my cheap-ass gaddamn dollarstore watercolour paper (the closest thing to actual proper watercolour paper i've been able to get my hands on in the past several months) is not only textured in a way beyond reasonable watercolour-paper-texturing, bUT ALSO reacts to water like goddamn printer paper!

what is this greasestaining water-seepage, paper?!? You literally are supposed to prevent that, you're supposed to not allow seepage at the slightest hint of moisture, that's what your ugly plasticy texture is supposed to protect against!

I thought 'oh maybe the water seeped underneath the paper through the masking tape and i just didn't make a good seal at the edges', but no, the water is being absorbed directly through the paper in splotches here and there, looking like grease stains. I also thought 'oh maybe it's the brushes i'm using, they're more acrylic-leaning and using them has produced more oily-like textures in my watercolour strokes on other papers, so maybe sOMEHOW that's what's going on?

No. no. I might have found a solution: I'm gonna have to turn the paper backwards.

that's right, i'm testing the smoothie smooth back of the paper and it didn't have the grease problems that immediately popped up when applying to the 'right' side. I'm waiting for this paint and water to fully dry but so far so good. Looks like i'm gonna have to be a lil freak and flip this goddamn insult-to-watercolour-paper around and use the pretty aesthetically pleasing backside like a goober.

art is a journey.

playing with oranges/orange-y reds in watercolours is one of my favourite paint-y things to do.

sketchings of my oc cybil.

unfinished sketchings of my high elf, cellan.

genuinely one of the worst things that’s happened to television in the last few years (exacerbated by streaming services) is death of Filler. going from 20 episodes to 8 because “we didn’t really need that episode where the main characters went to the beach right? it had no long lasting effect” but we DID!!! we needed to see how they act without the Big Bad Plot and to establish the dynamics between the characters and lay in the sun (do they forget sunscreen? how do they react to a thieving seagull? do they get buried in the sand or do they do the burying?). the plot isn’t everything. the action doesn’t hit as hard without the quiet moments. give us character development and our little scenes back

YOOOOOO your desgin for vaermina is soo GOOD I love it man the mask and how mystic they look❤️❤️

Pleaseeeee tell me your gonna do more of the daedric prince's?

thank youuuuu OuO

and i absolutely should. i've been wanting to futz around with daedric prince designs forever, but I'm not promising anything in the near future (maybe the not-near future): with the current popularity of 'ai art' bullshit in full swing, i'm extremely demoralized when it comes to making art to put up online. But that's something I have to wrangle with and figure out on my own.

So, uh, short answer, i'd love to! But it'll be slow going and probably won't be any time soon.

Ppl: “Glaze and nightshade all your art!!”

Also ppl: * does not mention that you need to have a fucking NVIDIA GPU and running nightshade on one image takes at best 20 minutes*

Like the online version of glaze/nightshade requires an account. And last time i checked they arent accepting new accounts because of the high pressure.

Like i make my art on my ipad. My MacBook is from 2014. If i tried to download and run nightshade on my decade old macbook and go throufg 10+ years of artworks i might as well just set it on fire.

I was meandering through imperial city pvp things back in january, when I came across a group of my alliance in the sewers. They asked me to join and it was the absolute most fun I've had in the entire goddamn zone. We had 2 damage dealers (myself -stam bow psijic/necro- and a staff-weilding sorcerer), a dragonknight tank (who looked like an old grizzly magma wizard merlin figure), eventually another tank (melee warden warrior looking guy), and our poor poor singular restoration-staffed healer. I remember this line from them and then realizing "oh god... oh no he's alone ;u; ". But he was great at keeping everyone alive, including my idiot-ass.

We went down to that circular room where all the alliance passages converge and ended up doing the lil boss event there. My first time doing any of it ;u;

I wanted to actually finish some images from these experiences, but I've only been able to do wild sketchings

just messy unfinished scrawlings.

What is this about the tumblr staff wanting to sell art data to midjourney?

An ex-colleague of mine mentioned yesterday that there may be contacts between Automattic and midjourney in that direction, but nothing is public yet and I don't have any more info. They probably won't have anything specific to share either, since they left the company weeks ago too. That being said:

I have no reason to doubt my ex-coworker word, they are a trustworthy person.

Tumblr's CEO has been absurdly enthusiastic (comically, even) about AI, and is a big fan of LLMs and 'AI' companies.

A deal with midjourney could solve tumblr financial issues (not the same company, but openAi is paying up to 5 million/year to news companies to use their content as training data... tumblr generates several orders of magnitude more content than any newspaper or any media company and it only would need a 20 to 30 million per year deal to be profitable)

So I don't have any extra info yet, but I'm keeping my ears open.

spore savant face markings, not meant for dunmer...

I have been OBSESSED with the spore savant face markings for months now, trying to get all components of the antiquity to finally unlock them, and after realizing (almost too late) that the infinite archive has the piece i'd been missing, i finally got ahold of my beloved mushroom makeup.

However,

I wanted this mushroom makeup for my dunmer... This is what she normally looks like (in this with the 'eyes of the scamp' contacts).

As you can see, she has dark dunmeri skin in warm medium greys. The spore savant face markings, which in lore are dunmer markings made for dunmer mushroom-mages, are NOT designed for characters with dark skin.

OBSERVE:

"What's the problem" You may be thinking. Well let's just spell it out for you, rather than getting a close look there at the weird light outlines, by showing how these markings look on my altmer:

looks fine.

ALSO, all the people who were putting up previews of what the spore savant head markings looked like only showed them on white humans and altmer (whose darkest skin tones are still unfortunately extremely light like my boy up there). For example, uesp shows a beautiful image of these markings having gorgeous orange and deep browns in them on their character. Am I blaming any of these preview people for only showing the markings on one single skintone? NO. Besides, 'eso.mmo-fashion' was the only place I could find that used to show these things on multiple species but that site no longer updates.

So why do these markings look like nice face art on light skin, but festering open sores on my dark-skinned dunmer? Because of transparency! Zos has been making a lot of body art items transparent, which looks nice on light skin, but horrendous (if it shows up at all) on dark skin. For this one in particular, as my sister pointed out "It's like they did the opposite of what you're supposed to do and made the lighter orange solid and the brown transparent".

It really feels as though zos went out of their way to make these markings look ugly on dark skin.

which is eXTRA wild considering they're markings BY elves with darker skin, FOR elves with darker skin.

genuinely, honestly, I wish fandom could move past "depiction isn't endorsement".

because it's really meant to be sort of the baby beginner step to media literacy but in fandom spaces it usually acts like a trump card to shut down critical discussions. it's one of the thought terminating cliches of fandom that discourages learning how to interrogate the text beyond "fiction isn't reality, dummy".

yes, the popular whump fic in your fandom isn't endorsing torture, but also, can you tell when the canon for your fandom is endorsing a message? how do you then choose to interact with that canon, and do you get defensive when people are critical of the source material?

depiction isn't endorsement, but can you tell when fandom trends are misogynistic or racist? can you see how killing off a black female character to "punish" her in fanfiction with the framing that she deserves it, and the popular narrative in a certain fandom that a heroic black man is a possessive liar and a white villain is a good man deserving redemption, is endorsing a message in fanfic? do you argue that it's "just fiction" when people get very understandably upset at misogyny and racism in fandom spaces?

yeah, depiction isn't endorsement, but do you think this is where it starts and stops as the only thing you really need to know? do you think people who are critical of things aren't engaging with it properly, or being mean, because they've forgotten the golden fandom rule of "fiction isn't reality"?

nbc hannibal isn't endorsing cannibalism as a dietary choice, but top gun maverick and call of duty: modern warfare were quite literally sponsored by the us military as propaganda for recruitment.

I'm not saying don't enjoy the ip that's making you happy or calling for moral purity in your media habits or whatever. just saying that there's a lot to media literacy beyond the feel good affirmations that periodically circulate fandom, and those affirmation posts both lack necessary nuance and discourage people from engaging with said nuance.

hey could y'all do me a favour?

Reblog if you're okay with "weird" compliments on your stuff!

things like "biting this" and such

i'm so elated you guys like my vaermina redesign attempt! aaaaaaaaaaaa

reading your tags and comments is making me giddy ^u^

I dunno if any of you like reading the thought process behind a piece, like i do, but if you do here's a lil ramble below the readmore:

honestly i was unsure with a lot of what to do with her. Like the snakes in eso's version of her, for example: I LOVE snakes, but I never understood where that decision came from. Did it come from adapting skyrim's vaermina book/wall art's shoulder-dragons into serpents? Who knows. But as much as I love snakes, there's a lot of overlap with other daedric princes there (peryite's lanky-dragony-ness, boethia's snake-dragon statue thingy), and I dunno it just feels like a knee-jerk reaction to associate 'evil tricksy deceptive lady' with snakes.

but I still tried to include them as like, sorta alternate smokey shoulder-accessory heads wearing her mask in my art, so there ya go.

I like that her hands turned out kinda spidery, but I'm sad the weird uneven extra fingers are sorta lost and not easy to pick out... maybe that works since it's a thing you don't notice unless you're really looking? I don't know. But yeah speaking of spiders, i'm desperate to include any sort of tie to her (new) daedra, mind-terrors (not just because they're my current favourite daedra of all time or anything), and something I stumbled across while finding them in the game is how upsettingly spider-like their movement can be. It's great! It immediately makes your brain go "haha nope", even if you happen to like real spiders. Sooooo, all this to say I stumbled my way into tying her back to her daedra with her hands, yay!

art is really a process of happy accidents.

I dont' know how well it comes across, but I really want to emphasize that the serene human-looking face is just her mask she has slightly lifted there, while the grooved void below is her actual face. I feel like it's not obvious enough and I might try doing more vaermina sketchings to play around with that.

vaermina redesign attempt #1

eso's vaermina design is extremely lackluster but I like the abstract mask they gave her. I tried to incorporate aspects of her skyrim art (the dragon shoulders), since her oblivion and daggerfall designs are criminally plain.

I also wanted to incorporate more characteristics of her mind terror daedra (since their design and animations are fantastic), but I can't find references of their movements/attacks: they've got good horror going on and I want to work more of that into vaermina herself. but for now I've settled with just giving her a face simillar to her horn-less mind terror daedra.

(also gave her too many fingers here and there)

vaermina redesign attempt #1

eso's vaermina design is extremely lackluster but I like the abstract mask they gave her. I tried to incorporate aspects of her skyrim art (the dragon shoulders), since her oblivion and daggerfall designs are criminally plain.

I also wanted to incorporate more characteristics of her mind terror daedra (since their design and animations are fantastic), but I can't find references of their movements/attacks: they've got good horror going on and I want to work more of that into vaermina herself. but for now I've settled with just giving her a face simillar to her horn-less mind terror daedra.

(also gave her too many fingers here and there)

playing modded minecraft with my sister and friends is fun.

i especially enjoy hoarding anything that is compostable to give me bonemeal and booooonnee blooockkkksssss

one of the mods gives you sacks you can craft and carry around, as well as a lil pully you can put rope on and wind and it's boggling my mind and i love it but can't wrap my head around how to use it.

also slowfall umbrella, my beloved.

i know i've posted before about how against the idea of women (because marvel's full of cowards and doesn't want to have that conversation) telepaths being romantically/sexually attracted to scott summers i have been.

and while I know the actual intent behind this pattern on marvel's end and still disagree with that for obvious reasons, ...

In a vacuum? It makes sense.

Most xmen characters express what they're about on the surface, and there aren't too many layers hidden underneath. I can imagine telepaths in the world of marvel getting quickly bored by the people in that world not having anything more to offer than what's out front. Then you have a character like scott, who is designed to be deeply introspective anti-surface-read. A character the audience only gets the full picture of (/learns to appreciate) if the medium allows that glimpse into what's going on below the carefully controlled outer shell. That must be fascinating for a telepath (especially in marvel where you don't have many characters strictly adhering to this design). Not only that, it would take a telepath, or someone who is privy to what's going on below the surface (like, a non-telepath who is trusted enough for scott to open up to) to appreciate the full breadth of this character. So of COURSE the ones who react positively to the idea of scott summers would be those who know there's a lot of unseen shit going on there. It makes sense.

I always prefer it when the colour of Scott Summers' eye-beams are given a pink-ish hue.