I don't know where to begin, your art is genuinely among the most impactful and beautiful art I've ever come across. It's so very obvious how much you pour love and passion into your characters, I've been coming back to simply just. stare. at your work for the last couple of days (not to sound like a creep haha), before finally gathering the courage to send in this ask.
I wanna say thank you, first of all, for sharing your art. I've recently picked up a pen to start learning how to draw, and was overwhelmed by the amount of content I had to study. I was really close to just dropping it altogether, but coming across this blog and seeing all your pieces and the symbolism, the horror and the underlying beauty, it inspired me to keep trying, in the hopes that one day I can also make creative works like these.
Since I've fallen quite in love with your work, and I hope I'm not being a bother in doing this, but I wanted to also ask if you have any advice for total art babies such as myself? A general direction we should take to? Is art school needed in order to master this creative field?
Thanks so much again for your time
Oh hello anon! Thank you for stopping by and for remaining to watch my work so attentively. Thank you also for being so brave and approaching me, it's not a bother at all. I will take your compliments to heart and hopefully repay you equally in the form of advice. I tried to make it as solid but easy to understand as I could, feel free to ask any questions below.
SIMPLE GUIDE FOR STARTING YOUR ART JOURNEY
YOUR MATERIALS - Don't aim for expensive materials. Buy what you won't feel afriad of ''wasting'', because you will make many drawings that won't satisfy you fully. You can't be afraid of letting that sketchbook look ugly, you should be afraid of letting it look empty. Despite not being a beginner, I still stand for this advice and my sketchbooks are bellow 5Eu and I use materials students use in school, like a normal mechanical pencil, regular pencils, and a white eraser. I highly recommend you start your journey with traditional art, with the simple materials I mentioned above. The lack of ctlr x will build confidence within you and it will show in every medium you pick, even digital. It's easier on the eyes as well.
DRAWING IS FUN - Oh how tedious it is to study! So in the very beginning in your art journey having fun is important, because it will be a force that will nourish you thro the most difficult tasks. You can have fun in redrawing the things you like (I redrew visual novel sprites back in my day), study cosplayers and anime/action figures (they're great because they're stylized while being spatially accurate, since they're a 3D object), draw the characters you like (which can be made easier if you can create them on any character-making game and take screenshots of them interacting. If not, just take screenshots of movie or cartoon scenes you like and draws them like that. Can be original characters or not)
FIND SOMEONE TO SEE IT - While not obligatory it is a great source of tenacity to have someone see and react positively to your art. Social media is not necessarily the ideal place for it because it leads to numeral comparisons and self-doubts (you can join, but have a steady and confident mindset). What I mean is a small group of friends that will always interact with your art. I recommend writers with ocs, since they rarely see their characters visually. They will encourage you immensely and their reactions are priceless
DRAW DAILY - Oh how tedious it is to study! Where to start? I recommend you take any picture you like online (preferably a photograph) and re-draw it. What did you struggle with? Write it down in the corner and make that your next drawing goal. I once did that and realized I wasn't good at dynamism, then I re-draw an action photo the next day. The I realized I wasn't confident in drawing faces so I made Vogue cover studies the next day. So on and so forth. You don't have to make every day a grand piece (there were days where I only drew kneecaps or ears) but doing it every day, even for as little as 30 min, does take somewhere
FINISH WHAT YOU DRAW - Even if it's just a sketch, take that sketch to completion. The start-to-finish is a journey you have to experience, you can't leave it for ''when I'm good enough''.
Here are some other past answers regarding how to approach a sketchbook and how to make studies fruitful
💬 1 🔁 29 ❤️ 140 · Hey nez! Ive DM'd you before and you opened my mind to re-examine how I think of design! My thought process about charac
💬 1 🔁 78 ❤️ 300 · hullo! your art is gorgeous and I love it.
um, do- do you have any advice, or tips for wannabe artists?
Thanks! Have a
Art school is not needed. I attended art university (it doesn't cost a bazillion dollars in my country) but that is aimed for people more advanced in their art journey. Everything I learned that allowed me to get in was available to me online and thro a few books here and there (which...can be probably found online as well). So with a sketchbook, pencils, and access online, the world of art is open to you!
Best of luck in your journey! Feel free to let me know if there's any other struggle I can help you with
Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.
Her name is Timnit Gebru.
She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.
The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.
The paper had not even been published yet.
Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.
The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.
This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.
The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.
The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.
Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.
Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.
The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.
In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.
The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.
In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.
The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.
Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.
This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.
The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.
The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.
Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.
She was making that argument from inside Google.
Then Google proved her right by removing her.
The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.
Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.
Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.
The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.
Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.
The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.
The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.
And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.
ok so, I approached my local library with a proposal to donate a mural as a way to A: build portfolio/gain practical experience and B: give back to a beloved public institution. The director was very enthusiastic about it and i've been working on it since the beginning of March. Come with me as I endeavor to paint what is in all honesty an excessive amount of birds
I wanted the birds to look like they were actually in the space so first thing after doing the draft was to do a lighting study
after that I covered the walls in letters in lieu of a projector/vr headset bc i have neither of those :) Then i take a picture of the section of wall and superimpose the lineart over top of it so I can pencil in the lines
et voila
and that was a whole week on it's own so next comes the paintin' >:)
Joan of Arc, John Everett Millais (1829–1896); Joan of Arc, (c. 1620–1640) Peter Paul Rubens; Joan of Arc, Albert Lynch (1903); Joan of Arc, Charles Amable Lenoir; Joan of Arc at the Coronation of Charles VII, Jean-Auguste-Dominic Ingres (1854); Joan of Arc, John Gilbert; Joan of Arc enters Orléans, Jean-Jacques Scherrer (1887); Joan of Arc, William Blake Richmond (c. 1900)
edit: for those who are curious here is the museum page for this suit of armor with more info and photos sorry it is in german (I cant read it either bc alas I only really speak american)
Brother Wenzel morning routine ✨ The other monks have given him the nickname "rat catcher" becaues he gets assigned all the shitty jobs no one else wants to do.
hey so i enjoy making emojis. here's half of the ones i've made so far. please use them, if you like! (i've put what i call them in the alt text, and i think it's silly and fun, but feel free to call them whatever works for you.)
Been busy with stuff & project for tmr: this one. I'll share this as freebies for this year's Sky Assembly in my country <3 aww they're doing silly Sky emotes while wearing Sky outfits~
I have the separated characters put in here bc I think they deserve their own images for better quality I guessss
baratheonpilled
dailybridgerton
titsay
theartofmadeline
yousharknotpass
