Art and Alliteration in the Land of Tomorrow

A new child has been born to the reference family. I will be uploading SFW reference for gesture drawing and get back to updating these and continuing update Digital Brushes. Thank you for your patience.

Elves drink hand sanitizer with cranberry flavoring.

Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.

In 2023, it was horror. Things not being what they seem; the unknown, things that go 'bump' in the night-- stories that revealed dystopian devastation as their twist.

In 2024, the theme was grief. Whether it was lost opportunity or lost loved ones, we had an overwhelming number of submissions that touched on the subject.

In 2025, the theme was not being good enough. Trying your best and failing, trying over and over and over again, feeling like you weren't 'built right' for the world-- with an even mix of happy and sad endings.

This year, the theme seems to be shame. Lots of work about embarrassment and about how trying can (and will) lead to catastrophic failure. It's not "Try anyway," it's "Don't you see how foolish trying is? Do you not see all the signs that this is dangerous, that it will fail?" where the character does fail and the lesson is "You should've read the room, idiot."

There is a city that this darkness can’t hide.

There are the embers of a fire that’s gone out,

But I can still feel the heat on my skin.

This mess we’re in, well you and I,

maybe you and I,

I was reading one story where the apocalypse was impossibly-rising oceans. Like, water is appearing from *waves hand* the Earth's crust or something, and literally all dry surface land on Earth is going to become underwater in X years. Part of the story was about a giant research project to invent FTL to send a few hundred humans to a nearby star which might have a habitable planet. You know what they were hoping to find? A planet with liquid water. Their plan was to descend from their starship and restart civilization using just the tools they brought with them, on a world with no life and no breathable air and the wrong gravity and the wrong temperate and the wrong sunlight and the wrong day-night cycle, just because it had liquid water. You know where else has liquid water? The flooded Earth you just abandoned. Instead of researching starship technology, you could have spent that time loading up all the same civilization-restarter tools into boats.

Art by Boell Oyino

May’s Theme: #TravellingBeekeeper

Presented by IDEA Academy

Discover the artists of the Character Design Challenge community and the current Theme of the Month in our Facebook Group! And when you repost your design on our Patreon page, you can also win awesome prizes every month and choose the future themes!

my friend's 5 year old recently got a toy veterinary medicine set - it's super cool, like one of those mini play kitchens a lot of kids have, but it's set up to pretend to be a vet (it's this thing) - it has stuffed animals and things to weigh them, give them medicine, take x-rays, write on their charts, etc.

so this kid, who is five and to my knowledge has no experience in the administrative bureaucracy of modern healthcare, puts a stuffed pig named Piggy on the exam table. she pretends to draw blood from Piggy using a fake syringe, and the blood goes into a toy test tube vial that she calls "the resulter"

i'm playing with her, right, so i'm like, awesome, what are the results of Piggy's blood test? and she says "we have to send it to the scientists." so we send the vial to the scientists (put it in her bedroom) and when we get back to the vet playset i'm like awesome what did the scientists say? and she says they have not gotten back to us yet

so she rolls her eyes, exasperated, and says we have to call the scientists. she pretends to call them. apparently, they tell her that Piggy's blood test is "at the bottom of the list" and "we have to WAIT." she frowns. we wait a bit longer and call them back. they tell us it will be a while! she says we should go ask the scientists in person so we go back to her bedroom and she inquires at this imaginary lab, at which point the scientists yell at her and tell her now they will make us wait even longer!

keep in mind she is 100% directing this play. she is making all this up. she is fully in control of this game, and she has decided that what we are going to pretend is that we are dealing with this exhausting nonsense, not actually treating Piggy.

finally the blood tests come back. they are inconclusive. the scientists do not know what is wrong with Piggy. the little girl walks back to the stuffed pig on the exam table, sighs deeply, and says in a very serious voice "we can never help you."

i'm obsessed with this kid. when given complete control over a make believe scenario, instead of becoming the heroic rescuer administering effective cures, she is instead a beleaguered vet making multiple calls to an overworked lab only to be left unable to help her patient.