#itoreplies

not all good artists are great professionals.

I might sound a little jaded saying this, but I've known phenomenal artists throughout my years of college and I would never recommend them for a job. I would never work for them. If I saw them at a future job, I would groan.

For a lot of people, art is escapism and fun and self-indulging, even if it's not a simple hobby. Professional artists hardly, if ever get complete creative freedom over any project,, and to many people that sounds like hell on earth: these people wouldn't make good professionals.

Generally, if the idea of breathing life into someone else's ideas doesn't bring you any joy, don't make art your job. If you have no interest in acquiring the soft skills that make a great Creative, aside from the hard ones-- don't make art your job. If you like to take your time with it, don't make it your job.

I think that memory itself is a love language.

The unconscious act of making space in your brain for someone else, to carry parts of them with you all the time, even parts that seem silly and unimportant.

My brother, he’s one of my favourite people in this entire universe, but bless him, he’s really forgetful. I think despite his best efforts he could forget his head somewhere, were it not attached to his neck. He has forgotten deadlines and names, and missed flights, and birthdays and all.

We were in his car last week and a song came on the radio. I told him I loved it and he said he knew, because I loved it as a baby too.

He used to put various music from his ipod for me when I was a baby to see if I responded to it positively (because what else would a fifteen year old punk do with a baby?) and said I started laughing a lot when this song came on and started tapping on his arm to play it again.

That’s twenty years ago now, he still remembers something about me I didn’t even know. For no reason.

I need to like. Sit on it for a bit. But i'm also itching to be louder than the people who outright hate it so here goes;

I've seen people talk a lot about how it's a bad ending, both badly written and bad, as in depressing. Denji ends up again with no family, a slave to Public Safety under Nayuta's rule, and poor, basically. So there's the question of why the whole story even matters.

I'm not sure how many of these people were around when Part 1 ended in 2021, but that was the exact same argument going around. Denji ends up with no living family, just the promise of one, in the spirit of the woman who ruined his life, and devils still exist--So, again, what was the point? The difference being, people loved the ending of part 1.

I'm not sure if I've vocalized it before, but I always thought Part 2 wouldn't have a good ending (well written but sad, I mean), for the simplest reason that Part 1 is the good one. I think the whole point of separating them so clearly and switching casts and stakes, instead of presenting Part 2 as a natural continuation of part 1, was so that Fujimoto could go balls to the walls with metaphors and absurdism and overall craziness, while still giving the reader a satisfying conclusion to the story, if they don't want to follow. I see the ending of Part 1 as a stop sign that's like "fuckery road ahead. If you're satisfied now, this is how you should remember the ending as. If you trust me, no you shouldn't, but follow along anyway."

All this to say that part 2 is a surprisingly more hopeful ending than what I thought Fujimoto could pull. I seriously believed he was going to pull a Fire Punch and blow the earth up or something. But I guess this just says more about me, and what I think is nice, more than anything. Why is it nice if Denji ends up indebted and blind and friendless again?

The thing is, Fujimoto doesn't believe in perfection, and he keeps hammering in that Evil, Turmoil, and generally "Bad Things" are as necessary to life, and the human experience as Good things are. It's been the same point he has been making since part 1. We know what Good movies are because Bad ones exist. You only know joy because you've known pain. One cannot meaningfully exist without the other.

So of course, Denji gets some of the good bits--he gets to live in a reality where he was never horrifically abused and brutalized in the ways we saw him being in the story-- along with some bad ones; he's still poor, and family-less, and his past with the yakuza still tracks. It's forgiving, in a surprisingly realistic and grounded sense,, though I get why to many people it might ring as unsatisfactory. It's hard to see a character you've been rooting for for years not get what he wanted, even after coming so close. But it's not meaningless.

There's the Dreams bit. In a few words, I can describe it as: Is it better to dream about something forever and never know what it feels like, or to get it, and then have it be not at all what you wanted? And what if you get it and it's every bit as good? What do you have to live for, then? Are you supposed to keep finding new dreams, stuck in a never-ending cycle of fulfilling them and chasing them over and over? Are dreams better off staying dreams? Are people who realize theirs the most miserable creatures on earth?

Denji still dreams of going to school and he still has this insatiable, vaguely shaped hole in him for things he once had, but can't remember having them-- but he will never know what it's like to go to school and be completely isolated by your peers and feel the chasm between your life experiences grow unbridgeable. He still wants a girlfriend (presumably) but he will never know what sitting in a cafe waiting for Reze as she bleeds out on the street is like. He'll never meet Aki, but he will never know what sounds he makes as he dies in his arms.

And Asa, it's the same with her. He saves Asa from falling, therefore erasing the event of her becoming ostracized by her peers. But by doing so, Asa will never see her face in Denji's. She will never feel as alienated and odd as him. And she will never call him Denji.

So is the ending well-written? I think yeah. It's in line with everything that I've been told Fujimoto believes in, and everything that Chainsaw Man has set itself up as, symbolically. I can understand part of the frustration being that many plot-threads are left ambiguous, or nonsensical in a very anti-shonen fashion, but man....Chainsaw Man was never about that for me. I don't want to rip its carcass open and make sense of every excruciating detail just so that it can prove its own plot-driven genius to me. I have attack on titan and Fmab for that.

If you would like to: feel free to use this ask as an excuse to ramble something about an oc of yours, or just any cool thought that you have!

Oooo thank you so much!!! Honestly the day itself was pretty shit but I got to have a nice dinner with my partner so !!! Small wins small wins

Honestly this is the greatest gift people can get me here; free ranting pass

Not an oc rant but I went to see Obsession on Friday since it finally released in my country and then kept thinking about Kenjaku possessing Yuuji’s mom in jjk, and how if Gege was allowed a bit more freedom in shonen jump he could hardcore lean into the horror of it in a similar way.

There’s such a lovely set up there with Yuuji’s father evidently knowing his wife isn’t really his wife, but either locking down in trauma response and accepting this clearly “wrong” version of her, or having something genuinely wrong with him the way Bear in Obsession does and conceding with using her body, if only because it’s her body and it looks like her and smells like her and has her voice and if he just doesn’t look at the stitches for too long—

Also Kenjaku genuinely not knowing how to act like a modern day suburbian woman or even a “normal” person at all would create such amazing horror. Him moving abnormally, him laughing abnormally, him not being able to get people’s cadence juuuuust right, him not blinking because he forgets.

Plus the implication that Nikki was conscious and just out of control while whatever it was possessed her body (I choose to think it wasn’t an entity or a “her” but Bear’s own obsession with Nikki repackaged and projected onto Nikki’s body like a vessel for something so intense it borders on sick) ,,, sometimes sprinting and jerking trying to kill Bear for letting her be used, sometimes flinching back in horror when kissing him.

It kinda brings me back to Shibuya and Geto’s body having muscle memory and trying to choke itself in reaction to Kenjaku trying to hurt Gojo with it? Amazing.

I love the accidental comedy one gets from Kenjaku but if one sits and thinks about it for just a minute longer you get shit like the two-sided SA between him and Yuuji’s father, or the realization that Gojo left Geto’s dead body on the street, or that even Sukuna calls Kenjaku truly sick in that one panel and you’re like…. Heavy metal shit. We could have gotten more.

I wanted to ask a very specific question. Throughout your history of making art/drawing what advice or tips on it did you find the most useful and helpful and also what kind of tips would you give to others that personally worked well for you (if you have any)?

God this sounds like a survey or an interview but I don’t know how to make it sound less official lol

Anyway, have an awesome day!!!

Hello!

Funnily enough I was ruminating about this a couple of days ago because I realised the advice i value the most did not come from my years of art school but my boss at my current job. So here’s my top 5:

1) Your eye is a muscle you should train constantly: consuming art should be as important as making it. Good art , bad art, doesn’t matter. What matters is that you constantly broaden your spectrum of influences and meaningfully interact with everything you consume. Figuring out what makes it work or doesn’t,,,picking up a new technique,, listening to the creators speak about their vision, ect. It all counts as practice and helps you get better at what you do

2) Everything should have a reason for existence: even when you’re filling a piece with details that seem brainless to an outside viewer, you should have a reason for putting them there. They should add something to the character, or the atmosphere or the aesthetics of the piece. Consider these details heavily and if you struggle to name their importance, remove them. You’re tiring yourself for something not even you see the point of.

3) you should sharpen your basics every once in a while: the learning curve in art looks a bit like a wave, and art block is also a thing, so what I find really helpful when I feel stuck, or that my ideas exceed my skill level, is going back to the basics. Quick form sketches. Traditional art. Painting only using 2 colors. Ect

4) if a piece is not “hitting” the way it’s supposed to even though you can’t see anything obviously wrong with it, then it’s probably the composition’s fault.

No blood and guts from me on this one, but this used to be my favourite art of them that I made, and I remember being so bitter when it didn’t do well in numbers lol

As for someone else’s art, I really really admire user @/uwu-mi1k on here and I used to study they use of color all the time back in my second year of uni. They only have a couple of works but i think this is my favourite:

(Tw: for blood)

my computer files have been a mess ever since i started working last year so I was only able to recover a handful that I still like, and they're mostly concept sketches. but here: