Hello Friend

you do not need to complete everything you do. sometimes a sketch is okay on its own. sometimes a piece doesn’t need shading. sometimes it doesn’t even need color! stop thinking anything that isn’t colored and shaded with a pretty background is complete work. a sketch is complete work if you want it to be. 

try different styles. i know one particular style may be easy and comfortable to you, but branch out and try new ones. it’ll open more doors and possibilities for you. do a challenge where you draw the same thing in different styles and see what happens! 

even if you hate it, post it. often times our problem as artists is we see what we want in our heads and what we draw isn’t an exact copy of what we were thinking of. so we think it’s bad. but from an outsider’s pov, it might be absolutely perfect to them. because they don’t know what your idea was. they’re just seeing it as it is now. and they see nothing wrong with it. 

pick your own colors. it’s okay to pick from a palette, but make sure you do your own color exercises too. know what colors compliment each other. 

My mom’s parents said “We don’t care who you love.” At that point she’d only ever brought home white guys. She brought my dad home-her mother called her a nigger lover and damned the relationship as much as possible. Her father grew around his prejudices after I was born but never apologized, just wasn’t a blatant fuck.

The day she introduced my father to her family was the last time she spoke to her mother for over twenty years. When I was getting sick and she called and asked her mother and grandmother if anyone in the family had anything strange happen similar what I was going through they told her “it’s because you married a black man. You made your bed, you lie in it.”

Cops pulled them over all the time and asked my mom IF SHE WAS OKAY AND IF SHE NEEDED HELP BECAUSE MY FATHER-A BLACK MAN-WAS DRIVING A 100 POUND WHITE WOMAN AROUND. HE WAS HARRASSED AND THREATED WITH ARREST.

My father ended up getting into a fight in self defence because some entitled hick decided he didn’t like seeing a black man and white woman in the bar together. Thankfully other patrons helped my father but he still couldn’t go to the er for his injuries. My mom patched him up and they were terrified the cops would take him away.

THEIR BEST FRIEND GOT LICENSED TO MARRY THEM SO THEY COULD ACTUALLY TIE THE KNOT BECAUSE NO ONE ELSE WOULD AND CITED JIM CROW ERA LAW AS TO WHY.

When shopping with just me my father wouldn’t hold my hand if there was a group around. Why? I’m far lighter than him and people had stopped and asked him “whose child is that?” Or “little girl where’s your parents?” and were stunned when I grinned and pointed at my dad and proudly proclaimed “my daddy’s right here.” You know where else mixed kids couldn’t hold their parents hands? Apartheid South Africa. We live in fucking FLORIDA.

we need to change the part of the history where yt ppl are given credit for “discovering” things that were never lost and were known by the indigenous ppl in the first place 

My uncle got a notification that someone was ringing his doorbell. This was the culprit. 

“A variety of wild animals visiting a water fountain”