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adventuresofclever · 3 years

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CleverMax: SDCC 2021 Masquerade Entry

Comic-Con@Home Masquerade Entry: Adventures of Clever Costume Title: CleverMax - Mr. Clever as a Borderlands boss Costume Description: Recreation of Mr. Clever from the Doctor Who episode Nightmare in Silver, written by Neil Gaiman, done in the style of the video game, Borderlands. Bio: They/He pronouns

Greetings all!

I realized that I never wrote about how I made my CleverMax mashup cosplay, so when SDCC posted about their At Home masquerade, I figured this was the perfect time to do so! Most of you know that I cosplay exclusively as Mr. Clever from Doctor Who, with the random mash up thrown in here and there. I’ve always wanted to be a Borderlands cosplayer, and the following is how I managed to combine the two together.

As always, enjoy the blog and if there are any questions, please feel free to contact me.

Let’s step into the TARDIS and jump back to October 20, 2009, when the first Borderlands game was released. It was my first foray into FPS (First person shooters) and I was hooked from day one. In 2012 they released Borderlands 2 which is, in my not so humble opinion, the best video game ever created. We got some of the most iconic charcters and storylines in that game. Including the best DLC ever, Bunkers and Badasses. And my second favorite villain of all time – Handsome Jack.

Jack’s sass, sarcasm and charm fits well with Mr. Clever’s personality. And in the pre sequel you get to play a version of him called the Dopplegnager. I mean, this pretty much wrote itself.

Handsome Jack from Borderlands 2 and Mr. Clever from Doctor Who

Borderlands cosplayers have aIways left me in a state of awe and admiration. The style of the game is so unique and seeing it recreated in person is nothing short of incredible. I’ve always wanted to figure out a way to be a Borderlands cosplayer. For the past eight years I have only ever cosplayed as Mr. Clever from Doctor Who. In the summer of 2019 I decided that was the perfect time to try to make this happen before NYCC.

When I initially decided to do this, it was going to be more of a mash up between Handsome Jack and Mr. Clever. I had planned on wearing Jack’s basic outfit, but in Clever’s colors with the a few add ons. Namely the bow tie and the cybernetics.

After much research and drafting, I decided against that. I ended up just turning Mr. Clever into a Borderlands boss. Same basic outfit as Mr. Clever/11th Doctor, but cel shaded and with weapons, cause Borderlands.

I made the accessories, chess set, and obviously the working cyberplanner piece itself for my Nightmare in Silver version of Clever, but I have never tackled anything this ambitious. An entire costume from scratch? Not something I thought I could do. Not knowing how to sew and being visually impaired were both challenges that I had to work around.

I started with looking around my house for various items that I thought I could use. I figured if I messed up, might as well mess up on something I hadn’t spent money on yet! I was going to toss a pair of my old paddock boots as they had some rips in the leather. Ripped leather? How very Pandora. They were the first thing I tackled.

Old paddock boots that I refurbished for the cosplay

This was my first time using leather paint and I have to say I am very pleased with the Angelus brand of leather paint. I have worn these in the rain and through puddles, and they have held up 100%.

After the boots were done, I started on the vest. I had an old black vest lying around the house that was sort of the shape and size I wanted. I don’t have a dress form, so I put it on myself, inside out, and used safety pins to make it the size I needed, then hand sewed around the safety pins. Not ideal, but it works.

I had a spare pair of black jeans, button down light blue shirt and a plain bow tie that I just ended up cel shading.

The only item that I really couldn’t figure out was the purple frock coat. Try as I might, I couldn’t find one to modify. So the coat was actually made by my friend Heather Long. I did alter the length after NYCC.

With the clothes themselves all set, for the most part anyay, it was time to paint. This was my first time trying to recreate the art style of Borderlands, often referred to as cel shading. I have a few “art of Borderlands” style books that I poured over before I sat down to attempt this.

Other than the accessories and anything leather, I used the same materials and techniques for each article of clothing. Instead of describing each seprate piece, I’ll just explain what I did to achieve the overall look.

When you look at a Borderlands character on screen, it can be a bit overwhelming. So many colors, and so many nuances of each color. I did my best to visually sift through all that, and try to establish what I thought was the base color.

Once the base color was determined, I just added blotches, blobs, shading, low lights, highlights and other variations of the base color itself throughout each piece. I recommend keeping your fabric wrinkled and using those wrinkle as guidlenes for where the lines and shading would fall naturally.

Once all of that dried, I then went over different sections of the fabric with white and black lines. To get that crisp, almost comic book looking outline of each piece I used black sharpie, and white fabric pens as well as white fabric paint.

When I sat down to do the coat, I wanted something a little different than just cel shading. During a second playthrough of Tales from the Borderlands, I noticed Rhys and other characters had interesting logos and designs on the back of their jackets. I ended up putting a chessboard pattern on the back as a homage to the chess game between the 11th Doctor and Mr. Clever in the episode.

Great shot of the chess board and my Judd Nelson pose

The materials that I used for all of the clothing items were craft paints that I had around the house. Any brand works, but I prefer Americana paints. I then added an additive that you use to make the paint water proof and used various sized brushes. Dry brushes are also very useful if you have them.

Black sharpies of different sizes and any fabric markers are also very helpful. Heat setting is required to make the paint waterpfoof, so if you mess up before you add sharpies, you can wash the clothes and start over.

A few tips if you decide to undertake cel shading clothing: Until now I hadn’t noticed that there aren’t many thing in Borderlands that are true black. Due to the art style most things that appear black are in reality shades of grey, with a grey base colr. This makes it easier to add the lines, shading, and what not. Looking back, I should have bought GREY clothes. It was a ton of work to make the pants look like they were a mixture of greys. And as a result of so many laers of paint, they are stiff, lost their stretch and feel an entire size smaller! So I would recommend grey fabric as a base for black clothing and buy a size larger.

The pants are so stiff that I think they will stand up on their own

This entire process was way more fun than I thought it would be and I’ve since become addicted to cel shading anything I can. I may or may not have started cel shading my guest room.

After the clothing was finished, I started on some accessories and props. The first being the easiet – a wee little cybermite that I cel shaded. My cosplay of Mr. Clever always has a cybermite on my lapel, so I took one of my older ones and repainted it.

You can’t have a Borderlands character without some sort of weapon, so I painted a nerf gun that looks similar to the one that Clara Oswald holds in the episode.

I have never had to carry a gun for my Mr. Clever cosplay before so weapon checks are sort of new to me. I didn’t want to go through that at NYCC so I came up with a clever, no pun intended, way around it.

I took a photo of each side of the gun. Went to Staples and had them printed on heavy cardstock. Then I cut around the guns, glued them together between a piece of cardboard then added some black electical tape around the edges. Viola. Instant weapons check approved gun that is lightweight, and also acts a fan when it gets hot. It was a huge hit at the con. A few security guards were like “ we have to check your…wait..is that flat?” And they proceeded to play with it. I highly recommend doing this!

Gun and its flat counterpart

I am holding the flat gun in this picture from NYCC

In the actual game, you can equip your characters with mods that give them certain abilities and bonuses. In the Pre-Sequel, you can play as a Dopplganger of Handsome Jack so I searched for some of his mods and found one in purple which seemed perfect. I made the mod with cardboard, covered it in craft foam, modge podge to set, and installed led lights. The first time I wore it I put it on my belt which didn’t work. It kept falling off. I eventually put it on my lapel and wore it like Jack does. Unfortunately, someone glomped on me at a con and broke it, so I recently had to remake it all over again.

No Borderlands costume would be complete without cel shading on yourself. This was a huge challenge for me for a few reasons. One, I’m visually impaired so doing line work like this was challenging. Two, I am highly allergic to so many materials and ingrediants that finding a make up brand that I could wear was a trial and error process that ended up with many break outs and rashes before I found the perfect combination.

I used mostly eye liner pencils and liquid eye liner to achieve the look. The Wet n Wild liquid eye liner lasts forever, and is actually difficult to remove, but that is not a bad thing as it stood up to the heat of a very crowded venue.

As for the cel shading itself, I relied on many refernce photos of various characters in the game. I started with the eyebrows first as that seemed to frame the face nicely and give me a nice mischvieous look. I then just outlined the bones of my face, adding some random lines here and there. It never looks the same way twice, but that’s ok. Playing with different angles, lines, shading etc is half the fun!

The only real challenge were my hands. The make up didn’t last that long on my hands so I had to touch it up throughout the con. I also eventually started to use band aids that I cel sahded to cover up a tattoo on my inner wrist.

Figuring what to do with my hair is an on going process that I still haven’t 100% mastered. I opted to not use a foam wig as I have over heating issues on a cool day let alone trying to wear one if it gets warmer. I have had adverse reactions to craft foam in the past, so I don’t want it touching my skin, and lastly, I think a wig AND a facial prosthetic would be too much for me. So I decided to just cel shade my hair.

This takes forever to do, and I’m still figuring out better techniques every time I wear it.

I have a really great brand of colored gel, called Mofajang which I apply with a baster brush that you would find in the kitchen gadgets aisle. I also use a clean mascara brush to add some finer lines here and there. Set with way more hair spray than I ever used in the 80’s and it becomes fairly waterproof.

I have learned that due to how hard the make up and hair color is to remove, I really need to wear this on the LAST day of a con. I made the mistake of wearing it on day one of Long Island Who one year, and spent hours scrubbing my skin and hair for the next day. Far better to just leave the con with a tad bit of left over cel shading. Which makes it very interesting when you stop at a roadside bathroom on the trip home.

With the entire costume done it was time to work on the actual cyberplanner appliance.

Next time I make a variation of Clever, I will make this FIRST. Making these pieces is the bane of my existence – I love wearing them, hate making them. It’s a long process.

I am allergic to latex, silocone, scuply, most clays, and so many other things that seem to be every cosplayers go-to. When I made my first cyber piece back in late 2013, I spent weeks trying to find a substance that would keep attached to my face all day without causing a rash. Like an alchemist in a fantasy novel, I submerged myself into creating the perfect concoction. It took 22 days to finish the final product.

I admit that I rushed a bit on the Borderlands one. As a result, it doesn’t quite fit as well as my others, and is a bit heavier than I expected. I only added two working lights, instead of the usual four, to hopefully balance the piece out. It lasted through two full days of a con, despite the heat of a crowded venue, but I did end up tweaking it a bit after. Even with the tweaks, it still doesn’t fit as well as I would like. It is too heavy and brings down the entire left side of my face, making it difficult to keep my eye open at times. I really need to sit down and force myself to make a new one.

There are a few more things that I would like to add to this costume eventually. Like a belt of grenades, and maybe another gun. But aside from that, I am incredibly pleased with how this costume turned out. It is by far, my favorite Clever variation that I have done.

I hope this post gives you the inspiration to go off and cel shade something, and possibly even play some Borderlands!

#doctorwho #misterclever #mrclever #nightmareinsilver #cosplay #borderlands cosplay #doctor who cosplay #comic-con #comic-conathome #comic-conathome2021 #comic-conathomemasquerêde #cyberplanner #borderlands

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factual-fantasy · 4 years

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I’m sorry you’ve been feeling that way. <:{ I myself have been struggling with feelings of bitterness, confusion and doubt. I hope both of us get better soon in that regard.😔

And I’m not 100% sure what you mean.. like, do you want me to ramble about my favorite characters? Or OCs? Since I normally don’t have the opportunity to go on and on about my OCs.. I’m going to hope/assume you meant my OCs. :} I’m going to ramble about Bash Buggy because I never got the chance to talk about this particular thing that I worked really hard on. I hope that’s okay! 😅

I put a lot of thought onto Bash Buggy’s weird eye, and I’m a little disappointed that nobody has mentioned it yet.

During the war on Cybertron, Bash Buggy’s left eye started going blind. So he got it removed, and replaced it with a tactical eye that he made himself. This weird eye allowed him to see in pitch blackness using Night, see people through walls with thermal, and allowed him to see hidden rooms and around corners with Grid. His eye helped him and the other wreckers out greatly when they were on missions, he was the eyes of the wreckers basically.

However, a downside of this eye is that it cant do much else other than the things that were mentioned. So when his other normal eye was damaged and had to be removed, his vision away from the battle field tanked.

Now with just this eye, he’s color blind, he cant read, write, recognize peoples faces, or see textures. And as his not-super-well-made janky eye starts to age, his depth perception starts becoming faulty.

So basically, if you showed him a picture, he wouldn’t be able to see it. He can barley see your face and he cant tell of something is soft and fluffy, or is as hard as a rock by looking at it. He cant write because he can’t see what he just wrote down or if he’s still writing on the lines. He cant read because he cant see writing, and he cant play games or read data pads because he cant see what’s on the screen.

Having this happen broke his poor little heart, because he got a lot of joy by seeing people smile, but now he cant see that. Bash Buggy now struggles to read the room and cant tell of he’s upset anyone by their expressions. So he prefers to not talk, as to not risk making anyone upset. His voice hurts him and it sounds terrible anyways so what’s the point.

Not to mention how badly this freaks him out at times. Everyone he sees are just faceless figures with the voices of his friends. The only way he can really identify you is by your voice. So just imagine what kind’a panic he would go into if he went deaf in his already somewhat faulty audial receptor.

When he saw Wheeljack again for the first time in a long while, he said. “I̶s̴.̸.̴ ̸I̷s̵ ̴t̴h̵a̷t̷ ̴y̴o̷u̸?̶ ̶J̷a̷c̵k̷i̷e̸?̷” And he unknowingly responded with “Of course its me, don’t you recognize me?” With a smile. Or at least, he kind’a assumed that Wheeljack was smiling. He couldn’t see him. He lost his good eye after Wheeljack left, so Jackie didn't know he couldn’t see his face.

When he reunited with Brown Suburban though, he said. “W̸h̶o̴ ̴a̸r̸e̵ ̴y̸o̷u̷,̶ ̴t̴e̷l̸l̸ ̸m̶e̴!̸” And he replied with, “Its me, Brown Suburban. You can recognize my voice, cant you?” Bash paused, but then he smiled and went, “Y̶e̶a̴h̶,̵ ̴h̶e̷h̴,̵ ̸I̵ ̷c̸a̵n̸ ̶r̶e̷c̸o̸g̵n̶i̷z̸e̶ ̸t̶h̴a̴t̴ ̴o̵l̷d̵ ̷f̷r̶a̷g̴g̷e̶d̴ ̷u̶p̷ ̶v̶o̶i̴c̵e̶ ̷a̸n̷y̶w̷h̵e̸r̷e̶.̴” He got a whack on the head for that one.

When someone meets Bash Buggy for the first time, they always say something like, “Hi-OH MY GOSH! are you okay?? What happened to you??” Or like, “Uh.. heh... hiiii....? Are uh.. are you okay? You’re looking kind’a uh.. sick..” Or even, “Hel- WHAT IN THE NAME OF PRIMUS HAPPENED TO YOU??”. He always tried to brush it off by laughing or saying “H̶a̶h̷a̵!̶ ̶I̴ ̴g̵e̸t̶ ̴t̴h̶a̶t̶ ̴a̴ ̷l̷o̸t̷.̴”. But it always upsets him, It really does.

He never wanted this. He never wanted to look like a monster. All he wanted to do was help people, and look where it got him. He’s an ugly, blind mess. He never wanted this.

Bash Buggy cried when he first came to the realization that he is not able to see his old friends faces anymore, and he’ll never know what his new friends’ faces look like.

When he met Agent Fowler for the first time, of course he freaked out a bit. It hurt, but Bash did his best to brush it off. Then he heard about Jack, Raf and Miko, the three kids that would be here later today to meet him. He sighed internally, and prepared some snarky comebacks for their plausible insults.

Later, Bulkhead pulls up and Bash hears a very enthusiastic “WOAHHH!! THAT’S HIM??” He looks down and sees this tiny blob running up to him. “Hey! Are you Bash Buggy??” it asks. He squints at it, he cant make out its shape. Then it goes “Woahh! Your eye looks so cool! I wanna see!” it reaches up at him with grabby hands.

He looks at Bulkhead with this dumbfounded look on his face and he sees him shrug. He looks back down, and he just cant. see. it. So he crouches down as the other two blobs come running over.

“W̵h̵o̷ ̴a̵r̷e̴ ̴y̵o̸u̸?̵” He asks. He switches his eye between modes to try and see which one lets him see it the best. He settles on thermal. “I’m Miko! Hey! I like your voice! WOAHH did you’re eye just change color??? That’s so cool!!” He looks surprised. “C̴o̶o̵l̵?̴” “Yeah! I like your paint job by the way! Look at you! You're all different colors!!” He looks even more confused. “I̷ ̶a̸m̸?̴” Bulkhead snickers.

They all just start pointing out things they think look cool on him, like his eye, his blue tire covers, all that. Even though he cant see his own colors, he smiles really brightly. He’s not used to getting this kind of reaction. everything that was a sore spot for him, they seemed to like. Its safe to say he got attached to the kiddos really quickly.

There’s a lot more I feel I could talk about when it comes to his eye and how it effects his life, but this post is getting much too long. I hope this was interesting and what you were looking for! I hope you feel better, and feel free to ask any more questions! My inbox it wide open. ♡●ᴗ●♡

#my response #transformer ocs #my original stuff

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sweetest-honeybee · 4 years

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To Hell and Back

Chapter 8

Summary: The evils hermits take their chance to dethrone Hels a bit earlier than expected. NPC Grian gets a little stabby stabby with Hels and it lands him injured in the overworld. Hugs and cuddles ensue.

Characters: Helsknight, BadtimesWithScar, NPC Grian, Evil Xisuma, Xisuma, and Welsknight

TW: Blood mention, unconsciousness, mentions of dying, it’s a bit angsty this time lol

Long chapter incoming! (I’m on mobile so I can’t to the read more thing ;v;)

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Steadily, as the days went by, more minor attempts at taking the throne were made by other people. Some caught the main hall on fire, others exploded the stables, and some even sent hit men to take out Hels altogether. Still, he stood his ground and each day inevitably brought more and more death threats.

He wondered why they wanted to kill him in general. Technically, if he read the rules correctly, there was no need to kill the Champion in order to take the throne. They mostly just had to be scared enough to step off of it and admit some kind of defeat. Which he could certainly do but Hels wasn’t exactly a fan of being seen as a coward for retreating rather than fighting.

Around Thursday, one of the other evil hermits came to dethrone him themselves. It was BadTimesWithScar, dressed head to toe in netherite armor. He appeared near the doors of the throne room where Hels was sat.

“Didn’t take you much for the fighting type, BadTimes,” Hels commented. The other alter merely glared at him.

“I wouldn’t be so cocky. Step off or we’re doing this the hard way.”

“We haven’t already been doing it the hard way? Half the castle is blown to pieces.” Hels rolled his eyes. “Also I’m not stepping down, I’m no coward. I have guards lining the sides of the room, you’re awfully outnumbered.”

BadTimes surveyed the room and Hels was right. Each guard stared him down like prey. He chuckled. “Oh, I’m not.”

Hels raised a brow. “And what exactly is that supposed to mean?” He stood from his throne. “Are you dense? There’s a hundred times the amount of people here than you.”

BadTimes grinned. “I don’t need to do anything, I’m afraid. You might want to look behind you.”

Hels turned quickly and there stood another of the alters- NPC Grian. Guards aimed crossbows immediately but were too late to react when the NPC pulled out a dagger and before he could react, the blade was already through his stomach. The knight met the blank gaze of NPG, sending him a sour expression through the now searing pain.

Ah, I see what he meant, he thought.

Suddenly, everything began going silent. Hels could see the guards charging at the NPC and he assumed they did the same to BadTimes. Arrows were sent flying and people were presumably yelling.

Wordlessly, he looked down at the wound and brought a hand to it slowly. Deep red liquid oozed out of the gaps of his fingers. He stared at it, expressionless. Maybe a hint of surprise crossed his features but he hadn’t noticed when a few guards were calling his name and asking if he was alright.

Was this what shock felt like?

He knew he probably was fine. Maybe. Maybe he wasn’t and that was just his ego telling him that he could simply survive through anything. He stumbled a bit and looked around. His vision was slowly becoming darker around the edges and only then did he begin panicking.

The panic wasn’t hardly external. His breaths left in shallow exhales through his nose and his hand tightened around the dagger still stuck in his upper stomach. However, internally, he was asking around for help. You can’t really expect such a stoic and hateful person to really keep up their facade in the midst of dying. He didn’t want to die.

Without thinking, a portal opened in front of him and he shakily stepped through it. More of his vision became blotchy and a wave of dizziness and nausea passed over him. Hels fell to the ground on his knees and flashes lined everything in his field of sight. He grew tired. Maybe he could sleep off the final effects of this and start again as a cloud of black fog.

While he thought, a figure was soon in front of him and another figure at his side. By now he couldn’t really keep his eyes open and even if he could see past the red and pink blobs in his vision, he wouldn’t recognize them anyways. He felt more hands join him on the dagger and just before everything finally went to darkness, he was standing again, yet leaning on something else.

It only felt like a few seconds, maybe a minute at most. He assumed by now he’d see that weird light that everyone talked about during death. But there was nothing, just an endless void and his thoughts.

The Hermits had the luxury of respawning after they died. That was simply because they were from the overworld. Clones and entities from other dimensions didn’t respawn like ghasts and pigmen, for example. Hels was among these kinds of creatures.

Additionally, Ex was too, he assumed. The man said he was an entity strung together loosely in the lowest levels of the Void.

Faintly, he could hear voices in the distance of the darkness.

“Is....Cloning machine?”

“Yes….shouldn’t...here.”

“Look, I know he......Ex…...friend….” Slowly, the words began becoming more muddled. He tried to catch onto what was happening around him. He looked around for any signs of waking up and a small glowing orb appeared in front of him, startling him.

“Is this….” he stared at it quite sadly. At least nobody was there to mock him for it. He sighed. “Well, if it must happen.” He reached out and touched the orb, everything falling dark again.

What he didn’t expect was opening his eyes to a blank white ceiling and sounds of machinery. He inhaled and raised a hand to his throat.

Still alive, he assumed.

He then looked at his hand, a small clamp around his finger. He made a confused expression and took more time to adjust his eyes to the room he was in. Around him were pale beige walls and a singular painting on the wall opposite of him of a cat. He looked to his left where a couple different devices were sat. They didn’t hardly look familiar to him so he didn’t know what they were. All he knew was that they were connected to him via various tubes and needles.

He exhaled and leaned back farther into the pillows behind him. This must be some kind of clinic. It looked a bit similar to the one they used in Hels. A rarity, but they had them.

He scanned around a bit more, looking to his right. Windows were set up on this wall and a wooden door indicated at least some kind of exit. With a closer look, he saw Wels outside talking to a man who looked eerily like Ex. If he knew his mobs correctly, the suit resembled that of a Strider. Perhaps that was Xisuma from what Ex had told him about the admin.

The door was slightly ajar and he could make out more of their conversation.

“He’s special to Ex. They’re finally getting along and you want to get rid of him?”

The voice sounded so odd compared to Evil Xisuma. The accent he usually heard through a deep and robotic filter sounded too high pitched for what he was used to listening to.

“All I said was that he should stay in Hels.”

“Hels is why he looks like this!”

“He’s their champion or whatever! I’m sure he can just come back and kill whoever did it. He likes to brag about it, you know.”

“Wels, he was near death. He couldn’t have come back even if he planned to. He doesn’t respawn like we do.”

Of course Wels wanted to throw him back to the hounds. He wasn’t surprised by that. He did threaten to destroy the server and threw him in a hole with their last encounter. Though what he didn’t expect was Xisuma’s defense. He wanted Hels to stay in the overworld to avoid what had happened prior to now. Hels also wondered if this had to do with Ex’s odd need for their friendship.

Wels finally gave in reluctantly. “Well if he stays, he stays away from me and my cows. Poor things were terrified of him,” he grumbled.

Xisuma could help but to snort at the request. “Can do, I believe he should be conscious now. I’ll be off.” With that, Wels walked off and Xisuma huffed.

“I know you heard what he said, Hels.” Hels perked up a bit at the comment while Xisuma entered the room. “How are you feeling?”

“Like shit. You’re Xisuma, I presume?”

“I’ll take it.” He clapped his hands together. “And the one and only. So! What happened? If you’d like to talk about it of course.” Despite his statement, Xisuma seemed to wait patiently for an answer. Hels looked away from him as if he were ashamed to admit defeat.

“They wanted to dethrone me.”

“Oh?”

Hels looked back at Xisuma who tilted his head to the side curiously. “Uh, yeah. I’m not exactly well liked around there. We’re competitive.”

Xisuma nodded. “From what Wels and Ex tell me, I assumed so.”

Hels sat up a bit. “Ex talks about me?”

Xisuma chuckled at how the knight hardly questioned what his clone may have said. “All the time! He keeps asking me about ways to become your friend. How’s that working out, anyways? He can be a bit pushy.”

Hels thought for a second, a small blush spreading over his cheeks. “It’s…going well. He’s covered my room in flowers because I um...I kept a few previous ones.” He scratched at his neck sheepishly.

Xisuma lit up. “How sweet! He likes getting others into his fixations. I’ve heard you two have a meet up in the garden tomorrow.” Through the helmet screen, Hels could faintly see Xisuma’s eyebrows raising repeatedly and eyes that Hels knew were paired often with a smug smirk.

He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, we do I suppose. I thought the weekend would’ve already passed. I don’t know if I’m in good shape to do a lot of work though.”

Xisuma nodded. “Well, the damage was fairly minimal. Just a flesh wound, nothing some regeneration and health potions can’t fix. I think it just comes down to how well you can handle pain. You’ll be sore for a while.”

Hels snorted. “I’m used to it.”

“Good, good. Well, if you’d like, I can go retrieve Ex. He’s been dying to see if you were….well, dying. But I think he’ll be quite excited for the news!”

“Sure,” Hels replied with a lopsided grin.

Then Xisuma left the room. Before Hels could completely nestle back into the pillows, Ex ran in with excitement. He bounced happily at the sight of Hels.

“You’re alive! Xisuma said not to hug you because you might be uncomfortable with that and I might damage something but at least you’re here!”

Hels rolled his eyes for the second time and sat up, putting his arms out to ask for a hug. “Bring it in, nerd.”

Almost too excitedly, Ex pulled him into a spine crushing hug which Hels happily reciprocated. He thought for a second they were hugging a little longer than he expected but he paid no mind to it. When Ex pulled away, Hels winced at the aching sensation in his abdomen.

“Oops, sorry about that.”

Hels waved a hand dismissively. “It’s fine, I’ve had worse. Also a little strider told me that you like to talk about me. I hope you’re not talking shit,” he replied jokingly. He didn’t notice how Ex flushed a little bit.

Ex rubbed at his neck. “Oh yeah, I do. And flowers, I talk about flowers a lot. Oh! Will you be alright to do the gardening tomorrow?”

Hels flopped back onto the pillows. “Yeah, I think I will be. I mean I’ve got nowhere else to be for the next thousand years.”

Ex raised a brow. “You can’t go back to Hels?”

“No, if I do, I’ll be killed. That’s kinda why I’m here like this now.”

Ex seemed genuinely surprised at the information. “Huh...Well, at least you’re with me! I can show you around!”

Hels’s gaze softened just a smidge. “Yeah, at least I’m with you.” He yawned. “Jeez, didn’t think I’d be so tired already. What was that? A few minutes of being awake?”

“Yeah, Xisuma said you probably will be asleep again soon so I had to be quick with the conversation. Something about some kinda medication he gave you. I’ll leave you to nap then?”

Hels chuckled tiredly, another yawn rolling past his lips. “I mean...you can stay, I’ll just be asleep for a little while. Shit, you can lay with me. I don’t care.” He yawned again. “Just...don’t kick me…” Slowly, his half lidded eyes closed and he drifted off to a sound sleep.

Ex couldn’t help but to stare. While this was the second time he’d seen Hels sleeping, the first time was in the dark so he couldn’t see the normally sharp features soften so much. He smiled faintly and looked around out in the halls. Nobody was there so he could take the opportunity to lay with Hels. This might be a once in a lifetime opportunity, he thought.

He also wondered if Hels even knew what he said before he fell asleep either, but that thought was quickly shoved to the back of his mind with new excitement.

He removed his outer armor and his boots, detaching his helmet from the main device over his nose and mouth and discarded it onto one of the chairs in the corner. Happily, he got into the bed with Hels, being careful not to tug any cords, and couldn’t help but to awe when the hellish knight nudged his own body into him peacefully.

This was normal right? Xisuma may not do this with his friends though, Ex wondered. Maybe it’s a private thing, he’ll have to ask X about it later.

#to hell and back #helsknight #evil xisuma #helsknight x evil xisuma #hels x ex #hermitcraft #long post

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ineffablefool · 4 years

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How to center and nice-size an image in an AO3 fic using a work skin

Maybe someone can use this? In my fic for the DIWS Good Omens Mini Bang, I embedded some images from my wonderful illustrator. The centered images will never be wider than the text, no matter the screen size, but they also are never stretched larger than their native size (I resized ‘em to 800px wide in my trusty paint program for faster downloading). Here’s how one looks on my giant monitor and on my phone screen:

If you have never done AO3 skins before then I promise they are not actually scary! You have the option of doing relatively complicated things with them, but this thing is simple.

Anyway this is how I center my images.

Step one: make a skin.

In your AO3 dashboard, click “Skins” in the menu (left or top of page, depending on if you’re on a big or small screen). This takes you to the Site Skins page, which are for if you want to make all of AO3 look different to just you. You want a Work Skin, though, which makes your fic look different to everyone, so click My Work Skins.

Click Create Work Skin in the top right and you’ll get an editor that’s similar to when you’re posting a fic! You only need to set two things. One, give it a title that makes sense to you (the title won’t be visible to people reading your fic). Two, paste some stuff into the big “CSS” box.

This is the stuff to paste:

.centered { margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center; }

.centered img { max-width: 100% !important; }

That was the stuff to paste! Just toss both of those two blobs in the big editor and click Submit. Now you have a skin!

Step two: use the skin in your work.

Open up the work you want to do this in. Find the Select Work Skin box (just under the Choose A Language box) and select the skin you just made. Yay! Sorry, the Homestuck and Undertale ones are just there for everyone and that’s how it is. (Nothing against Homestuck or Undertale. I just don’t like unneeded entries in lists.)

Step three: center your image.

This is the most complicated bit, only because I can’t give you an exact thing to copy-paste. But I can give you a basic template! Don’t try to paste this into Word or a similar word processing program. The quote marks could get turned into “smart quotes” (like the ones I typed there, just now -- see how the opening and closing quotes are different from each other?). If you need to save it off for later, Notepad or another very simple plain-text editor will be perfect, because it will keep the quotes as not smart quotes.

Find the spot in your AO3 work where you want the centered image to be. It would be between two blocks of text which are wrapped with tags, so something like this...

Into that space, you’re gonna hit Enter a couple of times (which I’ve already done in the screenshot) and then paste this block:

That was the block to paste. Before you’re done, you need to change two things!

BANANA goes away. Inside the quote marks where BANANA used to be, you need to put the URL of your image. This URL must start with http or https (preferably https), or else it won’t work. I can’t give specific instructions on how to get this, because it depends on where the image is hosted! If it’s only on your computer, or attached to an email, it can’t be embedded. It has to have been put somewhere on the web, like Flickr, Photobucket, or Google Drive. It will work to embed from Tumblr, but I don’t trust Tumblr not to change everything up and bork all the old image URLs, thus breaking your embedded images on an arbitrary date in the future. (Any image host could theoretically do this, but -- well. We’re all familiar with Tumblr, right?)

ORANGE also goes away. Inside the quote marks where ORANGE used to be, you optionally can (I recommend you do!) put a brief (200 characters or fewer) description of the image. This is text which is invisible when viewing your fic in a normal browser -- it’s there for screen reader technologies, used by people who are blind or otherwise have trouble seeing a screen. Their screen reader software will literally read out to them, so that they can hear it with their human ears, the description you put here. Don’t start it with “image of” or “picture of”, because the screen reader tells the human that it’s an image already. Here is a pretty user-friendly guide on how to write alt text! If you’re more technically-inclined, the W3C has more involved docs. Remember, the screen reader is going to say out loud whatever you put here, so don’t make it super long, or else you’ll force people who are using screen readers to wait through the long description for your story to continue.

A finished version of the banana/orange block might look like this:

Step four: do it again if needed.

If you have more images to center in the same work, just repeat step 3 for each! Step 2 has to be done once per work. Step 1 might be done once ever (and then you just keep pulling that same skin into many works), or you might do it multiple times (if you want other changes in the skin that are special to only this one work). I do a different skin every time I have a fic that needs a skin, but that’s because I do extra fancy things that are different for each fic.

You never have to do either step 1 or step 2 more than once per work, even if it’s multi-chapter. In future chapters of the same fic, just do step 3 again.

Step five: preview and/or temporary draft is your friend

I am an IT professional with a (technically expired but work with me here) Microsoft certification in HTML5/CSS and seven years of writing this stuff for pay under my belt. Even I don’t post without previewing. Preview and saving as a draft without publishing are both your friends.

Some fun(?) notes

What you are doing here is using cascading style sheets. The AO3 skin is a very simple stylesheet, which is a series of rules that your readers’ browsers will use to apply to text in your story. There are standards that all your normal sort of browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Edge, Opera...) are supposed to follow when they see these rules, so that no matter which browser someone uses, a webpage will look as similar as possible.

A skin created from the above steps defines a class named “centered” and tells the browser how “centered” should look. Then, in your fic, if you apply the class named “centered” to something in the big editor -- like, say, the aragraph tag that wraps around your image -- then the style from your skin will be applied.

The magic of cascading style sheets is that you can define your class exactly once and then use it many times. If you decide you want to change all the places you used it -- maybe you want every centered image in your 87-chapters-long heavily-illustrated fic to have a green border? -- you have to change exactly one place: your skin. The change will bubble down to every single place you used it.

Skins do not allow all the features of true CSS (no media queries; I am sad), and you can’t put comments in your skin (the editor strips them out). Browser-specific overrides also do not work (if you don’t know what this means, that’s okay, you have to go to extra work to try to use them in the first place). But they’re still pretty cool.

A lot of people will just put <center> tags around their thing, and use width=“100%” or some other number, but that is technically not standard HTML, hasn’t been for a very long time, and sooner or later Chrome is going to get clever and stop respecting it. (Google’s developers like to make Chrome very clever and change how it does things just because they feel like it. It makes my day job rather more difficult. Ask me about SameSite cookies!! Actually, don’t. Never ask me about that thing.)

For portrait-oriented illustrations -- taller than they are wide -- I like to float the image to the right of the text and have it take up no more than 50% of the width of the screen (as seen near the end of this chapter). But that is a more complicated thing than this one, and I am keeping it simple today. Maybe I’ll show how to do the nice floaty at some point.

For any-oriented illustrations, you could have a small resized version which links out to a larger version as a click-to-zoom thing. That is also a little more complicated, so it isn’t in this post.

Questions and clarifications welcome.

That is how to center and nice-size an image in an AO3 fic using a work skin! I hope you are having a good day.

#ineffablefool original post #man idk how i would even tag this thing #i'll worry about that later #not good omens #look you don't understand i love html and css this is fun for me #i don't get to do it very often at my job since they promoted me so i hafta get my kicks where i can

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darnedchild · 4 years

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Let’s Talk About Funko Pop Molly Hooper #3

“But wait, DC, what happened to Molly #2?” you probably aren’t asking yourself. She’s coming, but she’s a S4 Set!Lock Molly and I thought I’d continue off of my last Funko Pop Mod post with my second Lab Coat Molly (or Molly 3.0 as I call her in the privacy of my own home where there is absolutely no one listening).

Quick reminder of the two tips I shared last time:

Tip #1 - Soak the figure in hot water for awhile to let the plastic and glue soften. If you are luckily, the Pop will come apart easily. If you aren’t (as I haven’t been in most cases), you may have to result to several soaks, brute force, and/or a sharp blade. Hot water will also help you reshape some (but not all) delicate bits if they’ve gone a bit wonky.

Tip #2 - Compare your Pops before you begin to remove anything. Some heads/limbs can be virtually interchangeable, some require a lot of finessing to properly fit together. Measure twice, cut once.

On to Molly 3.0.

For my second go round with a Lab Coat Molly Hooper, I wanted to switch things up a bit. I decided to give her glasses since she is wearing them in her ID badge photo, even though she never wears them on screen.

This time I started with the Cosima Niehaus Pop from the Orphan Black line and Felicity Smoak from Arrow.

Unfortunately, they’re older pops and a bit harder to find now, which can be cost prohibitive.

Let me take this moment to mention that this is why I don’t sell my mods. Materials alone can range anywhere from $30 to $120 for each Molly, and that’s not counting my labor costs. No one wants to pay $150 for a single Pop made by a non-professional, and I can’t afford to charge less than that. Which is why I’m making these how-to-posts so you can make your own.

In this instance, I wanted to keep Felicity’s body for another Molly Project, so I had to be very careful with removing her head. This is also where I discovered that Funko heads and neck posts are not universally sized. Roughly put, Felicity’s neck hole is larger than Cosima’s neck post. I had to get creative with some super glue to make it work. I did not have access to sculpting putty at this point; I would highly recommend investing in some if you’re going to mod Pops.

Once I managed to get the head and body together and stable, I had to do a full body repaint.

You may end up with pretty obvious brush strokes. See Molly’s hair above. It’s my curse. Probably because I don’t actually know what I’m doing here and I’m just making it up as I go along.

Tip #3 - If my paint is too thick or drying too fast, I’ll mix a tiny bit of slow-dri fluid retarder or blending medium into it. Tiny amount. Tiny. You can always add more if you need to. Honestly, I’m pretty sure I’m using it wrong, but the slow-dri gives me more time to smooth out ripples and brush strokes and it’s not that expensive at the craft store.

The one place I absolutely hate seeing brush strokes is on the face. If I can’t get the paint smooth, I go in with one of those cheap eye shadow sponge wand things that no one uses anymore and lightly bounce the sponge across the “skin”. For some reason, I’m happier with a little speckle texture on the face than with brush strokes.

After the paint is dry, I always finish with a varnish. Above shows the difference between just the matte acrylic paint and a partial coat of matte varnish. (Her hair looks like a lighter brown in that picture because of the lighting, it’s really the same “Nutmeg Brown” as all the other pictures.)

A few fun details on this Molly: I painted Cosima’s book to resemble a clipboard full of paperwork. I used an ultra fine point Sharpie to add “writing” to the paperwork and to Molly’s ID tag. I painted shoelaces onto the shoes. Cosima’s shoes are booties, but I wanted Molly in something more in character; so I painted the upper edge of the booties a shade off from her khaki paints to make it look like a rolled cuff. The most iconic and recognizable piece of Molly’s wardrobe (other than a lab coat or the black party dress) is the cherry jumper, so I added some red dots to her white shirt. Molly’s ID photo is much too small a scale for my shaky hands to manage in detail; so I simply used some blue, brown, and beige blobs (with a little Sharpie) to give the vague idea of her ID.

Assuming no one tells me to stop writing about my mods, I’ll be back to talk about Set!Lock Molly as well as Matt the Radar Technician, Mary Watson, and the rest of the Sherlock gang that I’m hoping to tackle in the future.

Feel free to poke me if you’ve got any questions.

Sorry for the length of this post. If you follow me, you already know I ramble.

Toodles.

#molly hooper #funkopop #funko pop molly hooper #arts and crafts from a deranged mind #funkopop mods #my funko mods

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avengerscompound · 5 years

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The Five Stages - 3. Bargaining, 4. Depression

The Five Stages: An Iron Man Fanfic

Series Masterlist PREVIOUS //

Buy me a coffee with Ko-fi Word Count: 2145

Pairing: Tony Stark x F!Reader

Warnings: Age difference (not used as a kink), Drama, Angst, pregnancy

Synopsis: Tony tries to deal with the fact he has a pregnant girlfriend and a pregnant daughter by throwing money at the problem.

3. Bargaining, 4. Depression

Watching Tony trying to balance you and your pregnancy and the fact he also was getting to know his daughter, would have been funny if you weren’t directly involved in that balancing act. It wouldn’t even be so bad if his daughter wasn’t also your age and pregnant. But she was and everything just felt awkward and difficult.

You tried very hard to be patient with everything. Him, her, yourself. But it was like everything that was involved with you was now just a side project. Which was particularly painful after your first ultrasound.

Tony was right there by your side, holding your hand. Because of how early in the pregnancy it was they were doing an internal and you pulled a face and squeezed his hand as the tech moved the wand around inside you looking for the little flutter of life that was your baby.

She found it alright. Boy, did she find it. “Well, would you look at this.” She says moving the wand around. “Do you see this little flutter here?”

You and Tony look at the flickering black and white image in the mix of weird shapes and smudges on the screen. “Is that the heartbeat?” Tony asks.

“That’s right.” The tech replies. Tony’s hand squeezes around yours and the biggest smile breaks out on his face, making his eyes crinkle at the corners. “And over here, is the heartbeat of baby number two.”

It felt like time stops. You stare at the screen for what you were sure is an eternity but was really just a split second. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me?” You groan letting your head fall back on the table.

After your appointment, you and Tony walk back to his car and he swings his arm around your shoulders. “Think you might be able to stop speaking things into reality, honey?” He teases.

You groan and run your hands down your face. “Oh god, what if she is married to one of my exes?”

Tony starts laughing as he hits the unlock button on the red Tesla Roadster and opens the door for you. You smack his ass as you slide into the bucket seat and he goes around to the other side of the car and jumps in over the door. “Shall we see?” He asks getting out his phone and searching the internet. He flicks up a screen so it projected against the windscreen of the Tesla. “Says here that Sarah Waker married David Lee in a small ceremony in Westchester two years ago. Kept her own name I see.” He muses. “Here are some wedding photos. You know that guy?”

You narrow your eyes and peer at the screen. “No. I don’t know him.”

He closes everything up and starts the car. “Alright then. So relax. Shall we go check out some kinda baby emporium or bazaar and try and plan for twins?”

You nod slowly. “Yeah. Okay.”

“Twins for crying out loud. You don’t do anything by halves do you?” He teases as he pulled the car out of the street.

“God, Tony.” You groan. “How are we even going to do this? You’re like a million years old.”

He starts to silently laugh, pursing his lips as his eyes glittered. “You are a real little shit, you know that?”

“Yeah, but you love me.” You tease.

He leans over and quickly pecks you on top of the head. “Lucky for you.”

For the next week or so Tony went about hiring contractors to remodel the penthouse to there was a nursery right off the master bedroom. At the end of the day, he would sit with you on the couch while you ate, going through ridiculously expensive baby furniture and potential artists to paint a mural on the wall. There was a little print off of the scan with the two little peanut shaped blobs stuck to the fridge and you keep catching him staring at it and just after he’d come to you with some new expensive thing he thought he should pay for. He even brought up schools more than once.

Then he went to a doctors appointment with Sarah. She invited him to come to make him feel involved. Or so she said. You spent the day working in the lab and when you finished for the day he still wasn’t home. You ordered food in and ate it while watching TV waiting for him. He got home at around nine beaming. “Sorry I’m late, dear.” He says, flopping on the couch beside you and putting his feet on the coffee table. “I took her shopping after. All her baby things were second hand and I can’t have a grandson of mine without the best.” He stole a cookie from the plate you had. “Then I had dinner with her and David.”

You tense up a little at the mention of him shopping. Ever since you had met her, you had this feeling that she was after his money and she was so cold to you because you were getting in the way of it. You tried to shrug it off though. It was his daughter after all and you couldn’t get in the way of it. Nor did you want to. “It’s fine. I learned how to use the internet to order food a long time ago.”

He pats your knee. “You know you can get FRIDAY to do it for you, right?”

You laugh and clutch your head in mock frustration. “Damnit! I was trying to show off!”

Tony joins in your laughter and pulls out his wallet and opens it up. He slides out another ultrasound print out. “Look at this.” He says holding it out to you. “It’s an actual baby shape. Head and legs. Little hands. It’s all built just doing the last bit of coding.”

You chuckle at his use of words as you look at the black and white picture. It does look like a baby. Especially compared to the weird blob shapes that are the twins. You didn't think it is possible for a trip to a doctors appointment with Sarah could eclipse the fact he just found out he is going to have twins a week and a half ago. But here it is. Her baby looked like a baby. It's a real recognizable thing. Whereas yours are this abstract concept still. You aren't even showing yet. Just puking your guts out for half the day.

“That’s your grandkid.” You say touching the picture. “You’re going to be a grandfather.”

“I know. And you know what’s weird? I’m scared of so much stuff right now. Being a bad dad. Not being able to fix this with Sarah. Somehow doing something that messes us up. But the grandpa bit, not a big deal at all. You get to spoil your grandkids right? Buy them the toys their parents said they couldn’t have. Give them ice cream for dinner before sending them home. I can do that. That’s easy.”

You turn yourself toward him and run your hand down his neck. “I love you so much, you know?”

He smiles and shakes his head. “Alright, no need to get sappy.” He replies and leans in and kisses you.

That is how he balances things though. He’d spends way too much time and money on one of you, then suddenly switches to the other. You start to worry constantly about him. About what he's thinking is necessary to be a suitable father figure. You keep telling him he doesn't need to buy your love. That he has it. That the babies will love him regardless as long as he's there. He can't seem to stop. Work starts on the nursery. He hires an artist to paint a mural. He's designing tech to monitor breathing so he knew when they were going to wake up before it happened. He even donates a library to a school to ensure they’d get it. He keeps buying toys and clothes. It isn't just for the twins though. He brings things for you home regularly too. He keeps asking you if there was more he can do. Did you want to get massages? Go to a spa? Get your hair done?

For everything he is doing here for you it was more so with Sarah. To the point, they started house shopping. You tried not to question it, despite how uncomfortable it made you feel but the one time you do he said he missed out on so much that he owed her.

You and Sarah are not exactly getting along either. It's uncomfortable and awkward being around her. It makes you feel every second of the age difference between you and Tony when she's there. Not to mention she always speaks to you tersely, like you aren't welcome. Which makes you, in turn, speak to her that way.

So it isn’t a balancing act Tony was performing. It was a wildly swinging pendulum of trying to keep people happy around him by trying to buy their happiness.

That's until you wake one night to find the bed empty. You're now 16 weeks pregnant and having to see the doctor regularly because having twins is high risk. You had found out they were identical which upped the risk again. Things were going fine though. They were both growing at a fairly consistent rate. You were still working, but making sure to take it easy and not stay late. Sarah was coming up to her due date and really the baby could come at any time.

You get up and put on a robe, heading to the elevator and catching it to the engineering lab. Tony is right where you had thought he’d be. Working on another Iron Suit. Hyper Focused. But the stress is showing on his features. You approach him slowly and wrap your arms around his waist from behind. “Couldn’t sleep, old man?”

He doesn’t say anything for the longest time, just continues to work until he sighs and turns in your arms. He hides his face in your chest and his hands run over the slight swell of your belly. “I can’t do this. I don’t know how to do this. I’m trying. But how can I make up for all that lost time? And how can I be the father I need to be to these two when I am such a fucking mess? They’re gonna have a sister they barely know because you can’t be in the same room as her. They’re gonna have a nephew that’s older than them. I’ve fucked up so many things in my life and this just feels like the worst one. Normally I can fix it. I go to the lab. I spend some money. Not everything, but a lot of things that’s all I need to do. But this, this is so messed up and I’ve got no idea how to fix it.”

Your arms tighten around him and you bury your face in his neck. “This isn’t a money problem, Tony. You can’t just buy her love and I’m worried about you. I’m worried you keep throwing all this cash at her and that’s all she wants.”

He shakes his head. “I don’t care about the money. I have money. She can have as much as she likes, I’ll make more. I wish it was money. She’s like you. You know that? Just keeps saying I don’t have to, it’s too much. She doesn’t need it. But if I’d gotten to raise her, you don’t think I wouldn’t have bought her everything?”

You start to cry. The weight of the pain he's carrying suddenly bears down on you. It has never once occurred to you, that with all the concerns you have about him being used, that you are the problem here. Or at least a big part of it.

“I’m sorry, Tony.” You whisper against his skin. “I’ll fix this okay?”

He lets out a short laugh. “Alright, dear. Whatever you say.”

“I will. Or at least, I’ll make friends. I shouldn’t have been making it worse like that.” You insist.

He looks up at you and cups your chin. “I sometimes wonder what I did to deserve you.”

You shake your head. “From the sounds of it something pretty terrible. You better pick up the act there, pal.”

He laughs and pulls you into a kiss. It's hard and passionate, but you feel every ounce of the love he feels for you in it. When he pulls apart he rests his forehead against yours. “If you and Sarah could get along, it would really help.”

You give a small nod. “I won’t let you down.” Now you just have to think of a way to convince her of that too.

// NEXT

#tony stark #tony stark x reader #iron man #iron man fanfic #fanfic #fanfiction #reader insert #pregnancy #genius billionaire playboy philanthropist #the five stages #3. bargaining 4. depression

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artificialqueens · 5 years

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(I Can Still Recall) Our Last Summer - Chapter Seven (Group Fic) - pureCAMP

A/N - And here it is folks, the end of an era that no one cares about! The finale is upon us, and as always, I’d appreciate, you know, one nice ask *crying emoji*

Anyways, on with the 9.3k clusterfuck

Sharon had never felt more out of place in her life. The waiting room was mostly, for one, filled with elderly people, who kept to themselves until their name and number was called, when they would shuffle down the corridor and disappear into one of the many rooms. For the extreme opposite, the only young patients seemed to be children, coughing and spluttering and playing with the starkly coloured toys in the corner of the room. Sharon could tell from the decor that the clinic was expensive and high quality, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t bleak and grim at the best of times.

She tugged her coat around her body self consciously and shifted in her chair. Five minutes had been the expected wait time she had been given, and yet fifteen had passed with no mention of her name. Considering her increasingly-often need to dash to the bathroom for one reason or another, she wasn’t enjoying her time so far. And of course, on top of everything, she felt utterly exhausted.

In all honesty, she didn’t know what was about to happen. General knowledge told her she would be lying down and talking about what lay ahead of her, but she knew none of the specifics.

She really wished her friends could be with her.

Raja had wanted to come, and both her and Jinkx had begged for catch-up work so that they could miss their first two lectures to attend the appointment and then travel back, but they had been unsuccessful. Which meant - as Sharon had expected, but still foolishly hoped otherwise - she would be going in alone.

She knew her support base were thinking of her, but she really, really wished they were sat beside her. Raja would be boosting her self-esteem and Jinkx would be making her laugh, all while they rubbed her hands and soothed the churning anxiety in her mind.

Instead, she bounced her leg and hoped that would help to eradicate the nervousness.

“27, Mrs Abby Baker to see Dr Reed.” The automated voice called out.

Another white-haired woman struggled to her feet and shuffled, insanely slow, to her appointment. Sharon tried not to lose her mind and stared at the painting of a bunch of sunflowers in front of her.

Her mind had been made up; admittedly, she had made her choice the second her mom kicked her out of the house and disowned her. Raja and Jinkx warned her to think on it, just in case it was a spur of the moment, hot-headed decision, but she was sure. She still took their advice, however, and the more she dwelled on it, the more she knew she was making the right choice for her.

One way or another, she was going to have a baby.

After all, the baby didn’t ask to get mixed up in the drama and confusion of her summer. A six-week long affair and two fortnight flings had resulted - somewhere along the line - in the creation of a life that had the potential to be the best thing in Sharon’s topsy-turvy world.

Even if it wasn’t the best thing, it was pretty much the only thing she had. Sharon didn’t have a home, a penny to her name or any belongings worth keeping besides her few treasured items. It wasn’t going to be easy, but she was going to do her best to keep going.

Besides, in terms of her home life, it wasn’t like her decision mattered. Her mom would regard her as a sinner no matter what choice she made. She would still be alone, without a home or any money.

So she was going to see if the baby was healthy. If it was, she would keep it. Then it would be off to the island to begin a new life. Sharon comforted herself with the knowledge that she would only have to go to the mainland for checkups at the doctors and some occasional shopping. Everything else she needed could be obtained from her own little paradise - the island she would finally get to call her official home.

“31, Miss Sharon Needles to see Dr Visage.”

At the sound of her own name, Sharon’s breath hitched. She took a moment to compose herself and headed down the corridor. As she walked, she prayed silently that she wouldn’t completely embarrass herself by throwing up on the doctor, or something similar.

If Dr Visage did a double take at the nervous seventeen year old walking into her room, she did it subtly enough that it put Sharon’s mind a little at ease. The doctor had a kindly face, with thick dark hair tied back and sparkling eyes that told of her good humour and warm nature. She greeted Sharon with a friendly handshake and invited her to sit and talk before beginning.

“Sorry for such a long wait,” Dr Visage apologised. “You can call me Michelle, since I’m guessing I’ll be seeing you a lot. You’re Sharon Needles, correct?”

Sharon nodded.

“And you’re seventeen years old?”

Slightly embarrassed, Sharon opened her mouth as if to defend herself, only to be cut off with a reassuring voice.

“Hey, it’s okay.” Michelle told her. “I’m not here to push any agendas or judge you. My job is to support you and keep you and your baby healthy, nothing more. Don’t worry.” She smiled. “Now, I’m just going to ask you a few questions before we get started.”

She did her best to answer honestly, and listened carefully as Michelle explained why she was asking each question and what her answers would determine. She was gently walking Sharon through the entire appointment, which she felt incredibly grateful for.

“Alright,” Michelle scanned the computer screen in front of her. “I would put you at about nine weeks pregnant. Does that seem about right to you?”

Sharon thought back to where she had been nine weeks ago. Against her will, her mind was flooded with sensations she had tried to forget - the feeling of being nestled in Justin’s arms, foolishly believing it made sense that he would protect and cherish her. She stiffened.

“Yeah. Makes sense.”

Michelle smiled sympathetically, launching into a spiel about how it was difficult to predict the exact conception and clarifying that her estimation may be out by a few weeks - which made Sharon’s stomach churn. “We can discuss when you’ll be due in a moment, but it should definitely be in April. Now, I’m just going to set this up…”

Sharon’s mind was spinning. April. In April, she was going to have a baby. All of a sudden, a random day in a random month of the year would become one of the most significant dates in her life, and yet she had no idea which it would be. That thought alone sent her reeling, and she tuned in to what Michelle was saying a few seconds too late.

“I’m sorry, it’s going to go where?”

“It feels a little weird, but it doesn’t hurt.” She was reassured, with a little laugh. “And then I’ll just use this on your stomach if you can lay down here for me…”

Simply going along with Michelle’s instructions, Sharon lay back where she was directed, trying not to squirm as her shirt was lifted and the ultrasound set up. Michelle was busying around her, plugging things in and rigging sets and adjusting screens and switches that Sharon didn’t care to look at. Everything was happening far too quickly and she couldn’t take any of it in.

All at once, the room was filled with a strange hum. A faint gurgling thump could be heard. Sharon assumed it was the machine working - although not unpleasant, it was quite loud and she couldn’t make out anything in the crackling.

“That’s the heartbeat.” Michelle told her. “Hear it?” She imitated the quiet thumping with her hand. It was needless, however, because as soon as Sharon realized, her ears had identified the beating and she was transfixed.

“It’s already got its own little heart…” She murmured. “It’s so strong already. How is it this strong already?”

Michelle smiled warmly. “Their heart and your heart are going to work together in these coming months, as you’ll discover. Would you like to take a look at your baby?”

Choked up, Sharon just nodded. A lump had risen in her throat, much different to the usual nausea she felt. It took all of her willpower to hold back her tears in order to gaze at the screen, waiting for the image to appear. Michelle seemed to be as filled with anticipation as Sharon was, fiddling with the buttons in an almost frantic manner to strengthen the resolution.

The screen flickered to life. Sharon’s willpower shattered.

It was so small, curled up like a tiny bean right in the middle. Sharon had been expected some kind of shapeless blob that would trigger nothing inside her, and she found herself confronted with otherwise. She could make out a tiny head, the shape of a body and one little arm, raised as though it was waving at her.

“Baby’s just working on getting a little prettier for you,” Michelle commented, wordlessly handing her a tissue. “Most limbs are formed and their little heart is going strong. They’re looking perfectly healthy and a very good size. For reference…”

She leaned to one side, and then presented two photographs - one of her ultrasound, swiftly printed, and one of a small, pink cherry. “This is the rough size of your baby right now.”

Sharon’s fingers closed around the pictures, the tears spilling over her cheeks. “How can I already love it so much?”

Her baby, no bigger than a cherry, was tucked up inside her at that very moment, heart beating like crazy, and Sharon knew in that moment she would protect it with her life.

“I know just how you feel.” Michelle told her. “I have two daughters of my own… it’s scary but it’s magical. Treasure it as much as you can.”

With the appointment out of the way, and the realization of the baby solidified in her mind, Sharon turned her attention to the next most pressing matter - money. Again, Raja had offered all kinds of loans and financial assistance to help her, but Sharon knew she couldn’t rely on her friends forever. She felt bad even taking a penny from them. She needed work.

Sometimes, when desperate, she had been able to score shifts at the taverna that Maria owned, before the band would perform. Working the bar was easy, and it was decently popular among both locals and tourists, but she wasn’t too keen on that idea. Being surrounded with alcohol and drunk people during late night shifts…

No, it didn’t really appeal. Briefly, she wondered what opportunities there were for work on the island. Most of the businesses were family-owned, family-run, passed down from generation to generation. They were lifelong trades taught by father to son and mother to daughter, long-forgotten but highly valued arts that she had no chance of learning. She could sew, yes, but that wasn’t really enough. She had no hope of breaking into any local industries.

Then it hit her.

“Nope. No way. No way, sweetheart! I can’t let you do that!”

“Please, Pat!” Sharon begged, standing her ground so the powerful little woman couldn’t push her away. “You need me, I need you. It just makes sense!”

Pat sank into her armchair, sighing defeatedly. Her fingers curled around the glass of bourbon - an offer that Sharon had politely refused - and she swirled the liquid inside, staring at Sharon through the glass rather than directly in the eyes.

“Honey, how can I let you throw away your life looking after some crazy old lady?” She asked, pursing her lips. “I know you care, bless your heart, but you have so many opportunities, just like your friends.”

Sharon shook her head. “I don’t, Pat. I wish I did. But I need this job, and you need me.”

“Sharon… why do you need this job so much?” Pat’s voice was heavy. She seemed to sense the almost solemn mood of the conversation, the gradual shift from a casual offer to a hint of desperation.

Lowering her head, Sharon swallowed and crossed one leg over the other, fidgeting uncomfortably. It felt strange to be sitting opposite the old woman without Willam slung over her lap, but that was part of her predicament in the first place. She would have to get used to it - because she wasn’t taking no for an answer.

“I think you know why.” She mumbled, and cleared her throat. “If she hasn’t told everyone out of shame and disgust, then you’ve probably already noticed.”

Sharon didn’t miss Pat’s wince. It was unsurprisingly but still hurtful that her mom had outed her business to everybody in the church and wider community. She followed Pat’s gaze, watching as she eyed Sharon’s stomach and then, for the first time, looked into her eyes.

“I have to ask-”

“I don’t know.” Sharon predicted the question before it could leave her lips. “Would you still take me on if it wasn’t his?”

Pat smiled gently. “Sweetheart, you know I don’t care about that. I just don’t want you to be trapped to some old lady, whether or not there’s a relative of mine in there.”

“Pfft,” Sharon retorted. “You’re hilarious, and you barely look older than twenty five.” At that, Pat laughed. “And I need money, first of all. Babies… babies are expensive.”

“You’re damn right. Fuck it, shut that door and make yourself comfortable. You’re hired.”

That solved two issues that had been pressing on Sharon’s mind since the appointment. From then, she fell into a comfortable, if slightly busy, routine. Each morning she rose early - most often to be sick whilst Pat, unable to bend over, perched on the edge of the bath to rub her back - and then made breakfast. Pat would then indulge in whatever she wanted to do that day, often drinking or visiting the market or just going on a short walk to the beach and back again, Sharon assisting her along the way. After lunch, another meal cooked by Sharon as she honed her skill, Pat would have a little siesta. In that time, Sharon found herself cleaning, finding the repetitive process oddly cathartic in soothing her growing anxiety. The day would finish after a late evening meal, a long chat and collapsing into bed.

It was an easy, relaxing structure to follow. It gave Sharon time to think, to focus on what she wanted, and update her friends on every little change through letters.

Pat had been asking a question for a while that Sharon didn’t want to answer. It was far too grim, too morbid for her to dwell on without getting teary. She wasn’t crying at every tiny instance, as Jinkx’s letters had been convinced she would, but it never failed to cause her eyes to grow misty.

“You need to think about it, Sharon. This won’t last forever.”

Sharon blinked and shook her head, continuing to polish the mirror. “Pat, I won’t let you keep talking like this.”

“But really!” Pat exclaimed, throwing her arms into the air. “I know we like to have a laugh, darling, but I’m ninety three years old and I’m… not in the best of health. This job isn’t a permanent fixture. Soon enough I’ll be in God’s kingdom, hopefully smiting your cow of a mother.”

Sharon giggled weakly, the joke doing little to alleviate the heavy topic. “I can’t think about that now. I have a job, an income and a baby to think about.”

Pat hummed. “I know, I know. But there must be more to life than this for you. You must have some kind of dream, some hope for something better. I’m a wealthy woman, sweetheart, I can help you, but not for much longer. Not with the way I drink, anyway.”

Shaking her head, Sharon opened her mouth to reply but was cut off. “As your boss, I demand you tell me no lies and indulge me in your biggest fantasy. If you could do anything, what would you want? Realistic or not.”

“I…” Sharon swallowed, dropping the rag and studying herself in the mirror. Her bump had grown. “I want to have my own hotel. I don’t know what I’d call it, but it would be peaceful. You don’t have to worry about anything when you’re there. If you need somewhere safe to go, you’ve got your own little pocket of paradise to go to. There’s no angry parents, you can just dance and enjoy the food and the entertainment like you’re supposed to.” Inadvertently, she balled a fist. “No one judges you for being a single mom. Nobody stares and calls you names. You get treated like a real person there.”

Pat’s expression softened. “Sweetheart-”

“It’s a pipe dream.” Sharon said abruptly, picking up the rag from the floor and viciously scrubbing at the mirror. “I’m young and I’m pregnant and I’m poor. I didn’t graduate high school. What would I know about running a business?”

The old woman shook her head. “You’re thinking too much. Who says you can’t? If you had a bunch of buildings and some money to make it into a hotel, who says you won’t be able to make some magic out of it?”

Sharon sighed. “I don’t know.”

Slowly, carefully, the old woman rose from her seat, shuffling to slip on her shoes and then pressing a kiss to Sharon’s forehead. She beckoned Sharon outside, leading her down the front path and up some of the many steps around the island.

“Pat… where are we going?”

She shrugged. “I could tell you were getting upset, so I figured I’d cheer you up. I have a little gift for you. A thank you for everything you’re doing for me.”

Sharon shook her head as they walked. “Pat, you don’t have to thank me! I’m happy to be caring for you, and I…”

She trailed off. The walk had only been ten minutes at most, and now the two found themselves stood in front of a small cottage. It was wide and squat, tucked in the landscape like most of the tavernas, and the front door was wide open. Pat was smiling.

“Pat.”

“Check it out.”

“Pat.”

“Go on. Go inside.” Pat grinned, pleased with herself.

“Pat, you didn’t…”

Pat nodded. “Go look around!”

Somewhere inside her, Sharon knew she should’ve been feeling a little guilty. Pat had paid out of pocket for this little place, all for her. It was by no means big, but Sharon didn’t need acres of land and a house filled with splendour. She needed a home to raise a baby in, and this seemed to be perfect. Besides, she reasoned - Pat was far wealthier than her crass attitude and humble lifestyle let on. Sharon knew that the entire Belli family, Willam included, were fabulously rich. This was probably pocket change for her.

The kitchen was small but open plan, nestled in alongside a small living space with a worn red sofa and two armchairs in the middle. Although old and slightly creaking, the wooden stairs held strong as she ventured further into the house, noting a small bedroom with a double bed, a bathroom and one larger, empty room.

This could be the nursery, Sharon thought absent-mindedly.

She hurried downstairs again, where Pat had settled herself into an armchair. Her wrinkled fingers were clasped together, her entire demeanour one of pure satisfaction.

“It’s not perfect, but…” Her eyes gleamed. “It’s yours. You can’t be cooped up with me any longer. We’re running out of space, the size of us both.”

Sharon laughed, fighting back tears. “I love it. I love it. I don’t know what to say.”

“Don’t say anything.” Pat pulled her into a tight hug. “I had some lovely young men come and carry your things here, so everything is either stowed where it should be or sitting in boxes around the place. I didn’t expect you to unpack alone, so help is on the way, but…”

She smiled. “I’m off to the taverna. I’ll see you later today.”

Loneliness became the next biggest challenge Sharon had to face.

Of course, she still saw Pat everyday. Their routine had been revised slightly, but she was nevertheless a full-time carer for the old lady. Pat had started to sleep more and go out less, so Sharon’s duties lessened over time. She cooked and cleaned and chatted, and then returned to her own space.

And, naturally, she was never entirely alone - her bump made sure she could never forget that. She would always have her baby with her, snuggled up tight.

But she missed everyone dearly. It had been difficult for Raja and Jinkx to coordinate visiting, and so far they hadn’t managed. They exchanged letters as often as possible, but Sharon could hardly bear the waiting. It took days for her letters to arrive and days to receive responses back. Her best friends were too far away for comfort.

Overall, she just felt alone.

The past few days, she had taken to wandering her home. It was looking better now that she’d put some love and care into it - a fresh coat of paint and some new second-hand furniture had worked wonders, all paid for with her monthly paychecks. Most of the time, her mind was occupied with thoughts of the future; her baby was going to grow up inside these walls, and create lifelong memories that didn’t exist yet. Good things lay ahead, but they weren’t close enough yet.

Sharon filtered through her wardrobe, wondering if she should give up the ghost and toss out some of her old clothes. It was abundantly clear that they didn’t fit anymore - nothing did, but sentimental attachments kept her from throwing some of the garments away. Even the damned blue sequin dress that had forced her to reveal it to her friends held memories she wasn’t sure she could let go of.

“What are you doing to me, baby?” Sharon murmured, gently cupping her bump. “I never used to be like this.”

Her fingers suddenly brushed against a familiar fabric, surprising her. She could pick out the exact fabric any day, and identify it from a line-up of thousands of similar ones, but it didn’t make sense. Why was it…?

She pulled at the hanger, allowing the shirt to slip off into her hands, and let out a quiet gasp. Sharon let herself rub the fabric against her palm, the memories imprinting themselves into her skin and forcing her to relive them.

“See, that looks way better on you than it ever did on me,” Justin commenting, shifting himself into an upright position. The covers were carelessly slung over his legs, leaving his naked chest exposed and glistening with sweat. Sharon longed to rip the covers off and run her fingers through her tousled hair, but she resisted the urge.

“Doesn’t it always?” She teased, twirling. His white shirt had been the first item discarded; she had been unable to keep her hands off of him as soon as they shut the door, and had ended up pinning him against it as she undid the buttons.

Now, in the glow of their post-coitus haze, she had wrapped it around herself, inhaling the scent of his cologne. It felt like she belonged to him, and she loved it.

“I’m wounded!” He gasped, clutching his heart. “Light… fading…”

Sharon burst into giggles. “What, because I look better than you?”

“Darkness… approaching…”

Sharon rolled her eyes. “Shut up, drama queen. I’m never taking this off.”

“I need… the kiss… of life…” Justin rasped, pathetically reaching forwards as if he hadn’t just been confident and swaggering only moments ago.

“You do know the kiss of life isn’t a kiss, right?” Sharon checked, watching him through the mirror. Her own hair was a mess, her lipstick was smudged - undoubtedly peppered all along the muscles on his chest - yet there was a light in her eyes that had never been there before. Justin set her on fire and his flames were inescapable.

Justin dropped his act and laughed, leaning back to fix Sharon with a stare that sent lightning bolts zipping through her. It was all she could do to hold back a sigh.

“Of course I do. I need your kiss of life, not a kiss of life. A subtle but important difference.”

Sharon cocked an eyebrow, trying to act calmer than she felt. “And that difference is?”

“Get over here.”

He didn’t have to tell her twice. Every ounce of willpower dissipated from her body as she collapsed on top of him, kissing hard as he tore his shirt from her body. Both were desperate to feel skin on skin, refusing to let any barrier go between them. Sharon pressed herself against him and inhaled again, embracing the familiarity of the moment. She found herself smiling into the kiss.

“You’re so fucking gorgeous,” Justin growled, pressing heated kisses along her jaw and down towards her breasts. “Keep the shirt, it’s yours as long as you agree to be mine.”

Sharon giggled, love-drunk with the exhilaration coursing through her veins. “I already am, silly.”

Oh, how things had changed since then.

She held the shirt in her fist, letting its scent walk her through the memories and finally, briefly, allowing herself to think about him. Had he been thinking about her? Would it ever cross his mind to come back, to find her and fall in love with her all over again?

Her mind raced with scenarios, seemingly desperate to play them all out in the short time she was allocating. Was it possible that he was married now, but desperately unhappy, wishing nothing more than to return to the island and live out his life with her? Did he ever suspect that perhaps their nights together had resulted in something more? Was he trapped in his normality, clinging onto their faded romance to keep him going through the dreary work day? Did he miss her more than life itself?

Or - the thoughts she tried to push aside, to not allow any real estate in her mind - was he happy now? Had he used her as a stress relief, and settled easily back into his picture perfect life? Had his white wedding gone ahead, surrounded by family and friends who lauded the faultless couple and their commitment to one another? Was Sharon nothing more than his dirty secret?

It did no good to dwell on such thoughts. Sharon knew that now. Justin had loved her, and then he had stopped loving here. There was little else to it, she knew.

At least, from his perspective.

As she went to hang the shirt up once again, a slight fluttering stopped her in her tracks. Slowly, she retracted away from the closet and held the shirt again.

Was that…?

Sharon shook her head. She was imagining things for certain. Still, in spite of her surety, she slipped her arms into the soft white fabric, feeling a slight sense of accomplishment at being able to wear it comfortably. Moments later, her stomach fluttered again.

The baby was kicking.

It was a strange sensation; sort of like a muscle contraction she couldn’t control, a tiny little thump. The baby was trying to make certain that she knew they were in there, fighting for mama’s attention. Battling through the heartache of her old memories and the outpour of affection towards her baby, Sharon placed a hand over the fluttering spot and smiled gently, letting out a sigh.

“Well, I guess we know who your daddy is, huh?” She swallowed heavily. “You definitely seem to know him.”

Dear Sharon,

I miss you so much, you bitch! Jinkx + I coming next week for birthday fun so we’ll see you soon I hope! Can’t believe you’re going to be eighteen. And that you’re pregnant too. Wild.

Dr Visage is an angel, isn’t she? Glad she’s taking care of you.

Drop in on my mom at some point this week. She has been knitting tiny socks for the baby because she’s a little eager.

Eric is being a cunt again. I think I might just have to fuck his brother Don to spite him. Thoughts?

Sent you some cash with this letter, and a little camera too, in case you wanna take pics of stuff. Memories for when you’re old.

See you Sunday!!

Your favourite whore,

Raja xx

–

Dear Sharon,

I hope you’ve been working on some melodies between cooking your baby and looking after Pat because I’m DYING to sing with my girls again. It’s been too long!

Don’t have much time to write because Amy is due to arrive any minute and you know how it is. Looking forwards to seeing you next week though! What’s the betting that Raja either has a rich boyfriend or convinced her dad to let her have that weird cosmetic procedure she keeps banging on about? Life in plastic might not be so fantastic.

Also, I read that sometimes pregnant women get wild cravings so if you start eating weird things I’m gonna laugh my ass off. If it’s normal things then that’s boring and you can do better. Mom says if you ever want some of her spicy bean casserole she’s happy to make it for you. Anyways, update me on your alien.

Amy’s here, gotta go. Miss you!!

Love Jinkx xx

–

Sharon stood on the dock and watched the tiny dot grow nearer and nearer to the island. She had to laugh - of course they had decided to wait for the mid-morning tourist ferry to get them to the island, rather than rowing themselves over. Then again, she reasoned, she had always been the best at rowing, and she was officially out of action. And she’d written to each of them just to make sure they knew that under no circumstances would she be meeting them on the mainland for convenience.

Her newly developed anxiety about going to the mainland alone was something she needed to deal with eventually, but not right now.

Eventually, growing tired from standing for so long, Sharon took off her shoes and sat at the end of the dock, letting her feet rest in the sea as she watched the boat beginning to approach. Only when it drew close enough to make out the shapes of the passengers did she stand again, not wanting to be caught sitting. It was odd, she thought to herself, that it felt so embarrassing to have to cave to her body’s needs. She was pregnant - there really was nothing wrong with sitting.

But whatever. She stood and watched, smiling as the passengers disembarked and went their separate ways. Predictably, her two goofy friends were the last to get off; they always wanted to make a grand entrance.

At once they were upon her, squeezing her tight and laughing joyously at the reunion. All four of Raja’s suitcases had somehow jammed into Sharon’s side, and Jinkx’s wide-brimmed sun hat was brushing against her face, but she grinned into the embrace nevertheless. It was the most physically uncomfortable yet emotionally fulfilling hug Sharon had ever experienced. Almost instantly, some of the stress she had been holding in a pent-up ball in her chest melted away.

“Oh my god, you’re huge.” Were Jinkx’s first words as she wriggled out of the hug, staring at Sharon’s bump.

She giggled as Raja hissed, “Jinkx! Bolster!”, then looked down and matched her friend’s wide-eyed, shocked expression.

“Shit. You are pretty big. Still gorgeous though!” She added, Jinkx nodding in agreement.

Sharon laughed and entwined her fingers into her friends. “Did you forget how long you’ve been gone? Things have changed since then.”

Jinkx paused, then shook her head. “I’m not in the mood to do maths.”

“Twenty weeks.” Raja rolled her eyes, stealing the hat from Jinkx’s head to model it on her own. “So that’s…”

“Halfway point.” Sharon nodded. “About four and a half months. But we’ll hear all this later, at the appointment. I thought you guys might wanna come along and see what it’s all about.”

Raja and Jinkx smiled warmly, and Sharon felt her heart expanding with gratefulness. “We’d love that.”

“Anyway,” Sharon grinned. “Wait until you see my place. It’s not much, but… I love it. It’s a home, and it’s not her home.”

In preparation for their visit, Sharon had bundled nearly every blanket and pillow she owned into makeshift beds, though she knew their first night would be spent squeezed into her bed together. Maria had kindly offered to house them for a while, but she’d politely declined; the older woman was already doing enough for her at this point.

It was disconcerting, sometimes, how much Sharon felt she’d matured. Only a few months ago she had been emotionally volatile, sullenly hiding from her good-for-nothing mom, trying to spend all of her time at her friends’ houses. Now she had her own place, and had been desperately cleaning and tidying and prepping for their arrival like some sort of crazed mother goose.

Maria greeted them at the taverna when they stopped for a break, panting in the early morning heat with the effort of hauling suitcases up the notoriously steep, rocky island. Although it was much cooler towards the start of the day, the girls still found themselves sweating and desperate for something to drink when they stopped off. Like an angel, Maria had ushered them to their usual table near the jukebox and busied herself with two cocktails and a glass of icy water whilst Raja tried to find a decent song to play.

“We should do a Supermodels reunion tonight!” Jinkx suggested, humming one of their old tunes. “Thoughts?”

“Hell yes!” Raja replied, at the same time as Sharon went, “Absolutely not.”

They both turned, surprised. “What? It’s a terrible idea! You want me to perform looking like this?”

Jinkx pursed her lips. “You look beautiful! And it’s not like we need to dance, we can just sing the words and rake in some extra pennies. We could do Kisses of Fire again, or something else just as fun.”

Sharon shook her head. “I don’t think so. I don’t think I can even reach those notes anymore.”

It was only a half-lie. She hadn’t tried to sing properly since she found out, having had no real reason to. Singing didn’t bring her the same joy that it once had - it wasn’t an expression of her freedom anymore, but a reminder of how limited she had become. No, the main problem was how often she had been thinking about the one person she swore she wouldn’t. Refreshing the memories of them in her head would only worsen the situation.

Really, she had tried to move on. Justin obviously had. But it wasn’t easy to erase the romance that changed her life for both better and worse. She couldn’t even pour her heart out onto paper anymore, let alone into music. She had tried, desperately tried, to send him a letter. Just to explain everything.

Dear Justin-

No.

Justin-

Far too formal. As if he was in trouble. She didn’t want to make him feel like that - even if she knew that she was in trouble.

To the one that got away-

No, no, no. Who did she even think she was?

Dear Justin,

I don’t want to write this letter. I don’t know how to write this letter. You’ll never read it, anyway, because I won’t send it. I know that you’re married now, and probably really happy. In a way, I’m glad I could help you decide if that perfect life laid out for you was the one you wanted or not.

I’m lying. It kills me that you chose her, it kills me that I was just a stepping stone. But I want you to be happy, and I can’t ruin your happiness.

What kind of person would I be if I ruined your bliss by telling you about my hell? Is it better or worse if I don’t tell you? There are so many outcomes that I don’t want to think about. Some good, some bad. I’m stalling telling you the truth in a letter that I won’t ever send, that’s how afraid I am.

I think part of me wants to accept that I am a good judge of character, and I know you to be a good person. If I told you… If I told you the truth, would you come back? It’s strange. I’ve lost all confidence, I don’t know if you would. But then if you would, is it out of guilt? I shouldn’t really dare to hope that any spark lingered. Your absence probably proves that the spark is gone, at least for you.

All I’m doing at this point is wasting ink and paper penning this useless letter to you. I don’t even know where in the world you are. Maybe you’re miserable like me. Maybe you’re the happiest you’ve ever been.

I truly don’t know if, if I saw you again, I would embrace you with open arms or cast you to the side. It’s one of those heart vs head decisions where I know my head is right, but I know my heart will betray me.

Perhaps it’s right that I won’t send this letter, and you’ll never know about me and the baby. It’s easier that way. I just have to stop thinking about you.

She remained subdued for most of their journey to the mainland, where Michelle was waiting for the three to arrive. It was all she could do to try and clear her mind before the appointment, not wanting to be hung up about her ex in one of the most significant moments of her life. Thankfully, as soon as she saw the grainy image of her baby on the screen before her, all of her outside stresses melted away.

Michelle examined everything carefully, searching for discrepancies Sharon had no idea the woman could spot. After a few tense moments, Jinkx and Raja holding her hand on either side, she broke into a huge smile.

“A little small, but nothing to worry about. Some women just have small babies! My two were huge, so you got lucky.” Michelle grinned.

Raja, ever impatient, rolled her eyes. “Michelle, that’s charming. Can we see the magic now?”

She chuckled. “Fine, fine.”

Sharon held her breath.

“She’s perfectly healthy, congratulations.”

The birds outside seemed to sing a little louder, the sun shining a little brighter than before. Flowers bloomed in fragrant bunches. A million wrongs were righted all at once. Little pockets of happiness seemed to burst into joyous laughter all over the planet. Collectively, the world let out a little relieved sigh.

“She! Jinkx, Raja, did you hear that?”

Jinkx squeezed her hand even tighter. “You’re having a girl!”

“Another Supermodel!” Raja joked, blinking away the tears in her eyes. “Oh my god, a little mini Sharon is on her way! Hi, angel!”

Sharon’s heart had never been so full. All of the loneliness, all of the stress and hardship that she had been through and knew still lay ahead of her, melted away into nothing. Though it had been far from easy and would only get harder as it progressed, none of that mattered. This little girl was going to heal her heart.

“I… I can’t believe this…” She murmured, welling up. “If only-”

She paused. If only Justin were here, she had thought about saying, but decided against it. There was still the possibility that Jaremi or Willam could be her little girl’s dad, though she doubted it. Of course, whilst she had no way of knowing, she was sure it had been Justin. Still, as Raja and Jinkx didn’t know about her other stupid rebound flings, there was no point in debating which one was the dad. All that mattered was that Sharon got to be her mom.

“What, darling?”

Sharon cleared her head and smiled. “Nothing. It doesn’t matter. I have you two and I have my girl. That’s all that matters, isn’t it?”

Jinkx tackled her in a hug, Raja choosing the safer option of bringing her hand up to kiss it. Their eyes were gleaming, and Sharon took a moment to appreciate just how supportive they were. Despite everything, she was lucky to have them in her life when she needed them most.

“You know what this means, right? Other than a new Supermodel?” Raja asked, earning a giggle from each of them.

“Enlighten us, Oh Mighty Raja.” Jinkx laughed, seemingly on the same wavelength.

“We need to go shopping!”

Sharon wasn’t sure how they’d done it, but she had been convinced to try and sing with them. Maybe it had been their fierce protectiveness and mutual excitement for the new life - a little girl! - growing inside her, or their never-ending support. Regardless, somehow, they had softened her already weak heart into giving in.

They arrived back at Sharon’s in the mid-afternoon, laden with armfuls of tiny baby clothes and shoes that seemed too small to ever belong to a person. Sharon had insisted that they kept their money for themselves, that she could manage on their own, but Raja had simply rolled her eyes and Jinkx had told her in no uncertain terms that as aunties, this was their job.

Highlights of the day included watching her friends become utterly smitten with the tiny pink pastels they were filling their baskets with, and feeling similarly clucky as they browsed endless baby aisles. Sharon found herself more fascinated with the soft muslin than anything else; in just a few months time, her baby girl would be alive and squirming, safely wrapped in a blanket just like the ones she stroked between her fingers as they passed by. Although it was terrifying, she looked forward to finally meeting her.

Another highlight, surprisingly, came from a scoff and a judgemental comment from an older couple. Sharon hadn’t noticed their attentive gaze, too engrossed in the ridiculously tiny shoes, but Raja and Jinkx were already on high alert.

“The state of young girls these days. I mean, she can’t be more than eighteen, look at her.”

“I’ll bet she did it just to try and stop her boyfriend from breaking up with her. Wonder how that turned out.”

The couple snickered, their comments loud enough for Sharon to hear them. She took a deep breath in and focused on the shelves in front of her, determined to ignore it and continue shopping. The girls had other ideas.

“Well shit, I sure hope you two aren’t parents. I bet your kids are the fucking bullies of the school, the way you talk.” Raja spat, spinning on her heel to face the suddenly affronted couple.

Jinkx nodded. “Accidents happen, doesn’t mean they can’t be happy miracles. Unlike you, she’ll be a great parent to her baby, because she cares about people and doesn’t judge others like an asshole.”

Eyeing each other, the couple each raised an eyebrow. “Typical irresponsible kids.”

Sharon saw Raja tense, and knew that any moment, she would launch forward and start a scrap with the couple. Needing to diffuse the situation, she grabbed Raja’s hand and pulled her back, smiling gently as she did.

“Ignore them,” She said softly. “Look, you don’t have to defe-”

“Get your nasty ass away from my fucking friend, you piece of unholy shit!” Raja struggled to get free, straining and pulling until the couple eventually took the hint and decided to get out of their way. When they were gone, she apologised and brushed herself down, her chest heaving with anger.

“I’m sorry. Did I hurt you?”

Sharon shook her head, unable to stop the grin from sliding onto her face. “No. You’re both awesome, I love you so much. You really don’t need to do that for me.”

“But we want to, baby. We want to.” Jinkx told her.

“I know. That’s why I love you so much.”

Encounters like that were one of the many reasons Sharon was so filled with anxiety about going to the mainland. It was comforting to have her friends so fiercely sticking up for her, but she still didn’t feel completely at ease until the island began to climb into view from the sailboat. It had truly become a safe haven to her in a way that transcended the little paradise that had once been her escape from her mother. Now, it was a home for her new baby, ready and waiting and protected.

That morning, Pat was sitting in her chair, fiddling idly with the knitting needles she seldom used. A small project hung from one of them, pink and white, and she looked uncharacteristically nervous. Sharon was on guard immediately, setting down her bag and sitting opposite her.

“Everything okay? Is there anything I can get for you?”

Pat shook her head. Sharon only continued. “Maybe that pouffe if your arthritis is acting up? I could run upstairs-”

Again, she shook her head, this time clasping Sharon’s hand in hers to silence her. Her eyes were kind and filled with a desolate sadness that Sharon didn’t understand, but wanted to fix. It was the least she could do.

“Honey, you’re in no condition be running up any stairs.” Pat reminded her, smiling gently as she blushed a little in embarrassment. “I need to talk to you about something, something important. I just want to come out with it first and explain later, save the build up. I don’t want to cause you unnecessary stress.”

Sharon held her breath, but whatever she expected, this wasn’t it.

“I’m going into a retirement home.”

A million questions scorched the tip of her tongue, practically falling over one another in a hurried attempt to get out, but not a single one made it past her lips. All she could do was examine Pat with the intensity of a terrified child, desperately wondering why she had made that decision. It made sense, given her age, but it now meant that Sharon was out of a job and at such a crucial time when money was so tight, she needed that employment more than ever before.

“My needs are getting more and more complex, I’m not getting any younger and we both know that. My family have agreed I could use the help and, sweetheart…” She squeezed Sharon’s hand. “I don’t want to rely on you when you have so much else going on. You have been an absolute angel to me, and you have a knack for looking after people like I’ve never seen. But in just a few more months you’ll be busy with a baby and I can’t take priority over that.”

At some point, Sharon had teared up. She wasn’t sure when.

“You’re going to be a fantastic mom, I know it. You’ve selflessly dedicated your time to me and I know you will do the same for that beautiful daughter of yours. I can’t wait to meet her. But I need to get out of your hair so you can focus on what truly matters. However-” The sad sparkle in Pat’s eyes made way for an almost mischievous, proud glint. “You didn’t think I’d leave you without a few gifts, right?”

Sharon sighed. “Oh, Pat, you know you shouldn’t-”

“Nonsense!” The old lady replied. “It’s my wealth and I’ll lavish it on whoever I choose. These are for you.”

She handed over three items - a piece of paper, an envelope, and the knitted thing - a tiny dress, perfect for a newborn. Sharon took the paper and read it, unsure of what to expect from the gift, after stroking the soft fabric of the dress and imagining it on the daughter she had yet to meet.

Pat had outdone herself.

“This… this is the deed to those old buildings on the top of the island…” Sharon murmured, before her gaze shot upwards. “Pat.”

She grinned. “I already said, caring for people is something you’ve proved you’re amazing at. I’ve called some renovation and repair teams… you’re building that goddamn hotel. Take care of your guests like you did with me and I guarantee you’ll be a success.”

The envelope, Sharon found moments later, was wadded with money.

“Even when I’m six feet under, I won’t have you going hungry on my watch. To help with bills, just in case you’re in this situation because of our Bill.” God, that woman was wicked. Sharon wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry, and settled for a weepy mixture of the two. She was downright speechless, a quality that few had the ability to render her into.

In a matter of weeks, everything changed. Pat was gone, Sharon was at home, and the waiting game of labour seemed to be the only thing on her horizon. Most days, she went out to check on the construction and talk planning with the team, who seemed equally shocked and impressed that their boss was eighteen and heavily pregnant.

Raja and Jinkx would be arriving soon, giving them plenty of time to support her before the baby came. They would have a nice, calm few weeks together, and then her daughter would finally be here and everything would begin to fall into place.

Raja and Jinkx arrived on the eve of forty weeks, perfectly on time, and were down at the dock.

Maria, the bartender and owner of the taverna, was washing glasses in the sink.

Maria’s son Jose was collecting new shipments of ale from the loading bay.

Sharon was out on a walk along one of the shallow cliffs, where Justin used to take her.

Not long now.

Raja and Jinkx stood chatting, excitedly wondering how long they would be staying before the baby came. Raja was complaining a little about having to lug her own many, many suitcases up the notoriously uphill island, and Jinkx was reminding her through her laughter that given their friend was nine months pregnant, she had to cut her losses.

Maria thought about Sharon, who had picked up a few extra shifts since Pat had entered the home, and wondered how her part-time employee and long-time performer was doing that day. It was about noon, so no doubt she was enjoying some lunch and preparing for the arrival in a few days time, her workload reduced to nothing.

Jose spotted the two girls on the beach and wondered which one of them was hotter, and which one was more likely to respond flirtatiously if he offered to help them. He fixated on the tall, dark haired one and offered to help both carry their suitcases up the island.

Sharon winced a little bit, let out a sigh, and then winced much harder. It hurt.

Raja, in her element, allowed the young man to take her bags and gave him a wink, hoping to convey everything she was willing to do. Jinkx, rolling her eyes, followed her friend and shook her head as they made their way towards the taverna, where Sharon was going to meet them.

Maria decided, on a whim, to see how Sharon was doing. She liked taking a walk around this time, and was most likely on her usual route. It was only a short journey from her small taverna to where she would probably be.

Jose began regretting offering to help. These girls were carrying bags laden with wet cement, clearly.

Sharon swallowed hard and tried to stand up. The pain had subsided but then it had come back, worse.

Raja and Jinkx chatted idly about how Sharon was late. Typical, really. They laughed and switched on the old jukebox.

Maria’s eyes landed on Sharon, registered the situation and bolted, promising to come back with help.

Jose sat down and thanked the lord his mother was gone, so he could pour himself a nice cold beer and let his poor arms rest.

Sharon waited. It was all she could do.

Raja and Jinkx gasped as a panicked Maria burst through the doors, alerting them that Sharon needed their help.

Maria grabbed her son and yanked the beer away from him, yelling at him to run ahead and help the poor girl to her feet, possibly even to carry her if she became too weak to walk.

Jose thought of his poor tired arms and silently prayed as he made his way to help.

Sharon got to her feet without Jose’s help and took his arm. It would be fine once she got to her house. That was what she told herself.

She was so tiny.

She had been cleaned and swaddled in soft yellow muslin as she started to cry, and Sharon’s arms reached out instinctively to cradle her. Her cries soon quieted as she relaxed into the safety of her mama’s arms, wrapped up warm and tight into a small bundle. Her little nose peeked out from the blanket, and her rosebud lips were parted slightly in an awed reaction to being alive.

Sharon’s chest heaved with the effort but she clung on to her newborn, needing the reassurance of her warm weight as much as the baby needed her heartbeat. Maria was removing towels and Jose was running to send a message on the next ferry to Pat and Raja and Jinkx were cooing, but Sharon had only eyes and ears for her daughter.

The name had been an easy choice. An homage to the woman who had given her a home, a job and a career to build, proving that life didn’t have to disintegrate into nothing during a bad situation. Patricia may have been an old name, mostly unsuited to a small baby, but the name Sharon had chosen fitted perfectly.

“I bet that asshole Justin will kick himself when he finds out what a beautiful daughter he’s missing out on.” Raja cursed, before going starry-eyed once again and cooing at the baby. “God, she’s just stunning, isn’t she?”

Sharon sighed gently. “Don’t say his name. Please. Not in front of Trixie.”

Of course she couldn’t send any letter to him, or let him know. There was an entire, living breathing baby in her arms, and that was no small feat to try and care for. It was cruel of her to expect Justin to be able to cope with it, and even crueler for her to inflict an unwilling parent onto an innocent child. Things were better this way.

“So she’s never going to know about him?” Jinkx asked, using one finger to lightly rub against Trixie’s impossibly soft cheek.

“Never.” Sharon said firmly. “Look, she’s so small. She’s all mine.”

“She has the most tiny perfect little features…”

“She’s the image of you, Sharon. You to a T.”

The compliments kept coming, but Sharon didn’t really hear them. Her mind had drifted, trying and failing to imagine her own mother feeling the same compassion for herself as a baby. In that moment, she knew that she would endure any hardship, sacrifice anything, if it meant Trixie would be safe. She would never allow her precious daughter to come to any harm, or feel that she couldn’t go to her mama in times of need.

No, Sharon would do it differently. She would be better than her own mother, and Trixie would be better than them all. Sharon would guide her.

“Don’t make the same mistakes I did, baby girl. Do it right, unlike your mama.”

#rpdr fanfiction #our last summer #purecamp #sharon needles #raja gemini #jinkx monsoon #submission #m/f au #mamma mia au

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sickaede · 6 years

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Art and Writing Q & A

Ok so my askbox has gotten crazy amounts of people asking me questions about my art, writing, etc. and I figured instead of replying individually (since most are anons) I would just throw up a Q & A to get everyone’s questions all at once. As an added bonus, since I am terrible with explaining things in writing I made a little time-lapse to show the art process as well. Hopefully this satisfies everyone’s questions, but if something you wanted to know was not answered here feel free to send me an ask, they are always welcome!

The video is at the bottom of the Q/A, click read more and scroll down to see it please!

Questions about comissions, other social media, etc. Q: Do you take commissions? A: Yes! All my comission info can be found on webiste commissions page. If you’d like to donate as well, I also have a Ko-Fi page, and offer (optional) doodle rewards for donors. Q: You don’t post on tumblr frequently anymore, are there other websites I can find your art on? A: Yes! I don’t post as frequently as I used to anywhere anymore due to my projects taking up the majority of my time, HOWEVER...there are other wesites I post on. TMVIX.NET - My website will remain the most up-to-date with all recent art, writing, videos, projects, etc. Twitter - I like to post doodles, WIPs, and updates on my twitter as much as possible. NSFW Twitter - The good shit. 👌 🌶️ 🔥 I rarely post here, and it is a private account, but no need to ask just click the follow button and I will accept ASAP. Deviantart - Again, rarely post here it’s mostly reposts from tumblr, but it is where the majority of my original content (OC’s, and stuff of that nature) is posted. Questions about my art process. Q: What programs do you use for your art? A: Paint Tool Sai for almost everything, Photoshop CS4 for editing and transparency.

Q: What brushes do you use, and what are your brush settings? A: I pretty much only use the Brush tool, Pen tool, Marker tool, and Watercolor tool for drawing, painting, etc. Here are screenshots of their settings. (The size varies, I chage it a lot.)

Q: What canvas size do you use when you draw? A: As much as SAI and my computer hate me for it, I typically draw on a 4,000x4,000PX canvas. Once I finish my artwork I shrink it down to 50%-75%, this helps get rid of small mistakes in the piece. Q: Do you use a tablet, if so what kind? A: Nothing fancy, but it gets the job done. I use a Wacom Intuos USB Graphics Tablet - 8.5" x 5.3" Q: What kind of pens, markers, paper, etc. do you use on traditional work? A: My art classes have beaten brand loyalty into me, so I am spoiled with the types of pens, markers, pencils, etc. I use. Graphite pencils - Ticonderoga Colored pencils - Prismacolor Markers - Prismacolor Inking pens - Faber Castell Paper - I don’t have a specific brand I draw on, but I like drawing on big paper, usually A2 or A3. Q: How long does a digital drawing usually take. A: Its dependent on how complex and how I'm feeling when I'm drawing it but on average (cutting out time I spend doing other things).

Simple drawings/doodles take me about an hour a pop or less.

Flat colored and shaded drawings with line art usually take me about 2-3 hours.

Paintings and other complex art usually takes 5-6 hours or more.

Comics can take anywhere from 3-7 hours depending on how much detail goes into them.

Q: How long does a traditional drawing usually take? A: Again, depending on complexity about 5-10 hours. Colored pencils are a difficult medium to get right and blending is very touch-and go. Markers usually take a bit less time. Don’t even get me started on graphite and painting... Q: How do you make your line art so clean? A: Erasing/cleaning as you go instead of doing it all at the end usually helps me a bit...and I keep SAI’s stabalizer on S2 most of the time, but if there is a long line I need to make I crank it up to S7. If you want to see the exact process you can watch the video at the bottom of this post.

Q: How do you do your shading? A: I do multiple types of shading, painted, cell, gradient, etc. but the most popular seems to be the painted so I will assume you mean that.

You can watch the video below to see how it's done exactly, but to explain it simply I paint with white on a layer of solid color above my coloring layer, set it to multiply, and bam. Shading.

Q: How you do highlights, lowlights, etc.? A: Those are a bit trickier, and I didn't show them in the video but I will do my best to explain.

I like to treat lowlights like cell shading for the most part, think of them as a place where the darkest shadows would fall. Don't get carried away, lowlights are supposed to be subtle, and extenuate the depth of where those shadows fall. I use multiply for this shading layer too, and typically use a darker shade of the same color I did for the base shading.

Highlights are easier, just think of where the light falling would be the brightest on your piece. I like to do more than one set of highlights - usually two or three - but make sure if you do multiple sets to make the secondary highlights smaller and subtler than the primary ones or you will end up with a big shiny blob. I also typically use a brighter color than the one I used for shading (for example if purple is the shading color try pastel pink or orange for the highlight color) or sometimes I just use white. I switch between the 'screen' and 'overlay' blending options for them.

Q: What fonts do you use for your art, comics, etc.? A: Honestly, I usually just write out my own text, my handwriting is terrible but it's easier than opening photoshop and hunting for a good font... When I do use fonts, I HATE the factory ones for the most part, so I use stuff from Dafont.com.

Q: How do you clean your traditional art and digitalize it? A: I don’t do much traditional anymore, but I actually made an in-depth tutorial awhile back about it and I still use the same method. It can be found here.

Q: What are your inspirations for your art? A: My friends are my biggest inspiration, I am lucky enough to know a lot of talented artists that always inspire and encourage me to improve and keep drawing what I love.

Questions about my writing process.

Q:Can you give some writing tips? (There we a lot of these.) A: Well, i’m not sure what you mean specifically but I will do my best! Sorry this is a bit long-winded, but hopefully it will be helpful.

The most helpful thing you can do for your writing is to read other people’s work, of course that does not mean you need to copy their writing style...however, seeing the way other people put words together is very helpful to get out of your own head. It is easy to get stuck in a sort of ‘writing loop’ and end up writing similar things over and over again in different contexts. Taking a look at other’s view on things can help get you out of that loop.

Make sure you change up your wording! It’s easy to end up using the same descriptive terminology over and over again without meaning to. What I like to do when I write is to just get a big chunk done without worrying about grammar, repetition, etc. Then when I finish I go back and look over it, change up the words to sound fresh and different, and fix any grammar mistakes. Don’t be afraid to look up synonyms for stuff too if you can’t think of a different word, it isn’t a crime. Getting someone else's opinion on your writing after you’ve finished is also helpful! Proof readers are the best way to help you see your work in the eyes of your readers and make it exciting and interesting to them.

Get in the mood of the scene you are trying to set, be descriptive in what your characters are feeling and seeing. Often times people forget that even in simply scenes there is a whole world around your character that the reader cannot see. It’s your job as the writer to describe that world, so that the reader can see it in their head as clearly as you did when you were writing it. Listening to music while I'm writing really helps me with this, for example if you are writing an action scene listen to some high energy music. Get pumped up for that fight scene!

Build your world, even if it's not an original work. Fanfiction authors tend to forget that despite their fandom’s world being pre-built, it’s still YOUR writing! Leave hints, foreshadow, throw in some background characters to fill up your world and make it unique. Make your readers think about how the world around your characters work, what might happen next, etc.

Keep the rules and timeline of your world consistent and understandable. Yes, I know, it sounds boring, but it’s very helpful to make your writing sound more interesting and easy to comprehend. Is there magic in your story, how does that magic work, can everyone use it, are there different types? Apply simple rules like this to your world that apply consistently throughout your writing. Your readers will thank you for it.

Do your research, yes again, boring I know. It's easy to project yourself and how you view the world on your own characters, making their personalities similar or identical. Think about how someone in their circumstances would act, if they’ve been through a traumatic experience how might that affect the way things work in their head? The way they interact with others and the world around them? Make sure to diversify your cast, not everyone in the world is alike, and your characters shouldn’t be either.

Give yourself time, formulate ideas on how your storyline will connect and where it will go. You don’t have to crank out an entire book in a day, think everything over before you go through like a whirlwind and post stuff that you may not like. However, don’t take forever either. (I tend to do this a lot...) Overthinking your story can also hurt, don’t fret over every single tiny little detail. Making a timeframe for yourself and sticking to it can be helpful to keeping yourself on track and posting chapters regularly.

Lastly, never get discouraged. This goes for both artists and writers. Just because you aren’t entirely happy with how your art or writing looks or sounds at the moment, or you see someone doing it better than you does not mean you should give up. Use those that you look up to as inspiration to improve your own work. Keep going, keep practicing, you will get better! Keep doing what you love doing.

Q: What has your experience been with writing? A: I will try to keep this shorter than the last one, but here goes...

I honestly don’t have that much experience with writing, but I've always enjoyed it. I’ve been writing about my OC’s for MUCH, MUCH longer than I've been writing fics, in fact I can’t remember a time when I didn’t make up little stories for my various characters. Pretty much every drawing you see of mine has some storyline behind it. However, my fanfiction writing was more recent, I didn’t write anything fan-related until a few years ago, and I didn’t post any of it until I put OSR up. The majority of my experience comes from original content, role playing, etc. but I am so happy to be writing fics that people enjoy and hope to continue and eventually adapt OSR into a comic.

Q: Do you have original stories, can we read any of them? A: Yes, and no. I do have original stories, but I have not published them anywhere and they are still very much works in progress. Eventually I would love to share them with everyone, but it won’t be for a long time. For now, I hope you can enjoy the small amount of content I post about my OCs, and I will keep everyone updated when I do decide to share my own personal stories.

Enjoy the video, hope this helped! ✨

youtube

#Sick's shit #Q & A #Ask #Art process #art #writing #writing process #???#Idk what to tag #Archive

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ronja-tutorials · 6 years

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Outlines via Postprocessing

One of my favourite postprocessing effects are outlines. Doing outlines via postprocessing has many advantages. It’s better at detecting edges than the alternative (inverted hull outlines) and you don’t have to change all of your materials to give them the outline effect.

To understand how to create outlines via postprocessing it’s best to have understood how to get access to the depth and normals of the scene first: https://ronja-tutorials.tumblr.com/post/175679764562/postprocessing-with-the-normal-texture

We start with the shader and C# script from the postprocessing with normals tutorial.

The first changes we make is to remove properties and variables which were specific to the “color on top” shader. So the cutoff value and the color. We also remove the view to world matrix, because we our outlines don‘t have a specific rotation in the world so we can ignore it. Then we remove all of the code after the part where we calculate the depth and normals.

Then we remove the part where we write the camera matrix to the shader from our C# script.

The way we’re going to calculate the outlines is that we’re going to read from several pixels around the pixel we’re rendering and calculate the difference in depth and normals to the center pixel. The more different they are, the stronger the outline is.

To calculate the position of the neighboring pixels we need to know how big one pixel is. Luckily we can simply add a variable with a specific name and unity tells us the size. Because technically we’re working with texture pixels, it’s called the texelsize.

We can simply create a variable called texturename_TexelSize for any texture and get the size.

Then we copy the code for accessing the depth and normals, but change the names and we access the texture slightly to the right.

Now that we have two samples we can calculate the difference and draw it to the screen.

With this we can already see the outlines on the left side of the objects. Before we proceed with the next sample, I’d like to put the code for reading the sample and comparing it to the center values into a separate function so we don’t have to write it 4 times. This function needs the depth of the center pixel, the uv coordinates of the center pixel and the offset as arguments. We will define the offset in pixels because that’s the easiest for us to read.

So we simply copy the code from our fragment function to the new method and replace the depth and uv names with the names of the fitting arguments. To use the offset, we multiply it with the x and y coordinates of the texel size and then add the result to the uv coordinates just like previously.

After we set up the new method we call it in the fragment method and draw the result to the screen.

The result should look exactly like previously, but now it’s way easier to expand the shader to read samples in multiple directions. So we sample the pixels up, right and down too and add the results of all samples together.

Using the depth already gives us pretty good outlines, but we can go further by also using the normals provided to us. We will also sample the normals in our compare function, but function can only return one value in hlsl so we can’t use the return value here. Instead of using the return value, we can add two new arguments with the inout keyword. With this keyword the value we pass into the function can be written to and the changes apply to the version of the variable pass in, not only the version in the function. Another thing we need to generate outlines from the normal is the outline of the center pixel, so we add that too to the list of our arguments.

Because we now have complete control over the outline variable we can now also do the adding to the existing outline in the method. After we changed that we go back to the fragment method, create a new variable for the difference of the normals and change the way we call the compare method to fit our new arguments.

This again shouldn’t change the output of the method, but the new architecture allows us to also change the difference of the normal too. A easy and fast way to compare two normalised vectors is to take the dot product. The problem about the dot product is that when the vectors point in the same direction, the dot product is 1 and when the vectors move away from each other the dot product becomes lower, the opposite of what we want. The way to fixing that is to subtract the dot product from 1. Then, when the result of the dot product is 1 the overall result is 0 and when the result of the dot product becomes lower, the overall result increases. After we calculate the normal difference, we add it to the overall difference and we change the output to show the normal difference for now.

With those changes we can see outlines, but they’re different outlines than before because they’re generated from the normals instead of the depth. We can then combine the two outlines to generatecombined outline.

The next step is to make the outlines more customisable. To archieve that we add two variables for each depth and normal outlines. A multiplier to make the outlines appear stronger or weaker and a bias that can make the greyish parts of the outlines we might not want vanish.

To use the variables, after adding all of the sample differences, we simply multiply the difference variables with the multipliers, then we clamp them between 0 and 1 and get the difference to the power of the bias. The clamping between 0 and 1 is important because otherwise getting the exponent of a negative number can lead to invalid results. HLSL has it’s own function for clamping a variable between 0 and 1 called “saturate”.

With this you can now adjust your outlines a bit in the inspector - I boosted both normal and depth outlines a bit and reduced the noise by also increasing the bias, but it’s best to play around with the settings and see what fits your scene best.

Lastly we want to add our outlines to the scene, not just have them as a separate thing. For that we first declare a outline color as a property and shader variable.

To apply the outlines, at the end of the fragment function, we read from the source texture and do a linear interpolation from the source color to our outline color via the combined outline, that way the pixels that were previously black are now the source color and the white ones have the outline color.

The main disadvantages of postprocessed outlines are that you have to apply them to all object in the scene, The way the system decides what’s a outline and what isn’t might not fit the style your have in mind and you get aliasing (visible stairsteps) artefacts pretty quickly.

While there aren’t any easy fixes for the first two problems, you can mitigate the last one by using antialiasing in your postprocessing like FXAA or TXAA (the unity postprocessing stack provides those to you, but if you use v2 you have to redo the effect as a effect in the stack).

Another important point to keep in mind is that you have to use models that fit this way of doing outlines - if you put too much detail in your geometry the effect will paint most of your objects black, which is probably not the intended behaviour.

You can also find the source here: https://github.com/axoila/ShaderTutorials/blob/master/Assets/18_OutlinesPostprocessed/OutlinesPostprocessed.shader https://github.com/axoila/ShaderTutorials/blob/master/Assets/18_OutlinesPostprocessed/OutlinesPostprocessed.cs

I hope I was able to show you how to add nice outlines to your game and how it works.

If you have any questions feel free to contact me here on tumblr or on twitter @axoila.

#tutorial #outlines #unity3d #shaders #unitytips #madewithunity

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kanguin · 6 years

Text

My Take on Me (A-ha ha)

Puns aside, I’m gonna do something that makes no sense because when I do these really long, drawn out posts analytically thinking about things, it doesn’t garner much attention or response, but at the same time, I’m doing this for me and my own sake so that really doesn’t matter? If you’re at all interested to come along for this ride, I’m going to break down who I am, what I feel, and why. I’m surely not going to hit every note, because there’s just so much to say I guess, but I’m going to cover everything that’s on my mind right now, and that which has been ruminating, trying to find words to describe itself for a while now. It’s a ramble rant, but it’s under the cut if you want to read it.

If you asked anyone who knew me if I was inattentive, 99.9% of them would probably laugh and say a hearty yes. And I really can’t argue with that. There’s a lot going on in the world, and I really just don’t tend to pick up on that. Partially because there are social things that I can’t read, and partially because my attention span really doesn’t stretch out that long to notice all of the little details that I’m supposed to notice. My memory isn’t particularly great, but one event that I half remember from 5+ years ago really helps me visualize what is so different in terms of my attention.

What happened was I was on a college campus for a thing (as I have often been in the past decade of my life), and we went to this building that I think worked in psychology or data analysis, and they had a little thing that tracked your eye movements as you watched an ad, and they allowed us to test this out. You’d watch the video, and then when it was over, it’d play it back with a trace of where your eyes were looking all over the screen. Being naturally curious, I eagerly wished to try it out after others had their chance, and the results were amusing, to say the least.

I still clearly remember this to this day, which is impressive for me. When I sat down, the ad was for the second Dispicable Me movie, and it was fascinating to watch, since this trailer had just come out recently, and I hadn’t seen it. After the video was over, and my eye movements played back, everyone was confused. Even the people running the test. My eyes... didn’t go where they should have. A car in center focus went by and I stared at the houses behind it. Gru would talk, but I would only stare at his nose, then a lamp, then a balloon and never at his mouth like was expected. Almost every time something was in center focus... my eyes were somewhere else.

And I know exactly why this is. Aside from the simple explanations of “ADHD” and “Autism”, I know exactly why I was looking where I was looking, even though it was reflex movements. The reason is that I just take in a lot of information. A lot. And that may seem to contradict the previous point affirming my obliviousness, but just hold on and it’ll clear up. What sets me apart from what was expected is that I am uninterested in the mundane. In the easily processed. I delegate to the back of my mind, to the rear lobes of my thinking blob, what most people put in center focus. So while the lower levels of my mind process what is being said, who’s talking, and who’s doing what, I’m taking in the background details to paint a bigger picture of what’s going on. And the thing is, this isn’t some skill or talent. My mind is like this 24/7. And when too much is going on... I get overwhelmed. Because there’s suddenly so much information that my poor wrinkly cognito sponge gets overloaded with more information than it can process at once.

So this takes me back to that point about my obliviousness. In a way, I am oblivious to things going on around me. Things that happen that by all means I should have noticed, I simply don’t. Instead I pick up on the weird, random things that are going on, and usually others don’t notice. There’s something wrong with the prioritization in my brain, but hey, it’s part of what makes me, me. Gotta accept that which I literally, philosophically cannot fight. But more than that... it’s also fair to say that I’m just not paying attention. Because my focus isn’t out here, where other people are, and things are happening, and life is moving forward.

Instead, my mind is internal. I’m always processing SOMETHING. I can’t let things go un-thought-about. So when I’m confused, lost, or unsettled, I’ll always turn to ask why. And though I can’t always get the answer in the moment, that doesn’t mean it’s not a question I should think on. So, after I sort out the in-the-moment issue, I continue to think on why I had the behavioral or cognitive hiccup that I did. So that in the future, I won’t have that problem. I’m never really “in the moment”. It’s a problem, but not one I think I can realistically fix without upending the entirety of how my mind is structured. Believe me, I’ve tried.

So, people tend to underestimate me. When they meet me and get to know me on a surface level, my lack of awareness of what is going on in the moment is immediately apparent. I must seem like a walking contradiction to half of my peers, because they consider me intellectual in the same breaths that they express befuddlement at my utter obliviousness to the world around me. But I don’t know if they know I know that. Like I said, I can’t exactly read how others feel. I just notice patterns. It’s part of why it’s hard for me to get truly close to others. I can’t know someone until I predict their patterns with relatively high accuracy over time. And when I sit down and explain this to people, it’s met with confusion. Which is fair, granted I’m just as lost about what most people think and do as they are with me.

And like, this constant retrospective, constant thought of repairing to prevent further incidents, but being incapable of preventing them in the moment without a proper, previously established protocol, it permeates through my entire being. It affects how I think about things, how I think about others, and how I approach relationships with other people. I just established how it effects making friends, but I should also point out that it has pretty much put me in a place where I’ve only ever been in two romantic relationships. One that lasted a month before my trust was betrayed, and one that has gone on for over 2 years now. I’m quite satisfied with the one I have, more than satisfied even. Because it’s exactly what I need, and mostly what I want. But that’s the thing. What I want in life frustrates me.

I’ve sat down with myself, and I’ve realized I almost always seem to imagine romantic interests, both dreaming up for myself and for characters that I see myself in, as proactive, perceptive, adventurous, and really relaxed; traits that are exactly counter me. Because if someone like that was in a relationship with someone like me, then my flaws would almost seem like they didn’t exist. And that’s a wonderful, idealized, euphoric thought. One that dictates much of the romantic relationships I think up and love to focus on. But it’s not realistic.

Love requires understanding. But the thing is, someone like what I described is not someone I could understand the thoughts, behaviors, and actions of, inherently because those traits I ascribe to them are exactly counter of what I am. I am demotivated, unobservant, reserved, and somewhat high strung. I could not possibly understand and truly love someone that I could not understand, despite how much I want to feel that normalization. But a relationship like that puts all of the importance on what they would do to normalize me, and places me as a passive, static object within it that contributes nothing. And that’s just not a good relationship, in any way.

Yet as much as I rationalize it, it’s still something I instinctively crave, and probably can only ever get from fiction, because it’s not realistic and doesn’t make any sense. It’s almost funny then, that the person I chose would be so much like me, that I would almost have to personally personify my own fantasy to get anything to move forward at times. But I digress. Fear of new things is something I’m too familiar with to complain or judge. Speaking of which, fear. That’s another thing that I think about, for another time though.

The differences inherent to my being are fascinating. No matter what’s going on, I almost always, without fail, seem to feel like an outsider looking in on a world that makes no sense, but on the flipside, I’m aware enough to notice that 9 times out of 10 the missing information lies within my metaphorical blind-spot, and socially reconciling this discrepancy is hard, to say the least. People unlike me aren’t going to get me, but they’re used to getting everyone on the first try, so for literally everyone I meet that I don’t immediately click with, it is I who has to make the steps to bridge the gap between my world and theirs. Not because they are lazy, but because they simply cannot see what is wrong, because for them, socializing is so natural that it confuses them that it can ever go wrong even when no traditional miscommunication occurs. That is to say, their use of body language, implication, tone, pace, and so on, suddenly go from useful conversational tools to active roadblocks in conversation. I can’t blame them for not comprehending it. I can imagine it’d be like watering a plant, but in the process causing it to wilt, when the same water reinvigorated the others.

But all the same, it’s frustrating. I’m honestly kind of tired of having to come up with a million analogies just to explain to my own family why I’m not comfortable in rooms packed with people and loud noises. Traditionally I’d hear people telling me “remember maintaining relationships with parents isn’t necessary if they don’t get you”, and like. I kind of want to take that phrase from teenagers and say they can’t use it. Because yeah, they “don’t get you”. Sure. Let’s take away your social skills sensory filtering and see how much your parents don’t get you. Let’s see if the mass’s inability to properly communicate with their parents during teenage years and early adulthood mean their parents “don’t get them” as much as allistic parents don’t get their autistic kids, and vice versa. You wanna talk disconnection and alienation? I THINK THAT RANKS PRETTY HIGH ON THE “DON’T GET YOU” METER.

Again, I digress. This really has just. Turned into a dump of my thoughts and feelings. My point I was trying to make is that I preemptively resent the thought of venting issues I have with my mother to people, because they don’t get it just as much as my mom doesn’t get it. It’s not a problem with her, or with me. It’s a problem with the fact that we function and think so radically and unrecognizably differently that trying to communicate is like speaking two separate languages that are SIMILAR but then 10% (or more) of the time they diverge and nobody knows what’s going on. So that means issues I have with my mother are literally the same issues I’d have with any allistic folk. I don’t get you, you don’t get me. It’s just that I live with her and my brother that makes issues more frequent.

So yeah. That was a lot of stuff. I could probably dump more out, but this is already so long, and I’m dead certain nobody will read through this. If you do, please say so. I’ll be impressed, and you’ll have seen a glimpse inside my mind.

#kanguin original

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this-is-big-lady · 6 years

Text

Swipe Right part 5/10

part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4

I finished my second year of my bachelors degree! One year closer to having that super expensive piece of paper in my hands. So to celebrate, have some tinder fluffiness!

As soon as Davey woke up, he could feel the butterflies in his stomach. Today was the day of his first proper date. Not just going to the movies with a bunch of friends, sitting next to a girl who he thought he liked with an arm around her shoulder. This was an honest-to-god adult coffee date with a guy who seemed interested in more than a quick make out session.

And Davey was terrified.

He groaned and rolled himself out of bed, ready to face to day. Somewhat. If he took a little longer getting ready in the bathroom, ensuring he didn’t nick his face shaving or stealing a bit of Crutchie’s conditioner in the shower, that’s for no one but him to know. Davey hoped that the toast he forced down could satiate the butterflies in his stomach, but found the opposite to be true. If anything, it made him more nervous than he was before. Stupid butterflies.

“I’m sorry, what?” Crutchie asked Davey, mid-way through preparing his lunch. He was leaning on the kitchen counter, bracing himself without his crutch, and looking to the small dining table in the adjoining room where Davey was sat.

“What?” Davey questioned, slightly muffled, as he had a hand held up to his mouth to prevent a spray of crumbs from landing on the table.

“You mentioned something about butterflies…” Crutchie could see Davey’s cheeks tint red as he looked down to the table. Today of all days he should really be careful that he didn’t say anything out loud that he didn’t mean to.

“Lemme guess, you’re nervous about your big date with Jack?” Crutchie turned back to the peanut butter and jelly sandwich he was making, and could hear Davey sigh a “yeah…” from the table.

“You’ll be fine, Davey. It’s only coffee! I’ll even make you my signature PB and J for lunch as a good luck charm.”

“It’s not your signature PB and J, Crutch. it’s just PB and -“ Davey was cut off by Crutchie turning back to him, brandishing a butter knife covered in jelly.

“David Jacobs, you know better than to push a guy with a knife.” Crutchie tried to sound threatening, but the little blob of strawberry jelly that fell from the knife to the floor undercut any joking menace in his voice.

Davey stood, looking a little disgusted at the sticky addition to the kitchen floor, and walked with his plate to the sink next to his room mate. While washing the plate clean from crumbs, he retorted, “It’s a butter knife, Crutch. It couldn’t even cut through paper.” Crutchie just rolled his eyes as he pulled out two more slices of bread from the loaf, ready to help out with Davey’s lunch. “And besides, we both took behavioural psychology last semester. You know that good luck charms are bullshit.” The taller boy shut off the water, popping the wet plate into the drying rack, and then grabbing an apple for his lunch, a banana for Crutchie’s, and a muesli bar each for both of them. It was going to be a long wait for his date.

At 1:55 Davey’s phone buzzed with a text from Crutchie saying that he was inside Starbucks with his essay, and that Jack wasn’t there yet. His butterflies from this morning had had children by now, his stomach a tossing, turning mixture of of nerves and adrenaline. Taking a deep breath to steady himself, Davey stood up from the study desk where he had been staring at his laptop for the past 15 minutes, the blinking cursor on his literature assignment mocking him for being unable to focus. He slammed the laptop shut and shoved it into his bag, making a beeline for the bathroom and its mirrors to ensure that he had no remnants of peanut butter or jelly on his face, and that his hair was still in place. Reassured that his face looked as presentable as always, Davey walked out onto the busy footpath, and headed south to Starbucks.

He could feel his hands shaking, so he pushed them into his pockets to minimise the tremors. Davey’s phone vibrated against his hand, and pulled it out to check the notification. Crutchie’s name popped up on the screen above the words ‘he’s here. and cute.’ Letting out an unsteady breath, Davey slipped his phone back into his pocket and tried to walk to the little coffee shop without thinking about what he’d do when he arrived.

Being a student hotspot, he didn’t know how easy it would be to spot Jack when he was inside. The shop would likely be filled with other stressed out students cramming for mid-terms or finishing assignments at the last minute, and Davey didn’t want to stand in front of them, looking desperate as he scanned for a face he only knew from a couple of photos.

Which is why it was a blessing to see a guy with familiar floppy brown hair leaning on the wall beside the door to the small coffee shop. The boy was staring at this phone, giving Davey a second to do a once-over of him. He was wearing a blue flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. There were little flecks of colour across his hands and forearms - this had to be Jack, he had paint up his arms! Simple blue jeans and scuffed black Doc Martins finished his outfit. Davey had to admit, he pulled off the casual artist look very well.

Before he even registered what he was doing, Davey took a step into the bubble around Jack that passersby were leaving around him, and simply asked, “Jack?” The guy in question looked up from his phone, squinting a little as he was looking into the sun.

Shit. He’s got blue eyes. He’s gorgeous.

“Oh hey! You must be Davey! I’m Jack.” He extended his hand out to Davey to shake, and after a beat too long of staring at Jack’s eyes, he got the hint and clasped Jack’s hand in his own.

He’s got a firm grip. Oh no.

“Shall we go inside?” Jack tipped his head back in the direction of the door, Davey managing a choked agreement and dropping Jack’s hand from his own. Jack smiled and pivoted on his heel, heading towards the doors which automatically opened for him. Davey trailed a couple of steps behind him up to the counter.

I will not look at Jack’s ass. I will not look at Jack’s ass. I will not… Jack’s got a nice ass.

Jack ordered first - a grande caffe latte, and after waving his card over the machine, he smiled back to Davey. Not that Davey was paying attention, he was just staring up at the menu board above the counter. After a few pained seconds of silence, Jack staring at Davey and the employee behind the counter staring at the pair of them, Jack reached out a hand, gently holding onto Davey’s arm. Jack pulled the stunned boy forward slightly, accompanied by the question, “What do you want, Davey?”

Davey could feel the heat of Jack’s hand through the thin button-up he was wearing, and looked down to ensure he wasn’t imagining it. He most certainly wasn’t. Jerking his head back up, he locked eyes with Jack, who was smirking with amusement at Davey’s shock. Glancing over to the bored employee, unamused by this brief exchange between her customers, Davey simply asked for a grande hot chocolate and paid.

Get your head in the game, Jacobs. This is your first ever proper date. You can do this. Make Les proud.

They found a table by the window looking out to the street while they waited for their orders to be called. Jack leaned back comfortably, his hands resting in his lap, while Davey was perched on the edge of his chair, leaning forward with his hands clasped on the table

Jack was the first one to start the small talk, slowly carding his hand through his hair, giving Davey a quick look over. It was clear he was stressed, maybe nervous, maybe anxious? Davey’s prominent brows were furrowed together and his knuckles were turning white. Jack knew that these tinder meetings could be stressful, he certainly was when he first started, so he decided to ease the tension. “How has your day been, Davey?”

Nodding his head slightly in reply, Davey responded with a simple, “It’s been good.” He finished the sentence with a gentle smile and looked back down to the table. A flicker of confusion darted across Jack’s face at Davey’s short answer. “That’s good,” Jack continued, the pair falling into an unpleasant silence.

Davey quickly realised his blunder once Jack subtly pointed out his awkwardness to him. He desperately racked his brain for any interesting event that happened today, deciding to blurt out, “I mean, my room mate made me his ‘signature’ peanut butter and jelly sandwich today for lunch. So that was good.” Davey placed air quotes around Crutchie’s ridiculous use of the word signature, but he could see the confusion on Jack’s face morph into amusement at that. Davey also thought he could hear a spluttering laugh from someone behind a laptop a few tables away.

“Tell me Davey,” Jack started, leaning forward a little to mimic Davey’s posture. “What exactly makes a humble PB and J, “signature”?”

“Absolutely nothing, Jack!” The sentence was laced with laughter, Davey realising the idiocy of where their conversation went quickly. “It’s literally made of the cheapest bread, peanut butter, and jelly that we could find, since we’re both broke students. Nothing signature about it.” The corner of Jack’s eyes crinkled a little when he laughed, his nose scrunching as his mouth spread out in a smile. His laugh was a gentle baritone. A sound Davey could definitely get used to.

“Aw man Davey, you should try being a broke art student sometime! I don’t even have enough money for paint and pencils, yet alone peanut butter!” Jack was a very lively talker, his hands were either waving around to illustrate his point, skittering across the table. Davey was almost hypnotised by them, but was broken out of his reverie by a voice behind the counter calling out Jack and his names back to back.

Feeling his confidence climbing and supported by Jack’s laughter, Davey quipped, “I’ll drink to that,” in reference to the drinks that Jack stood to fetch. Jack let out a huff of laughter, turning to Davey and placed a hand on the table in front of him, leaning towards Davey, intruding ever so slightly on his personal space. “That was funny, Davey,” he urged, locking eyes with his date before walking away.

Les would be proud.

A blush was quickly rising to Davey’s cheeks under Jack’s gaze, and he tried to get it under control slightly before Jack returned. And partially succeeded, his face a gentle shade of pink that brought out the light dusting of freckles across his nose. Jack had plopped back into his seat, scooting Davey’s hot chocolate towards him and taking a huge gulp of the caffe latte. “Anything else exciting happen other than that sandwich?” Jack asked between sips.

How the fuck can he drink that already when I can barely hold onto this scalding cup.

“Not particularly,” Davey warmed his hands on his hot chocolate cup, bouncing his fingers on it when it was too hot for his palms. “I had a literature lecture this and worked on a couple of assignments, then came here.” He couldn’t help it, Jack was too intriguing. Davey watched the muscles on his forearm move under his paint-splattered skin as he lifted the coffee cup to his mouth, brown hair falling forward on his forehead and brushing his brow while the hair at the nape of his neck curled up to his ear. And his first attempt at flirting just fell out of his mouth.

“But being here with you is definitely the best part of my day.”

fuckfuckfuckfuckshitfuckfuck

Jack smirked into his coffee cup, swallowing his mouthful before placing the cup back down and lifting his eyes to his date. “Davey… Whatever your last name is-“

“Jacobs.”

“Well then, Davey Jacobs, are you trying to flirt with me?”

The gentle pink across Davey’s face quickly changed to fuchsia, or at least that’s what it felt like. He was like a deer in the headlights, being called out within the first five minutes of the date. Did he admit it or deny it? If Davey was being honest, the idea of flirting with Jack wasn’t exactly repulsive. So he played the middle ground.

“Am I succeeding?”

Jack’ smirk changed into a smile, complete with a murmured, “maybe.”

Davey, 1. Jack, 0.

A beat of silence washed over the pair, and Davey took a sip from his hot chocolate. “So veering away from my attempts of flirting with you…” Another smile from Jack - success. “How has your day been, Jack?”

“It’s probably been one of the weirder days I’ve had in a while, to tell you the truth. You know I’m a Fine Arts student, right?” Davey nodded, mid-sip. “Well, this semester my class is combined with the Dance students. We’re doing a course together called Dance and Interdisciplinarity, and-“

Davey waved a hand in front Jack, pulling him out of storytelling mode. “I’m sorry, I’m an English major and I have no idea what that word means.”

“Sorry to tell you Davey, but I’m 5 weeks into this course and I have no idea what it means either!” Jack articulated through his grin. “It basically means the area where dance meets other art forms - the fancy name for performance art.” Davey nodded, that made sense.

“They thought it would be good to combine dance and art students, “broaden our concept of art”,” Jack mocked, complete with air quotes, “and all that bullshit. And today we were discussing feminism and interdisciplinarity, which is cool and all, but with no warning - no bloody warning,” Jack really seemed to be iterating that point, and in a few seconds Davey would come to regret that he chose now to have a drink. “The lecturer puts up a picture of this woman, completely naked, pulling a scroll out of her vagina.”

Davey choked. Straight up choked. Not a great impression for a first date. But then again, mentioning that particular piece of live art may have not been the best topic for a first date either. After a few moments of coughing and spluttering, Davey managed to take another drink from his hot chocolate to stop the burning feeling from gagging on his previous sip.

“Woah, Davey, are you okay?” Jack’s voice was laced with concern, an arm extended and his hand rubbing Davey’s arm soothingly.

“I’m… fine…” Davey articulated while patting his chest to expel the last of his coughs. After his heart rate and breathing were back under control, the duo launched into a huge discussion about the work, and art in general, and whatever else took their fancy.

A couple of hours flew by Jack and Davey’s table, customers coming and going - even Crutchie leaving when Jack excused himself to the bathroom for a minute. He could see the date was going well and could tell Davey was doing just fine on his own - Jack was decidedly put in the ‘most probably not a murderer’ category of tinder dates.

When they noticed that the employees started giving them dirty looks as the coffee shop started to fill up in the late afternoon with students preparing for all-nighters, they thought it was probably best to wrap it up.

“Hey Davey, you know how I’m drawing people for my art project?”

“Is that the vagina class?” Davey teased.

Rolling his eyes, Jack managed to explain that no, it was not for his live art class, but for his core drawing class. “I was wondering if you’d like to be one of the people I draw?” Davey could sense a true hint of vulnerability in Jack’s eyes. Davey could say no, but he selfishly wanted to see how this captivating artist could portray him.

“I would love to Jack.” He reached forward and lightly placed his hand on top of Jack’s, and the artist’s face lit up at the confirmation that he’d have another compelling subject for his project. He fished around for something in his pocket, grabbing his phone and unlocking it before sliding it across the table.

“If you can put in your phone number, we can arrange a time for a portrait sitting?” Davey tapped in his name and number, and handing it back to it’s owner. Jack then lifted the phone in front of his face, exclaiming, “Smile!” and Davey heard a shutter click.

“Hey, not cool! I wasn’t ready!” he protested, while Jack set the candid as his contact photo. Jack spun the phone around to his date, simply admitting, “You look adorable. And I’m an artist, I like to has a visual representation of who I’m talking to.” Davey just groaned at how he was immortalised on Jack’s phone, wide-eyed with his collar slightly skew-whiff, and that damned blush still on his cheeks.

But he called you adorable.

Jack pushed his chair back, giving him room to stand up. Davey mimicked him, and Jack took a step around to his side of the table. “So, I guess I’ll see you soon, Davey.” Jack reached up and held on to Davey’s bicep, giving it a light squeeze that made his heart soar. Jack was standing close to him, not uncomfortably, but definitely closely than a stranger would do.

“I guess you will, Jack.” Davey shot back a gentle smile and Jack grinned back. He let go of Davey’s arm and walked towards the exit, but spared Davey a glance and a small wave as he passed the window where they were sitting mere moments before. Davey was still rooted at the spot, slightly surprised at how well that had gone. Complete with a promise of a second date. Well, a session where Jack would draw him. Close enough.

Les will never be as good as me.

#javid #davey jacobs #jack kelly #crutchie morris #newsies #newsies fanfiction #tinder au #david jacobs #jack x davey

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georgiabread · 7 years

Text

sometimes this has a hot, sweet taste

summary: Then, the inevitable declaration, murmured into the skin just below his ear: “I really, really love you, Phil. Like, so much.”

word count: 2.4k

trigger warnings: none

a/n: this is slightly trashy and they're uncharacteristically sappy, but maybe i got it spot on. if you can't tell, dan and phil at the beach is my favourite thing.

Santorini is sleep, sun cream and fruity cocktails all folded between a few days of calm, and Dan realises he needs it.

This revelation arrives with half-lidded eyes, his body curled into the rubber of an inflated doughnut, floating in the pool of one of those Greek villas he used to see all over holiday sites and Pinterest. The water is blue and blinding and smells like bliss, and he has never appreciated Bryony’s spontaneity more.

The trip was planned and booked before he and Phil ever got the chance to say yes, but there were no regrets involved. Excluding the ungodly hour they arrived and the frail tax-driver of which they were at the mercy, of course. The man had grappled with their lives, scurrying around cliff roads to reach their hotel, and Dan remembers watching his heart tumble across the floor of the minibus.

But no – this idea was a tremendous one. A weekend spent with the people he’s known the longest, without prying cameras and anxiety-inducing social events. It’s a weight off Dan’s back. Because he can rest, unadulterated, no what if’s and but’s attached. Because no one will recognize him and Phil in a sheltered cove off some island in the Mediterranean.

If only it was that simple back in London.

The doughnut grazes the edge of the pool, twists and pushes Dan in another direction. It’s enough to knock him from slumber. Eyelids peel open, toes curl and crack. Dan whimpers in his throat when the sun burns his eyes. Where are his sunglasses? Didn’t Phil borrow them? Damnit Phil. Half-submerged in water and sleep, he decides to blame Phil for any possible blindness.

“Ah. The beast awakens.” Bryony’s voice rises and falls over the pool’s ripples.

Dan glances around, slightly disoriented, until he finds his friend reclined on a deck chair, pineapple juice in hand. “Did Phil steal my sunglasses?” he slurs.

“Probably. He went to get ice cream with Wirrow.”

“If that bitch doesn’t get me chocolate…”

“Don’t worry. He mentioned something about you and choc ice cream.”

“Good.”

“By the way, you should get out of that pool sometime soon. Don’t want another run-in with heat stroke.”

“Fuck, why didn’t anyone wake me up?” Dan flounders in the doughnut for a moment, sinking down the hole in the centre. He eventually makes it to the steps and clambers out. He touches his arm. Definitely freckled. And definitely hot.

Bryony chuckles and sips her juice. “You were too peaceful. Here, I took a photo.”

She finds her phone and her nails patter over the screen, before a picture of Dan’s almost-naked sleeping body is shoved in Dan’s face.

Dan narrows his eyes. “Send that to me. I look mildly cute enough to post it.”

A thick blob of gelato drips from Dan’s cup, landing with a dollop on his thigh. It’s chocolate, bittersweet with a dash of coffee. He wipes it away with his thumb and licks it, hears Phil snigger beside him about gross boyfriends or something like that. Their ankles are hooked together underwater, the two of them perched on the side of the pool with expensive ice cream cooling their lips. There is warmth where their arms meet. Freckles are drawn together like constellations, connecting their bodies.

Dan side-eyes Phil after his muttered comment, mouth twitching. “Excuse me?”

“Nothing! I just said it’s yucky when you eat off your thigh,” Phil says, slurping on his spoon to conceal a grin.

“I thought certain people rather enjoyed eating off my skin.”

“Hey, don’t be so vulgar.” Phil shoves Dan’s shoulder, letting his cheeks accumulate a satisfying redness.

Giggling, Dan falls to the side a little more than necessary, and when he straightens up, paints Phil’s blush with his own ice cream-smothered spoon. “There. Eat that.”

“You do it.”

Eyebrows quirk up. Dan tips towards him without hesitation and drags his tongue over Phil’s skin, licking up the cream. Phil gags and scrubs his cheek, his nose crinkling in mock-disgust. “Urgh. You’re horrible. That was hardly sexual.”

Dan pouts. “Is my tongue no longer appealing?”

“Not when you get your saliva all over my face.”

“I’m disappointed in you.” Dan scoops at his gelato, watching his partner carefully. There’s a glint leftover in his eyes. Phil definitely loved it. Dan looks away to hide a smile, rubbing Phil’s foot with his own.

There is a silence. It takes a long, soothing breath, settles around them like a blanket. Dan focuses on the ocean before them. It’s a vast and glossy thing that oddly comforts him. There’s something about the enormity of it, knowing he’s so far away from the responsibilities and hassle of their London life, that puts him at ease.

“We should do this more often.”

“Do what? Lick each other’s faces?”

“No, idiot. Go on holiday. It’s…nice.” Dan’s voice grows soft. “Just being here with you, that’s nice. And – I can hold your hand when we’re in public and stuff, without worrying who’s gonna see and question us or…or expose us online. Of course it’s great hanging with Bryony and Wirrow, but. We never get enough time like this, you know? Time alone, I mean.”

Phil had reached up and brushed his fingers through Dan’s matted curls while he was talking. Now his fingertips land on his jaw, and Dan turns his head. He watches the smaller sea swirling in Phil’s eyes.

“Yeah, I know,” Phil whispers. Their ice cream is a distant memory. “What if we went to Japan again? I can propose under the cherry blossoms.”

“If you do that, I’ll actually say no simply because it’s too cheesy.”

“Rude.”

Phil kisses him then – delicate, a reassurance. He tugs on his bottom lip, leaves a taste of lime and pistachio behind. Dan chases the kiss, hands landing on Phil’s arm and neck, then face, cupping his cheeks, their mouths coalescing. The water ripples around their legs. Something painfully fond fills Dan’s chest. When he pulls back, a thumb brushing over Phil’s cheekbone, he – and it’s stupid, it’s so stupid – he suddenly wants to cry.

The four of them go snorkelling in the bay. Fish are abundant in all sizes and colours, and Phil confirms this by calling out, “Guys, come look at this!” whenever he lays eyes on one.

Wirrow is mildly interested. Bryony pretends to go deaf. Dan humours him for about the first four. Then shoves his face underwater and keeps it there, preferring to quietly observe the sea life going about their day. His skin feels slick from all the sun cream Phil lathered on him, going on about UV rays despite his own ghostly exterior.

Afterward, while removing their snorkels and diving fins, Phil crosses his arms like a five-year-old and whines about being snubbed.

“We loved your fish, dear,” Dan sighs, eyes soft. “But they weren’t all that remarkable.”

He leaves a kiss on Phil’s cheek as he stands.

It’s ridiculous, how easy it is.

By 7 pm, the sun shies away behind the horizon. The ocean purples. They end up at a bar called the Chrysós Brewery; it has a roofless balcony overlooking the cove, and tall torches are scattered between mingling patrons. Bryony and Wirrow disappear quite suspiciously, probably wanting Dan and Phil to have the evening to themselves.

They make the most of it. A petite table for two near the glass balustrades is pinched, and they order the most zany-sounding cocktails on the menu. When the waitress hands over their drinks, Dan studies his warily. It’s blood red, with an odd-looking bunch of fruit and lavender petals sprinkled over the foam.

“Maybe you should drink it instead of having a staring contest with it,” Phil teases after a minute. He takes a sip of his own cocktail, transparent turquoise and decorated with strawberries.

Dan gives him a withering look. “Alright, McSass. I don’t need your comments, thank you.” He takes a large gulp, and the cocktail explodes against his taste buds and eats away at his tongue. He’s left with wide eyes and a tangy aftertaste that actually…isn’t that bad. “You know, I think I’ll order another,” he says.

By nine o’clock they’re near-drunk.

At one point, Dan fumbles for Phil’s hand and hauls him away from the table, swerving to a stop somewhere along the railing. “I can’t believe we’re drunk and it’s only nine o’clock.”

Phil blames it on him. Dan frowns and says they’re in Greece, there’s no rules here. But having downed a variety of bizarre brews and beverages, he doesn’t even trust his own judgement.

“Well, we’re not actually drunk,” Phil points out. “We’re just tipsy, or maybe slightly above, I dunno.”

Dan blows a raspberry when he sighs, winding his arms around Phil’s waist and making his head comfy on Phil’s shoulder. “Whatever. We’re doing this ancient ruins-tour-thing tomorrow, so don’t be hungover.”

“Oh, I’m not that drunk, you bum.”

“I guess time will tell.”

“Shut up.”

“Make me.”

Phil pretends to vomit. “We can wait till we get back to the villa for that.”

“I can’t believe I’m dating a party pooper,” Dan grumbles.

“I can’t believe I’m dating a child.”

“We should just agree to split up if that’s how we really feel.”

Phil draws Dan closer and nudges his nose into his neck. “Definitely.”

Live music fills the silence that passes, drifting from a corner of the bar. Unconsciously, they begin to sway. Dan traces his fingers over Phil’s back, and Phil tucks one or two kisses inside Dan’s collarbone.

The moment is blissful. Dan’s brain is a little clouded, and he has to blink away the urge to sleep, but he loves this. He loves slow-dancing with Phil, blind to everyone else in the room. All he can see is the dark-haired man nestled against him, his best friend and assigned ‘grow old with me’ person. And Dan realises that maybe the places he tried to find solace in had never mattered from the beginning.

Then, the inevitable declaration, murmured into the skin just below his ear: “I really, really love you, Phil. Like, so much.”

After that, Phil chuckles, his whole body shifting against Dan’s. Then he shuffles back and takes two dimpled cheeks in his palms and kisses him, drunk and sloppy and smitten. “Love you too, you nong.”

“Your heart line’s kind of long and curvy…I think that means you express all your emotions freely. Or is that content with love life? I’m not sure.”

Phil’s voice is soft and matted with sleep, matching the muted light in their villa bedroom. He studies the creases carved into Dan’s left palm with a thoughtful frown, fingers ghosting over the smooth skin. The sheets are still sticky and twisted around their tangled legs. Sweat is stranded in Dan’s hairline. His eyelids flutter closed every now and then but he rebels against the drowsiness, much preferring to stare at the quiet concentration on Phil’s face as his palm is read.

Dan huffs a low laugh through his nose. He can’t tell if this is legitimate or not, no matter what Phil says about his psychic ancestors. But he doesn’t dwell on that for too long. Phil’s right about his love life, at least.

“What about this one?” Dan murmurs, pointing to the groove arching away from his thumb.

Phil traces it gently. “That’s your life line. All about general health and life changes. Yours is quite deep and round, which I think means you have a lot of enthusiasm and stuff.”

“Bullshit.”

“I think that’s actually quite true. You’re sweet and energetic when you’re in a happy mood.”

Dan snorts but hides half his face in his pillow. He won’t voice the embarrassing thought in his head, something to do with the knight of wands. “I hate you.”

Dan can’t remember the time they got back from the bar. He was too busy pulling Phil’s shirt off, crumbling when Phil ran his hands over his bare chest. But now, it’s late, and they need rest. Tomorrow is dedicated to exploration. They still have another three days of Santorini, before it’s home again on a flight to audience expectations and boundaries they know not to cross. But Dan wants to be stuck in this moment forever, love in his chest and Phil’s delicate fingers on his skin, their naked bodies woven together with warmth in the most innocent and most passionate way.

Phil’s lips brush over Dan’s fingertips, bringing his focus back to the palmistry at hand. “Now this is your head line,” Phil murmurs. “Yours is quite straight, which is like, you think realistically. But you also have a little doughnut there and that means…you, um, love food.”

Dan’s laughter is like wind chimes. “That’s the fakest thing I’ve ever heard,” he whinges. “You’re just being stupid now.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re a phoney palm-reader.”

“Hey! These are great services. You should be paying double.”

“Okay, tell me about this one, then.” Dan taps the crease that runs through his heart line.

“Your fate line is broken in two,” Phil observes. “Right. That means one day, some guy is destined to chop you in half and that’s how you die.”

“Fucking shut up.” Cosy giggles burst from Dan’s lips, and he leans closer, bumping their noses together. “I want a refund.”

“Nope. No refunds,” Phil says, linking their fingers. He lifts Dan’s hand to his mouth and kisses his knuckles, one by one.

“Well, you can expect a strongly-worded review on your website, then.” Dan’s voice takes on a mock-angry tone. “Phil Lester is the worst palm reader I know. He never knows what he’s talking about and his face is too pretty and distracting. Zero stars.”

“What?” Phil laughs softly. His eyes dip down to Dan’s mouth, before meeting his gaze again. His next words squeeze through half-parted lips. “You should be thanking me for my good looks. They’re obviously a bonus.”

Dan tilts his head. “Obviously,” he murmurs, before pressing his mouth deep and tender against Phil’s. He can taste the bite of vodka and lemon, but everything feels saccharine, his own tendrils of drunkenness blurring his thoughts, lulling his heart. Phil squeezes his hand, nibbles gently on his bottom lip, making sure to leave it chapped in the morning. And Dan just breathes him in until he fills his lungs and with every kiss, he says;

You are where I want to be, always.

phanfics

#they're so gross #phan #phanfiction #dan howell #phil lester #phan fluff

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dramallamadingdang · 7 years

Photo

Technicolor was a series of processes used in filmmaking mostly between the late 20s and the mid-50s. There were several different processes used over that time period as technology improved, but in a nutshell they all messed around with color channels in various ways, attempting to reproduce colors correctly on a movie screen. We're going to simulate the effect of one of those old Technicolor processes by...Oh, hey! Messing around with color channels! Imagine that! Then we're going to screw around with layers to make things appropriately saturated and slightly blurry and vintagey-looking.

I'll warn you up front that this is fiddly and subjective. I can tell you basically what to do and what to look for, but a lot of the steps are things you just have to fiddle with until it looks good to you. And this isn’t going to work on absolutely every pic. It has to be done on a pic-by-pic level. There are no universal settings in these steps that will work for all Sims pics. This is art, not science. That said, once you get the hang of it and memorize the steps, this takes less than a minute to do on a pic in its basic form. Really. I promise.

The instructions and pics in this are for/from Photoshop CS6. That said, there is nothing about this process that you can't do in much older iterations of Photoshop, although there is one step for which the controls are significantly different in older versions. But I think you can muddle through fairly easily. And if you don't have Photoshop I imagine other full-function image editors (GIMP, Paint Shop Pro, etc.) have similar functions if you poke about a bit. The instructions are as detailed as I can make them. (And therefore this is very long and has lots of pics. I’m sorry.) So even if you have no real clue what you're doing or why, I think you can follow along. The only thing it assumes you know how to do is open and crop/resize a pic in Photoshop. :) So here we go...

To start, pick a Sims pic. Any pic. (Although, if I were you I'd use an outdoor pic so you can follow along with this better to get you started. ) Open it in Photoshop and crop/resize it to your liking. You don't need to do anything else to it because you're just going to totally change everything, anyway. This is my starting point:

Cunningly, I picked an outdoor pic that has a Sim in it. Hi, Simon!

Now, Step 1: MAKE ALL THE THINGS RED AND CYAN! Really, that's what you do. Because that's exactly what this Technicolor process did on real film in the 20s/30s. Imagine that. Go Image--> Adjustments-->Channel Mixer.

You'll get a popup that looks like this:

In that popup, in the "Output Channel" drop-down where it says “Red” by default, pick "Blue" instead. Because blue is going bye-bye. Then, in the sliders in the middle of the box, set the red slider at -5%, the green slider at 100%, and the blue slider at 0%, like so:

You can type numbers in the boxes; you don't have to use the sliders. Typing is easier when you know the values you need. Also, if you think you might be doing this process a lot, you can save these settings as a preset. Click the icon that looks like this:

Choose "Save Preset" then give it a name like...oh, I dunno...”Technicolor,” maybe. ;) Then, in the future when you want to do this process again, you can click the "Preset" drop-down shown in the above pic and pick the setting you saved from the list, saving you a few keystrokes. But anyway...

Leave everything else as it is, and then click "OK." Your image should now look something like this:

Pretty funky, eh? (Unless you're doing a night shot, that is, in which case this step can actually look pretty darn good all by itself. Takes right out all the damn purple-blue that the game adds at night.) But otherwise? Don't worry. We're not done yet. And this is where our first subjective step comes in.

We're going to fade the channel mixing to some degree, so that it's not quite so powerful and we get touches of the lost colors back. To do that, go Edit-->Fade Channel Mixer. You'll get a popup that looks like this:

Make sure the checkbox called "Preview" is checked (it should be, by default) so that you can see the effect of what you do on your image as you manipulate it. Then, yank that opacity slider around (or type in numbers in the box) until it looks good, pretty much. Told you it's subjective. :)

No really, what you want is some touches of colors other than red and cyan showing through a bit but not too much. You don't want to lose the overall red-and-cyan, but you DO want, for instance, a little blue back in your sky and a little green back in your grass. I find that values between 50% and 80% are generally where you want to be here, but what will look best will depend entirely on your starting pic.

For my pic, I went with 60% opacity for this step, and now it looks like this...

I've got blue back in my sky and some purple back in Simon's jacket/t-shirt and a bit less-turquoise greenery. If you've got unnaturally-colored Sims or Sim-hair in your pic, you'll want to make it so that the real colors show a bit, too. (Which can be challenging depending on the color in question; the channel mixing intentionally sucks purple-blues and purples right out, just as the real film process did, and it's hard to get them back without losing the Technicolor effect unless you do some more serious and far-more-time-consuming editing which is beyond the scope of this.)

Once you're happy with your balance, click OK on the box with the slider. Now it's time to layer this puppy so that we can have two independently-adjustable copies of the same image to play with. In your layers window, you should at the moment have only one layer, called Background, like this:

(If for some bizarre reason your layer window isn’t showing anywhere, click “Window” in the toolbar at the top of the screen and select “Layers” from the list that drops open.) Right-click on that lonely little layer and in the menu that pops up choose "Duplicate Layer." Then just click OK on the window that pops up. Now you have two identical layers, the original pic and a copy of it called, creatively, "Background copy" on top of it.

Click on the top Background Copy layer to highlight and therefore activate it:

Now we can do stuff on that layer without it affecting the image below. The first thing we're going to do is blend the two layers together with a layer blend. This will create an appropriately Technicolor-y saturated effect without actually messing about with saturation levels. Somewhere in your layer window you should have a drop-down that looks like this:

By default, it's set at "Normal." When you click the drop-down, it has a bunch of options like "Multiply" and "Screen" and "Hue." For our purposes, we want either Overlay or Soft Light from this list, depending on your image. They do similar things, but the effect of the former is more intense than the latter. I find that Overlay generally works better for outdoor images and Soft Light works better for indoor ones, so I'm picking Overlay. Now my image looks like this:

Pretty harsh, with very dark darker colors, but super-saturation has been achieved. In fact, it's been achieved a little too well. So now we're going to make this top layer that we’re working with somewhat transparent, in order to weaken the blend effect but not kill it, obviously. Time for more subjectivity!

In your layer window there should be a bit that looks like this:

Usually, it’s right next to the layer blends you just used. If you click the drop-down arrow, you get a slider, or you can just type numbers in the box. Drag that slider down (Or type in numbers less than 100) until you can, for instance, differentiate shades in the darkest colors of your image. Generally, values between 35% and 75% work best here, but it will totally depend on your image and the lighting in it and stuff like that. For mine, I went with 48%, and it looks like this:

The colors are still strongly saturated, as they should be for this process, but now I can, for instance, see the pinstripes in Simon's jacket again (although you can't see that in the sized-down pic :) ) as well as the different colors in the rocks in the background and the difference between Simon's hair and those rocks. You'll also want to be able to see things like highlights in darker hair colors. If it's an indoor pic, you want dark furniture that doesn't look like black blobs. That's the sort of thing you're looking to accomplish in this step.

Next, we want to add some blur to this layer. This will, among other things, simulate the color bleed that is present in Technicolor films and old films/pictures in general. We'll do that with a Gaussian blur. So, go Filter-->Blur-->Gaussian Blur.

You'll get a popup that looks like this:

Again, you have a slider or a box you can type in numbers to apply a blur to this top layer of the image. I find that a blur of 5-15 pixels works well here, again depending on your image and how you want it to look. It gives you appropriate overall soft-focus, a bit of bleed around the edges of colors, and it smooths out highlights on skintones and hair that the layer blending step makes fairly harsh. Those are your goals. I went with 8 pixels on my pic, and now it looks like this:

Now, time to brighten things up a bit because the layer blending darkens things down. OR with night shots, you might need to darken back down a little. To do either kind of adjustment, go Image --> Adjustments --> Curves, which brings up a popup that looks like this:

See that window with the diagonal line through it? You can click anywhere on that diagonal line and then drag around the point you "caught" to make the line curved instead of straight. Generally speaking, if you curve it down, it makes the image darker. Curve it up, it makes the image brighter. We probably want the latter unless you started with a night pic, so click somewhere in the middle of that diagonal line and then drag upwards, like so:

Drag around until you like how bright (or dark) your image is. You should see things like nicely-white whites, if there are any in your pic, but otherwise it's totally a preference thing. My pic now looks like this:

Almost done! Now, it’s time to warm the image up a little with a lighting effect. This needs to be done on the original, bottom layer of the image and, unfortunately, this is where things are pretty different between Photoshop versions. I know it's totally different in CS2, and I don't know when it switched over to more like the style that CS6 has. But hopefully you can puzzle things out if you have an older version.

This is also the step that's the artsy-fartsiest of them all. You can do really weird/cool stuff with lighting effects, like make things melancholy and moody, like the finished pic at the top of this post and that you can see a bigger version of here, which owes its moody appearance to different lighting effects drawn on multiple layers between the bottom layer and the semi-transparent one on top. Or you can make it bright and sunny and happy and pretty much anything in-between. I encourage you to experiment to your heart's content. But for brevity's sake, as a "base" to work from, I'll just give you basics here.

First, in your layer window, click on the original background to activate it and then go Filter-->Render--> Lighting Effects, and your image will now look like this:

(Don't panic, it's just preview. ;) ) First thing you wanna do, over in the right-hand side of the screen in the tab called "Properties," is click the drop-down that says "Spot" by default and change it to "Point," like so:

(If you're on an older Photoshop version that looks nothing like CS6 and you're looking at a popup now, there should be a drop-down somewhere in that window that'll list...actually, a whole bunch more effects than what CS6 has. Look for an effect called "Flashlight" and then you can fiddle with the settings from there, including the size/intensity of the effect, which in CS6 is done on the actual image instead.)

Now your image will look like this:

See that circle thing superimposed on your pic? You can move the center of the effect by clicking on that circle and dragging it around your image. The light will radiate out from whatever center point you choose to whatever distance you choose, which is defined by the bright green circle. To choose that distance -- which you'll want to do before you mess with the other settings, so that you can see the effect of the settings you choose better -- hover your cursor over the green circle. When it turns yellow, click and then drag to make the scale -- the size and range of the effect -- larger. Generally, unless there's something interesting in the pic that I want to highlight or if there's an actual light source like a lit lamp, I'll just put the center point in the center of the pic (It'll be there by default) and then set the scale so that covers about half of the image, like so:

Once your effect area is larger so you can see things better, you'll want to screw around with the settings of the effect. (The "Properties" tab on the right-hand side of the screen, over where you changed “Spot” to “Point,” for those with later Photoshop versions.) Here are the setting ranges I typically use:

Color: Click in the white square next to the word "Color" and you'll get a color picker popup. In the picker, in the box at the bottom labeled "#", type fff5e6. That's the hex code for a light ivory color, and it'll warm up the image just a touch, as the red/cyan processing is rather cold. That said, you can totally use whatever color of light you like. You can make it even yellower and/or a bit orange, which ramps up the “this-film-needs-restoration” look. Pink is nice if you've got a lot of pale/light skintones. Green is good if your main subject is a Plantsim or a green alien. A bit of blue is nice on outdoor winter pics with snow in them. Or, you can just leave it white. That works, too. Whatever the case, when you're satisfied with the color of your light, click OK.

Intensity: 0-30ish

Exposure: 0-20 or so

Gloss and Metallic: 0

Ambience: Between -10 and 10. Or more. Or less. ;)

Ultimately, all of these settings depend on the "feel" you want the pic to have. Play around with the sliders, to see what each of them do. When you're happy with what you see, click the blue "OK" button at the top of the screen. (Or "OK" on your popup, if that's what you've got.) My pic now looks like this:

(Settings: Color fff5e6, Intensity 32, Exposure 15, Gloss and Metallic 0, Ambience -2)

Final step! Do a Gaussian Blur on the bottom layer, to finish the color bleed effect and make the thing more vintage-appropriately blurry. Do it just like you did it on the top layer. The bottom layer is not semi-transparent, however, so you'll need to be much more conservative with the amount of blur you apply. You're going to want less than one pixel. On mine, I used 0.3. and the final result is:

And, that's it! I know it seems like a lot of steps, but once you do it a few times and don't have to look at the instructions, it goes quickly. :) From this point you can call it done or you can screw around with it further still. Add some scratches with a scratch brush, sic different filters on it for artsy effect, whatever.

#sims 2 #sims 2 pic-editing tutorial #tutorials #this would probably work on ts3 pics too #i haven't tried it #and i don't own ts4 so i can't try it on that either #vintage is good #sims in technicolor

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