propheticfire asked: If you're not too full up on the color palette meme, I'd like to see Sailor Jupiter in D4 please?
zigzag slash
propheticfire asked: I had this crazy dream last night that I was you, lol, and I had brought a bunch of my new dolls to the library to take pictures of them, and all the dolls were so brightly colored and fun so people kept commenting on how cool they were, but all the dolls were also nonbinary so people kept misgendering them, even though I told people they were nonbinary, and it was frustrating. But the dolls were cool. One of them was named Mave.
This is kind of amazing, I’ve been thinking about this all day.
THE PUFFY SKIRT!!!
:D :D :D
buy petticoats on Amazon, they are So Much Fun
(I still need a black one)
Thanks, haha. The eyes do have that kind of necromancer quality to them, don’t they?
I just threw it on my face earlier to take some photos for some drawings I want to do but I’ve also been kind of interested in eventually using black around my eyes anyway. Good to know that if I actually maybe tried to put it on properly it could look good!
I’m moving back home and gonna be unemployed for a while, and I’m so ashamed because I feel like my family thinks I failed at being an adult. They already think I need to go out and meet people instead of spending all my time interacting on tumblr and watching The Clone Wars. So I kinda feel this.
I’m sorry. I really am. I feel you completely. I have felt like I failed in one way or another since I had to leave Portland and it’s been literal years. There are some people who know me who probably still think I’m there because I was too ashamed to tell anyone directly that I had to come back because my fiancee left me and I had to move back with my mom. I’d kind of rather they think I’m still out there instead of where I am, even though here I’m objectively doing better because I’m not being emotionally or creatively stifled and I’m not living on foodstamps.
I hated being unemployed at my mother’s, I felt like complete garbage. I hope that time is short for you. You have my pained sympathy.
Eeeee, those look so great!
Thank you! The more I look at them the more I’m really pleased with how they look and I’m excited to show them to the whole office next week, not just Agent P! I hope they all recognize him!
You know, I had the opposite reaction to most of that. I loved the animated one; was my favorite Disney movie for a long time. And some of the plot stuff they did with the new one I just didn’t understand. So it’s interesting to hear your perspective. But the “gay representation” Disney is so proud to claim this movie has is rubbish, and I agree with you on that. It hurt to watch it.
Haha, yeah, I expect to be in the extreme minority! Everyone else’s vast love for that movie is inexplicable to me. But I love the Disney movie no one likes, so, you know, haha
I’d stayed away from most of the publicity about it because I just didn’t care, so I only caught the ‘gay moment’ talk on the fringes and nearly forgot about it and then I kept thinking, “okay, something going to be gay… but Disney gay, so it’ll last two seconds and be a harr harr moment” and I legit thought it was the boy who was happy to be in the dress at first, especially when Lefou was dancing with women for most of the end.
Then it was like, BAM, SUDDEN MAN, SUDDEN SHOCKED ADORATION, SUDDEN CUT AWAY. And I was just, “Oh. ‘Moment.’ Okay. They were being Super Literal right there. Kay.”
That’s…actually really helpful.
Hooray~! Perhaps I really will make that ‘This Is What This Is’ post to link to every time I post a chapter! I seem to have a bunch of you all suddenly seeing this at once.
Check my ‘swanish’ tag for asks and art and testimonials from others, weirdly enough.
Should you remain curious, I will guide anyone who wants to through the ‘basic JTHM primer’ if you decide to read reSWAN ~ (which is what you will read and not the original, ohmygod)
FUUUUUUCK YAAAAAAS OHMYGODDDDD!!!! *throws things across the room in excitement* AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!
THIS IS EXACTLY HOW I FEEL
propheticfire asked: Hey Lady! I've caught the watercolor bug again and I busted out my paints to do some practicing. But I've only ever used watercolors like three times before, so I was wondering if you had any quick tips and suggestions for beginners, or like, advice you wouldn't get from a class. Also if possible, could you explain to me how gouache works? I've read about it but I still don't understand it. Any words you have would be helpful; thanks so much for your time. :)
Sorry this took so long, I had an Interesting Night when you sent this and it took me a while to have the fortitude to run through a whole answer! Don’t worry, sometimes even the advice you get in a class doesn’t make any goddamn sense. I was literally told, “Be one with the paint” in one of my first watercolor classes. I think I remember putting my brush down and looking around at everyone else to confirm whether or not I was on television.
That’s a good thing to say someone who is already skilled a little bit, but to a person just trying to figure out what the fuck to do with the medium, it’s not super useful.
Uh, let’s see, I don’t know what stuff you’re currently up against, and forgive me for saying so, but it’s been a while since I was a beginner at this, so I’m trying to remember what would have been helpful to me ten years ago.
I start with shadows or just darker areas and I had to learn over the years not to be afraid to commit to a dark color early on. Paper can only take so much water before it starts shredding, so you have limited numbers of times you can wash back over something. When you start with the dark areas you can kind of blend them out with a lighter color and then leave places as the white of the paper as the color dilutes.
Some of the beauty of watercolor does come when you just abandon control of it a little. Sometimes I think it’s not so much ‘painting’ with watercolor as ‘controlling’ or ‘herding’ it. But it takes sort of a while to get the hang of letting it go wild in an artsy fashion. This is where my instructor was trying to articulate ‘be one with the paint’.
Mix colors with their compliments rather than a black or brown to make them darker. Watercolor can get muddy really easily even without doing this, so it’s best to keep your colors as purely COLOR as possible. This also helps you avoid things looking sort of washed out and dull in the end.
Related to that, things will dry a little less intense/lighter than the color you first down, so again, don’t be afraid to commit to a darker or more intense color. It will almost always calm down and you’ll likely darken it even more later to balance the painting.
The paper you use does make a difference. The paint will pool on some papers and not others. It’ll raise the pulp on some paper. It’ll stay workable on some and get sucked in immediately on some others. If you find the paint is staying wet too long or not long enough for you, try changing up your paper before giving up on what you want to do. Some papers will almost record every stroke you make so everything is really patchy, and others will blend so much it’s like running a brush chaotically over ice. It all depends on what you want to do and what you like.
I find varying whether you let an edge dry in a hard line or a soft blend makes paintings interesting looking.
Try varying whether you wet the paper before you put paint on it. You can do combos like a lot of water on both the brush and the paper, tons of water on the paper but not much on the brush, a little water on both… If you’re looking for soft or smooth coverage of big spaces, this might help.
Gouache is technically supposed to be used in an opaque manner, but I’m a troll and use it almost entirely like watercolor, which you can do too if you have some. There is a lot of pigment in gouache, so I get a lot of my really bright shit accomplished with gouache rather than watercolor. Since you can use them together, I usually end up mixing them without even realizing what I’m doing. I do use it somewhat properly for big areas of solid flat black, and I like using white gouache for highlights, but I don’t often otherwise use it like a proper artist. I’ve used it the way it’s supposed to be while I was in school a few times, but I was not overly charmed with the application of opaque stuff in general. I did see some demonstrations of its superior pigmentation and brighter color than most acrylic, though, so if I ever decided to paint opaquely, I’d probably be using gouache rather than acrylic. Maybe I should approach it again! My acrylics all get used to doll faces now anyway haha It’s more expensive than watercolor in a lot of cases, so unless your soul is screaming ‘BRIGHTER COLORS, DAMMIT’ like mine often is, I wouldn’t fuss too hard with gouache for now.
I hope some of that is helpful???
