#matineeidyll

THIS IS FANTASTIC

OMFG DUDE THATS AMAZING!!!!! :oooo

Heeeeeeeeeeeeeey Mia thank!!

6. What is your favourite stand-alone book?

Most of my favourite books are stand-alones because I’m a gross English literature snob and most gross snobby English literature is “stand-alone”. But they are, as follows, as per my Goodreads “favourites” tag:

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (amazing, amazing, amazing book. every person should read this book, I’m not kidding, it’s a life manual)

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (it’s gorgeous, wistful, and sad. also watch the 1981 TV series)

A Room with a View by E.M. Forster (my first brush with Forster; it’s satirical and quite feminist, and Lucy Honeychurch is an inspiration)

Maurice by E.M. Forster (no words. it’s gay, happy, and modernist. what more can you want)

Lolita by Valdimir Nabokov (the way Nabokov writes makes me want to stab myself in the chest with rolled-up pages of the novel)

The Secret History by Donna Tartt (best described as Frankenstein with ancient Greek and murder)

Dubliners by James Joyce (you can argue that this doesn’t count as a stand-alone because half the people have cameos in Ulysses but let’s just. not go into that)

17. What is your favourite book that contains an LGBTQ+ character?

Answered below already! TL;DR it’s Fire from Heaven which is definitely a book you Should Read.

23. Who is your favourite author of all time?

I’m going to deliberately elude this question and say W.B. Yeats even though he’s a poet. I could never choose if it was a prose fiction author.

29. What book are you currently reading?

ooooOOooh thanks for these art questions!

1. Do you prefer traditional drawing, or digital?

Undeniably traditional, but I did start off doing digital and now I’ve improved a lot in traditional I’ve been itching somewhat to get back into digital. (There’s a longer tale about my Yr12 VA body of work which was mostly digitally drawn and painfully ugly, which put me off digital drawing immensely for a while.) Some of why I want to switch back (or at least have the option) is slightly a wounded pride sort of matter, because digital art tends to get more...let’s say...online recognition than traditional, regardless of quality. However, there are certain digital effects which are difficult to achieve on paper - and in watercolour as well, being a translucent medium. It’d also just be easier for me to use in things like commissions because the last time I did one the commissioners kept wanting me to change stuff after I’d done all my trad to digital rendering Ha Ha. 

It’s gonna have to be a while though; my current laptop is a touchscreen but it reacted awfully to the stylus - and then I lost the stylus - and it’s just kinda uncooperative with external drivers and stuff so I don’t want to spend money on a tablet only for it to not work or something. So in the years before this one dies I’m just going to have to prove myself worthy in traditional media before trying digital again.

2. How long have you been drawing?

I guess my parents have always fostered my “””creative skills””” (possibly thinking that I would grow up to enter the medical field and have this creativity to make me a bit more well-rounded. Little did they realise that I would simply become ensnared in the arts) so I did a lot of drawing classes as a kid. I wouldn’t necessarily say that they really taught me anything useful, just maybe got me interested in drawing in itself. The real turning point was during Yr8, when I started really getting into fandoms and had a friend who was amaaaazing at drawing, and sort of channelled that creative spark into drawing the things I liked. And I’ve just sort of kept drawing and improving along the way! So the moral of the story is that if you want to draw well start now.

5. What’s your favourite thing to draw?

I tend to always draw characters from media/texts I consume and love. I don’t really have any OCs tbh.

18. What are you currently trying to improve on?

Naked people! My sketchbook has a lot of naked people right now (cos for some reason I just always drew people wearing clothes and then kinda realised how little I know about muscles and bodily proportions of things and bends and folds and tendons etc.) and it’s actually turning out to be quite useful for my rabid Alexander/Hephaistion drawing because I managed to pump that newfound male nude knowledge into some gay-ass shit that got published in the uni paper except they made it super fucking tiny so you can barely see all the detail I put into butt shading and arm tendons and marble veins and I even did abdominal muscle shadows even though I find them disquieting so like what in heck.

19. What is the most difficult thing for you to draw?

Feet? Shoes? Like the angles are pretty difficult and they’ve always looked super-weird and I don’t often draw them bc I prefer busts which is BAD! Also I’m not very good with poses and expressions tbh because I Don’t Challenge Myself Enough. Also not very good with drawing animals.

I think it’s also hard to draw Asians mostly because I am an Asian and have a very Asian social circle so all the common Asian appearance stereotypes have been shattered for me and I’m basically just like what features even make us look Asian??? and avoid the stereotypes, then pump out someone who doesn’t look Asian at all.