they/them
art requests and commissions closed to the general public and zeke
I'm always out there turning the white snow red as strawberries in the summertime
dni if you call victor frankenstein a doctor
This might be a silly/obvious question, but is the 'Black character that's really good with technology' a stereotype or just a character trope? Because it's used pretty often, especially in animated media. Think Cyborg from DC, Tucker Folley from Danny Phantom, Dr Nitrofunk from the demo's for Scratchin' Melody, and more that I currently can't list from the top of my head. Considering media's track records with repeatedly putting Black characters in a specific role, I just wanted to ask if it's a harmful thing or not. I tried to search it up first, but didn't manage to find anything.
Character trope. Wouldn't call it harmful, just overdone and kind of boring. Now what IS a stereotype is the Nerd Friend™, which is usually a "oh but it's positive!" Depiction of the Black best friend whose job it is to be the emotional lean on and brains of the nonblack (usually white) MC. Often comic relief. Never usually gets to be developed on outside of his relationship with the MC.
I love your art so much! There's such a charm in your style and colors. How did you learn to draw children and babies so well? I try but they never quite look right. They just look like I messed up an adult face. Any tips?
hey, thank you so much!!! tbh, children are tricky and it took years of practice before i felt like i drew them okay--hopefully these tips are helpful to you!
using georgia and her much younger self as a guide: children have big heads in relation to their bodies, with their features mostly relegated to 2/3 or even 1/2 of the face, depending on the art style. babies and toddlers in particular almost always have large foreheads and big cheeks, no matter what their individual features are.
my children tend to lean more cherubic and cartoonish because i've always adored how rose o'neill, the creator of kewpie dolls, drew children and babies. great big eyes, small noses and mouths, etc.
that being said: as you can see with georgia above, her younger self still has fuller lips and a wider nose, they're just small in proportion to the rest of her head, if that makes sense!
i would avoid any harsh lines/super definition on the face. i usually add a soft touch of shading or a few very, very light lines, usually to show the fullness of the cheeks like i've done with eloise above.
there are exceptions. sometimes my characters like wilma and all of her children have dimples or a particular way their eyebrow crinkles, or some other definable feature. all that is okay! but just know the more lines you add to a character, the older they look--so you want to use a lighter hand when drawing very young children or babies.
as children age, they "grow" into their facial features. their heads are usually still a bit bigger in proportion to their bodies, with a jawline that is beginning to define, but still relatively soft.
with ellen and leon below, you can tell they are several years older than eloise above, but not so old they begin to look like teenagers or mini adults.
overall, these are the tips that have stuck with me! because i like to give my ocs children or draw them as children, i make a point to dedicate time to figure drawing people of all ages, from babies to old folks, and it has helped a lot!! thanks for asking!! <3
"I love seeing Black children happy. It bothers me so much when people are buzzkills about the joys of children, but it especially pisses me off when people are annoying about the happiness- and loudness- of Black children. It’s already hard as fuck enough out here, it’s not going to get any easier, and now the kids are supposed to be miserable too? Let the kids be happy!
At any point this world might decide that they should be murdered for the audacity to be alive and Black; I want them to cheer and clap and dance and sing and blast music as LOUD as they can because they are here too and they have every right to be! Take YOUR miserable ass on somewhere instead, and consider why happy Black children bother you so much. Maybe consider that YOU might be the threat! You want to fight somebody, pick on somebody your own size!"
A very pertinent quote from my lesson on Black Childhood
Gordon Parks captured the Jim Crow South with a quiet, devastating clarity—using his camera as both witness and weapon. Through intimate portraits and everyday scenes, he exposed the cruelty of segregation not with sensationalism but with humanity, dignity, and truth. Parks showed Black life in the South as it was lived: tender, resilient, disciplined, and determined, even under oppressive laws. His photographs didn’t just document injustice—they challenged America to see what it preferred to ignore.
sorry but once you notice how often ppl use a southern accent as shorthand for being unintelligent you can never unsee it. classism is baked so deeply and why are you acting like anyone who talks the way my grandfather talks is stupid.
people on here who have been on 10-15+ years like myself...i don't know how they claim that there were never any Black bloggers on here, or that it was always such a white website. trudy gradientlair was on here. thisiswhiteprivilege was on here. there was a feminist citation project sara ahmed was involved in on here. there was someone on here whose username was wretchedoftheearth and that was how i learned who fanon was when i was 12, by googling those words. tumblr was the only place i knew i could go to get accurate & compassionate info about what happened to trayvon martin, when everyone around me irl was rabidly racist. the amount of reportage and scholarship that happened on here before the first big wave of bans was so huge and so much has been lost. where were you when it was happening??? why weren't you paying attention??
Every time people speak about how all the "problematic" people left the site and went to Twitter, I simply presume whoever says it is racist. Everyone who wanted to try to discourage people from returning here when Twitter was overrun, I presume was antiblack. Twitter became unsafe and Black people STILL kept at it, because it was literally still more productive for them to do work there than it was to try doing it here.
There were folks here that I know elsewhere now who literally help save lives in their communities and have online safe spaces in other places that they were able to build and cultivate. Seeing Black people who became huge when they left here will always be my perception of Tumblr. It is a place that Black people started great work and were put out because the work wasn't valued by the white Tumblr population or was straight up sabotaged by them.
I FINALLY got back in touch with Cashawn, who was the first person who got "Black Girls are Magic" poppin. I hadn't been in touch with her for nearly a decade! Because she fucking left here. And there are a few, very few who tap in and see what's up over here every now and then. But a lot of them simply let Tumblr kick rocks and they were correct to do so.
And it was the central place, not just for Trayvon's story, but everyone's. When other sites were not giving information or giving construed information, there were so many boots on the ground activists who used THIS SITE to communicate their situations and tell you what was real. In fact, one of the main points of the purges were getting rid of activists who were using the site to keep others informed.
This WAS the site people came to for things, and then it had to become Twitter and there are still ignoramuses on here who chuckle "Twitter is having old convos from Tumblr lol" Twitter is having PRESENT convos that many of the same people who were having them on Tumblr had to go have them on Twitter instead, because Tumblr became unsafe for the work that they started here. Twitter is STILL having conversations that Black people have had to have in every space we occupy and are often run out of.
But, because Tumblr IS full of white people, their arrogance makes them think they are special and smart and revolutionary. They don't even know how much of the shit they say has been picked from the bones of something that Black people originally grew on Tumblr before they were deactivated or jumped ship.
you'd think that because the first word in this post is "storytelling" it would make the point that im talking about using marriage as a story device/framework and not talking about the real life institution of marriage. and yet some notes in this post say otherwise.
The “Lady” in the name “ladybug” is the virgin Mary. People just cannot stop giving religious names to this bug.
The reason for this was that if you lived in an agrarian society then your survival was a throw of the dice every year, depending on the success of the crops. A failed crop year is a very hard year where deaths are expected. And if you grew a cereal like wheat, there were several things that could cause your crops to fail, but one of the big ones was if you happened to get a fuckton of aphids. You know what eats aphids? Ladybugs! If there are lots and lots of ladybugs around, there was a good chance that it’d be a good crop year! They were little crop protectors! When your family lives or dies on the success of that crop, of course they’d be seen as a blessing and given an appropriate name!
truly dads with new born babies v dads with children are two completely different people this man used to strap this child to his chest with a double chest wrap because he was terrified of giving her shaken baby syndrome and now he just kinda hucks her , I'll be sitting on the bed and all of a sudden my child just comes soaring towards me
Husband when child was newborn: you are my beautiful soft amazing little creature and I will be so gentle and lightly clean you softly and sing you sweet songs
Husband now that child is 4 years old: carries feral child upside down into the bathroom telling her she is a smelly little beast and she has to wash her butt while she sings him songs about spraying him with the shower head
Husband when child was newborn: "bath time and bed time is my special one on one time with my sweet baby angel where I tell her how special and soft and sweet she is and spend much needed time relaxing and getting her to relax and snuggling"
Husband now that child is 4 and "sturdy" (his words not mine): "bath time is my special time for hand to hand combat with my warrior princess where I teach her how to throw a punch and try to exhaust her enough that she passes out until tomorrow, and if that doesn't work I just start making deals like she's a mob boss and I am a desperate flunkie"
Husband when child was newborn: here is your hypoallergenic formula heated to the exact temperature that you need to have the thickening agent activate in a ulta double sterilized bottle my miracle NICU baby, it takes 25 -35 minutes to make but it is what we must do to keep you safe and healthy.
Husband now that child is 4: "I had to make her a breakfast snack of two eggs and toast before we go out to brunch because she was gnawing on the bars of her enclosure and I am frankly terrified of the small piranha she becomes when hangry."
“The LEGO Movie was my favorite movie of 2014, but it strikes me that the main character was male, because I feel like in our current culture, he HAD to be. The whole point of Emmett is that he’s the most boring average person in the world. It’s impossible to imagine a female character playing that role, because according to our pop culture, if she’s female she’s already SOMEthing, because she’s not male. The baseline is male. The average person is male. You can see this all over but it’s weirdly prevalent in children’s entertainment. Why are almost all of the muppets dudes, except for Miss Piggy, who’s a parody of femininity? Why do all of the Despicable Me minions, genderless blobs, have boy names? I love the story (which I read on Wikipedia) that when the director of The Brave Little Toaster cast a woman to play the toaster, one of the guys on the crew was so mad he stormed out of the room. Because he thought the toaster was a man. A TOASTER. The character is a toaster. I try to think about that when writing new characters— is there anything inherently gendered about what this character is doing? Or is it a toaster?”
— Bojack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg commenting on how weird gendered defaults in entertainment are, and why we should think twice about them. Excerpted from this longer original post.
(via 360degreesasthecrowflies)
so many misguided metaphors around violence and desire. if the open maw of a panting beast fills you with the want to be devoured, that does not make you prey. while the rabbit trembles in fear, its deepest desire is to run. evolution demands it. in fact, the desire to be eaten does not make you any small animal at all.
One time when I was a kid a group of girls and I had to treat another student for hypothermia by ourselves because she had so many invisible health issues that the adults we asked for help didn't believe us. The student in question was actively hallucinating. When I finally ran for help the people I grabbed were slow as shit to respond, casually joking about how "dramatic" the person in question was.
The kid was picked up by an ambulance 30 minutes later.
Now as an adult working in security I get SO MANY folks- upper-middle aged mostly- coming to me to 'rat out' people they think are faking it.
I was once sent into a bathroom because a client demanded that the "fucker won't get out, so go drag them out"- I was NEVER going to do that, so I did a wellness check instead. You know who it was? A person recently released from the hospital after a car accident. They had a hole in their skull and major hearing loss. They couldn't answer the owner because they couldn't HEAR the owner.
Another time about a homeless man who got around town by kicking the ground from his wheelchair. "You know he doesn't actually need that thing, his legs work fine, it's just for pity points"- Oh, so he's not paralyzed, his wheelchair is performative? Funny story Dale, I actually know that guy, he was backed over by a truck and has chronic pain from his shattered pelvis. But sure, let's make him stand up and walk everywhere so nobody feels too bad for him and tries to help him or something.
"She doesn't need that scooter, I've seen her get out of it."
"Look how fat he is, because he just rides around and refuses to get up."
"She doesn't really need that cane- she comes here without it all the time"
Sincerely, truly, from the bottom of my heart- as someone who isn't physically disabled but hears this shit all the time- fuck off
there's no such thing as dusk in the city @skieskrash - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
