Devotion

@dykeseyelmao

soft toy, ca. 1902

toy rabbit called ‘tiny’, in an upright stance, printed cream velvet with brown spots; english?, ca.1902

It's my genuine opinion that people who find insects or reptiles ugly looking are choosing to do so, even if they don't realize it. If you look at anything in nature, anything at all, with the intention of seeing beauty you will see it immediately. That goes for dirt and decay and diseases or deformed things too, there's beauty in all organic formations. Some people are just black hearted and stubborn about things they're culturally conditioned to identify as weird.

This is in response to a post that disappeared off my dash where someone in a screenshot was grossed out by cute weevils, and someone I talked to on here just yesterday DISGUSTED by..... axolotls

I'm not talking about fear here, but people seeing "aesthetic ugliness." Like hating opossums or bats or crabs because somehow a scaly tail or spooky wing or jointed armor is supposed to be unpretty. I've met people who hate so much as pigs or cows for this nonsense concept. Or snails or moths or, I shit you not, whales. I saw a little girl once cringe at a SLOTH and say it's ugly. If you think any of those sound arbitrary and unfair I feel the very same of all organisms.

An ugly living thing is a fake concept.

Dads love having undiagnosed autism

Bayverse tranformers when they're transforming is erotic to me

the autism has won

gonna show u guys a little opalescent highlight hack i threw together today

rainbow gradient above your main figure (i usually have all my main figure folders/layers in one big folder, so i can clip gradient maps + adjustments to it!). liquify tool to push the colors around a bit. STAY WITH ME I KNOW IT LOOKS STUPID RN I'M GOING SOMEWHERE WITH THIS

THEN: set it to add/glow (or the equivalent in ur drawing program), lower the opacity a bit, and apply a layer mask. then u can edit the mask with whatever tools you like to create rainbow highlights!!

in this case i'm mostly using the lasso fill tool to chip out little facets, but i've also done some soft airbrushing to bring in larger rainbow swirls in some areas. it's pretty subtle here, but you can see it better when i remove the gradient map that's above everything, since below i'm working in greyscale:

more granular rambling beneath the cut!

u could also just do this with a brush that has color jitter, but what i like about using layer masks for highlight/shading layers is how simple and reversible it makes everything. i can use whatever brushes i want, and erasing/redoing things is super low stakes, which is great when i often approach this stuff with a super trial-and-error approach.

example: have u ever thrown a gradient w multiple colors over an entire piece, set it to multiply etc, and then tried to erase it away to carve out shadows/highlights? it's super frustrating, bc it looks really good, but if u erase something and then change ur mind later, u basically would have to like. recreate the gradient in the area u want to cover up again. that's how i used to do things before figuring out layer masks!! but masking basically creates a version of this with INFINITE undo bc u can erase/re-place the base layer whenever u want.

anyway, back to rambling about this specific method:

i actually have TWO of these layers on this piece (one with the liquified swirls shown above, and another that's just a normal concentric circle gradient with much broader stripes) so i can vary the highlights easily as needed.

since i've basically hidden the rainbow pattern from myself, the colors in each brushstroke i make will kind of be a surprise, which isn't always great -- but easily fixable! for example, if i carve out a highlight and it turns out the rainbow pattern in that area is way too stripey, i can just switch from editing the mask to editing the main layer and blur that spot a bit.

also, this isn't a full explanation of the overall transparency effect in these screencaps! there's other layer stuff happening below the rainbow highlights, but the short version is i have all this character's body parts in different folders, each with their own lineart and background fill, and then the fill opacity is lowered and there's multiply layers clipped to that -- blah blah it's a whole thing. maybe i'll have a whole rundown on this on patreon later. uhhh i think that's it tho! i hope u get something useful out of this extremely specific thing i did lmao

Kim Kitsuragi, Kid Master General

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Ground rules: No AI, no copying/reposting my art/ocs