Holy shit I was eating this apple and I lost focus and just ate like the entire fucking core. I'll post a photo of it compared to my thumb and another apple.
Afternoon repost: The morning post image was of really poor quality. Ick. Had to redress that.
Deep Rising 4 was done during college, and it actually was for a class assignment. It might have been Watercolor II or Illustration I; I can't remember - it was about 25 years ago.
I wanted to experiment with all kinds of things in this piece - the illusion of layering, breaking out of picture boundaries, mixed media, and dealing with a really horrible mistake. I used the sea dragon type of creature because I wanted an easy subject to which I could apply a bunch of experimental handling.
Most of this is watercolor, with some India ink and some colored pencil detailing. But it got really wet. Too wet. I think I had tape on there to keep my edges straight, and I tore the tape off too early. The still-damp top layer of Bristol board RIPPED OFF. I go, "Oh hell oh bugger oh blast oh damn; I just put 10 hours into this damned thing what-am-I-going-to-do?!" I decided to run with it as-was. I ripped it up a little more to make the edges irregular. I spattered paint everywhere. I ripped and scuffled a bit more. THERE; now it looked like I meant to do that. The oh-bugger moment became a usable textural effect. (This turns out to be one of the most important lessons I learned during my college education - it certainly wouldn't be the last time that I had to seriously ad lib to save a project from the burn pile.)
The piece was unusually well-received, especially with the ruined-it-then-saved-it story that I told as part of my in-class artist statement and critique. I later showed it at a summer SF convention and earned an award for it being nifty and interesting (even without the story).
Concept: All women have become self-taught chemists.
Conflict: with the patriarchy still brainwashing society, women use their newfound chemistry talents to mix facial serums to slow the aging in their faces instead of use their new information for dismantling societal norms and destroying ridiculous beauty standards so they no longer sit above all other qualities and/or skills a woman may build.
Solution: there is none. Everything is chaos, but at least we all look like smooth, squishy babies and some of us have more than 5k followers on IG, even though most of them are Russian bots secretly stealing our identities to create hot lady robots to rage war against the world. This war is funded by ads from Glossier, Shein, and Maybeline via merch worn by hot lady robots during the livestreamed battles. Hot lady robots inadvertently destroy society by destroying the world itself. They are still hot. It does not matter.
I've just opened another blog to complain (= trashtalk) about everything, as I already do IRL. Still wandering if it's a wise choice (= probably not) but it's already too late because I've opened it anyway lol
tfw When you put something off so hard, you stay up all night.
Too tired to move not sleepy enough to just drop a sleep too tense and nervous about doing the thing at a bad time or anything else that gvies away you've been up all night!