Fate Spins Along As It Should.

"It took me TWO years to finish this sketch book!" Well that's cuz you're not fuckin sketching. Those are fully painted pieces dawg that's a renderedbook. I've gone through four sketchbooks in my off time this year alone I just draw stupid faces and shit for fun. pussy up like the rest of us and start drawing stick figures with guns

We must protect them

A bit of a strange question, but if there were any of your videos you were to "remake" today for any reason (ex: you feel like you misrepresented the original text or spread misinformation), which would it be and why? None of them is a perfectly valid answer

Again: bit of a strange question, but I've been thinking about my own creations and how I could have done so much better with some of them, but I also know that is a sign of my growth and constantly chasing "what if I did this instead" isn't always healthy for nurturing a creative mindset, and I was wondering what your opinion might be as a Creator of Things with a bit more experience than I

There's been a few trope talks where I've thought later of other angles I could've explored that might warrant sequels or part 2s, but I don't dislike any of the summaries enough to justify a rework.

I always find "I could've done this better if I made it now" to be a bit of a fallacy. I'm only better at making things now because I made all those earlier things. If I knew everything I'd learn from making a project before I started the project, it wouldn't come out the same.

I think when it comes to the "rework remake perfect" instinct, it helps to zero in on what the impulse is really grounded in. In my experience, more often than not, it's not actually about making the art better, except incidentally. It's usually about showing that you are better. It's demonstrating your competence and your higher standards and your skills, and more importantly it's overwriting the proof that you were once less than perfect. If people look at your old work and think that's all you're capable of, they'll be judging you poorly!

If that's the motivator, it's a very unhelpful one. You can't control for being harshly or incorrectly judged. It's a fruitless effort to stave off potentially upsetting outdated criticism, and it's not even going to work. Fear of critique is an unreliable and untrustworthy motivator.

If it really is about making the art itself better, perfecting your magnum opus with your newly leveled-up skills, that's a little more solid. But from where I'm standing, it's always better to use those skills to make something new instead of polishing something old. The older, unpolished work has already acquired its audience that finds it appealing for reasons that might never occur to you. Trying to bury or overwrite it just deprives that audience of the thing they like, and maybe makes them feel bad for having liked it in the first place. Also, usually when you look back on the older work, you'll conclude that the problem is everything and it'll need to be torn down and started from scratch. I know when I revisited the first three chapters of the comic, when I let my critic brain spin up, it wasn't shading or lineart I wanted to fix - it was panel composition, overall pacing, the entire structure of the chapters as a whole. I would've had to make them all over again to be happy with them, and they wouldn't be the same story by the end.

I've been thinking a lot about the Discworld through this lens lately. It ended up over 40 books long, but everyone agrees that the first two are not what you should start with, because they're the worst ones. They're entirely parodic, purely referential of at-the-time major fantasy series, and borderline mean-spirited in places. If you haven't read Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and Dragonriders of Pern, you're not gonna understand like a full 50% of The Colour Of Magic.

It's clear that when he started in on them, Pratchett was entirely focused on taking the piss out of a genre he found mostly shallow and unimpressive. But the Discworld wouldn't leave his head, and everything he made fun of he clearly eventually found himself overthinking. He'd make little one-off jokes in the early books about Dwarves having no women and a hundred words for gold, and then twenty books later he'd have a Dwarf gender revolution make waves across the Disc, and then he'd write Thud!, a book that delves deeper into the nuances of Dwarf societal structure than Tolkien ever did.

If you look for them, there are continuity errors everywhere in Discworld. In his introductory book, Carrot defused a dwarf bar full of rowdy brawlers by guilting them all into writing to their poor lonely mothers back home. Shortly thereafter, Carrot will be outraged at the mere concept of an openly female dwarf. Pratchett even eventually wrote Thief of Time, a book that loosely explains that the Disc makes no sense because history has been broken and put back together incorrectly twice, and therefore any continuity errors are because of that.

He's the writer. He could've gone back and fixed it, edited the reprints to be less disruptively discontinuous with the later books. Instead he continuously moved forward and allowed the world he made to grow without cutting it off from its roots. And because he didn't bury his older, far worse work, we have the privilege of following the Disc's evolution from the very start, and seeing how this shallow, stock fantasy world parody became something incredibly rich and complex without ever pretending like its early installments never happened.

Anyway, that's why I think it's better to move forward. You make more good stuff that way.

there's an angel (insect) and a devil('s coach horse beetle) on each shoulder

thinking of opening a small shop next year... these would be a set of 2 stickers :>

Random idea flew into my brain and obviously i had to draw it. What do you think they did.

comic done for a project assignment a few years back!

Good Evening Mr. Phelps.

30 years ago, the city of Aeor created the Latimus Princeps, a device that prevents divine entry and scrying within the city of Aeor. Since then, our covert agents within the city have learned that Aeor has neared completion of a god-killing weapon known as the Factorum Malleus. In addition, they have created a failsafe protocol spread throughout the city, wherein should they feel there is a threat to the Factorum Malleus, they will disseminate knowledge of how to build it across the globe, ensuring its recreation. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to infiltrate the city of Aeor in the guise of a mortal, sabotage the failsafe mechanism and Latimus Princeps, and destroy the Factorum Malleus. As always, should any of you or your IMF team be caught or killed, the secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions.

This message will self destruct in five seconds.

comics as an art form make me insane. they’re so difficult to do well. there’s so many different ways to make sequential art work and most of them are deeply unintuitive. onomatopoeia that feels completely ridiculous to put down often reads seamlessly. panels on a page become a fractally nested image composition challenge that’s only possible to lose because if you do a good job no one will notice. you have to direct the readers’ eyes on a specific path across the page but also account for the fact that they won’t follow it. comic time isn’t linear. if the order of events isn’t crystal clear the story becomes incomprehensible. sometimes you need to do this on purpose. all this for a medium almost universally considered less effective than animation and less respectable than plain text. even its own name doesn’t take it seriously

So here’s my thought, because I don’t think the Archheart is wholly wrong about the gods needing to leave, but I think, as in all things, there’s nuance to that solution. Specifically, I don’t think all of them leaving at once is the best option.

I think the Archheart and whoever the second god is that wants to leave need to take the plunge and go off on their own. Because their argument hinges on this notion that mortaldom cannot grow with them still there, but by refusing to leave without the whole of their family beside them, they too are refusing to grow. To go off on their own and explore the cosmos for themselves. They are waffling on the choice of sticking with their family as they always have or leaving the home they found and made together, just as many of their siblings have waffled on their children VS their siblings. But the thing is, they (the Archheart plus one) know they want the latter choice—leaving—more than they want to stay (and as such stick w the family), so they want to force their family’s hand so they come with and they (Archheart plus one) can get their cake and eat it too.

Which is understandable! With all they’ve been through, all the family they’ve already lost, it makes sense that they don’t want to leave anyone else behind! But in order for them to grow, they need to. And I think, with time, if the Archheart and their fellow did leave, others would follow. Would see that the choice wasn’t as calamitous (heh) as they once feared it might be. Some would stay, because the world needs its constants—the sun, death, hope, nature—and because they care for their children too deeply to stray too far and that would be okay.

Staying close may well be as suffocating as the Archheart believes it to be, but then surely the inverse—severing that tie completely by all abandoning Exandria at once—must be just as harmful. There has to be balance; some stay, some go. Perhaps one day some even come back to visit. But the gods—the Archheart, their fellow, the rest—need to realize they can survive without each other too, just as they want to show mortals they can survive without them. They’re the same, after all.