The ol' art blog

18+| they/them | 27 | Blonde Boy Collector | Problematic™ | Also on Bsky!

[literallyspoon]

Pinned Post!

They/them | Adult | Autistic and ADHD | Queer | Potty Mouth

Minors and Blank Blogs will be yeeted (i.e blocked)

Procreate iPad

Comprehensive info below the cut!

TLDR:

I draw sometimes. I'm anxious. I tag stuff. You can mute those tags to block posts I use those tags on. Tell me if you want something specific tagged so you can block it. Quick to block especially if the blog is blank or sparse.

General Info:

I'm Spoon! I'm and artist and creative that's been drawing since as long as I can remember. I've never been a big poster, but lately have been trying to be less of a perfectionist and more chill about sharing things so here we are ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I tend to post my art here in tandem with my Bluesky account. Sometimes I include WIPs and extra stuff here, but other times on my Bluesky! Not really a rhyme or reason to why

Sometimes I fuck up which blog I send posts to so if you suddenly see a wall of not very art related posts, just know I will panic about it in 2-3 business days if I didn't catch it immediately and then delete them all :)

Tagging Process:

I tag things for my own organization purposes as well as for blocking purposes for other users. I'm not sure if this is common etiquette anymore, but I tend to preceded trigger tags with "tw" For example: "tw bugs" but I will also include other words to try and make sure a post is more likely to get caught by someone's mute list. Just shoot me a message if there's something specific you want tagged for you to block!

On a related note, I historically tag "suggestive" stuff as nsft (Not Safe for Tumblr) because I think this doesn't get the post nuked while also allowing people to block those posts if they wish. However, any full on nsft works would not be posted here in full and instead would be found on my Bluesky! I'll need to test more if this is actually the case, and come up with something else if it gets flagged. I want to make sure things are organized enough that people can block things they aren't comfortable with!

On a related note: I tend to do a lot of OC insert-type art as well as Character x OC art. I will try and tag those accordingly if you don't want to see that!

The Block Button is a Dislike Button:

Lastly, I have better things to do than sift through spam or argue with people on the Internet. I'm a firm believer in liberally using the block button. If you have a question or comment, just say it. No need to beat around the bush (in fact, I'm more likely to think you're a bot if you do so and may just block without any interaction).

You can also use the block button. Don't like what I draw? Didn't vibe with something I said or shared? Block me! You are in charge of your own Internet experience, and the block button is a wonderful tool to cultivate that experience ദ്ദി´ ˘ `)✧

Other Accounts:

Main (personal) Blog: @the-pansexual-beekeeper

Ao3: LiterallySpoon

Artfight: LiterallySpoon

CharacterHub: LiterallySpoon

Bluesky (Art and stuff): literallyspoon.bsky.social

TikTok: (Games and IRL stuff mostly): literallysp00n

Twitch (Mostly games. Sometimes drawing): literallyspoon

Twitter and Instagram are also literallyspoon, but I don't particularly use them. I do not have an art Facebook and have no plan of making one. This is the same for any other site I do not have listed here. If you see accounts posting my art with my handle (or a different username!) elsewhere, please let me know as it is unlikely to be me and would like to know!

Personal Tags:

Catch all art tag #spoon draws

Catch all personal OC tag #spoon ocs

Catch all text post tag #spoon says

Tag for my OC Blaise #blaise carda

Long posts, especially with no cuts are tagged as #long post

Catch all for #Character x OC

[ghiblin]

HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE ハウルの動く城 2004, dir. Hayao Miyazaki

[wordfather]

doctor diagnosed me with oc sickness in the brain; the ocs will spin around in my brain forever and ever

[charseraph]

[not drawing voice] I miss my character.

[coldgoldlazarus]

[not writing voice] I miss my character.

[redstonedust]

i keep using 'blorbo' to refer to my own OCs to the point i forget its supposed to be a fandom term. yeah i know blorbo from my shows. and those shows? only airing inside my own brain and the dms of a few lucky friends, baby.

[writingdose]

a writer’s struggle

[wyrm-house]

[24x81]

what they don't tell you about writing is that you're gonna spend way more time moving those guys across a room than you ever thought you would

[softest-punk]

While I understand the desire to make Big Art entirely and viscerally I think it's worth considering that small art often leaves an outsized impact on its audience. Short stories, teensy indie games, short films, sketches on scrap paper, carved or sculpted figures that would fit in the palm of your hand, etc. etc. are all things that, when they hit your psyche at just the right angle, can stay lodged in there forever specifically because they are small. It is not necessary for a thing to be sprawling for it to have impact.

[stjohnstarling]

Ever since starting to publish romance novels I’ve been checking out the romance books at the thrift store specifically for the clinch covers, as a reference for what I might want to do with my own books.

As a culture we mocked these to extinction but I think we were just afraid of their power. The modern clinch revival still hasn't reached the heady heights of what they were doing in the 80s! The vintage covers can be really quite explicit. These ones in particular were steamy enough they had to be hidden on an inner flap.

[stjohnstarling]

This episode of the Smart Bitches Trashy Books podcast where they interview Shirley Green and Sharon Spiak, who were romance novel cover artists in the 80s, is a fascinating look at what a huge industry these covers were. Did you know they had whole photography studios full of props to make these? They’d take photos and turn those over to a painter who’d make something like a couple of these a day. They had it down to a science.

[stjohnstarling]

Here is a particular favourite of mine, also by Sharon Spiak!

[wendou]

untitled

2006

Zhou Wendou

[ms-demeanor]

What I love about people who claim that “Fountain” isn’t art is that they’re never the kind of people who are actually into art so they’ll just start whining about a urinal and you can come back with, like, 30 pieces that have been made as a reaction to “Fountain,” everything from Brian Eno recontextualizing it by pissing in it to Zhou Wendou conceptually unmaking it and remaking it as something that is more unquestionably art and these “BUT MODERN ART DOESN’T MEAN ANYTHING” jerk are just over there feeling wanky don’t have any idea about any of it. They’re trying to yell about a hundred-year-old statement, the opening thesis of a discussion about art, and they haven’t bothered to look at the last hundred years of art nerds arguing and debating and doing fucking art about it.

“Fountain” is genuinely one of my favorite pieces of art because of how much more art it has provoked and how compelling the conversations about its status as art can be (if Duchamp’s goal was to make people question what art is does that mean that all the reactions and remixes and arguments about the original piece are actually an extension of Duchamp’s work? Is this a communal art project we’ve all been participating in for a hundred years and can you be a part of it too? I would say extremely fuck yes.)

[ms-demeanor]

@spycrabsunited said:

Y’all really gonna just be vague about modern art and how “fantastic” it is or are any of you going to explain how pissing into the glued together pieces of restroom equipment is art? 

Brian Eno didn’t piss into Zhou Wendou’s 2006 Untitled piece (which is the glued-together broken urinal); he emptied a vial of urine into a replica of Duchamp’s 1917 piece “Fountain,” which was a mass-produced urinal laid on its side and signed “R. Mutt.”

Duchamp had a series of what he called “readymades” - mass-produced objects that he presented as art - and “Fountain” is the most famous of these readymade sculptures.

Plenty of people will look at a urinal in an art show and go “this isn’t art!” but in the early Dada movement nobody had thought to question whether a mass-manufactured urinal might be art. It’s a man-made object. What separates industrial craft from individual art? Is it the presentation? The context? The original intended purpose? Again, in 1917 this was a question that not a lot of people had asked before so in very general terms Duchamp put a pissoir on a pedestal and said “This is Art; Prove me Wrong.”

And then 102 years of arguing about art happened.

In 1993 Brian Eno (ambient musician and all-around weird guy) went to an exhibit that included “Fountain” and poured some urine into it. Several other people had done the same thing over the years, which is why Eno couldn’t piss directly in it and had to carry around a jar of his own waste in order to make a point.

So Eno’s point was “you’re glorifying this one particular bit of ceramic and it’s against the spirit of the original piece, this needs to be a pisspot again” and other people have peed in it to make the point that it has a broad context - it is both high art and a low urinal.

These are people who were publicly performing an action in order to make a statement about art - these were people doing performance art.

SO.

Back to 2006.

The Zhou Wendou piece takes a readymade urinal, breaks it down to ceramic, and then remakes it into a vase. It’s being very playful - conceptually remaking Duchamp’s piece into a piece of intentional art again instead of found art is clever and funny, especially when the intentional art it makes mimics something else that could easily be mass produced - it reminds me of Ai Weiwei’s 1995 work “Breaking a Han Dynasty Urn,” which also references Duchamp (it was part of Weiwei’s series about repurposing “cultural readymades”) and that’s likely intentional; I’d be surprised if Wendou wasn’t commenting on this:

“It’s powerful only because someone thinks it’s powerful and invests value in the object.” - Ai Weiwei

So that loops back around to the original piece in 1917.

Is putting a signature on a urinal art?

Is pissing in a piece of conceptual art performance art?

Is breaking an old piece of art art?

Is breaking a urinal and shaping it into a vase art?

And the reason I think all of these questions are so cool is because they boil down to this:

Is making people question the definition of art in itself art?

And I say yes.

[literallyspoon]

A lil' Hugo x OC for the soul

Flat color before I merged a bunch of layers and reference pic below!

Haven't drawn much aside from a couple sketches since the end of December so I indulged myself with some heavy referencing and skipping lineart. The results were me finishing this drawing faster than I think I ever have finished anything as an adult so maybe I will skip the lineart more often now

[tumblr]

Reblogs in a chain now get their own notes

The reblog chain is one of the things that makes Tumblr unlike anywhere else. All the notes on reblogs are attributed to the original post, no matter which branch people actually liked or reblogged. We want to keep encouraging conversations, and give contributors the recognition they deserve. 

Soon, you'll be able to like, reblog, or reply to any part of a reblog chain, and that note will go to that reblog's author. Each reblog will have its own counts, instead of one aggregated number from every version of the post. And yes, you’ll be able to like multiple posts in one chain.

If a reblog doesn't add anything, the love flows up to the last person in the chain who did. Your post doesn't lose notes just because people spread it quietly.

Past notes will stay on the original post — we're only changing what happens from here on out. Retroactively re-attributing all of them would be... a lot.

This is just the beginning. More changes are coming as we keep building this out – stay tuned!

[headspace-hotel]

This is horrible I can't see the number of notes on my posts at all without adding up everything in the chain

Cursed cursed cursed evil evil evil

[jv]

This is a terrible idea. Horrible.

EXTREMELY BAD HOLY FUCK.

This would kill the entire point of the reblog chain. Staff, please, don't do this. It will transform the reblog chain in just plain twitter quotes.

[jv]

Seriously, this is a tumblr-killer feature. This breaks the most fundamental way tumblr is different from any other social network. This makes tumblr just another blueskytwitterthreads. Or worse: An unfederated mastodon clone.

Please, stop this. Please, don't roll this out.

[jv]

Please, mutuals, post about this, comment and reblog the original post (while you still can without making it your own quote-post). I don't know if staff is looking or if the feedback would matter, but seriously, this is a terrible change that would kill tumblr as we know it. Please, don't roll it out.

[jv]

look, I can endure any kind of UI changes that are supposed to help tumblr-rookies to understand how this works. They may be a nuisance, but that's ok, we have x-kit or we can get used to buttons being here or there.

But this. This changes the data architecture. This changes the SINGLE THING that makes tumblr the "... yes and" website. This KILLS THE COLLABORATIVE POSTING THAT MAKES THIS SITE DIFFERENT FROM ALL THE OTHER MEDIA PLATFORMS.

Please, don't do this. Please, don't ship this.

[heartsmourne]

if you want to leave official feedback on this, go to tumblr.com/support and select the dropdown feature of "feedback," let them know exactly how we feel about this

[blue-green-memes]

[cannibalchicken]

[icedoatmilkmatcha-deactivated20]

also

[yeahokayillreblogthat]

Yeah okay Ill reblog that!

[aggressivelybicaptainamerica]

Not a scholar at first, but the guy who wrote Jaws hated that people used it to justify hating sharks so much he dedicated the rest of his life to shark research and advocacy.

[ruffboi-mags]

The woman who popularized gender reveals wishes she hadn't, afaik.

[fall1ngfeather]

(afaik- the woman who popularized gender reveals did so because she had a long history of miscarriages. The reveal was a celebration of the fact that one of her pregnancies had gotten far enough that there WAS a physical sex to reveal. It was never intended to be like... *gestures at modern gender reveals* all that. That same kid later came out as trans and yes, the family had a second gender reveal for that lol.)

[depsidase]

[isuggestguillotine]

i have a suggestion

[isuggestrevolution]

me too

[poobletoods]

i call this phenomenon "god hates me"