beautiful cums

Lovelies, your stories and art are beautiful because they are from you, and FOR you. Stats do not determine the quality of a product. Again, some of the BEST stories on the archive I have ever read were around 100 hits, and 0-10 kudos. Some of the BEST ART I’ve seen has 0 notes.

You know how I can tell? Because the authors and artists poured their heart and soul into their craft. As long as it can inspire ONE person, you should be proud. You just radically changed the life and perspective of ONE person. That’s amazing.

Sure, you might think your art or story is “cringe” or “bad”…OR, it can be someone’s comfort piece that they go back to after a long day. You may see your stats and think, “man, nobody enjoys this,” not knowing that maybe, juuuust maybe, you have that ONE person who you’ve inspired, who loves your work, and lurks your socials awaiting for your next project. Your art, your music, YOUR story has the potential to do that, but you have to love what YOU do.

And yes, your love WILL show. Maybe not with stats, or kudos, or notes, or comments. But you may be someone’s favorite without even knowing. As long as your art is out there, it WILL reach somebody. I will try to be that somebody for a lot of you, but there is indeed A LOT of you.

Open wounds. What are open wounds? A taunt not forgotten. A joke that hit a little too close to home.

Anxiety. An open wound to live with, your entire life. You might get used to it gradually, but it's always present at the back of your mind

Burning like embers after a bonfire, and if added a little more wood, it would burn a little too brightly, a little too painfully.

And the smoke makes it a little harder to breathe, the initial smoke that is. Later on, you would need oxygen masks for it.

And when your chest tightens a bit too much, when the wound is poked a bit deeper, and you really cannot breathe. It gets harder and harder, more difficult, like an out-of-body experience.

You watch and watch, helpless to do anything because what can you do? how could you stop it? how could you hope for it to stop, when it hasn't for years.

But then it does. Slowly, steadily, like a train coming to a stop. And then it's gone and there's relief. Relief as it's gone and relief that I don't have to feel like that anymore.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

The elbows are near the same height at the belly button

the hands go about 1/3 of the way down the thigh

add fewer folds in clothes than you think you need

The colors of shadows look different depending on what color your light source is

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HARD LINES AND HARD SHADOWS

if you don’t like doing highlights digitally in procreate, add a black layer over the whole drawing, then click the little N of the layer and scroll down to Color Dodge. pick a color for your highlights and draw. Use a soft airbrush to create glow, use a harder brush to create sharper lines

if something is out of your skill level but you really wanna draw it, get a reference! It’s ok to trace! It will help you get better!

think of objects and people as piles of shapes if you are having trouble with positioning

if you don’t like drawing the other eye: copy and paste, cover it with hair/hat/eye patch/hand/scarf/literally anything you can think of

try new styles! it doesn’t matter if it looks good or not, but now you know what you do/don’t like doing, what you’re good/not good at, and what you want to improve on!

when you’re drawing profile heads: add a little extra length to the back of the head. heads aren’t perfect circles. doing this will make the face, ear, and jawline feel much less cramped.

this is a personal preference, but i like to find old photos from like the 40s and 50s to use as references because people got really wild with how they posed and i find it helps with angles and positioning

heres an exercise i like to do to help with positioning: draw a few pairs of circles, make them at all different angles. then, so back and use those circles as placements for hips and shoulders and draw the first pose that comes to mind. keep it simple, but try to make it natural

I used to hate the summer.

Summertime equals heat. Summertime equals sweat. Summertime equals gross.

There was nothing that made my uncomfortable developing body feel safe within the summer. All of the bad memories that ruminate through my body and my psyche are attached to the sweltering heat.

But this year, I love it. It's weird how transformational our perceptions can be. But I feel like being self aware is not the best when it comes to this level of inquiry about how our innerworking minds tinker with our memories.

Art, to me, is very very intimate. Art feels like fucking sometimes. It's an exchange of vulnerabilities that I only unsheath for those that I feel are worthy of its valor; some have dishonored it in the past. So now, I am stingy.

Our bodies are so cruel to us sometimes. Jealously feels like a dying star-the pressure of the implosion-that tries to sever all connection and all life before it is ultimately spread apart to birth something new. The death is hot. The death is sudden. The death is revolutionary.

Over the past few months, I have realized that I am a relatively jealous individual. And I hate it. I don't like the physicality of jealousy. The way it makes me hold my chest tight with suppression of something so demonized. The sin of the possession of another, gnawing at the seams keeping my ribcage together.

I struggle with connection. Not with others, but with myself and how I am not special. I am not special.

I am not special.

And I will not sit here and fool myself into thinking so. I am not special, but I am devoted; I simply wish to be worshipped like back in the days when the Ancient Greeks glorified what their gods were best at. I wish I was the cold and still statuette getting kissed at the feet for providing words of wisdom to those who love me.

I wish I was your art. And I wish it was a closed practice that hexes those that dare to get near.

Of course, I am blindingly aware of the stipulations behind this frame of thinking (I am acutely aware of my ego and where it bubbles out, ready to burst with hot air.) I don't like that I even have the capacity to think this way, and I also don't like the things that dissatisfy me in the process.

Will your art forget me? Will your art leave me behind? I am fearful of failure. I am fearful of abandonment. I am fearful of never ever ever being enough and that I will always be left behind. That is why I need you to assure to me that I am a chunk of you always. That I am the piece you never leave behind. You die without my chunk of your body. But in the process I have never stood alone.

My art has never been for one. My art has always been for you. My art has never been for me.

Which is why I hate when you are happy. That is why I hate myself when you are happy. That is why I hate only myself. It is not your fault. It is never your fault.