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zinzabee · 5 months

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A Message for the RotTMNT Fans

For everyone who is afraid of drawing Rise Raph because of his large body type and proportions, I am here to give you this message: I promise you, I would much rather see you try your best effort and it look a little wonky than for you to exclude him entirely from your art and doodles.

The reason I am able to draw Raph as well as I am right now is because I learned how to draw fat/muscular/chubby body anatomy in my early art career. But it's really never too late to start practicing! I encourage you, I implore you even, to take a few small steps out of your comfort zone for a bit and see where it takes you. If you want to draw him (or any favorite character from a piece of media you love, really) but are intimidated because of their size being abnormal from the thin/skinny, I want you to know that it's okay to be scared. What's not okay is giving up, quitting, or not even trying to attempt their bigger proportions at all. Because then that will bleed over into the rest of your art style/mentality, and there are aspects of your art that you may never improve on because of that. You don't know until you try.

I know it may feel awkward at first, and you may be intimidated by the pressure of getting it right, less anyone make fun of you or you get caught by peers or non-artists and be judged. Trust me, I know. I have been there! It's not a pleasant experience. But if you want to get better as an artist, you need to learn different body types. You need to unlearn the internal fatphobia that society has ingrained into your brain. You need to free yourself and allow yourself to make mistakes as you learn and practice to get better.

Raph is such a wonderful character and he deserves just as much love as all the other brothers, but I've talked to so many artists who all repeat the same thing; "He's so hard to draw." "I can't get his shapes quite right." "I don't draw him that much because I'm intimidated." You are 100% valid for these feelings, I promise. But I think it's for these reasons that you should draw him anyway, and learn his shapes, and learn to draw larger bodies and bigger muscles, because it helps you grow as an artist. And besides that, representation matters. I know there's plenty of fans out there who would love to see more representation like Raph.

So go for it. Even if you're scared. Even if you're unsure. Give yourself a little grace if you wanna draw that big lovable turtle, and do your best. And when it comes down to it, I bet that if he was real and you showed it to him, he'd love it and appreciate the effort no matter what. <3

#rise of the teenage mutant ninja turtles #rise of the tmnt #rottmnt #rottmnt raph #rottmnt raphael #fatphobia #fat positvity #I mean this all in a very positive and encouraging tone #I don't want it to come off like I'm being mean or pointing fingers #but I notice Raph doesn't get as much fanart as the other three #and I understand it might be because of his proportions and body type #so idk I just want the younger artists to know that its okay to experiment and try #also kind of saying this in light of a really popular artist of a popular show recently admitting she is scared of drawing larger body type #and it reflecting heavily in her art style and character design #and if you know then you know

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tathrin · 1 year

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Ehehe, hello, I am here to feed the procrastination gremlin! Those prompts all sound fun, but 21 and 28 are speaking to my heart rn.

Maybe 36 to if you feel up for it but it's your writing and you decide how many you wanna do<3

The procrastination gremlin thanks your mightily! Because I tend to Get Too Long when I write thing, I'm going to preemptively separate these out into their own posts and just assume that I'll ramble too much for it to make sense to do them all in one lmao. Also I will definitely do all three because yes more gimleaf yes. This is an ask meme that I will literally always be accepting prompts for (although if somebody sees this in the tag in like a month or so and wants to send one in, maybe include some context so that I know what that random number I just got in my inbox means? lmao). So, prompt taken from this; anyone can feel free to send other numbers in at any time. Literally.

#21....on a place of insecurity.

Gimli stared at his reflection in the round silver mirror, his hands paused even though his braids were still half-undone. "Do you ever wish that we had crossed the Sea sooner?" he asked.

Legolas blinked at him, cocking his head in that familiar birdlike tilt of confusion that Gimli knew so well.

"Sooner?" Legolas repeated. "How could we have come sooner?" A frown furrowed his smooth, beardless face; a temporary crinkling of skin that would never show the faintest wrinkle. "You mean before Aragorn died?"

"You're right," Gimli sighed. He tugged at his braids, their once-bright copper laced so heavily with strands of silver that he sometimes felt like he had just walked out of a snowfall. "We could not have, of course. But...do you ever wish..."

"Leaving sooner would not have spared us the pain of his death," Legolas said quietly. "It would only have meant that we would not have been there for him when it happened; only have meant that we would not have been there for Arwen or their children either. Knowing of his death only from stories brought by later travelers would not have spared us anything, I do not think; knowing of his death without having been there ourselves would, I think, have only made it hurt the worse, my dear."

"Yes," Gimli said, "yes, of course. I did not mean—"

He stopped. Legolas had walked up behind him and bent down to look over Gimli's shoulder into the mirror. It should have looked awkward, the sight of Legolas's long spine arced at such an angle, but elves were spindly, lithesome creatures. Wood-elves in particular seemed to be as supple and spritely as saplings, and Gimli had yet to witness Legolas contort himself into a position that strained his pliant bones.

"Gimli," Legolas said, "what is wrong?"

"Nothing," Gimli said. He lowered his eyes and his fingers both, twisting his remaining braids into place as quickly as he could without mussing the pattern of the plaits or dropping strands. He scowled, even though he knew that doing so would only deepen the wrinkles that already lined his eyes. "Nothing is wrong."

Long, smooth fingers pressed gently on his own calloused ones until they stilled. Gimli looked down at the overlap of those long digits across his own, the one set brown and spindly as twigs yet unblemished by time or strife; the other pale as underground mushrooms and gnarled by both time and heavy forge-work.

"Gimli," Legolas said. "Tell me."

Gimli turned his hand so that he could enfold those long brown fingers in his own and gave Legolas's hand a reassuring squeeze. "Nothing is wrong, my love," he said again. "I am only feeling melancholy this morning, it seems. Think no more upon it."

He raised the elf's ageless hand to his lips and pressed a kiss to those smooth knuckles, then released it so that he could continue with his braids.

Legolas did not rise. Instead he dropped lower to fold his arms across the back of Gimli's chair, his bright eyes studying the sight of the dwarf before him in the mirror. Gimli avoided his gaze, focusing instead on the intricate plaits that hung from his chin, but he could feel the weight of Legolas's eyes passing over his face, searching for the answers that Gimli would not give him.

He did not find them.

"Will you not tell me?" Legolas asked at last. His voice was soft, his eyes full of sorrow. "Please?"

Gimli sighed and let the braid in his hands droop loose and unfinished down his chest.

He looked up into the mirror again at last and met Legolas's searching, worried eyes there. He looked at that smooth, beardless, beloved face waiting there behind him; unchanging and unchanged from the day they had first met so long ago and far away in Rivendell.

His eyes flicked sideways to his own reflection, to the wrinkles that time had carved beneath his beard; to the strands of silver that wove through the bright copper braids that hung before him. He reached out and pressed his fingers to the mirror, to the sight of the lines around his eyes, and sighed.

"I would not be so old," Gimli said quietly, "if we had come sooner; that is all. I only wonder if you wish, sometimes, that we had. That is all."

Time did not pass in Aman the way it did in other places; or if it did, then it did not feel as though it did, and it carried no trace of decay with it. Gimli had not aged a day since they had first set foot upon these white shores—but he had aged two hundred and sixty-two years before that.

He was still hale and hearty, for dwarves—especially the dwarves of Durin's line—often lived many years longer than that, and rarely weakened before the very ending of their days came upon them. But he was no spritely youngster of sixty-two, either, moping because his father had deemed him too young to go along on a Quest; nor was he a mature youth of not quite one hundred and forty, boldly striding forward at last upon a Quest of his own, all bright brown eyes and ruddy copper beard.

Gimli was old, now, and he looked it. He could see it every morning when he looked in the mirror to do his braids, or every afternoon when he caught sight of his reflection in the cooling barrels at the forge or in some clear, still pool that held Aman's crystal waters. He could see it, and he knew Legolas could as well; how could he not, when he was surrounded by the contrast of all the smooth, beardless, ageless faces of his people?

"Are you tired?" Legolas asked, and his light voice was a dry croak. Shadows as thick as Mordor's fogs filled his eyes, and Gimli turned from the mirror with a cry and caught Legolas's hands with his own.

"No!" he cried. He knew that Legolas was not asking after Gimli's slumber, or weariness from working the forge; was not asking about anything as simple as a day's ordinary exhaustion. He was asking if Gimli was tired of life; if he was tired of eternity. If he was ready, at long last, to claim the gift of his own mortality.

"Legolas, no," Gimli said, squeezing those spindly fingers so tightly that had they been the frail twigs they seemed they would have snapped beneath the pressure of his grip—but elvish flesh was strong, so much stronger than it looked. So were dwarven spirits, and Gimli had no intention of ever growing weary of the world, not so long as Legolas was in it. "I promise," he assured his elf, raising first one hand and then the other to his lips. "Never, Legolas. I am here with you, and I always will be."

Legolas's smile trembled, but it was a smile. Gimli counted it as a victory, and pulled the elf up out of his crouch and into Gimli's lap. He had too much leg to fit on such a short chair, of course, but the two of them were used to that problem; it was no effort at all to fall into the long habits that had his ankles curling sideways under the chair, his elvish flexibility making easy work of the awkward position.

"Then what troubles you?" Legolas asked. He snaked his long arms around Gimli's shoulders and leaned his beardless cheek down to rest upon Gimli's head. "My love, please. Tell me."

"I am old, Legolas," Gimli said. He unwrapped one hand from the elf's slender waist to press his fingers to the cobweb of wrinkles beside his eyes. "You can see it plainly on my face. Old, as no one else in Aman ever will be."

"Bilbo is old," said Legolas.

Gimli rolled his eyes. "Yes, all right," he said. "And Sam, too. But aside from them, everyone else here is an elf—"

"Or a maia," Legolas interrupted. "Or one of the Valar. Or—"

"My point," Gimli cut him off loudly, "is that age is writ across my face in ways that elvish faces do not age. I am only sorry, my dear, that I can do nothing to erase those lines, these streaks of silver; only sorry that you cannot spend eternity beside a dwarf in his prime of life, but must instead contend with these wearisome wrinkles."

Legolas drew away far enough that he could gape down at Gimli. "Wearisome?" he repeated. "Sorry? Gimli!"

"I know, I know," Gimli soothed, "it is a little enough thing, I suppose, and I am not ungrateful; I am only sorry for your sake, my dear—"

"Sorry!" Legolas said again. "Gimli, you everlasting fool of a dwarf! Is this what you've been fretting over all this time?

"...Yes?"

"Gimli!" Legolas squawked. "Oh, my beloved idiot! I feared you were growing tired of forever, and were going to have to leave me! Instead you've just been pouting over how handsome you are?"

"Handsome!" Gimli exclaimed. "Legolas, enough. I am sorry beyond words that I made you worry, but that is no call to mock me—"

"I do not mock," Legolas said. His lilting voice for once was as firm as stones. "I adore every inch of you, Gimli. Yes, even the wrinkles; yes, even the silver in your beard!" He shook his head, scowling down at his dwarf. "Perhaps especially the silver in your beard, for it gleams like mithril in the moonlight, even as the ancient lights of lost Trees are said to still gleam in the locks of the Lady Galadriel, oh Lockbearer!"

Gimli sputtered, heat rising fast in his cheeks. He tried to push the elf away, but Legolas tightened his grip upon his shoulders and refused to be budged from Gimli's knees.

"And your wrinkles," he continued in a softer voice, "are the signs that our years together have etched upon your face, even as your clever hands carve beauty into simple metal and plain rocks. How could I help but love them, when they trace our story out upon your face for all to see?" Legolas leaned in and pressed a soft kiss to the sparkle of crows-feet that framed first one eye and then the other, then traced the deep tracks that lines Gimli's mouth and nose beneath his beard. Finally he raised Gimli's hand and pressed a long kiss to those ruddy, wrinkled fingers.

"Legolas, I...I feel I've been a fool," Gimli murmured. He found himself once again unable to meet Legolas's eyes, this time because of the blush that darkened his cheeks with a blaze of hot mortification.

"You have been," Legolas agreed, "but fortunately I knew you for a fool long before I knew you for anything else, my love, and so I am not bothered overmuch."

A watery laugh spilled from Gimli's lips, and he could not help but smile. "And you are as irritating and irreverent as ever," he retorted.

"Of course I am," Legolas agreed, and hopped up off Gimli's lap and the low chair upon which he sat and grinned down at his dwarf with a twinkling smile. "Some things do not change with the passage of time—but even though my face does not show it, I have very much been changed by knowing you, my dear Gimli, and I would not trade a second of it in exchange for a single lifted wrinkle or silvered hair."

"Well," Gimli said, "I am glad to hear it, and sorry now that I did not voice my concerns sooner."

"So am I!" said Legolas. "But I cannot hold it against you when I did not voice mine either, although in my case it was because I feared to pressure you into extending your time in life beyond your own comfort for my sake alone."

Gimli stood and took his elf's hands in his and held them tight. "Forever is only barely enough time to spend at your side, Legolas," he said, "but as it is all the time the world will give us, I will take it; but I will accept not a second less than that, and would not see that time shortened for any reason even if it was only for your own comfort, and not my own. I can think of no greater purpose for one's life than to bring comfort to one whom I so love."

Legolas beamed down at him, his pale eyes bright with unshed tears. "Well!" he said. "That is all sorted, then!"

"Indeed it is," Gimli agreed. He knew that the smile spreading behind his beard was the sort of soft, misty-eyed grin that Peregrin Took had always labeled "absurdly sappy," but he could not help himself; he felt as though he was fairly brimming-over with love, and he could not contain himself from letting it show upon his face, erstwhile sappiness be damned.

"In that case," Legolas said, his damp gaze dancing suddenly with dry mischief, "let me get you out of that tunic and into our bed and I will find all your other wrinkles and properly express my love for them, too."

Gimli decided he could finish his braids later.

#first thought on this one was actually going to be legolas being insecure about his ''naked'' chin when visiting erebor or aglarond #and gimli reassuring him that he thinks legolas is beautiful even without a beard and he doesn't care what any other dwarf thinks #but then my fingers started writing this one instead so. here we are in aman again whoops.#also you should know that around about paragraph three or four i was SURE that this one was going to be short #and i was going to eat my ''oh gosh my stuff always gets too long tee hee!'' words on this one #NOPE!#lmaooooo #these fucking idiots just do not know when to shut up! (and neither do i)#gimleaf #gigolas #gimli #legolas #ask meme #send a kiss meme #lotr fanfiction #my writing #my stuff #aman #lotr #anyway fair warning this one gets a little sad but then it's happy again in the end #because these two are so relentlessly untragic they cannot help but have a happy ending always no matter what #and anyway isn't that just the elvish experience in a nutshell? (except happier because it's them and they're Like That)#this ship sails itself all the way to valinor

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