Bluh

me:

Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with having LGBT+ characters, especially if you’re LGBT+ yourself, most (if not all) of my characters are. But very often on this site you see people fail to give LGBT+ characters any personality outside of that, because they’re being used as a marketing tool. People that love to draw attention to the fact that their story has a (for example) Chinese nonbinary trans ace lesbian, but fail to actually care about real life Chinese nonbinary trans ace lesbians, because to them LGBT+ people aren’t people, they’re a faceless demographic to market to.

It’s not proper representation, going around saying “My story has 8 gay!! Buy it! 8 gay! Oh! Some of the gay are POC!!! And trans!! 8 Trans gay!” but failing to actually provide anything more than just the fact that they’re gay, they’re not characters. They’re props, a story full of tokens. The objectification and dehumanization of LGBT+ people is bad enough without us being treated like ads. 

-colours are nothing but RELATIVE -neutral backgrounds. NEUTRAL BACKGROUNDS. they make your colours pop because COLOUR. RELATIVITY.  -rim light are a cheat sheet for making awe-worthy art -on that note, DON’T DROWN YOUR DRAWINGS IN RIM LIGHT. LESS IS MORE. -light purple + ‘multiply’ = BEAUTIFUL SHADOWS -hell any light colour + ‘multiply’ = bam you have atmospheric shadows  -orange/yellow light + blue/purple shadows (because our instinctual reference for light… is the sun. which is yellow/orange. and blah blah blah something light physics blah blah it makes the shadows the opposite colour, so opposite of yellow/orange sunlight is purple/blue shadows). I mean it’s a nice default but it’s not set-in-stone and other colour palettes add mood so GO ON WITH YOUR COOL LIGHTS AND WARM SHADOWS

I’m a teacher. Today I was covering for a grade 9 science class. Decent kids, if a bit rowdy, and didn’t want to do their work. Wtv, it was textbook work. Not the point.

1 girl (reminder that these kids are, like, 14/15) was doodling bust portraits (head & shoulders) in an art book. I had a squiz and asked her if they were her characters. She said they were and excitedly told me she had so many characters for this one story of hers. I laughed about how I wished I could draw mine, and moved on.

Later in the class, I hear her enthusiastically telling her friend all about her main OC - a gay kitsune prince with a tragic past. It was so, pure, classic Deviant Art: my first OC. And you know what? I loved it. I was just sitting there half overhearing, smiling to myself and glad that her friend was engaging and interested in her story and characters.

This is a girl who will become a creator. She will draw and write and imagine, get better and better. She’ll probably move past this stage and start making more nuanced characters (she was already lamenting she didn’t have enough girl OCs). But this is where she started. This is where so many of us started. I had a tiger catgirl, goth witch/sorceress OC in high school. I found my original design for her recently. Look what I create now.

Let kids be kids. Let them explore and invent and go wild and be cliche and make overpowered OCs. Let them have their anthropomorphic animal OCs. Let them try everything before they settle into maturity.

the baby alpaca was only a week old

this is from a farm in wisconsin

what happened is: she was taking a dust bath and fell into a badger hole

what caught the farmer’s attention was the entire herd of alpacas surrounding the hole, which is about a mile out in the field

the poor girl was in the hole for hours and was entirely underground when they found her