I Really Like Drawing Viktor :)

"he was all alone for so long. and then... a little cat appeared." shut the fuck up this is literally what everything ever is about forever

Meet Viktor Hargreeves (ART BY: @lydsirabella on IG)

You ever have a compliment that just sticks with you for literal years and years? Maybe forever?

For me, it’s when I was working as a figure model for art classes at my university (because it paid well due to being an early-morning thing and was easy to get because nobody else wanted to apply due to the near-nakedness and pervasive body image issues in our culture). There was this one professor who was always so happy when I showed up as the female model for that day because he said that I had a “good sense of motion”, and it was fun to draw. (Which, in itself, was a great compliment because I am a clumsy, self conscious person.)

But what really got me was one day we were doing 15-minute poses, which are harder to do because you need to come up with something interesting and dynamic, but you have to be able to hold it for a quarter of an hour without moving even a little bit. They didn’t have any specific guidance for us, so I just… did something. Idk. But about five minutes into wandering around helping the students and talking to them, he paused and told me that I was doing a good job, and, “What a fun pose. You’re reminding me of Rodin’s ‘Eve,’ there. You always have a very Rodin sort of energy about you. Thanks for waking up early for us.” And then just went back to discussing the use of ink with one of the students like he hadn’t almost reduced me to tears.

Then I went home and looked up Rodin’s ‘Eve’ and was blown away because she actually did look like me? I had ended up in that pose almost exactly just by chance, but she also had a soft, squidgy tummy and the hip dips and weird butt and big feet and thunder thighs and strong calves, just like me.

And I don’t have a great relationship with my body. Very much the opposite. I frequently hate the way I look and fit into it, but then occasionally from the depths of the past comes the voice of an art nerd telling me I’m like a Rodin sculpture, and I feel like, “Yeah, I have Rodin Energy so suck it, brain!” And it helps me reframe the way I’m thinking about myself because I can get outside of my head for a minute and see that while I’m frustrated with my body, it has an art to it just by existing. Soft tummy? Fun to draw, nice curves! Big thighs? Strong lines! Dimples and wrinkles and slopes become a place for light to sit. Bodies are so cool, and that includes mine! Even if it’s not quite what I want it to be, it’s still a work of art that nature sculpted just for me.

And for him it just seemed like such an off-handed, normal, natural thing to say. He thought “Hey, that looks like Rodin,” and so he said it.

Just… Idk. Compliment people. Say what’s on your mind. You have no idea whether it’s going to totally change a person’s life. It’s just words to you but it could be really, deeply important to them.

oooo if you‘re taking requests can you draw Ranboo?

lethe

on trust and manipulation

Back in early high school, I knew a girl - we were kinda friends by virtue of having multiple friends in common, but in hindsight, she never much liked me - who had this purebred dog. I’d met him at her place, and he wasn’t desexed, which was pretty unusual in my experience, so it stuck in the memory. And one day, as we were walking across the playground, this girl - I’ll call her Felice - said to me, “Hey, so we’re going to start using my dog as a stud.” And I’m like, Oh? And she’s like, “Yeah, we’ve been talking to breeders, we’re going to get to see his puppies and everything,” and I made interested noises because that actually sounded pretty interesting, and she went on a little bit more about how it would all work -

And then, out of nowhere, she swapped this sly look with another girl, burst out laughing and exclaimed, “God, you’re so gullible. I literally just made that up. You’ll believe anything!”

And I was just. Dumbfounded. Because I was standing there, staring at them, and they were laughing like I was an idiot, like they’d pulled this massive trick on me, and all I could think, apart from why the fuck they felt moved to do this in the first place, was that neither of them knew what gullible means. Like, literally nothing in that story was implausible! I knew she had an undesexed, male, purebred dog! It made total sense that he be used for a stud! And it wasn’t like I was getting this information from a second party - the person who actually owned the dog was telling me herself! And I felt so immensely frustrated, because they both walked off before I could figure out how to articulate that gullible means taking something unlikely or impossible at face value, whereas Felice had told me a very plausible lie, and while the end result in both cases is that the believer is tricked, the difference was that I wasn’t actually being stupid. Rather, Felice had manipulated the fact that she occupied a position of relative social trust - meaning, I didn’t have any reason to expect her to lie to me - to try and make me feel stupid.

Which, thinking back, was kind of par for the course with Felice. On another occasion, as our group was walking from Point A to Point B, I felt a tugging jostle on my school bag. I didn’t turn around, because I knew my friends were behind me, and my bag was often half-zipped - I figured someone was just shoving something back in that had fallen out, or had grabbed it in passing as they horsed around. Instead, Felice steps up beside me, grinning, and hands me my wallet, which she’d just pulled out, and tells me how oblivious I was for not noticing that she’d been rifling my bag, and how I ought to pay more attention. This was not done playfully: the clear intent, again, was to make me feel stupid for trusting that my friends - which, in that context, included her - weren’t going to fuck with me. As before, I couldn’t explain this to her, and she walked on, pleased with herself, before I could try.

The worst time, though, was when I came back from the canteen at lunch one day, and Felice, again backed up by another girl, told me that my dad had showed up on campus looking for me. By this time, you’d think I’d have cottoned on to her particular way of fucking with me, but I hadn’t, and my dad worked close enough to the school that he really could’ve stopped in. So I believed her, a strange little lurch in my stomach that I couldn’t quite place, and asked where he was. She said he’d gone looking for me elsewhere, at another building where we sometimes sat, and so I hurried off to look for him, feeling more and more anxious as I wondered why he might be there.

I was halfway across campus before I let myself remember that my mother was in hospital.

I felt physically sick. My pulse went through the roof; I couldn’t think of a reason why my dad would be at school looking for me that didn’t mean something terrible had happened to my mother, that her surgery had gone wrong, that she was sick or hurt or dying. And when my dad wasn’t where she’d said he would be, I hurried back to Felice - who was now sitting with half our mutual group of friends - only to be met with laughter. She called me gullible again, and that time, I snapped. I chased her down and punched her, and the friends who’d only just arrived, who didn’t know what had happened or why I was reacting like that, instantly took her side. Noises were made about telling the rest of our friends what I’d done, and I didn’t want them to hear Felice’s version first, so I ran off to the library, where I knew they were, to tell them first.

I walked into the library. I found our other friends. I was shaky and red-faced, and they asked me what had happened. I told them what Felice had done, that I’d hit her for it, that my mother was in hospital for an operation - something I’d mentioned in passing over the previous week; multiple people nodded in recognition - and how I’d thought Felice’s lie meant that something bad had happened. And then I burst into tears, something I almost never did, because it wasn’t until I said it out loud that I realised how genuinely frightened I’d been. I sat down at the table and cried, and a girl - I’ll call her Laurel - who I’d never really been close to - who was, in fact, much better friends with Felice than with me - put her arm around my shoulders and hugged me, volubly furious on my behalf.

And then the other girls showed up, and Laurel said, with that particular vicious sincerity that only twelve-year-olds can really muster, “Prepare to die, Felice,” and I almost wanted to laugh, but didn’t. A girl who was a close friend, who’d come in with Felice, took her side, outraged that I’d punched someone, until Laurel spoke up about my mother being in hospital, and everyone went really quiet. Which was when I remembered, also belatedly, that Laurel’s own mother was dead; had died of cancer several years previously, which explained why she of all people was so angry. I have a vivid memory of the look on Felice’s face, how she tried to play it off - she said she hadn’t known about my mother, I pointed out that I’d mentioned it multiple times at lunch that week, and she lost all high ground with everyone.    

Felice never played a trick on me again.

Eighteen years later, I still think about these incidents, not because I’m bearing some outdated grudge, but because they’re a good example of three important principles: one, that even with seemingly benign pranks, there’s a difference between acting with friendly or malicious intent; two, that ignorance of context can have a profound effect on the outcome regardless of what you meant; and three, that getting hurt by people who abuse your trust doesn’t make you gullible - it means you’re being betrayed. 

And I feel like this is information worth sharing.  

the impossible return

Persistent guilt without closure

I finished listening to season 2 of Critical Role (600+ hours after I decided to check it out, haha). Anyway I spent the entirety of the finale drawing this! The Mighty Nein was a fun crew. :)

There's this weird tendency among fandom types where they'll take a character, and insist that they are fans of them, before changing their design, age, pronouns, backstory, blood type, species, hometown, favorite color, zodiac sign, medical history, and every other facet of their being.

They will then violently insist that this version is superior to the canon one and act like they "fixed" them and it's like. Buddy that's not the same character anymore. That's just your own oc commiting identity fraud. Like. I get the desire to experiment with different interpretations of a story. But first of all it's okay to just make an original character if that's what you really want to do. And second of all, are you even really a fan of the character you "fixed" if they're a completely different person afterwards?

Like. Idk dude for somebody who claims to be a fan you sure don't seem to like them as they are :/