is it safe to put watercolor paint in your mouth?
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If it’s for little kid activities (crayons, etc.) it’s usually nontoxic.
Tempra paint is the safest! It’s made of organic stuff, and that’s why it gets that awful sour rotten smell after a while— it does actually spoil. Don’t put spoiled tempra paint in your mouth. It is so nasty.
Anything by Crayola is formulated specifically to be eaten by toddlers! Go nuts.
Still, it’s not good to get into the habit of treating any paint as nontoxic, because a lot of gouache paints use metals and minerals for their pigments and fillers. At art school we all got warned about this lady who licked her watercolor brushes to moisten them and reform the points, and over time the metals in the pigment settled in to her bones and gave her cancer.
Acrylic paint will fuck you right up. Acrylic paint causes nerve damage over time, you never ever ever want to fingerpaint with it or use it in body art. We were also warned about a guy who thought fingerpainting was more vital and dynamic than paintbrushes, and ended up with nerve damage so severe his hands shook all the time and couldn’t pick anything up.
Oil paints are pretty bad for you too, and the thinners are definitely substances you don’t want to just go dicking around with– keep your containers clean and make sure they all close properly. We were, of course, warned about a lady who didn’t store her solvents and turpentine and shit properly because her workroom was far away from the kitchen, but it turned out that the air vents in her house circulated the fumes around and she realized shit was up when her pet bird died. Turns out they both got cancer.
Enamel thinners, paints, and paint dust can basically all melt your face off via cancer if you’re too casual about ‘em. Also once I put a brush with enamel in my mouth by accident and it was super nasty and sort of stuck my lips together in a spot like superglue, it was a bad time.
Spraypaint should be used with a facemask because, again, cancer.
If you go to art school and they don’t tell you exactly how hard you’ll fuck yourself up from improperly handling or storing all your paints, markers, photo chemicals, sculptural mediums, ceramic glazes, or power tools, then you are not going to a very good art school. Basically everything will fuck you up.
Except chalk. Chalk is actually totally fine to eat, but it will make your poop look really weird.
Clay is pretty much fine to ingest also, but some glazes can make you sterile. So don’t risk it.
Draw Buddies Club!
What is it? Draw Buddies is a little thing I’ve started for people like me who want to draw and paint, but have a hard time finding the motivation to do it without the companionship of other people who also draw and paint. This is a way to share art, get feedback, and commiserate with other people making art in a casual, friendly way.
What do you do? Make art, and every Friday I’ll put up a Draw Buddies Weekly Check-In post to remind people that it’s time to post something you’ve worked on in the last week. You can post by either reblogging the weekly post, or making your own post and tagging it with #Draw Buddies weekly check in. (Note: no hyphen! Hyphens break tags.) Then, go forth and reblog other peoples’ posts with your comments! However, please refrain from giving critiques unless they’re specifically requested.
You can also post to share with others outside of the weekly check-in or ask for advice or support with the #Draw Buddies Club tag.
I’ll be tracking both tags so I can comment and signal boost as needed, as well as post my own work. :)
Who can join? Absolutely anyone. If you want to draw more, have fun with it, and support other people making an effort to draw more, please jump right in.
Any guidelines? Be kind to yourself and others in your comments, and reciprocate in giving comments and support. Focus on positive, specific comments (e.g. “I love your line work on this, the light line weights really give the piece an airy feeling”), and only critique pieces where the artist specifically requested a critique. If you aren’t sure how to give a good critique, please read through the answer to this Captain Awkward letter before you begin.
That’s it! Go forth and draw, my friends. Check-ins start on March 27.
sodiumqueen tenacious-fat-rolls kurlozmakara @hellfirelover
I don’t know about you, but I’m heading toward my ‘mountain.’
In this amazing video Neil Gaiman gave one of the most inspirational speeches I’ve ever heard. I’ve seen a lot of comics, posters, even animated typography about the more well known “Make good art” portion of the video and, while that made a distinct impression, there was one part of it that I found to be very useful that I didn’t notice getting much attention. At one point he says, about his professional success, “[Calling it] a career implies that I had some kind of career plan and I never did. The nearest thing I had was a list I made… of everything I wanted to do.”
This really stuck with me, the idea that you don’t need a formal plan of action in order to be successful, that it was entirely possible to just keep your goals in mind and work toward them however you were able to at the moment. I’ve tried making career plans before and they never seem to work out; life always gets in the way, throws a wrench into the works at the worst possible time. Making a plan and sticking to it seemed just short of impossible to me but imagining my goals, as Neil said, to be a mountain ahead of me… that I could do. Keeping myself aimed at that mountain and just taking whatever opportunities I could that would take me closer to it… that I could do. So I made a list of my own and thought “I’ll bet there are people out there who could make use of this, too.” So I followed the more famous advice and made this to put up on my wall by my workspace.
This is my mountain and I’ll be moving toward it from now on. How about you?
Here are a few simple creature design tips I’ve figured out over the years. Mostly common sense, but might be helpful to some.
- To make a creature look big, a simple step is to make the eyes very small in relation to the rest of the head. Look at how smalls the eyes of a whale or elephant are compared to their head. Do the opposite to make things look small.
- In theropod dinosaurs, more often than not the tail is roughly the same length as the rest of the body including neck and head. You can use this same rule to apply to dragons and many other creatures to help achieve a more believable and balanced look.
- Scales get much smaller at joints to allow for maximum mobility.
- Wings are just advanced forms of arms. They have shoulders, elbows, and wrists; look for these to help lay out wings more easily.
- Adding some scars is a very easy way to show age of a creature. Wear and tear on creatures is often overlooked.
- Watch nature documentaries and go to zoos. Most of the time nature has already done a design element before you and probably did it better. The real world is fucking cool, bring it into your work.
it is truly awful and evil that there are millions of young girls being told that covering any imperfection in their skin and lengthening their eyelashes so as to better frame their face and trying desperately to hide the natural shape of their nose is art. that this learned practice of picking out everything you’ve been taught to hate about yourself and systematically concealing or altering these things so as to make yourself more appealing is “a form of art”. there is nothing creative about the need to ~Be Beautiful~ at the expense of being yourself
I hate that all of the replies to this are some form of “Well I feel better about MY crippling insecurities when I wear Kat Von D brand makeup so SUCK MY FUCKING DICK AND LET ME DO WHAT I WANT, OKAY?” Like…this post isn’t to “shame” people who use make up or some moral judgement on people who wear makeup, it’s a critique of this culture that tells women that they’re ugly unless they spend countless hours fretting over every “flaw” that culture tells them is hideous and trying to constantly change the way they look so that they can feel validated by others.
This is some pretty generalized BS, like maybe a few people wear it due to trying to hide imperfections, but some foundation to cover a big pimple and some mascara doesn’t fucking matter if it boosts someone’s confidence for the day, it only becomes a problem once someone feels like they can’t go out without makeup, then it becomes a burden and a problem that needs to be addressed, but until then let people wear their makeup. It’s this kind of mentality that makes people think that people who wear makeup are insecure and end up with stupid fucking comments like “oh you’d look better without all that makeup!” Or “you know I think you’re beautiful, you don’t need makeup”. Like we know , thanks. You can say it’s a critique on society, but most people now understand the difference between media and real life,and help others who don’t, this post is just another post coming after people (because people other than girls wear makeup, thanks) who wear makeup, making the idiotic statements of how it makes people feel like they need makeup in order to be acceptable….yeah no sis. Also the whole saying makeup is art is wrong thing??? Yeah no. Until you can do amazing makeup on day one, I don’t wanna hear it. People use makeup to do amazing colorful looks, sometimes to completely transform themselves into something you’d see on a canvas, it’s different from traditional art because it’s not paint on a canvas, but learning how things work with the shapes of faces and color theory make creative makeup a beautiful art, and saying otherwise is simply incorrect.
I think you’re missing the entries second part of this post. It’s not trying to demean or say anything about people who wear makeup or claim makeup is incapable of art. It is simply saying that makeup has and continues to be used as a standard of beauty. So you have one side telling (specifically women) that they must wear makeup in order to be acceptable and another side saying makeup is powerful and art so you should do it then you have two sides encouraging the same behavior with only differences in intention and not in practice which may result in the same mentality that makeup is the standard because makeup=acceptance and makeup=art so where can you go wrong? Both result in people (not just women) giving money to companies (usually run by men) that make their entire living off the insecurities and ideologies of our beauty obsessed culture. This post does not say nobody should wear makeup. It does not say anything bad about those who do. It is simply stating that makeup has always had a toxic effect on youth and to claim the intention is art does not erase those effects.
I’d like to mention I wear makeup a lot. It makes me feel better. It has a definite effect on my mood. And I have to understand that while the effect is positive it may come from a negative place. I have to critically analyze WHY I feel the way I do with makeup and what makeup stands for in or culture. I’m not going to stop wearing makeup and it’s not going to stop making me feel better but at the same time I can recognize the prolific problems in the beauty industry and that an effective combatant of those issues is not telling myself “I wear it for me” or that I’m practicing an art. Because regardless of my intentions my actions are furthering the traditional standards of beauty. At the very least it is something we can be aware of and change our actions in such a way to decrease the importance so many people put on physical beauty. And part of that is not encouraging young people (and they are starting younger and younger each year) to buy into this industry and shape impossible standards for literal children.
After a year of putting up with this, I’ve decided to go public about BCMetalCraft.
Back in April 2012 I discovered that someone had copied the Tardis clock design by Amber (UnicornEmpirePrints). They had copied the design exactly and they were selling it on Etsy. I was…
I’m always amazed at how people justify this behavior to themselves and others.
Im starting to see a pattern: people who want to make things or be seen as a “creative” but do not want to put much time into learning how to make something from nothing. Yes they learn the mechanics of cutting metal or moving clay around or applying paint. But these folks need a template to work off because coming up with good ideas and a personal aesthetic takes a lot of time and mistakes. Unfortunately this kind of desire for instant gratification usually comes packaged with an entitled personality that is weak at self evaluation. They see people making living off their work, people getting praise for making up beloved characters or iconic timeless work…and well, they want a piece too. But like, NOW. And want half the work already done. Because , NOW. Fuck you, gimme.
There is also an issue with not really valuing other’s work because they skipped a step and didnt really earn their stripes or put in the time or tears. There is just no love in there, only mechanical making, paint by numbers. It’s just a Thing to them, it’s not a personal piece…. no emotion/soul/story was invested into it. So when they are called out, the notion of creative ownership or artistic respect is completely out of their world view or personal experience. It sounds like crazy talk to them. Some are wildly offended by the idea. I think most of it starts out as just being oblivious because they didnt have teachers or fellow artists to guide them through ethics. It can often turn into malicious behavior after they are called out and thats when it gets bizarre. I have experienced it and seen it happen to others many many times. They might feel bad afterwards but arent sure why and so it must be the fault of the artist who told them The Bad Thing. And then you see people’s true character and it can be real ugly.
Hopefully this guy will back off or will lose interest soon. Unfortunately many of these folks but into the “any attention is good attention” so who knows!
I think there’s two sides to this kind of thing though. Yes in this *specific* case the person making the knock off versions is pretty much just a simple thief. That’s made clear by the fact that he’s perfectly willing to use somebody else’s designs totally unchanged.
But I also just finished a debate with somebody who seems to think that taking any sort of inspiration from somebody else is theft, and it’s not. Drawing inspiration from others, taking ideas you get elsewhere and re-working them to make them your own, those things are essential parts of art. They always have been. These days though I see so many people who seem to think that any kind of idea they come up with should be theirs forever, never to be used in any way by anybody else. Even to the extent of people who claim to own concepts like “purple husky” (seriously, I saw that one once) or that whole recent nonsense of Warhammer owning the concept of space marines, or any number of other similar things I could mention.
It’s really not the idea, it’s what you do with it. And I wish more creators were less defensive and more open to other people’s inspirations. It’s very sad when somebody starts throwing around accusations of theft right and left over nothing more than an idea. Somebody I liked and followed has been dropped from my watch list recently over that, because I just could not stand watching that person attack other artists who “stole” their ideas, when even *if* those other artists had been inspired in the first place, they’d obviously taken that idea and made it into something new and original that was quite different from this person’s creations. But they were so fixated on the idea, and how it belonged to them and they weren’t open to any discussion or debate on the subject at all. It was really disappointing.
I agree. Inspiration is a good thing and nobody lives in a vacuum. We are the sum of our experiences and everything we see gets stored in our brains and poops out in one form or another in our work. I think people get confused about the difference between being inspired and cribbing too. It sucks because it can really toe the line. Inspiration can be used to defend cribbing and some people who are honestly just inspired can get shat on over nothing. Sure the people who make knock off Disney movies arent just recoloring or tracing the animation but it’s also pretty obvious they are just trying to ride coattails. It’s not the exact same thing and after all Disney doesnt own the idea of “female archers with red hair and celtic themes”. Disney doesnt own the technique of 3D rendered characters or animated movies, either. But still, its painfully obvious whats going on and it’s not right. But if someone sees the movie Brave and gets inspired to start drawing female archers with red hair with Celtic themes or even the character of Merida in their own style… or Bears! and warriors! or even the color palettes in that movie make them start to explore a new way of painting or maybe the tapestry made them want to try embroidery so they make their own real life version of it …thats inspiration! It’s healthy and that movie added to that artists arsenal of sources and ideas that they can riff on and grow from.
And personally it’s awesome to see your work inspire someone else. One of the reasons i make blank masks is to get people riffing off of my own work and creating whole costumes around them. I enjoy seeing where people go with them, often in directions i would never have thought of ( and in turn inspiring me!) Some artists paint them up and resell them for profit which is cool that we both can benefit monetarily and fairly. A lot of the folks who buy a mask have never even painted anything before and it’s so cool to see them try something totally new and start to explore….
I just sort of ran out of steam on this one but i hope im making sense haha :)
It makes perfect sense. Inspiration is glancing at your classmate’s homework, seeing they used a different easier method to solve a problem, and seeing if you can make that method work for you, the “I never thought of doing it that way, let me try.” Stealing is just straight copying their answers word for word, number for number, and then going “This is mine, I did it. Praise me for it, bitches.”
One of these is clearly wrong, and if you do it then people who actually have to work for their shit want to punch you in the face.
art classrooms are the opposite of liminal space
explain
it has something to do with the paint on the walls, the tables, the floor, the electrical outlets; the cans with their labels torn off sitting in the sink, full of paint-colored water; the pencil doodles on the tables that get erased and changed constantly; the way everything is arranged slightly differently every time you go in; the half-finished projects everywhere in sight, laying on drying racks, hanging on the wall, propped up on an easel. everything about it suggests continuous use even when it’s empty. it suggests continuity and returning and belonging
thats fucking beautiful what the hell
I think it also has something to do with taking the unknown and the mysterious, and transforming them into real things that can then be shared. Liminal spaces carry this sense of solid reality slipping away into the cracks, or something that isn’t quite real slipping in. Art classrooms are a space where, instead, nothing becomes something.
And it’s definitely connected to continuity; liminal spaces are often tied to Time, and its lack of passing or passing very fast without you realizing it. Art classrooms and art projects mark progression across time, which helps to define reality.
I’d also theorize that it’s an anti-liminal space because people and characters who experience liminal spaces are often being acted upon by other, greater powers. Art classrooms are a space where the student acts. They have power and free will. They have autonomy (excluding the class assignments of course).
Now I have to wonder what else counts as a non-liminal space or anti-liminal space. And would these same characteristics carry across to them?
Metal working shops are also non liminal spaces; everything in a metal working shop, and I would argue most crafting fixated spaces, are Real. Intensely, intensely real. Objects go from every single step of their creation, from their rawest form (ore, wool, string, plants), to every step of being turned into the object they then Are (a shovel, knit blanket, tapestries, dyed material).
Things Are in crafting shops. They Are and then they Become and then they just Are even more. There’s no wispy strangeness, no shifting. The park made on the wall where something banged it will probably stay there, theres paint on the ceiling from a mysterious past accident, the Things you made and make from are There.
I beleive in this very strongly because I grew up andering in my dads welding metalwork shops, and sometimes getting to see my grandmother (step, technically, but she was there MY whole life so) in her wool she dyed from hand written formulas and spun and knit.
There are few things, to me, as Real as the smell of ozone and melting metal, of copper dipped in chemicals to make it shine green and blue like the ocean, of the toughest woman I ever knew turning wool into far better then gold.
Nanny looked around. But, after all, this was a forge. There had been a forge here long before there was a castle, long before there was even a kingdom. There were horseshoes everywhere. Iron had entered the very walls. It wasn’t just a place of iron, it was a place where iron died and was reborn. If you couldn’t speak the words here, you couldn’t speak’em anywhere.
Even so, she’d rather not.
“You know,” she said. “The Fair Folk. The Gentry. The Shining Ones. The Star People. You know.”
“What?”
Nanny put her hand on the anvil, just in case, and said the word.
Jason’s frown very gently cleared, at about the same speed as sunrise.
“Them?” he said. “But aren’t they nice and—?”
“See?” said Nanny. “I told you you’d get it wrong!”
-Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies
howls moving castle: howls vain obsession with beauty is his fatal flaw. this is made extremely clear in numerous circumstances. this is supposed to be the thing you dont like about him
all of us including me: hhgfgh howl … pretty ………
Yeah, he’s sure pretty alright.
But his vanity wasn’t actually his fatal flaw, at least in the movie. It was just a minor charming comic-relief flaw.
His real flaw was refusal to shoulder his responsibility. The beauty of the resolution of HMC, is that by loving each other, the characters all teach each other courage.
in the book, if we’re running up comparisons, howl’s vanity definitely wasn’t his fatal flaw, it was…more of a defense mechanism.
it covers for a number of insecurities, ranging from the childhood self-worth kind to the ‘my ability to feel normal emotions is compromised by having given away my actual physical heart in a magical pact i can’t get out of without killing my asshole friend if at all, and this causes me major identity problems.’
(according to Calcifer he also isn’t actually particularly good-looking under all the cosmetics and hair-care, but Sophie never actually evaluates that so idk.
the first impression he makes, at May Day before she knows he’s Wizard Howl, is ‘dashing’ with a ‘bony, sophisticated face’ and ‘well into his twenties.’ no further details ever come up. his attractiveness is definitely dealt with more as a matter of presentation than of his specific features, tho–like his ability to produce a gorgeous romantic tableau through posture and positioning when courting Actual Lettie–and there’s every indication Sophie wouldn’t be all that interested if she wasn’t attached.)
i didn’t realize the avoidance of responsibility thing made it into the movie! the way he’s half-killing himself…turning into a harpy and…overflying the war…kind of overshadowed it for me i guess. huh, cool.
being a slitherer-outer, as Sophie puts it, is…sort of his flaw, in the book? like, it absolutely is. but it’s also one of his chiefest strengths; it’s how he kept ahead of the Witch’s curse for so long. she had to manipulate Sophie and Michael and threaten Howl’s family in Wales as a distraction to finally catch him up.
(as sophie says in the sequel, “Vices? I’m just describing Howl.”)
this is how flaws often work in dwj’s work, come to think of it. the only fatal traits are the ones the villain relies on to advance their agenda, right up until they push it and/or the people bearing the consequences of it so far they experience overwhelming backlash, and those tend to be of the ‘exploiting/manipulating’ type.
…most notable is that incredibly awful guy who entered the effective field of a poetic-narrative-based reality warping computer he’d imprisoned thousands of years ago, and turned into a dragon.
Please don’t tell another chronically ill person “oh I wish my symptoms were like yours.” or “your symptoms aren’t as bad compared to mine.” because you have no idea what other conditions or symptoms they may have. Yes, they may have a symptom that is less severe than you but they may have another that is more severe. Don’t turn chronic illness into a suffering contest. It’s just so insensitive.