of the written language, the evolution of alphabets and writing styles from Ancient Greece all the way through the Spencerian movement.
And I fell into calligraphy. I hyperfocused.
And over the course of a year, developed my own cursive hand (going from never writing in cursive) that was a loose blend of Palmer, Spencerian, Chaucurian and 16th century Italian italics, with a lot of acender and defender flourishes.
I handed in homework in 15th century German High Gothic blackletter.
I did reports in 17th century italics.
And my teachers went from hating me for my horrible, illegible handwriting, to loving the sudden shift to legible bubble letters, to hating me again because they couldn't read my writing again, but for a different reason.
Only now, they didn't really have a good reason to be mad, because if they admitted to not being able to read Chaucerian font, they'd be admitting that they couldn't comprehend someone performing at a level of education and familiarity with the written language far above their own skill set (yes I had one teacher actually admit that to me in 8th grade. I genuinely respected her for it and picked a font that was easier to read than blackletter for her class).
And so began my descent into the rabbit hole of medieval illumination and calligraphy.
And so now, 25 years later, I do stuff like this:
(The bottom image has my celtic art business logo for Art of the Ancients; im on Instagram, but haven't updated in a long while because I've been busy with other projects and there wasn't a heck of a lot of interest. I still do commissions though)
Bob Ross once said, "A talent is just a skill you're willing to practice." I heard that, ran with it, and never looked back.
(Someone suggested I should tag my Instagram for my artwork: @art_of_the_ancients https://www.instagram.com/art_of_the_ancients/ )
PLEASE do not stop talking about Palestine and spreading information, especially from Palestinians, whether it's here or on other social medias you use more often. Palestinians themselves have said over and over again that spreading this on social media helps, I've seen some people say that it feels different this time now that the world is starting to hear their voices. and please donate if you are able to
The qualities that divide good children’s literature from bad children’s literature:
1) The dragons are real.
2) The adults don’t believe you.
will elaborate
what I’m getting at here is that being a child is an experience defined by marginalization—by powerlessness, not being taken seriously, not being believed.
when you are a child you are aware of the terrible things in the world and terrified by them, and you feel everything so intensely. Before you learn to manage your emotions, they are consuming, incandescent experiences that are almost impossible to access again as an adult. You are small but your emotions and experiences are as large and as vivid as anyone else’s, but they are not taken as seriously as everyone else’s. You recognize that adults condescend to you and dismiss you.
As a child, you know that the world ought to be fair, that people ought to be helped, and you ask “Why?” And you ask “What is the point?” And as you become an adult you learn to repress those things. The answer to every question you ask as a child is “Because you have to” or “Because that’s the way it is,” and these are bullshit answers and we all know it, but defending an authoritarian relationship to someone weaker is easier than defending things about our world that are indefensible if we look at them honestly.
In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, when Lucy first enters Narnia, she is not believed. Narnia has so much about it that makes it THE quintessential children’s book series, the archetype for children’s book series, and it all centers around how Narnia cannot be understood by adults.
Imitators have reduced this down to something about the Wonder of Childhood, something about how children are innocent and special that means only they can see magic because only they are able to believe in it. This is Not Correct. Books that do this are saccharine and awful because this is fake and we all know deep down that it’s fake.
Here’s the truth. Children do not live in an idyllic fantasy land where bad things aren’t real, adults do. For kids who have dealt with grief, abuse, trauma of all kinds—and let’s be real, that’s most of us—it’s condescending and idiotic to treat children as if they’re innocent about the evils in the world. Almost every child experiences evil early and is unable to communicate that experience to adults, whether this is in the form of a relatively innocent childhood fear or deeply damaging abuse.
There is much that has been said about how the Narnia books are about the trauma of World War 1, but most of that can also be said about how Narnia is about childhood in general—the traumatic nature of the return to the Real World is left unstated, because it is understood by the audience. Children have a vivid inner world that they do not have the vocabulary to explain to adults, and this is what Narnia is about.
There’s a reason why Neil Gaiman’s children’s books are so memorable, and it’s the same reason that they scared the living shit out of adults. There’s a reason why Where the Wild Things Are and Shel Silverstein’s poetry have had such a long cultural shelf life. These are not cozy, comfy stories that affirm adult perceptions of the childhood world as flat and innocent; they are troubling and ambiguous.
There’s also a reason why the children’s books that are so important often piss adults off. The best example I can think of is the Captain Underpants series. I never read any of them and yet I remember the extraordinary disdain people had for those books; they were the poster child for What Terrible Thing Has Become Of Literature.
And sure, maybe to an uncritical adult eye the adventures of misbehaving kids thwarting the rules of the world with poop jokes has no value, but I would argue the opposite—the poop jokes are, in fact, fundamental to the anti-authoritarian message. Adult attempts to suppress the scatological sense of humor children have hold a very important message about power.
Because here’s the thing: poop and farts are funny because they’re taboo, and especially so to children because we are constantly telling children what they Can and Can’t say. It’s not about poop, it’s about how adults betray themselves every time they get in a tizzy about a seven year old saying “turd,” because the fact that “turd” gets such a reaction means that uptight adults don’t have the power over kids that they want kids to think they have.
Scatological subjects embarrass adults, and the more uptight and controlling those adults are, the more devastating the embarrassment is. Kids are super conscious of the power dynamics in all their dealings with adults—how could they not be? And the explosion of raucous laughter that results from an elementary school teacher saying something that sounds sort of like “doody” wouldn’t happen if elementary school teachers weren’t constantly trying to reassert and solidify their position of power.
They, too, can be mortified and laid low by a humble “doody,” and if it did not have the power to do so, they wouldn’t try so hard to stop the kids from saying it.
I'd argue that where that all stands for Captain Underpants, part of it is also that it's a comic book series for kids that features two kids who constantly disobey their teachers and principal. Dav Pilkey, the author of Captain Underpants, has ADHD and dyslexia and has been open about the fact that he was punished very often for both of these things. The reason why many adults find Captain Underpants distasteful is not only because of fart and poop jokes, though that is certainly a factor, it's that the series is for those kids who can't focus, who struggle in school academically because the author himself was a kid like that, and as a result Captain Underpants has some pretty strong anti-authority messages. For example:
Dab Pilkey genuinely has the best ‘about the author’ I’ve ever read and I think it’s a crime that it hasn’t been included yet
Dav Pilkey is not even in the vicinity of fucking around, is he.
A couple days ago a whole Palestinian bedouin village was completely destroyed. And its not the first time they targeted this community (its the 6th time). Whenever israeli occupation forces target bedouin homes its "easier" for them to get away with it bc the world doesnt consider tents as valuable but a home is a home and they have no where to go. Their food and water was taken. Their belongings (everything they owned) were taken and dumped miles away of where they were. Ethnic cleansing is occuring all over Palestine as we speak funded by american tax dollars.
imagine if steampunk was “actually” punk and not just fucked up empire fetishism
#i think about this a lot #steampunk is based on the idea that the world wars never happened and the industrial revolution never stopped #so imagine that the social movements that were born in the aftermath of ww1 and 2 never happened #imagine if steampunk focused on the colonised countries and the secret technologies and hidden gagdets #that the resistance work on; bitter and disillusioned they cut open their hands on whatever metal gears they could sneak off #to build whatever kind of weapons they can cobble together to defend themselves against the white colonisers #imagine if steampunk focused on the disastrous consquences of a white supremacy that cannot be stopped in its tracts #b/c let’s face it; this is a much more likely to turn into a world-wide dystopia than anything cyberpunk gave us #cyberpunk was about the struggle for personhood in a corporate-dominated future but so many stories are white power fantasies #imagine if steampunk was about the struggle for personhood in colonialism disguised as gentility (via stardust-rain)
The Victorian Era was not just a time of rampant colonialism, but of counter colonial movements and social justice. This was the time that saw the rise of Socialism, women’s suffrage movements as well as the first movements towards racial equality. Some of this shows up in the history as well as the literature.
This is something that gets buried, and something that fascinates me about this particular era in history.
If we’re rewriting the laws of physics, can’t we rewrite history so that the British Empire never existed and Britain made it’s wealth by selling awesome inventions and it’s cool and multicultural?
I started writing a buncha words about alternate history and then decided to make them their own post, but in essence: Yes.
Real life Victorian Britain was surprisingly diverse. There’s a veil that disguses the actuality of the day from us, and it’s the reams of writing that British Victorians produced about how they felt the world should be.
It was a world of unceasing change where strangers from overseas were moving into the “homeland” and life was becoming increasingly global. Third sons who once might have gone to London or the Continent were going to India to make their fortunes. Goods were being imported from across the ocean – by the end of the 19th century, meat was successfully being imported to London from America and Australia. It felt like the world had gotten bigger overnight, and that it was filled with people who shared no common customs with good ol’ Englishmen. Change was happening at what felt like an ever-increasing rate, and the human effects were visible all around. If you ventured into the East End of London, you would see a sea of non-English faces, and you might not hear English spoken all day.
And that was fucking terrifying to many middle-class white Britons. It felt like too much, too soon, and dozens of writers pushed back against the individual issues they were disturbed by. Sometimes this was poverty and the mistreatment of workers in an increasingly mechanized world. Sometimes it was non-white immigrants existing and women moving from at-home cottage-level work to factories.
If I had to define Victorian Britain in one word, it would be backlash. That intense focus on propriety, privacy, keeping oneself to oneself, all of it grew out of backlash against the rapidity of the industrial revolution going on all around, and to the “looser” moral codes of the 18th century. There was a feeling that things had gone much too far and it was time to refocus on the “traditional” home and traditional English way of life (do I have to tell you that they were inventing these things as they were praising them). And when I say English I mean English. Wales was pretty thoroughly Anglicized, ditto Scotland, and Ireland continually restless and very angry at being under the English thumb.
That’s why all those writers you read are hammering so hard for non-whites to be kept ground down, for women to stay in the home, for men to take up the white man’s burden, for “traditional Englishness” to remain paramount. They were scared of the progress that was actually happening.
A lot of steampunk writers stop at the surface layer of what writers wanted their time and place to be, and just rewrite every shitty Victorian novel you ever read, but with gears glued on things. Very few look further and realize that there was only a thin scrim of that uptight Victorianism, that its maintainers fought very hard to keep it there, and that there’s every bit as much exciting unrest and rapid change to pick at in Victorian London as there is in any given cyberpunk setting.
[id; a tweet by nathan bernhardt @jonberhardt: “why do marvel movies do so much stuff in CGI surely they could have just had wardrobe-” makeup and wardrobe is a union crew. the CGI animation sweatshop is not. it really is that simple. end id/]
Also just adding, you can outsource CGI to third world countries but makeup and wardrobe has to be in the country 👀
This is in response to the process ask I just received…
Above is the finished product of a creeper from Scooby Doo I made a whiles back. The character was designed by the wonderful Alex Toth. Toth is a great illustrator to try to mimic in cut-out form because he illustrated for animation and, as such, was very economical in his line use.
So the first step is that don’t use crisper. I’m sure the technology will improve with subsequent iterations, but from what I can tell the shapes it creates are really static.
What I prefer to do is draw the images in pencil or straight on with an exacto knife. I’m not the best at drawing, but often the groove of the paper will help in offering up a more confident looking line.
Then I’ll use black paper to stand in as the border lines. I’ll cut out the spaces the layer underneath, like the dude’s mouth and eyeballs.
Some white paper taped to the opposite side works as the white of his eyes and teeth. Then I double side tape the piece to the paper, lining up the eyes and mouth and cut it out leaving a small margin between the green of his skin and the black of his facial outline.
Now that you got the dude’s face, the rest is easy. I used a different color green for his cloak… sketched a rough outline of it and then cut. Double sided matting tape is good for an elevated three D kind of look. Again I leave a small margin between the boarder of the green and the black to create the illusion of an illustrated line.
His hat and hair are just separate pieces I drew with a knife and then double sided taped to black paper. Knowing that his hat would cover much of the hair, I just drew what parts would show from the hat on either side of his head.
Again this takes some degree of drawing skill, but once you get used to it, the knife blade really helps in keeping the line looking confident and crisp.
This is my favorite part. Will the individual piece cut out, it becomes a rudimentary puzzle to be put together
Again, I like the double sided mounting tape… it has like a foam basis that gives good lift off the paper, helping to create a quasi-3-D like effect.
Take your time taping the pieces together. It’s all about layering and making key choices of what parts are covered by the other pieces and which ones aren’t.
I use my iPhone to photograph it. A plain colored piece of paper works, or you can print out whatever background image you like. Something it helps to place a lego or eraser under the main piece to lift it off the background. This will cause a neat shadowing effect if you angle your light source.
I recommend starting off with simple, less detailed pieces and then moving on to more detail. I don’t fancy myself any great artist, but I often feel hand done things look better than computer assisted stuff. Maybe one day I’ll try out crisper, but for the time being I feel not her beats the meditative quality of working with one’s hands.
Please let me know if you have any further questions, good luck and be safe handling those exacto knives.
Hey! I’m currently working on a comic called @2names1life ! It’s about my grandma during WW2! Check out what I have so far!
#tradsart #traditionalart #webcomic #twonamesonelife #grandma #ahmah #history #familyhistory #publichistory #historycomic #historywebcomic #sejarah
https://www.instagram.com/p/CQ94JKYjj6_/?utm_medium=tumblr
Art byPorin Rašpica
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