hiya! Honestly i too cannot escape getting glue on my fingers, I just make sure to wash them when I notice they're getting to be a problem.

I use Lineco pH-Neutral PV glue, which is pretty fast-drying. So while yes, I do need to wash my fingers from time to time, really they just get kind of tacky and start accumulating dust and graphite, becoming a fingerprint hazard.

When pieces are really small I put a dab of glue on the end of a safety pin, then touch it to the paper piece to pick it up and maneuver it into place. More of a way to work with teeny bits of paper, but it does mean less glue on the fingers as a nice bonus!

Much luck papercrafting! 'u'

my incomprehensible valentine to my partner @fortheninth (,,,μ_μ,,)♡ happy valentimes sweetheart

Featuring Harrow and Gideon of The Locked Tomb and referencing that Ryan Gosling notebook image

zee tee on blee skee

Heya! Sorry the art blog has been quiet recently, I've been at a low ebb I guess. I am working on inking my heraldecember and hourly comic day posts, so look out for that sometime soonish. But! In the meantime, I've just gotten a Bluesky! I'm at zeeteeart.bsky.social, come find me if you'd like to watch me yell into the void about random thoughts, and eventually post art too!

<3 Edward "barbiegirl" Teach <3

I love the wild curls in 80s Barbie illustrations, and I couldn't resist giving them to Ed! Combined it with some portrait practice based on screencaps.

A few weeks ago I virtually attended the Adobe Max conference, so once again as in previous years I picked a character design theme to draw in my notes. This year I went with pirates! Please click through to see each set larger! Images described in alt text.

The first three sets are a bunch of generic pirates. The last one is Ed, Izzy, Stede, and Mer-Stede from Our Flag Means Death, 'cuz I wasn't gonna draw pirates for a week in October 2023 and NOT draw The Boys!

This year's Adobe Max was extremely A.I.-focused and A.I. dreck makes my soul melt out my ears, so that's why there's a little me having a Bad Time over my lunch in the first one. Whole thing really brought the luddite out in me, ggh. The sketches with a dot grid are actually from my work notebook, I had a long meeting a few days back and scribbled a few more buccaneers.

The next five Dungeons and Dragons and Inktober entries!

Septimus is a skaven monk, which, well, is basically just a Redwall character, huh? I named him that because I wanted some squeaky sounds and also as a pun, because mus means mouse in latin. Brónach is a sad weeping willow dryad. She grew up over an enchanted spring and became a sorcerer, and she has a hard time controlling her powers. Kaius is an angry little goblin barbarian, always spoiling for a fight. Unfortunately I was having a kind of bad Friday the 13th so I gave him spectacularly bad luck as well. Felicita is a bugbear rogue who likes to run various scams, uhh I mean fun games of skill!!! Iggh is a heron aarakocra ranger. His name is a croaky heron call, friends who can't pronounce it call him Iggy.

The day I finished Felicita and Iggh I realized where I got the claws I've been having fun drawing on all these monsters... it's the berenstain bears claws, that's what they've been this whole time, oh my godddd

Five more of my Dungeons and Dragons and Inktober entries! Genoveva is a gentle old goblin druid. Ched Fearchar is a goliath ranger, a champion competitive archer that loves testing skills and has a bit of a boisterous, frat boy attitude. Siramaritai is a minotaur lady of the court, very willing to keep her eye on goings-on and manipulate them to suit her purposes. I always give my minotaurs Minoan clothes and names, and I referenced her face from a cow I saw at a country fair recently. Nawra is a djinni druid (I'm realizing belatedly I should have made the four D&D genie types another rollable variable, but oh well, next time) who specializes in air plants, of course! Astrit is a dragonborn druid, he's researching lizards at the Drosophil magic lab.

Descriptions in alt text. You can see the list I'm rolling from here. Please do not use any characters I roll for your own campaigns or stories, but feel free to roll your own from the list if you want!

Classic Zee move to post an Inktober list and then go silent for half the month. I have been drawing them! I've just been either too busy or too tired to sit down and scan 'em.

So! Here's the first five of my Dungeons and Dragons and Inktober entries! Edda is a hill dwarf wizard, they're a grouchy librarian at a magic science lab. Nanami is a merfolk paladin, I based her off an eel and gave her a weapon based on a fishing trident. Katsuo is a kenku monk, very serious and no-nonsense. Gollá is a sweet firbolg and a celestial warlock. I based her and her son Ávvu's clothes off of traditional Sámi clothing. Marzell is a drow fighter, a mercenary for hire. He should probably stop wearing a glowing crystal directly over his heart but he cares a little more about aesthetics than sense.

Descriptions in alt text. You can see the list I'm rolling from here. Please do not use any characters I roll for your own campaigns or stories, but feel free to roll your own from the list if you want!

Since I'm DMing an actual game now and keep finding myself needing more NPCs, I'm doing another round of Dungeons and Dragons and Inktober this year! I expanded my list of character races because I do actually have a 30-sided die, then I realized that's just. a normal Inktober prompt list. minus 1. I'm still gonna roll for it because that's fun, if you wanna play along but just do one per day down the list then you do you man, i ain't stoppin ya

Please do not use any characters I roll for your own campaigns or stories, but feel free to roll your own from this list if you want!

I've found myself DMing a homebrew Dungeons and Dragons game for a chaotic group of mostly middle schoolers and millennials and also the local pastor. Finally I have a use for all those characters I created a few Inktobers ago!

Our first adventure was a """one-shot""" I wrote for my siblings a little while back, in which Our Heroes help Nanny Hulda find her son, who got lost in the Dark Crystal Pyramid in the woods outside their village. Along the way they were supposed to explore a room with a mummy, but one of the kids decided to kick a flaming barrel of rum down the shaft that led to the room, and I was amused enough by this that the next session (yeah the one-shot took like 3 or 4 sessions to complete) I introduced the ghost of the mummy they were supposed to fight, if only he hadn't been blown to smithereens. The kids were so immediately charmed by this silent grumpy ghost that they adopted him into the team and may be starting a cult in his honor.

At first my screen was just some cardboard with character cards awkwardly taped to the top, but that wasn't Enough for me, I wanted More. So I designed a new screen to look like a castle, complete with stained glass windows that double as character card displays! The banners along the top of the wall are initiative markers: I had players draw an insignia representing their character on the front, while the back side has important stats written in dry erase marker on tape, so I can edit them on the fly.

Now our chaotic band is headed into Kypree Swamp, where they've met three bullywugs (they did not care for one but attempted to adopt the other two) and the grouchy half-orc Lilòia, who I was worried would get called Shrek but was immediately dubbed The Duchess. Completely unpredictable, these kids. I've included all the character cards I've done for both campaigns, even the ones nobody's met yet, because only two of my players follow my tumblr--one of whom is my partner and saw me drawing them already anyway haha

Descriptions and names in the alt text! Please do not use my characters for your own games.

I was assigned frames 142 and 274 of the Our Frames Mean Love collab! I could not stop myself from papercrafting one of them, this project was such a fun excuse for everyone to show off their different fanart mediums! The second is a vector illustration done in Illustrator, because the papercrafting demon couldn't win me over twice and I also had a time crunch, I was away the whole week right before the deadline. And well also because I like doing vector art too!

I've included a couple photos I took during the cutting process. Please note the wood stain samples I used for parts of Stede's hair and the sparkly marbled paper I used in Ed's, they're my favorite details! I also managed to find a mulberry paper in just the right reddish-brown for Ed's lip that I fussycut along a lighter seam of pink fiber, giving him a bit of a lip line. I was so pleased with myself for figuring that out, haha. The papercraft piece is 12x6cm in real life!

The full animation featuring these and hundreds of other beautiful artworks can be found here on twitter: https://twitter.com/emcolbs/status/1662126565071749127 Thank you again for starting this, @emcolbs!

A preview of my portion of the Our Frames Mean Love project, in which a bunch of fanartists drew single frames from The Kiss in OFMD, which will be strung together to make an animation! I allowed the papercrafting demon that lives on my shoulder to convince me to papercraft one of them but I drew the line at both, so the other is a vector drawing.

I'm soooo excited to see the final product, everyone's put their all into each frame!

Ceramic adventures from the past few months! A local potter put on a couple painting workshops where she provided premade cups, bowls, etc and my friend and I were like oh heck yeah

The first time I painted a cup with Dionysus and Hestia chatting. Thanks to the stories where she gave him his throne I like the idea of them as an unlikely favorite auntie and nephew duo. Unfortunately the potter made a mistake when glazing them... you can't see the figures and the underglaze is weirdly pockmarked, making it impossible to even drink from it. Ah well, such is life... someday I'll make the Dionysus+Hestia kylix of my dreams...

The second time around I painted a different opposite duo, Apollo and Artemis. I like to draw Apollo wearing his more feminine accoutrements, it makes the differences between him and his sister Artemis even starker, and that's fun! And this time you can see through the glaze, woo!

Descriptions in the alt text!

Given that it was just the first anniversary of The Most Important Kiss in Our Flag Means Death I figured I should commemorate it.

Drawn with a Pentel brush pen in its death throes, my favorite method of using one! You get such lovely texture! I wish I could keep one Pentel constantly on the verge of drying out, I wonder if I could recreate the effect with a portable watercolor brush...