Cthulhu Lemon

the designs are so adorbs.... i hope they'll one day uncancell it and continute working on it oughhh

I'm still Big Mad from the animation industry AI news, and I had some thoughts I needed to get out. There are lots of more important reasons why artists shouldn't use AI, but here is my philosophical take on it.

I wanted the birds to look like they were actually in the space so first thing after doing the draft was to do a lighting study

after that I covered the walls in letters in lieu of a projector/vr headset bc i have neither of those :) Then i take a picture of the section of wall and superimpose the lineart over top of it so I can pencil in the lines

et voila

GIVE IT UP FOR BIRD NUMBUH 5, THE CANADIAN GOOSE, Branta canadensis!!!!

bird 5/14, Bluejay, Cyanocitta cristata

birds 6 and 7: American Goldfinch, Spinus tristis, male and female

BIRD NUMBER 8, (yellow shafted) NORTHERN FLICKERRRRR, Colaptes auratus

genuinely made me start questioning my sanity around day 3, it's half the size the of the goose, WHY did it take me 4 days to finish??

Bird number 9: Red-tailed hawk, Buteo jamaicensis

my chains are broken i am FREE. although i did have a great deal of fun with this, the barring on the wings itself took me like four days and i am READY to move on

this was a week and a half of continuous work so please excuse me for getting a little emotional in the bg 🙏

BIRD NUMBER 10!!! The Male Mallard Duck, Anas platyrhynchos

the male and female ones are gonna be posted separately bc they're taking a lot longer lol but yea! super happy i was able to capture the iridescent green of the head, i found metallic green and blue paint at a craft store that really made his head POP. it looks better in person i promise

ALSO!! As this is the 10th one, BIG announcement. The end is in sight!!!!! I plan to finish within the next 3 weeks and there will be a small dedication ceremony/ unveiling happening at the library to commemorate its completion on the 16th of May. If you live in the Western New York region and want to check it out for yourself shoot me a dm!

aaaand another one bites the duck,

we're movin right along with bird numero 11!! The lady Mallard!! Anas platyrhyncos

power couple that they are, here's bird number 12 and 13,

the Northern Cardinals, Cardinalis cardinalis

and NOW that they are complete, ITS GO TIME, in the next five days (library's closed for mother's day 😭😭) i need to have the GBH fully rendered, the names of the birds vectored, weeded, masked, applied to the wall, and then painted, plus additional cattails throughout. I may be able to get away with just getting the GBH done in time for the unveiling and then just have the names and cattails added later, but i'm gonna really try to get it all done in time. BUT, i have a plan. Part of why i take so long on these is because i really am just figuring it out as I do it lmao. there have been many a time where i am sitting on top of the ladder googling "how to paint birds" but I think if i take the time tomorro to do all that figuring out how to approach it beforehand, this will go a lot faster. I may also recruit some of my artist friends to help with the placing of the names... hrmm we'll see.

Anyways, shout out to the librarian who tracked down exactly the thing i needed so i could figure out where to place the highlights in my birds eyes, ur the real mvp

Bird number 14 out of 14,

The Great blue heron, Ardea herodius

thank you to everyone who reached out or got excited about this project, it genuinely gave me the fuel i needed to keep going. In total, the 480+ total hrs it took me to cover this wall pales in comparison to how long its expected to spend on there, hopefully imparting a sense of beauty and love for the natural world to the next generation and here's hoping i'm only getting started with these.

pov youre ryland grace: mysterious blood covered hunk grips you with such strength and you haven't felt the touch of another human in literal decades, now have a normal reaction to it challenge: IMPOSSIBLE

On January 9th, 2016, I came out as transgender to, well, everyone. In a way, it's like a second birthday that, THIS YEAR, will be celebrated with leftover Pizza for lunch! lol

That said, It's hard to process that it's ONLY been 9 years that I've been on this journey as it's hard to remember NOT ever being out. It's weird.

As such, every year at this time, I like to re-present this sort of... Finding Dee ORIGIN story! A 5 page encapsulation of the fact that, YES J.K., Trans kids DO exist and I WAS one back in the late 70s.

Sometimes I feel like adding onto a reblog will cause things to get lost.

Every point made in that post is exactly how I feel.

I am so sick and tired of cutting back my words to be "good". To be "normal" to be "like everyone else in a fandom" becuase I fear what would happen if I was truly myself.

I am 35. I am turning 36 in a few months. I adore Teru and Shigeo and mob psycho 100. I love this show with all my heart because it helped me, as a 30 something year old, find something inside me I had lost.

I love terumob so much. They bring me joy, sadness, ideas. I love exploring them in AUs and cannon. I just adore their dynamic so much.

I love my ageswap au with my soul. It's a atory of loosing something you love and finding it again in the most unlikely of places.

And I love this fandom that has given me some of the best friends I've ever had

And yet there are times.... many times... where this culture can feel cruel. And judgemental.

I once saw a post on twitter where someone, in all seriousness, asked if they can still ship terumob when they turn 18 (because teru and shigeo are 14 in canon). And I’m over here, at 35 thinking “What the fuck….”

….why did you feel that you were not “allowed” to ship something as you grew? This is no fault of the poster, they are asking because the culture made them feel like they had to.

Who said? Who dictates these rules? Why are some so obsessed with infantualization of the characters? It is a beautiful fandom, but also has so many gatekeepers and judgemental individuals. How can a show and story about accepting everyone, including their dirty and unsavory sides, be twisted into “you can only ship X, Y or Z” or “you can’t write that horror fic, they are 14! It's torture porn now" Etc etc

I see so many tweets about the fandom is dying. Could it be becuase new fans are afraid to post, becuase of the fear of persecution? That they will say or do, or god forbid LIKE some art that may or may not be drawn by some "problematic"?

No wonder no one wants to write anymore. Or share their art.

I am not trying to start an argument. But I have seen time and time again, fans who have disengaged with the fandom due to its toxic culture. I have met others who are scared to even post their fanfics or art because they fear someone calling them out, canceling them. Even I have felt this need to keep to myself. I love to engage and run fandom events, but then I think “if I get too loud, someone is going to get mad about my age or what I write or who I am”

"If I engage too much someone is bound to find something

you do not, however, have the right to suicide bait or wish death threats upon or clog up city government resources over people who draw or write shit that makes you sick. you do not have the right to risk someone's death by cop over prose about teachers and students having sex or aged-up canonical teenagers experimenting with kink. i am not overreacting here and you are not light fucking yagami.

no one is trying to defend or normalize incest or pedophilia or <insert whatever culturally-unsavory thing conservatives profess to hate but do behind closed doors anyway here> when we advise you to simply block people and move on with your life. anyone who mounts a harassment crusade against writers and artists in fandoms who make twisted shit? is fighting a losing battle on a grand cosmic scale. you will never purge these desires or ideas from humanity. ever. they are older than the pyramids. real-life occurrences of these things have remained remarkably constant over time, irrespective of the amount of depictions in print or paint.

i beg y'all: please. please put all that restless vigilante energy into public service, preferably offline. or maybe write your own fanfics.

</sighs and steps off the soapbox>

i will say this: no one wants to remain in a fandom where most of the fanworks are unchallenging bits of peter pan marshmallow fluff about teens who never have dirty thoughts ever and never grow up, because it highlights in rather grim fashion what wasn't allowed to stay. i've been part of this fandom long enough to see married-and-still-in-flirty-raunchy-love middle-aged terumob get scrubbed from the internet. a PoC creator of lushly-inked dark canon-divergent terumob got drummed out of the fandom a couple of years ago. (the english-speaking mob psycho fandom seems to reserve a special ire for dark canon divergence and i have no clue why. i'll say it again: mob psycho is not lighthearted fluff, particularly if you've read the manga.) an artist into the shoumob rarepair gave up on this fandom after being harassed one too many times for simply daring to age the two up and pair them. i could keep going, but the list would swell to unbelievable proportions and i have other things to do with my day.