Season’s Greetings! :) What Adorable Kitties

There are a few very nice Nygmobblepot wedding pictures out there, but I think this one has to be my favorite--it’s so action-packed and, really, the most “them”, because can you honestly imagine these two having a wedding that doesn’t involve some form of explosions? 

Funny story about this one, actually. I saw it on Pinterest once when I was clicking around, but then I clicked on something else and lost track of it, and I couldn’t find it in my history or anything because Pinterest is weird like that. I tried googling “Nygmobblepot wedding”, but sadly, it doesn’t come up (although some other very nice pictures came up which I’ll also have to share--or I guess reblog; this isn’t facebook--some time). So I spent the next couple of weeks clicking desperately through Nygmobblepot art on Pinterest trying to find this one again so I could save it. I never did find it that way. Eventually, I looked at the Nygmobblepot art I had already saved to my laptop to see if I had anything in a similar style, and as luck would have it, I did have some Spicy Watson art in my folder already, and I managed to recognize the art style and follow the watermark back here. It’s a really nice feeling to find such lovely art of your ship, but it’s even more amazing when you find it, lose it, spend weeks looking for it, and find it again! :) 

troublemakers

[please don’t repost anywhere]

DOCTOR WHO The Time Monster

You know, I'm the kind of person with like 80+ ongoing projects at any given time, and I rarely ever post things on here about them because I'm always waiting until they're finished and trying to get things perfect first and then I wind up never posting them. But I have to remind myself there's no law against showing off WIPs, and in fact, that's actually like a normal thing to do on tumblr. So, I thought I'd show off my progress so far on my Danger Days phone case insert I've been working on!

[Image ID: a tall narrow painting roughly the shape of a smartphone. The background is a rainbow watercolor fading radially from one color into another, starting with red in the top left, orange in the top right, yellow down the right side, green in the bottom right, blue in the bottom left, then purple shading from blue violet to red violet heading back up the left side. The watercolor has been textured with a salt resist technique creating small floral shapes of lighter paint. On top of this background, “Look Alive Sunshine” is written in tall wavy block letters in an assortment of colors meant to contrast the background, such that the “L” is light green, the “A” is yellow, and the “S” is orange and so on. Some letters are fainter, written in sharpie that has faded into the paper, but others are brighter, having been gone over in acrylic paint. There is a ring of poked holes in the top left roughly where the phone’s camera sits and a bit of uncovered background space to the top and bottom of the text design, which covers the majority of the piece. End ID] (*If there’s anything you’d like clarified about this description feel free to ask, I found it tricky to describe clearly. )

I tried to copy the comics font here--wait, actually, I'm just going back through my reference images, and I think the text I copied from for this is actually from something by @tapefish that was itself based on the comics font. Yeah, this is based on a design that's on their redbubble actually, though I didn't trace it specifically, but that's what this is drawn from. In that design, both words in "look alive" are on the line above "sunshine", so because of the way I've done it here, "sunshine" wound up being twice as narrow, hence why letters are all really squished, but hopefully it'll still be more or less legible!

I went over the letters in sharpie initially, but they were really hard to see, so I'm gradually painting over them. I'm also probably going to put more pictures and/or text on here, like a Danger Days spider and/or an eye like the one on the mailbox, and possibly "keep running" and/or "art is the weapon" in the space at the top or bottom.

As for the color scheme, I just went "how can I make this as colorful as physically possible" and ran with that, lol :) Well, to be more precise, I did a rainbow ombre in the background and then tried to make each letter roughly the complementary color to the part of the background it was on, but I tried to still have a variety of colors in the foreground as well.

Mostly, I'm just happy I've finally gotten around to making some progress since I first did the watercolor for the background literally like 2 years ago in our first pandemic summer, and that's just the rate at which I work on things sometimes, lol.

Anyways, I could ramble about my design and my plans for this for a while yet, and I could definitely proofread and edit this post some more, but I'm trying to stop myself from spending all afternoon on this post now instead of actually continuing to work on my phone case insert. Feel free to ask me stuff about this, though I can't guarantee anything remotely resembling a quick response haha. But hopefully someday before another two years have passed, I'll be posting a finished version of this! For now, enjoy this rare glimpse into my artistic process, hahaha.

Wow, these druids are really in character!

Hahaha. The cutest way to TPK :) 

Total party wipe in my DnD game the other night. Damn op kittens.

I’m feeling such secondhand bittersweetness right now; 100 episodes of an awesome show is a great accomplishment, and I’m happy we got this far. All the same, I can’t help that endings are always sad--like, I’ve heard that whole “don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened” quote, and I often think about it, but still. But at the same time, the end hasn’t even properly started for us yet; it’s just over for the actors and camera people and such. I imagine the editors have a fair amount of work ahead still (shoutout to my editing peeps ;) (I work as a video editor for a local historical society)). Still, I’m glad I found Gotham when I did, and it’s been a fun ride. 

I mean, it’s crazy because I just started watching this summer, but it’s cool to be here now to go through the end as part of the fandom. It’s rare that I’m caught up and active in a fandom, especially at such a climactic time. I mean this was a couple of days ago now, but still. In the broader span of fandom history... I was here, watching as Gotham ended. I feel like I’m standing with my fandom dramatically perched on a rooftop gazing into the sunset as chaotic explosions bloom around us in the encroaching night. 

@tvline

Happy 100th episode, @GothamOnFox! 🦇 .

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#Gotham #BenMcKenzie #JamesGordon #DonalLogue #HarveyBullock #DavidMazouz #BruceWayne #Batman #CamrenBicondova #SelinaKyle #Catwoman #RobinLordTaylor #OswaldCobblepot #ThePenguin #CoryMichaelSmith #EdwardNygma #TheRiddler

Via: Instagram

Well... heck. My mom literally just called me and told me this was happening (”I know it meant a lot to you when we visited it, so I wanted to let you know”, she told me) and I just... didn’t really know how to react. Honestly, I opened tumblr to kind of distract myself, but then I suppose I am glad to know some more facts and specifics on exactly how bad it is. 

I did look up the video of the tower collapse, too. Wow. It does feel like a gut punch to watch. 

But I am glad most of the stone structure of the building should be alright. I was in first grade when we visited it, and I would love to go there again; I know you can’t exactly order a new church spire online, but hopefully they can get it fixed.

Thank you for the information. My prayers are with you.

notre dame is burning.

this is ok.

it has happened before. it will happen again. it has been lost before. it will be lost again. and again. and again. and again. art and architecture are transient, and temporary, and 850 years may seem like a lot to the individual, who will live maybe 100 if they are very lucky and very healthy, but even the pyramids at saqqara have only existed for about 6000 years and that’s still not all that much, if you consider the grand scheme of things.

yes, this is terrible. as someone who is deeply religious and literally a professional historian with a focus on art and architecture, this is terrible. im mourning. im gutted. im horrified and upset and miserable. but.

it’s not over.

victor hugo wrote hunchback because notre dame du paris was in the process of collapsing and falling apart, and revitalized the entire world’s focus and love for this church, and that was not even 200 years ago. it led to it being renovated.

the roof has fallen in. the scars of fires are on its buttresses. the rose window has fallen out. the beams and piers have collapsed. the spire has toppled. the stones have suffered, and will suffer again, but it is not gone.

renovation work is essential. sometimes things collapse and burn and break and have to come back. it’s not a terrorist attack, it’s renovation, an accident, but we have so much evidence, history, carefully documented everything on one of the most studied places in the world.

it’s not the end.

So, is the guy with whom Lucy wishes she could set Mina up the owner of the same insane asylum as the one across the street from the castle Jonathan found for our friend the Count, or are there just a lot of insane asylums around in 1890s London?

Tall Ships and all views from and of them are simply so gorgeous, and looking at pictures like these always puts that sailorly tingle in my chest. I know I tend in hindsight to idealize the week and a half or so I spent studying on Schooner Roseway, but I do keep feeling that ‘call of the sea’...

*Unbidden, Moana slinks from the shadowy corners of my mind to sing her song.*

just spent three days delivering the soggiest schooner i’ve ever been on a hundred miles down the coast, in the company of a really excellent dog!

I figured I ought to tell the story of my blog background (which gets into the story of my blog) and give credit as best I can for the picture I used to make it. Also I should probably warn you here and now that I tend to ramble. 

So, first off, I have to admit that I can’t give exact credit for the original picture I used; I got it from Google Earth a long time ago, and now that they’ve changed the photos layer, I can’t find the original anymore. I’ve tried a reverse google image search, but it doesn’t come up. All I can tell you is that it came from Narrows, Virginia, or the surrounding area, and it’s of the New River. So, if you’re the photographer who took this picture, let me know how you’d like to be credited (or if I need to find a new background image). 

I love this picture, though, with the tranquil water reflecting the mountains and that lone tree jutting up on the left. It has a nice balance, or perhaps a good visual flow, and it reminds me of home. (I’m originally from Blacksburg, Va, and Narrows is a little over half an hour west and a smidge north of home.)

Anyways, I’m also posting the various stages of my photoshopping (well, actually, I just used the “markup toolbar” in Preview on my Mac to edit the color of the image, but that doesn’t work as a verb as well as photoshop does). 

Aside from my general love of all things purple, I also wanted to tint the picture purple so that it would be a picture of “the Lande of Violet Mists”. The Lande (with an “e” for artistic flair) of Violet Mists is a fantasy land and somewhat of an in-joke going back to the blogspot blog I made Sophomore year of high school. It has a vague mythos on said blog--in bits and pieces, such as the one I have in my blog description here--but it’s mostly more of an aesthetic theme than a properly developed literary location, though I have written bits and pieces set there. Remind me to dig some of those back up and see if any are worth sharing here, actually. 

At first made this edit for aforementioned high school blogspot, and I did try to set it as my background there, but I couldn’t get the formatting to work. When I started this tumblr, though, I was happy I had it in reserve. 

So, basically I tinted the picture pink and turned the temperature towards cool (aka blue) to make it purple. I think I also decreased the sharpness to give it that atmospheric haze and boosted the saturation some to intensify it. I decided the first one wasn’t purple enough, so I made the second one, but that one just looked too unnatural (and a bit too pink) so I went back to the first one (each time I started a new edit, I made a copy of the original so that I could have each step as a separate image) and made it just a little more purple. I liked that one, and I just inserted a translucent square to have that more opaque region in the middle where posts go. That wasn’t wide enough, though, so I actually took a screenshot so that I’d have an image in proportion with my computer screen and copy-pasted the image onto that and stretched it wider, and that’s how I got the final image. I suppose this isn’t necessarily specific enough to be helpful as a tutorial, but hopefully it gives the gist of how I edited my background picture. When in doubt, add purple :)

I love any and all AU’s where the Doctor and the Master go travelling together, and this art style is just lovely! It’s all surreal and cubey but also soft and emotional, and the use of color and light is just beautiful :)