i just wanted to draw them all together

me trying to be supportive: can i offer you a nice "we should kill them" in this trying time?

the thing about art is that it was always supposed to be about us, about the human-ness of us, the impossible and beautiful reality that we (for centuries) have stood still, transfixed by music. that we can close our eyes and cry about the same book passage; the events of which aren't real and never happened. theatre in shakespeare's time was as real as it is now; we all laugh at the same cue (pursued by bear), separated hundreds of years apart.

three years ago my housemates were jamming outdoors, just messing around with their instruments, mostly just making noise. our neighbors - shy, cautious, a little sheepish - sat down and started playing. i don't really know how it happened; i was somehow in charge of dancing, barefoot and laughing - but i looked up, and our yard was full of people. kids stacked on the shoulders of parents. old couples holding hands. someone had brought sidewalk chalk; our front walk became a riot of color. someone ran in with a flute and played the most astounding solo i've ever heard in my life, upright and wiggling, skipping as she did so. she only paused because the violin player was kicking his heels up and she was laughing too hard to continue.

two weeks ago my friend and i met in the basement of her apartment complex so she could work out a piece of choreography. we have a language barrier - i'm not as good at ASL as i'd like to be (i'm still learning!) so we communicate mostly through the notes app and this strange secret language of dancers - we have the same movement vocabulary. the two of us cracking jokes at each other, giggling. there were kids in the basement too, who had been playing soccer until we took up the far corner of the room. one by one they made their slow way over like feral cats - they laid down, belly-flat against the floor, just watching. my friend and i were not in tutus - we were in slouchy shirts and leggings and socks. nothing fancy. but when i asked the kids would you like to dance too? they were immediately on their feet and spinning. i love when people dance with abandon, the wild and leggy fervor of childhood. i think it is gorgeous.

their adults showed up eventually, and a few of them said hey, let's not bother the nice ladies. but they weren't bothering us, they were just having fun - so. a few of the adults started dancing awkwardly along, and then most of the adults. someone brought down a better sound system. someone opened a watermelon and started handing out slices. it was 8 PM on a tuesday and nothing about that day was particularly special; we might as well party.

one time i hosted a free "paint along party" and about 20 adults worked quietly while i taught them how to paint nessie. one time i taught community dance classes and so many people showed up we had to move the whole thing outside. we used chairs and coatracks to balance. one time i showed up to a random band playing in a random location, and the whole thing got packed so quickly we had to open every door and window in the place.

i don't think i can tell you how much people want to be making art and engaging with art. they want to, desperately. so many people would be stunning artists, but they are lied to and told from a very young age that art only matters if it is planned, purposeful, beautiful. that if you have an idea, you need to be able to express it perfectly. this is not true. you don't get only 1 chance to communicate. you can spend a lifetime trying to display exactly 1 thing you can never quite language. you can just express the "!!??!!!"-ing-ness of being alive; that is something none of us really have a full grasp on creating. and even when we can't make what we want - god, it feels fucking good to try. and even just enjoying other artists - art inherently rewards the act of participating.

i wasn't raised wealthy. whenever i make a post about art, someone inevitably says something along the lines of well some of us aren't that lucky. i am not lucky; i am dedicated. i have a chronic condition, my hands are constantly in pain. i am not neurotypical, nor was i raised safe. i worked 5-7 jobs while some of these memories happened. i chose art because it mattered to me more than anything on this fucking planet - i would work 80 hours a week just so i could afford to write in 3 of them.

and i am still telling you - if you are called to make art, you are called to the part of you that is human. you do not have to be good at it. you do not have to have enormous amounts of privilege. you can just... give yourself permission. you can just say i'm going to make something now and then - go out and make it. raquel it won't be good though that is okay, i don't make good things every time either. besides. who decides what good even is?

you weren't called to make something because you wanted it to be good, you were called to make something because it is a basic instinct. you were taught to judge its worth and over-value perfection. you are doing something impossible. a god's ability: from nothing springs creation.

a few months ago i found a piece of sidewalk chalk and started drawing. within an hour i had somehow collected a small classroom of young children. their adults often brought their own chalk. i looked up and about fifteen families had joined me from around the block. we drew scrangly unicorns and messed up flowers and one girl asked me to draw charizard. i am not good at drawing. i basically drew an orb with wings. you would have thought i drew her the mona lisa. she dragged her mother over and pointed and said look! look what she drew for me and, in the moment, i admit i flinched (sorry, i don't -). but the mother just grinned at me. he's beautiful. and then she sat down and started drawing.

someone took a picture of it. it was in the local newspaper. the summary underneath said joyful and spontaneous artwork from local artists springs up in public gallery. in the picture, a little girl covered in chalk dust has her head thrown back, delighted. laughing.

bad like a barbie

My uh- My hand slipped 🌟

A Forbidden West update to my old 'Aloy smooches for every NPC' featuring the new Gaia gang members, Seyka and two personal faves I HAD to include 😌

eternal pun-ishment

the brainrot won

there was like this gay couple at the aquarium and one of them read "they suck the life out of their prey" about an animal and the other one said "that's what you do to me"

aww aww katsuki coming home to find you and your kiddos in the kitchen, a disarray of gingerbread and icing and candies spread out across the dining room table.

you'd managed to dye your daughters frosting pink, and she's jumping up and down on her tippy-toes when she sees him, grinning so hard the tendons in her neck are straining. she'd wanted to build and decorate her own gingerbread house this year, but so far she's spent the last twenty minutes being very particular about only the first wall.

"daddy!" she leans her head all the way back when he puts his hand on her face, giggling beneath his palm with her little squished nose. "look at mine, look at mine!"

your wobbly son jumps up in his own chair, using the table as leverage to balance himself as he lets out a squeal of gibberish that vaugely sounds like an echo of what his sister is saying. at the excited pitch in his voice, her head whips around, free from katsuki's grip as her brows furrow.

"he's not even decorating anything," she protests—and she's not wrong; whatever your little boy is doing hardly classifies as 'decorating', and is more like 'eating all the frosting he can before getting caught'. there is a mess of sugar dried all around his mouth.

still, your son squeals in his chair, jumping up and down with even more energy when you place a hand on his butt, in case he slips. the promise of you only encourages him, and katsuki reaches across the table to snatch him up when he tries to get his little knee up on the surface.

your daughter's frown grows; sharing attention remains a soft spot for her. instead of saying anything, she only makes an annoyed little sound and presses her cheek into her dad's hip.

"stuff's gonna give you cavities," katsuki murmurs, though he picks up a few red and green candies and shares them with your already sugary boy—who hums happily. "need a toothbrush for christmas."

"no," your daughter pulls back and tugs on his belt loops, sneering up at him playfully when he pinches her nose. "you have cavities!"

katsuki makes a point to bare his teeth at her, and then presses his forehead to his son and does the same until they're both giggling. "ain't me, bighead,"

"you're a bighead!"

"yeah, 'n i am big, so what's your excuse?" a wicked little grin splits his face when she starts swinging on him, and he deposits your son into your lap before scooping her up off her feet, her girlish scream vibrant and happy in the space around you.

katsuki waits until she calms down a bit, holding her to his chest like a baby, before coming around the table to get a good look at her little pink masterpiece. he presses his mouth into her hair, like he does with you, and her little ruby eyes sparkle when he murmurs, "looks good, kid,"—just to her and only to her.

Hey hey! The Scrapnik Island trade book comes out 2 days from now, on 8/29! Since I haven't posted them here yet, here's all 4 of my covers for the miniseries! Additional thoughts about the covers themselves below:

Big thank yous to David Mariotte and Riley Farmer! They were really kind in letting me do the A covers for this miniseries, ALONG with character design and coloring work! My goal for these covers was to make them feel like old horror movie posters. I also strategically tried to not reveal Mecha Sonic in most of them, as the covers were being announced before the story details at the time and we really wanted Mecha's return to be a big surprise! (Natalie Haines' cover absolutely knocked it out of the park for that reveal)

Color-wise, like the story itself, I wanted to gradually increase the amount of red and intensity until the breaking point of the finale in #4. For the 4th cover, I really wanted to depict the intense emotions of the finale. The fight between Sonic and Mecha Sonic, the Death Egg's shadow looming over it all, and at the bottom, a sunflower, falling into a burning incinerator. However, I also wanted to make it so if you flip the image, like someone miraculously flipped the entire situation upside-down, instead of falling into a burning abyss, the sunflower is meeting a beautiful new sunrise, a new day.

the older and weirder i get the more i'm beginning to realize that i was actually a very cool kid who had no shame or fear until i was taught that i'd be punished for it and everything since then has been a slow uphill battle to get that part of myself back

they want to talk about mental illness and acceptance and how everyone is a little ocd it's cute and quirky and their "intrusive thoughts" are about cutting their hair off and you say yours are about taking a razorblade to your eye and they say ew can you not and everyone is a little adhd sometimes! except if you're late it's a personality flaw and it's because you are careless and cruel (and someone else with adhd mentions they can be on time, so why can't you?) and it's not an eating disorder if it's girl dinner! it's not mania if it's girl math! what do you mean you blew all of your savings on nonrefundable plane tickets for a plane you didn't even end up taking. what do you mean that you are afraid of eating. get over it. they roll their little lips up into a sneer. can you not, like, trauma dump?

they love it on them they like to wear pieces of your suffering like jewels so that it hangs off their tongue in rapiers. they are allowed to arm-chair diagnose and cherrypick their poisons but you can't ever miss too many showers because that's, like, "fuckken gross?" so anyone mean is a narcissist. so anyone with visual tics is clearly faking it and is so cringe. but they get to scream and hit customer service employees because well, i got overwhelmed.

you keep seeing these posts about how people pleasers are "inherently manipulative" and how it's totally unfair behavior. but you are a people pleaser, you have an ingrained fawn response. in the comments, you have typed and deleted the words just because it is technically true does not make it an empathetic or kind reading of the reaction about one million times. it is technically accurate, after all. you think of catholic guilt, how sometimes you feel bad when doing a good deed because the sense of pride you get from acting kind - that pride is a sin. the word "manipulation" is not without bias or stigma attached to it. many people with the fawn response are direct victims of someone who was malignantly manipulative. calling the victims manipulative too is an unfair and unkind reading of the situation. it would be better and more empathetic to say it is safety-seeking or connection-seeking behavior. yes, it can be toxic. no, in general it is not intended to be toxic. there is no reason to make mentally ill people feel worse for what we undergo.

you type why is everyone so quick to turn on someone showing clear signs of trauma but you already know the fucking answer, so what's the point of bothering. you kind of hate those this is what anxiety looks like! infographics because at this point you're so good at white-knuckling through a severe panic attack that people just think you're stoic. even people who know the situation sometimes comment you just don't seem depressed. and you're not a 9 year old white kid so there's no way you're on the spectrum, you're not obsessed with trains and you were never a good mathematician. okay then.

mental illness is trending. in 2012 tumblr said don't romanticize our symptoms but to be fair tiktok didn't exist yet. there's these series of videos where someone pretends to be "the most boring person on earth" and is just being a normal fucking person, which makes your skin crawl, because that probably means you are boring. your friend reads aloud a profile from tinder - no depressed bitches i fucking hate that mental illness crap. your father says that medication never actually works.

you still haven't told your grandmother that you're in therapy. despite everything (and the fact it's helping): you just don't want her to see you differently.

👻💚🌻

Danny Phantom x Into the Spider-verse! Decided to add the little blob ghosts I’ve seen everywhere.

What do you think he’s listening to?

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