#wakandas

I guess I'm making a habit of end of the year commissions from @wakandas and honestly loving the trend of a year end/early birthday present.

I’m absolutely in love with this piece and cannot even put into words how I’ve lovingly gazed at this since getting it

silly costume design below

As a disabled person, there is definitely something problematic about not knowing how your own body parts work. I get some of the anger but not all of it. It seems overblown. (Because people don’t usually give a fuck about disabilitis, and this actor is not actually disabled.) 

But in the context of the MCU, I feel like Shuri et al didn’t know if Bucky would be brainwashed again or anything. And it is smart to keep your vibranium from becoming a weapon that could hurt someone. 

Wakanda is always very protective of their vibranium. It’s their resource. This seems like the writers correcting the fact that they probably would never have given any away in the first place. 

I was able to commission the amazing @wakandas for an early birthday gift for myself — really because I’d missed out mid 2024 and would have kicked myself forever if I didn’t jump on the opportunity to commission him.

I double checked to make sure this was just top for 2018 because I was gonna have a crisis doing my top of all time! XD

This is actually gonna be grouped by series because I have a hard time isolating books from within a series, so I’m cheating a little, but:

1. The Broken Earth - N. K. Jemisin. Holy shit, I can see why this series won three Hugo Awards. It blew my mind. Brilliant and devastating. (Books: The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, The Stone Sky)

2. Villains - V. E. Schwab. These were fun. Fascinating characters, and fast-moving plots, with an interesting angle on the idea of supervillains. (Books: Vicious, Vengeful)

3. Get Well Soon: History’s Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them - Jennifer Wright. Wouldn’t have expected nonfiction about plagues to be one of my favorite books of the year, but it was fascinating, accessible, in-depth, and hilarious -- with moments of poignancy as well. 

4. Reamde - Neal Stephenson. Stephenson’s books are insane and this book took a hundred pages to get moving but once it did holy fuckballs. Thoroughly entertaining and researched to neurotic obsessiveness.

5. Doctrine of Labyrinths - Sarah Monette. The fact that I have already written fanfic and done fanart for these books speaks for itself, I think. Great worldbuilding, very character-driven, and lots and lots of feels.(Books: Mélusine, The Virtu, The Mirador, Corambis).

HEEEEEEYYYYYYYYYYY!

Hmmm. That’s a tough one. I think one of the hardest things to let go of in and unlearn, which I managed in college, was the idea that certain things were “cheating.” Redrawing from an underdrawing with a light table, drawing from references, drawing in the style of another artist and deliberately emulating them… My drawing 101 class made me do all of these, which got me to drop a lot of ideas about what was or wasn’t ‘allowed’ and made me get a lot more realistic. 

I learned how to separate myself from my art, as that’s basically the only way to survive critique sessions without bursting into tears. I could pour heart and soul into a piece, but while it was made with parts of me, it had to stand on its own and not be me. (and I learned how shitty it feels when you fail at that and feel like someone just suckerpunched your baby).

I also learned there’s no such goddamn thing as ‘talent’ for 99.9% of the population. There’s 0.01% naturally gifted assholes, and everything else is just different amounts of work and perception. People seen as ‘talented’ are really just people who a) have put in more time and work, and/or b) people who are better able to look at a thing, and draw what they see and not what they think they see. Chalking it up to some magical ‘gift’ is nonsense. Everyone is wired differently, sure, but pretty much no one is born capable of painting the sistine chapel ceiling the first time they pick up a brush.