Thingies

For portraiture you have the unique challenge of capturing the distinctive features while flattering them. There’s a tension of “what makes the person look like themselves?” against what they WANT people to see.

Acknowledging and respecting that, reflecting a View of the Self instead of a simple photograph, has always been an ephemeral and noble challenge of portraiture. It’s a rare skill, and while I’m not claiming to be a brilliant practitioner, here’s how I go about it. You want the person to feel SEEN - on a level and in a way that only a portrait artist could.

If someone in a novel were to spend a paragraph studying the portrait, they ought to be able to say something plot-relevant, like “the artist had faithfully captured the FAMILY RESEMBLANCE in the notable features and the PLOT POINT in the shape of her eyes… but no photograph could have captured the wistful turn of the mouth. Across a hundred years of distance, her soul was clear, speaking to Protagonist as if she were merely in another room…”

That’s the skill of portraiture, really, and it’s rarer than the ability to do good lineart (which I can’t do either; note that I’m not claiming to be GOOD.)

The immediate outstanding features of the “fan” are

Dark, hooded, distinctive eyes - she’s probably proud of them

Challenging, knowing expression

Long dark hair is a feature she’s proud of; because it’s well-cultivated

A sweet beauty of youth, but I can see what she’ll look like when she’s older

Notes on her features:

Roman nose that’s unusually short for the bridge type. Doesn’t have the space to be “hooked” but has the shape.

Natural brow with natural arch - fuzzing in to a shapely tapered form

Rounded face but with an interesting composition of flat slabby cheekbones and a high flat forehead. I’d love to look at it from other angles but she could model for a LOT of time periods and a LOT of artistic traditions.

Cool olive skin - very tricky!!! Especially with that pink lip. Frankly beyond me to depict fairly tbh… but at least I tried

Dark pigmented undereye and eyelid, which I chose to handle in the sense of “flattering eye makeup”rather than true depiction of her colouring.

Full mouth with NO CUPID’S BOW - fullness in lower lip

I’d elide the faint double chin out of gracious recognition of the angle and acknowledgement of the fact that the sitter would PROBABLY prefer it not to be noticed. I ultimately alluded to it, but elided it.

Even without the double chin, her determined yet rounded chin is another charming and forceful contradiction that lends what we call “character” to the face

💯 keep the moles

Presumably a fan of Instagram anime art is familiar with conventions and is therefore hoping for a portrait with glow brushes and SHEEN and TEXTURE and anime petals and veils barfed all over it - so I did a final version with those things - presuming it would make the “customer” happy

Obviously you can see that I’m quite humbly and realistically not an ARTIST but I thought it was interesting to contrast what skills are valued in a party trick of portraiture (breaking down and flattering features, playing a delicate game of flattery/pleasure and clear-eyed recognisability) vs a much more skilled and stylish render that is based on replicating anime aesthetics and thus - despite being better which I acknowledge! - didn’t engage so much with the goals of portraiture. Returning to the goals of portraiture - likeness, gesture, expression, picking out features, affection for the subject - is so,so good for the soul. For one thing, it reminds you of your ability to fall in love with faces…

Attempted to do an anime/manga-style portrait with the actual features of the fan (plus a little artistic licence which was definitely intentional and not a result of me not bothering to sketch). Please excuse one of the worst hands in the history of art.

Playing on hard mode here since anime really de-emphasises the nose, and the nose is the part I recognise faces by. Often European characters in anime have relatively long noses, even if they're not prominent, so that's what I've done here.

"We are the Interstellar Library. Do you want to swap? We have thousands of stories."

There were many replies.

The library was silent for a whole day, then:

Part of socializing and having friends is being a good listener even when you don't actually give a shit about the subject.

Your are hurting other people's feelings when you bluntly respond with "Anyway..." and then change the topic.

It can not always be about your preferred topic.

oh wow the glass-tower office buildings we constructed when we thought air conditioning and central heating would never have downsides...have downsides?

and we're still building them?

while the Victorian house museum where I work, with thick walls and small windows and big wooden shutters stays ~10 degrees above (winter) or below (summer) the outside temperature for days on end with no help at all?

uh. okay then

Captions cover the spot on the screen you put the information I need

The dialogue is captioned but not the song you have playing that the dialogue is responding to

You only captioned the person on the screen, not the person off screen who is also talking

No captioning of critical sound effects (alarms, bells, dogs barking, etc)

Speakers are not labelled at moments where it is not clear on the screen who is talking.

Captions cover the spot on the screen that you put the information I need!

Other d/Deaf people welcome to add.

In most of the US and Canada there’s detached single family homes with a yard and there’s high rise to mid rise apartments. Very little in between.

Row houses, duplexes, large family sized apartments, etc. do exist but outside of a few locations they’re unusual or only seen as something that poor people live in.

Thing is though that there’s a market for these in between types of housing and they could really help with our density problems where cities are so spread out due to all the detached single family houses that it becomes expensive and environmentally problematic to get utilities to all of them.

I know that I would very much like a cute duplex or row house when I feel financially ready to have kids. Walking distance to a school and a bus stop, tiny yard for an herb garden and citrus tree but not so big that it’s a pain to maintain it, neighbors nearby, easy walking and biking access to the road, hopefully a playground nearby for my kids to use.

But that sort of thing doesn’t really exist where I live and doesn’t exist in a lot of North America. You either live in a small apartment or you live in a house and either way you’re probably forced to own a car.

baby boromir.

frickin’ baby boromir.

Aragorn: it can’t be him. he is a baby

Most media picks a lane. You’re either in a world of dragons and spells, or you’re riding a spaceship powered by neon blue lights. And when stories do try to blend both, it usually comes off like one genre is just cosplaying as the other. “Oh, it’s not magic, it’s just tech so advanced it looks like magic.” Cool. Sure. But that’s not a blend. That’s sci-fi wearing a glittery hat and calling itself a wizard.

But Artemis Fowl? Artemis Fowl gave us elves flying with mechanical wings, centaurs programming surveillance satellites, and also dwarves unhinging their jaws and eating through solid rock. It didn’t strip the fantasy creatures of their mythic weirdness to make them technologically advanced, and it didn’t simplify the tech to keep the magic pure.

And what makes it work is that both sides of the worldbuilding—the magic and the machinery—are treated with equal weight, equal logic, and equal absurdity. There’s internal consistency. There are rules. There's friction. The LEP doesn’t just use magic to solve every problem—they rely on tactics, training, strategy, and yes, a whole lot of gadgets.