Where is my pen

33 | aro-ace | agender Hallo! Illustrator from Norway here! This is my personal/fandom blog :D My artblog! Art tag!

[turtlehell]

reminder. if you ship incest or support people who ship incest or dont care that people ship incest i am not your friend. that shit is harmful, nasty, and fetishizes normal family relationships. do not interact with me and do not expect respect if you do because you will not get it

[orteil42]

given the current climate this pride especially i feel i must mention that i love my trans friends, i stand with trans people in the fight against transphobic legislation and those who would enforce it, and this blog is not a good place for you to be if you do not vibe with that

[incisedwound]

[w0nderland42]

i get that americans love their cultural imperialism, but it really does piss me off that june is “international” pride month just because something happened in the united states.

in aotearoa, june isn’t our pride, it’s theirs. marsha p johnson and sylvia rivera are their historical figures, not ours. the phrase that “you owe your rights to Black trans women” is true there, but here we owe our rights to (mostly) Māori historical figures. i have the freedoms i do because of the legacy of an entirely different set of people operating in an entirely different context at entirely different times.

But because of american cultural imperialism, most queer people in Aotearoa don’t even know our own queer history. Carmen Rupe, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, the Dorian Society, Gillian Laundon, Georgina Beyer, and the Wolfenden Association are some of our queer history. We should know their names! we should know what they did for us! but because of the power of the american imperial machine, we don’t.

our national pride month should be july, the month that the Homosexual Law Reform Act passed in 1986. our two largest cities hold their pride festivals in february and march, respectively. american queer history has very little (or nothing, depending on who you ask) to do with our queer history. anecdotally, from my own queries, queer youth in aotearoa know more about american queer history than our own.

anyway, happy pride, americans. i’m truly sorry that most of you don’t see the negative impact your nation’s culture has on the rest of the world. and to the rest of the world reading this, try searching for your own country and culture’s queer history, don’t accept the american narratives as your own. we deserve our own histories divorced from the cultural hegemony of the USA.

[gr4ndtheftcanoe]

i want arts n crafts time with u

[cozywisteria]

[raythefairy]

I see so many posts like “imagine being adrian and” and i haven’t seen ONE PERSON SAY imagine you’re adrian and your husband goes on a mission to save the world and comes back 50ish earth years later with an alien and they saved the world. Your husband tells you all about this planet they went to that had the microorganisms needed to save the world. And your husband named it after you. Oh my god that’s- oh. Oh you named it after what the alien called me? Ok. I guess. Still sweet, i wasn’t involved and you weren’t sure you were ever gonna see me again so i guess- the fuck do you mean THE ALIEN NAMED IT AFTER ME. IT WASN’T EVEN YOUR IDEA? YOU WANTED TO GO WITH MEDIUM ROUGH TEXTURE CIRCLE PLANET??? THE ALIEN WAS THE ONE WHO THOUGHT OF NAMING IT AFTER ME?????

[colorfulcuttlefish]

Okay, but you have to consider the cultural differences. Adrian going "you named the planet after me? Why."

[raythefairy]

A couple people have given this take and i find it SO FUNNY adrian being like “why would you name it after me i had nothing to do with it. Like if you’re gonna name it after someone why not ‘medium rough texture circle planet named by rocky and grace’ much more scientific” and rocky being like YES THANK YOU

[autisticlittleguy]

"Grace Ryland is Rocky's dog" is such a funny fucking dynamic when you think about it

Eridians are further behind than humans technologically right? They dont have computers, relativity, quantum mechanics, etc. In fact, Eridians probably dont even know about the Big Bang because their atmosphere would filter out most of the cosmic microwave background radiation we use to detect it. On a human timeline, theyre anywhere between like early-mid 20th century. Rocky's basically a cosmonaut.

So the human civilization is pretty advanced from Rocky's perspective. Rationally he understands this. On a conceptual level he knows this to be true.

But at the same time... imagine youre one of the first ever cosmonauts to make it into space. Then you meet a 10 year old alien dog who cant do 2+2 without pulling out its calculator. It forgets everything constantly and has to keep notes everywhere, like it basically lives in Memento (2000). Also if it doesnt nap constantly it gets even stupider. And you somehow has to reconcile this with the fact that this dog has a better understanding of physics than your entire civilization does. Like the dog knows how the universe started.

[rovermcfly]

rocky's crew dying from radiation exposure, something humans go to great lengths to prevent and are very scared of and ryland's crew dying in their "sleep" with nobody watching, something eridians go to great lengths to prevent and are very scared of. cool book that is easy to read through your tears.

[epicallyepicnerdery]

[fallout-lou-begas]

do you have any advice on character design?

watch The Sopranos

[fallout-lou-begas]

i actually wanted to elaborate on this and say that i think it’s a really bad habit of a lot of artists, influenced by current media casting practices, to unconsciously or consciously make every single character they create super pretty, like everyone is just hot in that very boring, homogenous way, and this also comes as a result of people using actors and celebrities as character references or faceclaims and AI facial generation programs like Artbreeder being trained on people who are generally very pretty-looking. it results in alienating, uncanny worlds and drawings completely devoid of people who just look like regular people. it results worlds populated by mannequins fresh off the CW. I feel like whether a character is attractive or not should actually matter, be part of their character, because that kind of thing absolutely affects the way you move through the world and the way the world treats you.

so i wanted to throw in some suggestions that, whenever I’m trying to find a character reference or otherwise draw very interesting-looking yet regular-looking people, which i usually have to do for bit characters in @ikroah​ or something, I tend to look for references in the following places. these are far from the only reliable way to get inspiration, this is just a non-exhaustive list of places i’ve looked before for visual inspiration when needing to create a character, whether starring characters or background ones:

pre-2000s television (The Sopranos and Twin Peaks especially having incredible character design)

extras in comedy sketch shows

esports players

real photos (not staged stock photos) of line cooks

70s baseball players

athletes from more obscure olympic sports like the javelin toss or greco-roman wrestling, especially if you’re looking for a specific body type

ska, jazz, and blues musicians

firefighters

improv troupes

for teenagers, searching “high school english class project” on youtube and sorting by Upload Date

state senators, small-town mayors, and generally obscure local government positions like comptroller or treasurer (yes i know politicians can be bad sometimes but smaller elections especially don’t really depend on looks)

people who walk by your window (if you live in a city like I do)

and again these are just, in my opinion, deep and easy wells to dive in if you want to get a good idea of what regular people look like. these suggestions aren’t the limits on where you can possibly find inspiration for character design

[roganaut]

Fellini’s movies have remarkably interesting and unique looking actors

[fallout-lou-begas]

Yes!!! There’s an entire book called Fellini’s Faces that’s nothing but portraits of his actors that’s phenomenal for this kind of thing, though it’s fairly rare to get a hold of today.

[sartorialadventure]

(Since I know a lot of writers/artists follow me for costume/character design ideas!)

[rockyp77mk3]

The Spirit of Energy on the c1932 Art Deco Nimo building in Syracuse, NY.

[kidzbopdeathgrips]

it's really funny how the entire world basically just blew the fuck up six short years ago and nobody wants to admit that that may have had some lasting consequences lmao

[kidzbopdeathgrips]

like so much of Everything today is premised on the idea that the earth-shattering catastrophe which happened within living memory of everyone older than a third grader has had no meaningful material or psychological effects on the general public and i don't think that's good, lol.

"(some of) the top-line economic indicators (sorta) recovered (in most places) so everything is fine and we don't need to talk about it" is not a sustainable framework for interfacing with reality

[kidzbopdeathgrips]

"why is everyone so angry and paranoid now?" "why is politics so dysfunctional now?" "why is [x] [y] and [z] now? blah blah blah"

2020:

[cookiethebirddoll]

they should invent blankets that make you feel warm (good) but don't make you feel warm (bad)

[mclennonyaoi]

[mclennonyaoi]

this is the funniest piece of graffiti i’ve ever seen. thank you mr two pens

[depsidase]

[funkyness]

you know how edgy boys will call things “fatherless behaviour”? we all know that’s bullshit but can i coin the term “siblingless behavior” because oh my god the things some of you people say. you’ll see two siblings love each other or hug and say “😳… sweet home alabama” just admit you don’t have sisters or brothers and only know sibling dynamics from diary of a wimpy kid