Untitled

hello my name is rebecca i am here to post mediocre fanart and then vanish for months at a time

[comicaurora]

as long as we are trading cat photos here are two photos of my actual cat boo radley and two photos of foster kittens we have had recently. highly recommend selfie cam cat photos if you haven't tried it the results are almost always incredible

apologies to everyone else who absolutely inundated me with pet photos in the last 24 hours, I simply cannot trade for all of them. fortunately I CAN provide a cat selfie cam

[rwxtd]

Happy Book 2 Release Day! Usually I post the jewelry I make on TikTok or Instagram, but these are fanart, which means they go here. I don't often make fanart necklaces because I never know what to do with them after, but I was whacked upside the head with both inspiration and hyperfixation at the same time and now I have seven more necklaces than I did last week. Whoops. Anyway, this is actually my primary creative outlet/hobby so I'm gonna let myself ramble a little more about these.

Fire: Pretty directly based on panel 1 of 1.19.7. I was considering basing them all on actual comic panels, but that idea fell through pretty fast. I think it's executed well enough but I wish I had gotten a little more creative with it.

Life: I have all this colorful wire that I never use so I tried to use that to kind of make it look like vines. Would have liked to use more colorful flower charms as accents, but the gold ones were the only ones I had that were small enough. Kind of a shame but I still really like how this one turned out.

Stone: This is technically the first design I made, but I wasn't sure how I felt about it so I waited a while before I actually finished it. I think I was a little stuck on the gears because they have nothing to do with anything, but I just love to put tiny gears in my designs.

Water: Surprisingly might be my favorite of the bunch? Crazy because I had basically no ideas going in. I kind of just dumped out all of my blue charms onto the table and dug around. Went through a lot of different variations before I ended up with one I liked, but I'm really happy with how it turned out and I'm glad I was patient with it.

Wind: My only guiding thought was "bird". It was tricky because I feel like the comic doesn't feature a ton of wind magic besides the occasional spellbird, and also real life wind is invisible. The purple pieces are amethyst chips that I've had forever because they're semitransparent and therefore hard to use. Also they might be fake.

Lightning: I really wanted to use a gunmetal frame instead of black for this one but they didn't come in time and also I'm like 70% sure they're gonna send me the wrong size anyway. Kind of wish I'd tried a little harder to get those spikes to look more uneven, but the triangles did NOT want to go where I wanted them to and they kept moving around and it was pissing me off. I still like this design a lot, but my execution probably could've been better.

Void: This one glows in the dark! That's actually more of a coincidence than anything else. I have a very pretty nail polish shade that was exactly the right color for Light (Mooncat's shade Avatar State, it was one of their ATLA collab polishes) and it just kind of happens to also glow in the dark. I wanted the reference to Light because of the whole "two sides of the same coin" thing and because I wanted the void rune to actually be visible. I'm glad I was able to get a good picture of it glowing in the dark, because I don't know if that effect is actually going to last. The rest is these little sparkly square beads I had that I thought looked sort of like dragon scales. Also, those are googly eyes that I painted gold.

Ultimately, I actually really like how these came out! It's fun to set myself challenges like this and I really enjoyed having a big project to work on this past week. Despite my individual criticisms I actually do really love this whole set and I'm quite proud of myself. I also think my photos are improving, which I'm happy about as well.

[rwxtd]

she has everything i want (internship at the Henry Doorly Zoo & Aquarium)

[rwxtd]

artist rendition of me forcing the semi-feral cat that lives under my bed to watch drawtectives with me

[rwxtd]

update: miss boo radley has rapidly become World's Cuddliest And Most Clingy Cat, so if anyone was wondering if drawtectives is an effective cat socialization technique, the answer is a resounding yes. the only downside is that the name has become almost comically inappropriate

[rwxtd]

i have hated everything ive tried to make in every medium for like a week straight so i have decided to return to my roots. time to point and laugh at the angry gay catboy

[rwxtd]

artist rendition of me forcing the semi-feral cat that lives under my bed to watch drawtectives with me

[rwxtd]

havent been drawing much recently despite my best intentions but I did do some collaging in my scrapbook last night after a particularly long day at work. and yes my scrapbook is a mass market paperback copy of the fellowship of the ring that I got for fifty cents at a library book sale. that shit has enough pages to last me at least a few years and because I got it for dirt cheap there is zero pressure for me to make it look nice

[rwxtd]

I am learning astrophotography!!!!! My dad's a big hiker so we went out to take some photos and learn how to actually use my camera yesterday, and these are some of the photos we took. My sister also gave me some tips on editing them. There are definitely improvements to be made in both the photographing and the editing, but considering this is my first ever attempt at this I'm really happy with how they came out.

[rwxtd]

i always forget how fucking difficult it is to take decent pictures of complicated nail art. light rune is my best guess based on panel 3 of 2.3.40 bc as far as i am aware there is no canon light rune anywhere that we know of yet???? but ive already spent too long on this and im not great at freehand designs so if any of the runes are wrong don't tell me

[comicaurora]

in that ask you mentioned other villains in your stories having similarly “tempting mistakes” — what are some other examples of that, in aurora or elsewhere? i’ve always been really interested in the characterizations of your antagonists, and i’m wondering if this has something to do with it

The Collector is so fixated on solving a problem that she's completely divorced herself from the world around her, and will disregard any cost in lives or suffering because it is truly irrelevant in the paradigm she's anchored herself into. Hyperfixation is a bitch, and obsession can make anything outside of it seem unimportant. To create a character capable of such effortless widespread suffering, she needed to be truly incapable of seeing it as relevant. Jolon is the same way, but in a much smaller scale.

Tahraim is a similar model of "disregards everything beyond extremely narrow priorities of what he cares about" but he's much less of a dick about it, so while he's not really a villain, his morality is still pretty situational.

Zuurith, like Shrike, is obsessed with control. He's the epitome of "the world would be perfect if everyone just did what I think is right," and that paternalistic impulse feeds into every savior complex and vigilantism fantasy. He wants the world to work Just So, but he can't even make his own domain do that, and rather than seeing that as a failure of the goal itself, he sees it as a failure of his execution.

Tynan just wants attention. Terror is the easiest way to get it. He's the star; he's the coolest, deadliest thing around. He's unstoppable, a literal force of nature. And yet he still only has so much control over how he's perceived, and that makes him so angry.

The Void Dragon is self-awarely evil. He is a monster, a nightmare, the dark heart of this tomb world. He knows what he is, and that makes everything so easy, because he's not capable of kindness or mercy or creation or anything beyond his role as the eater of stars. He knows what he wants, and he knows how to get it, and the only joy in his existence is how much he gets to play with his food. When you're trapped and the world feels small, cruelty is very, very easy. When you're certain you're only good for hurting things, hurting things can become all you do.

The Paladin Champion knows he's right. He has built everything around the rock-solid understanding of what is Good and what is Evil, and because of the cause he serves, what he does is Good, even if it is at times cruel or imperfect. Being certain you're right is a very dangerous thing. Being certain of the morality of your cause can make it very tempting to stop listening to the morality in your head.

[rwxtd]

i promised myself i would only post art on here BUT i am making an exception because i wanna talk about the Arenamaster! I don't necessarily think he falls into the "tempting mistakes" category, but I do really like the way he's used in the story. I am a huge fan of Red's Bathos trope talk, I think it's a really thoughtful and well-articulated breakdown of something I've become increasingly exhausted by over the last few years, and I think the Arenamaster is a really fantastic example of how to do bathos well, in a way that is very funny (in my opinion) and also contributes to the story in a meaningful and satisfying way.

Falst's "WHY ARE YOU STILL HERE" is very funny to me, and a classic example of bathos: a sincere moment of victory is unceremoniously interrupted by a joke. What I really like about this is that the Arenamaster *is* the joke. He *becomes* a joke, literally, as soon as the prison is destroyed, because the only reason he was ever a credible threat in the first place was the oppressive system that gave him power. Now that that system is gone, neither the characters nor the audience need to take him seriously anymore.

Of course, he still *tries* to be taken seriously, which leads us to the other really bathos-y moment and the real end to the Arenamaster's role in the story- Dainix one-hit KOs him from off screen while he's very dramatically threatening to kill Falst. It's a very funny deescalation, but it's also infinitely more satisfying to see Dainix knock out this man who's been bullying him for six months in one hit than it would be to watch Falst have to do more fight choreography with a broken arm. And the fact that they barely even address it says a lot: the Arenamaster doesn't matter anymore. He was a threat when the system was intact and the game was rigged, but on a level playing field, he's not even worth the time it takes to gloat.

(Only tangentially relevant, but still worth mentioning: this is the first time we see Dainix outside of prison, with his poncho and a real eye patch. It's sort of a secondary character reveal, where we finally get to see him in his element/in his standard character design. This just makes the Arenamaster instantly become even more irrelevant, to the audience at least, when he is visually replaced in the frame by Cool Main Cast Character Who Actually Matters. Basically what I'm saying is that he matters less than Dainix's cool poncho.)

So: if bathos works by undermining sincerity for comedic effect, then it can be a really effective way of indicating to your audience when something or someone is no longer a threat. The Arenamaster was, at one point, a serious enough threat to force two main cast members to physically fight each other in an arena; Red's use of bathos instantly demotes him from Serious Antagonist to Literal Joke, and it becomes painfully obvious that any power he once had was bestowed arbitrarily by an unfair system, and without that system he has nothing to fall back on. He represents that system, and as long as it remains dominant he's a powerful antagonist, but he doesn't matter at all outside of it.

[rwxtd]

normally I only post the jewelry I make on instagram, but I wasn't planning on posting this one because I'm keeping it for myself, hence why I am posting it here instead. look at her. she's so cute

[rwxtd]

ok so im gonna post some little comic doodle things i made back in college, mostly bc i drew these partially on my notebooks for class and partially on the whiteboard outside the common room in my dorm and i just wanna have them all in one place.

anyway here are the adventures of percy and steve, date est. september-october 2019. there's definitely gonna be repeats, and i'm sure at least some of them have been fully lost to time, but i think this is most of them.

(shoutout to one of my friends from college for that last joke, I didn't come up with it)

(colorized)

(it would seem my beef with boring romance subplots is ancient and eternal)

(also quick warning for extremely brief Harry Potter mention on this next one, I made these before JKR's transphobia arc)

and that's all i got! If I ever find more in any old notebooks or something, ill add them, but I kind of doubt that'll happen and I don't think there was much more than this anyway.

I saved all the physically written down ones that I could find- I think I'm missing at least one notebook- and spent most of wednesday evening glueing them into my scrapbook so I'd have them all collected in one location, but my deep love and respect for The Archive requires that I also keep the ones I only have photos of and that I try and preserve the original context/panel layout as much as possible, which is why I took pictures of them all before I cut them up and moved them to the scrapbook.

It's also kind of funny for me to look back at these now that I'm actually making an active effort to get better at drawing and comic-making, because at the time I was fully convinced I was Bad At Art and that that was somehow the end of it. I stopped drawing for fun in like third grade because I became convinced it wasn't something I could ever be good at, and by college I felt like even if i could learn i should've learned sooner and now it was too late and i never would. and that whole time, all through middle school and high school and college, I was still making stuff like this consistently. almost every notebook i had has at least one goofy little stick figure comic in it somewhere. so I guess it's just nice to have these here as a reminder that this is not only something I've always liked doing, it's something I've always *been* doing, even before i started actively learning how to do it. it's kind of good for motivation, i guess- i like drawing and making comics, and I should keep working on it even if i feel like i'm still not that good at it yet, because if I don't make stuff on purpose then apparently i'll just end up making stuff by accident.

[comicaurora]

set a layer combine mode wrong and accidentally made the psychic torture slime bisexual

[rwxtd]

happy pride month to the psychic torture slime. am i too late to make this joke

[rwxtd]

In honor of the return of Drawfee Variety Hour

[rwxtd]

fellas is it gay to like cool rocks

[rwxtd]

Poem is Bee! I'm Expecting You! by Emily Dickinson. I actually drew this like over a year ago but I had a lot of fun with it and I like how it turned out so I definitely want to try and make more mini comics like this

[rwxtd]

i can't remember why or how this idea came to me but i have to assume jetlag had something to do with it

[demiaseranmage]

@comicaurora

[comicaurora]

being a rock is actually a stress response :(