Contains OCs and reblogs

and that's a wrap on artfight 2026! please excuse me while i enter a brief torpor state

in order:

— bitter honey

Please support some of the following (and please feel free to tag more)

Thunder Bay Community Pasture

Northern Reach Network

What if the children go to schools unafraid of tear gas and bullets?

What if the birds come back, and the bees are healed, and every species moves from endangered, to threatened, to thriving?

What if the rainforest ADVANCES?

What if every parking lot had solar panels? What if every structure had solar panels? What if we built climbing gyms and terraced gardens in the skeletons of old coal power plants?

What if you baked your neighbor bread, and they shared their home-grown blackberries?

What if every person who needed a home, had one? What if every person who needed healing was healed?

What if every body was treasured for what it was, not what it should be?

What if every trans child's parents attended their graduation, their wedding, their new-name-day?

What if every warehouse became a closed-circle repair station? Goods flowing out, and back, and out again? What if landfills started to SHRINK?

What if the water and air were clean? What if there was enough public transit that the cars dwindled, leaving the streets safe for kids on bikes, evening deer, midnight cats and foxes?

What if we win?

The condors are back. The whales are saved. The sea turtles are no longer endangered. The cranes are back. The bees are recovering. The air in LA and Tokyo and London is clean again. The aquifers in the LA Basin are refilling.

Children are kinder than previous generations. Parents are stopping the abuse cycle. Being trans and queer is more acceptable than ever on a ground level.

It's hard to see if you're young, if you don't know how to step back from social media and the news. But remember--bad news sells, and the algorithm knows despair keeps you scrolling. It's a skewed lens.

We are fighting and we are winning against this adminstration's bullying. We are coming together against the bullies and they are running away scared because they don't understand that we will do that.

People are working hard every day to find ways to make sure fewer animals get hit by cars and planes and rockets.

Maker spaces are more common than ever. Solar and wind are more common than ever. Coal plants are shutting down every day.

Unprecedented numbers of acres are being bought back or given back to their rightful stewards, and the world heals because of it. People are working hard every day to learn how to help a forest recover faster.

We are not at zero. We are at decades of effort to heal the world. We've come SO far.

In 1982 there were only 22 California Condors left in the world. In 1992, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), with its public and private partners, began reintroducing captive-bred condors to the wild. In 2001 the first wild nesting occurred in Grand Canyon National Park since re-introduction. In 2002 there were only 8 pairs of wild nesting birds population-wide. In 2008, for the first time since the program began, more California condors were flying free in the wild than in captivity. Today there are nearly 500 – more than half of them flying free in Arizona, Utah, California, and Baja Mexico.

When I was born, there were no condors in the wild. I'm 37 now, and there are over 250 condors flying free.

When my mom was born in 1955, there were days when she wasn't allowed to go outside to play, because of the air pollution. When I was born, that never happened anymore.

When I was born, humpback whales were critically endangered, and people thought they were going to go extinct. Today, they've recovered to exceed their recorded numbers. Other whales too!

We fixed it.

Since 1990 extreme poverty has decreased worldwide by over HALF.

Here is a free pdf of xanathars guide to everything

Here is a free pdf to monsters manual

Here is a free pdf to tashas cauldron of everything

Here is a free pdf to dungeon master’s guide

Here is a free pdf to volo’s guide to monsters

Here is a free pdf of mordenkainen’s tomb of foes

Hot damn, Burgess Shale merfolk are fun. Going to have to do more once I’m done with my exchange stuff.

Hallucinogenia: The first one I’d drawn of the set, which is rather apparent with how sketchy it is. Probably explains why they’re so pissed off too. Remind me to whip up a better one sometime, Ultharkitty.

Opabinia: Figuring out how to incorporate it’s iconic mouth into a mer without making that mer into some sort of Lovecraftian beastie took a little longer than I would have liked. Still, I love her to bits.

Pikaia: Couldn’t leave out what is very likely to be the earliest animal to have had a backbone, and a backbone so new that it wasn’t much more than a thicker chord of tissue running through the animal.

And Charnia: Which actually doesn’t belong to the Burgess Shale but is an Ediacaran animal Ultharkitty introduced me to during a discussion of merfolk and had mused whether or not it could be done. Well, there we go.

As soon as I've added some watercolour to this I'll get back to drawing the rest of the delightful suggested critters!

Anyways, here's the lady all coloured in.

This one is called Cambrian Bowling Alley Carpet, and there's a smaller coordinating Cambrian Creature Confetti print. (I posted about this on my sewing and other drawings sideblog and will reblog it here later, but figured I'd add it to this post as well.)

The final lineup of large and medium sized motifs is: omnidens, anomalocaris, opabinia, norwoodia, marrella, facivermis, diania, pikaia, and hallucigenia. And the little confetti creatures are: orthoceras, burgessia, wiwaxia, isoxys, kiisortoqia, tuzoia, vetulicolia, dinomischus, urokodia, plectronoceras, nectocaris, eokinorhynchus, and various trilobites. Thank you to everyone who left suggestions!!

Of course they're not remotely to scale, but I did make Omnidens the biggest.

And I liked the Omnidens so much they got to be their own pattern, with some added texture. I did a blue and a brown version.

I will definitely do more Cambrian patterns, it's been delightful reading about these weird little aquatic friends and there's such a great variety of shapes! (I started sketching out another pattern, but it'll be a while before that happens. I didn't do much sewing in January because of all the drawing and editing, and I must have some drawing/sewing balance!)

The other patterns from this bunch of fill-a-yard samples are this crinoid fossil one copied from a 1760's teapot.

(More on that here and here.)

And these monster ones (more on them here).

"(Drawn for the 2019 Lanzendorf contest by Christian M) “Wonderful Life” Deep in the early Cambrian ocean, below the shadow of the Cathedral Escarpment (A giant rock shelf formation), life goes on as normal. Bioluminescent Amiskwia swim in groups, trying to escape the carnivorous Opabinia. It can walk on the sea floor with legs, or swim through the water with undulating fins. Among the algae, strange sponge relatives called Choia exist, holding themselves just above the rock surface. Hallucigenia sparsa feed on the marine snow that falls, catching it on hairy tentacles and shoving it in their mouths. Aysheaia feed on sponges called Vauxia, which grow on the rocky substrate. Preying on hard shelled animals like trilobites, using its armoured antennae to break open armour, Anomalocaris dwarfs everything. It is followed closely by a shoal of Pikaia, which survive by feeding the scraps left behind when Anomalcaris finishes messily ingesting it’s prey with a horrifying circular mouth part. It can see Opabinia with the best eyes that would ever evolve for millions of years, only rivalled by dragonflies and possibly griffinflies. The Opabinia, though it has 5 compound eyes, still has a more limited resolution, and doesn’t notice the Anomalocaris swimming towards it through the gloom of the depths."

Compiled some basic information I know about drawing fat characters for beginners since I've been seeing more talk about absence of really basic traits in a lot of art lately.