valeriehalla

[valeriehalla]

not for nothing, but these past few weeks i have also been feeling “holy shit it’s good to see her active again!!!!!” about valerie halla ;◡;

#text #don’t worry about what that means. i’m getting through it is the point

[valeriehalla]

more random materials from CURSE/KISS/CUTE, upcoming queer nature-themed monster-liker web novel which is (actually) almost ready to launch, and WON’T!!!! get me banned from tumblr to continue showing off (Prayer)

#art #CURSE/KISS/CUTE #i’m healing from my deep sucking Art Wound and i’ve been on a huge roll all week ;w;

[valeriehalla]

Just discovered your blog and wanted to say that I love the music you're making! Have you posted it on any other site than Tumblr? Like Bandcamp? I ask because I intend to listen to it on repeat.

thank you. almost all the music i've written in the past year-plus has been for a multimedia project which i am close to launching, so i don't plan to formally organize it anywhere before then.

#ask #text

[valeriehalla]

Hello! I was reminded of your webcomic Goodbye To Halos recently and wanted to let you know it had a pretty big impact on me. I read it during my teenage years and I think it really helped me to contextualize and make sense of some feelings I was going through about - well, teenage stuff. Change, I guess, mostly. Changing bodies, changing genders, changing role in society, changing relationships with others - your comic helped me process a lot of my fears about those things.

Your comic was probably my first exposure to nudity that was neither sexual nor comedic. It really stuck with me how your comic has characters in states of undress fairly casually. Not like "walking down the street" casual, they're always in a safe place like a bedroom or a bathroom or something, but still. As someone who was raised Catholic it was really powerful to see nudity portrayed as so... not-shameful. Nudity is just a state the characters pass in and out of; they're nude after taking off their clothes like they would be wet after taking a shower. There's no shame in it. And that's really the way it ought to be, right? We were all born nude, it shouldn't be such a Thing as society makes it out to be.

That's just my little input on what impact your art has had on me. It was a good thing that I read it when I did. I wish you luck on all your future endeavors.

that's extremely kind of you, and very well-said, and thank you, and also that's absolutely wild for me to read.

i actually had to remind myself just now that there was in fact a sequence of (counting) eight pages where enae had her tits out. i didn't think a ton about it at the time. i do remember debating mentally whether to slap a "warning this page has boobs in it" label on the social media posts: i chafed at the idea, and i think i didn't do it? or only did it for some of them? i didn't want to because to even put such a warning immediately prompts the reader to think "oh something Sexualle is going on here," putting them on high alert and making it into a whole Thing. and it was not a Thing.

i always thought that some day, if ever i found the right moment, i wanted to have a page where fenic was fully nude. my idea of the "right moment" for that was that it would have to be at a juncture in the story where it made sense for her to be nude, and also where it would feel to the reader like there was absolutely no "point" to her nudity. the one page in the comic where fenic is topless was sort of a prelude to that idea: that might have been the moment, if there had been any reason at all to include her lower body in those panels, which there wasn't, so i didn't.

it's a fine line to walk. i think it's fairly obvious that there were many panels in that comic where the reader absolutely was meant to think "wow this character's attractive" (if they could get past my art back then lmao). i peppered those in liberally, sometimes because it was personally fun for me to draw, but always because it just seemed, i don't know, honest? for this story about young queer adults who are sort of omnidirectionally horny for one another to have a gaze reflecting that--for the reader to feel like they're "in on it" too, not in a leering sort of way, but as if they're just, like, sharing in it with the characters themselves. but then to have that, and then to also have full-on nudity, and for that nudity to feel at home with that sensation, but also purely incidental, and not in and of itself sexual, is a lot of objects to juggle, especially if one indeed (like me) wants it to not feel like there is a "Point" being made. so, it's cool to hear that it worked for at least one person. sorry for writing 999 words about this

#text #ask

[valeriehalla]

when one sees her (spot illustration from CURSE/KISS/CUTE chapter 0)

#art #CURSE/KISS/CUTE

[valeriehalla]

song that might play when something stupid but also kind of cool is happening

#music #CURSE/KISS/CUTE

[valeriehalla]

oh, and so much yaoi you couldn’t possibly believe it. just a gobsmacking amount of yaoi

people are always saying that i have read homestuck. what energy do i emit that makes people think “this one’s a homestuck liker,” i wonder. maybe if i had read homestuck i would know the answer to this question... alas............

[valeriehalla]

probably it’s just that i was born immersed in the same primordial internet ooze that a lot of that era’s webcomics came out of, though my own work in comics started years later. but when homestuck was on the rise i was still busy rereading all of achewood for the 30th time. i remember reading problem sleuth and thinking “haha that’s pretty silly” and then i never touched homestuck because i had had my fill of That Sort Of Thing. i guess it ended up being a Different Sort Of Thing in the end, but by that point i had already not been reading homestuck for long enough for homestuck to become far too many problem sleuths long for me to ever start reading homestuck? so there you have it. the most direct influences on my work are the various anime and video games i consumed as a teenager, which are too multitudinous for me to tweeze apart their contributions, and the various contemporary webcomics of my friends and peers, whose effects on my art and writing are i think a lot more visible.

people are always saying that i have read homestuck. what energy do i emit that makes people think “this one’s a homestuck liker,” i wonder. maybe if i had read homestuck i would know the answer to this question... alas............

[valeriehalla]

people are always saying that i have read homestuck. what energy do i emit that makes people think “this one’s a homestuck liker,” i wonder. maybe if i had read homestuck i would know the answer to this question... alas............

[valeriehalla]

song that may play when looking into a mirror

song that may play when a fairy boy appears and he’s three apples tall and you can see up his skirt but he’s epic for some reason

#music #CURSE/KISS/CUTE

[valeriehalla]

I’m gonna keep using Tumblr, but be aware that I have a Cohost, and everything I post here goes up there too!

I flipped the “don’t jack my shit” toggle within hours of it going live, but I’ve long resigned myself to the inevitability of all my artwork being scraped, whether or not any quasi-legal contract has been signed by the cloven-hoofed business executives upstairs. I think it’s important to manage that particular expectation: until there’s some real, actionable regulation on the books, there’s kind of nothing you or I can do to stop these freaks from vacuuming up our stuff short of never posting it on the internet.

That isn’t to say that you shouldn’t leave: what I mean is, if you leave, leave in protest, not in fear. It’s despicable what’s happening to the platforms we use; I don’t have words to describe how it all makes me feel.

#text

[valeriehalla]

as fun as big time-sinking productions are i really love the opportunities a soundtrack presents for making sparse, focused little tracks for character moments

#music #CURSE/KISS/CUTE #the [several things in song] are a metaphor for the [several things about the character]

[valeriehalla]

random materials from CURSE/KISS/CUTE, upcoming queer nature-themed monster-liker web novel which is (finally) almost ready to launch

#art #curse/kiss/cute

[valeriehalla]

on the concept of a “human furry”

i feel that there are some artists whose relationship with humans is much the same as a furry artist’s relationship with animals. that is to say, the artist admires these creatures, finds within them enormous aesthetic and tactile potential, and seeks to express themselves through that potential: but you could hardly argue that the end result of this process is a literal depiction of the creature in question. it’s, you know, a beautiful chimera, possessive of whatever aesthetic qualities of the source material the artist finds emotionally resonant.

when the source material is a non-human animal we call this “furry art”; when it’s a human we don’t really have a particular word for it. maybe you could argue that this is simply cartooning, though i’m not totally convinced.

most of my favorite cartoon art of animals that are ostensibly humans is by furries. furries fucking own: they just Get the concept of Embodiment. furries latch on to all the things that would rule about having a particular kind of body. furries know exactly what’s to like about having fur, or a huge tail, or a snoot and perky ears, or whatever. Embodiment! when that same lens is applied to the human animal, the resulting art often carries that same feeling. that feeling of, like, “this artist knows why this shape would be cool to be.” maybe what results isn’t a literal depiction of a human any more than any given anthro can be called a literal depiction of a fox: it’s a beautiful chimera inviting you to play in the space of Embodiment.

anyway that’s how i’ve been thinking about drawing lately. thanks furries. i love you

#text #??? #furries

[valeriehalla]

song that may play when a fairy boy appears and he’s three apples tall and you can see up his skirt but he’s epic for some reason

#this releases soon and i’m so excited. for you to meet him #music #CURSE/KISS/CUTE

[valeriehalla]

funny writer’s trick: i’m writing a chapter of fiction right now. in this chapter, “character A” has a Problem, and must Solve that problem. also in this chapter, i would like for character A to receive a particular emotionally-satisfying Reward. my problem is this: there is no obvious causal relationship between the solving of character A’s problem and the receiving of their reward. they’re just two things i want to happen: i want them to struggle with This, and then i want to give them That, even though This does not entail That.

my realization is this: it kind of doesn’t actually matter? from the reader’s perspective, if they experience a character dealing with something hard, and then they experience the catharsis of that character’s reward, this is still emotional cause-and-effect, even if the former does not literally cause the latter. within reason, you can just have stuff happen sometimes, especially if it creates a better emotional push and pull.

#text #don’t take writing advice from me though.

[valeriehalla]

this drawing seems to have gotten an equal amount of attention from transfem and transmasc folks, which i think is beautiful. daily we construct new and sophisticated semiotics of boy

boy’s componence thursday

#self reblog #canonically he’s got a dingaling but that’s neither here nor there