Mangoes Art Pit

Hi, I’m Mango, Nex, or Daina depending on how you know me (no preference for how I’m referred to and OP works fine 90% of the time). I am pretty consistent about posting just my own art here, but on occasion I’ll reblog others’ art or post about my houseplants or the local birds.

I currently live in the USA but I’ve applied for Lithuanian generational/birthright citizenship and the goal is to move to the EU as soon as I’m able to.

I am 21+ but this blog will always be SFW. I’m sure I’ve sworn here before but it’s minimal. I don’t really believe in DNI lists but I will happily block anyone being hateful. I don’t mind NSFW or gimmick blogs interacting, if anything I think it’s hilarious.

At the time of posting this I have not been on Tumblr for all that long so I’m going to make an effort to be much better about keeping things organized from now on.

Main tags:

#ihavethemangoes — for those of you who prefer the tags feed

#wip — works in progress

#finished — finished pieces

#resources — tutorials and other art resources

#art history — art research rambles

#reblogs — reblogs

#not art — miscellaneous

#fiber art — knitting, crochet, weaving etc.

#traditional art — drawing and painting

#digital art — digital illustration, graphic design, etc.

#artfight — I participate in the event every year

Art tags:

#weaving

#baltic pick up

#macrame

#knitting

#crochet

#lace

#embroidery

#cross stitch

#quilting

#watercolors

#gouache

#digital painting

#pixel art

#original character

#graphic design

#video editing

Other tags:

#birds

#houseplants

#carnivorous plants

#loom

Really on a roll this week, I finally got through the Void of single color cross stitch. I’m actually not sure if I want to follow through and make it my serious profile picture on my serious social media, it is exceptionally hard to get a good photo of cross stitch and I think the effect gets lost on such a small scale.

All finished! I will absolutely be doing more with splicing colors together, it’s a really nice effect and will help out a lot. DMC has so many colors but somehow I still manage to feel limited by them on occasion.

To be clear, I don’t base my self-worth on numbers. HOWEVER, I want to be an artist as a career and getting traction MATTERS.

So tell me why the SAME VIDEOS I made last year are doing absolutely awful this year even though I’m making them higher quality because I have a better mic and a better idea of what I’m doing.

Whole thing’s a scam. They change the algorithms, tell NO ONE, and expect their content creators to churn out content to figure out how it all works again. I went from getting routinely 2k views to NOTHING. It’s not just TikTok either, even SHORTS is doing me dirty.

I know the videos themselves aren’t bad, because the engagement has been good! I know what the pattern is supposed to be, these should be DOING WELL.

I don’t know why I bother. Maybe I should just stick to long-form content that I actually care about making. I enjoy posting on Tumblr because it doesn’t feel like this hellish game of chance. My therapist said I’m doing all I can online at this point and if I really want to be doing more then I should prioritize in-person networking.

Spent pretty much the entire day yesterday taking nice photos of my paintings with the nice camera and then editing them. There’s definitely still some small edits I need to make, I don’t have good lighting equipment so the bottom left corner is a TINY bit darker. Will be opening up a print shop once I order some test prints to make sure the vendor is good, I’m very excited :)

Crappy phone photos below for a fun comparison (it’s pretty subtle the difference is mostly lighting).

This project is definitely a marathon and not a sprint, but I’ve finally gotten far enough that I can get a better picture of the ‘right’ side. It’s definitely going faster now that I’ve figured out the rhythm of the design a little more but we’re still talking like. Two inches an hour.

Very cool technique! Looking forward to doing more (with wool instead of cotton) in the future. The material makes a pretty significant difference in design legibility.

Important PSA to my fellow digital artists to check your color profiles!

I do not enjoy being a Mac user but that’s what I have. It turns out Apple uses a P3 color profile by default and my Clip Studio Paint (drawing program) has been using the same thing. So for about four years every single digital artwork I’ve uploaded to any website has looked desaturated as hell. I’m not even sure if my social media has been spared.

Some good plant news: My maranta (prayer plant) was super root bound so she’s graduated to a 12 inch pot. I am VERY proud as they are notoriously difficult to care for. Also acquired a variegated prayer plant and a little baby monstera Thai constellation for an absolute STEAL of a price. Spent the day potting up a whole bunch of plants.

Shoutout to my mother’s lavender in the background that she grew from seed. I don’t usually do from seed but according to her lavender is very hard to start.

Decided to start a new alpha bracelet since I needed something to do on Plane Ride and I’ve been meaning to make one since I haven’t touched the technique since like last year. Was originally going to do monstera leaves but it just wasn’t turning out the way I wanted. And then I remembered I can literally do whatever plant I want so I’m doing the ever-glorious venus flytrap. My actual flytrap is doing AWESOME and I am a very proud plant parent.

Currently WILDLY obsessed with making html profiles for my characters on ArtFight. While I do hope they whitelist calc() and linear-gradient so that I can make stuff format nicely on mobile and have gradients, I am very pleased with the update. I’d like to make one for all of my characters but there’s 20 on the site right now so we’ll see.

More below the cut, my ArtFight is IHaveTheMangoes if you’d like to read the full profiles.

LET ME PUT Y’ALL ONTO THIS BOOK

So the book is Reflections From a Flaxen Past by Kati Reeder Meek. It’s specifically an exploration of Lithuanian fiber art from the perspective of an outsider, she’s super clear about not being Lithuanian herself so the vast majority of the book just features other Lithuanian artists.

Very cool to see the many, many pictures of women weaving and spinning. Also a great inspiration book because again, there’s just SO MANY pictures of weavings.

I’ve seen a couple posts about weaving songs AND THIS BOOK HAS SOME both in the original Lithuanian and an English translation.

But my FAVORITE part of the book is ALL THE PATTERN DRAFTS. They’re all very pretty and there’s quite a few I haven’t seen before.

Thank you! You’re in luck because I did actually take notes for this one!

To be perfectly clear, this was mostly improvised and I adjusted as needed. The notes were so that I would be able to mirror it on the other side.

After I did the feather tips I realized it would actually be easier to do math for the color transitions so I’m more pleased with the color changes in the blue than the black. There’s not as much shaping at the top edge so it’s a little more predictable to count from there.

For the black, I started counting from the bottom of the first row for each feather and then moved the colorwork one stitch per row.

For the blue, I wanted it to start halfway on feather 6 and reach the bottom by feather 12. The first row on feather 6 is 90 stitches, so I would start at stitch 45 from the top. The last row of feather 12 is 54 stitches, which I subtracted 3 from for a decrease on the end.

I went for a straight line between the two so the math worked out that I only had to move the colorwork one stitch per feather. If you wanted a curved line you could totally do some exponential math.