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Mary's Lurking Grounds

@maksn / maksn.tumblr.com

Mary's reblogs. Lots o' vibeogame, artgasm posts, occasional doodles and other random stuff whoooo! Visit my artblog today!
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reblogged

EOC (Elves of color)

Reblog if u agree

Bitch who made Beyoncé into an elf

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bace-jeleren

I love it when Magic the Gathering stuff makes it out of the fandom because we get gems like this. There she is, the genius inventor elf, Beyoncé.

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feynites

No but MtG is actually really good for this sometimes. Not even just with elves if you like wizards or fantastical types who aren’t just vaguely white, it’s pretty good:

I mean it’s not perfect,but part of that’s because there are a lot of different artists who contribute to things.

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rosebesch

ARI & NANA

commission for @danipanteez <3

///pscc + cintiq13hd + surface pro

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maksndraws

I’M BACK. SORTA.

Happy Pokemon day everyone!! What did you guys think about Pokemon Sword and Shield? I’m SO in love with Scorbunny’s design!!

(Also Sobble ahhh💖)

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reblogged

An Open Letter to Tumblr about the Adult Content Ban and How it is Hurting Your Users:

Recently, Tumblr was removed from the Apple app store due to an incident involving child pornography. This incident is incredibly unfortunate, but it doesn’t stand alone. Tumblr was also removed from the app store due to the large influx of porn bots and pornographic spam, users claiming to be proud to be pedophiles, blatant Nazism, racists who are not deleted for sending hate and harassing users, and more. I myself reported someone for harassing me, but because I had blocked the person and couldn’t access the messages where they harassed me, they were still able to send me anonymous asks. Your support staff, with back doors to the website (presumably), claimed they could not access the messages, and I was left SOL. Many features on this website do nothing to actually protect your users from harassment, racism, homophobia, transphobia, Nazis, pedophiles, predators, porn bots, and more. 

You claim in your statement to us that you “have been working on these problems for a long time”. This is blatantly untrue. Please do not lie to us and patronize us. We’ve been here. We’ve seen you do nothing over, and over, and over again. 

We complained to you for months and months about the rampant porn bots, and you did nothing except add a report button on mobile which only reported sensitive content or spam at best. You could have addressed this problem with an effective algorithm, but you did not. We complained to you about being harassed and sent hate speech for being LGBT+, and you did nothing. We complained to you about blogs being randomly deleted, and sometimes you’ve restored them, other times you have not. We complained to you that there were people proudly claiming to be “Minor Attracted Persons”, or pedophiles, and you did nothing. We complained to you about people proudly claiming to be white supremacists, and you did nothing. All of these things are “against the community guidelines”, and yet over and over, you have not found effective ways to handle these problems or suppress the feeling of welcome that these users claim to get here. You have had a long time to work on these problems, but you haven’t addressed them. To say you have is untrue. 

 Multiple other social networking websites, such as Wordpress, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and others have effectively dealt with rampant pornography, racism, pedophilia, and other problems without causing massive issues for their users who are not misusing the platform. They are continuing to find new, effective ways to deal with these issues without causing problems for their userbase as a whole.  There is no reason that you are unable to do this effectively other than that you wanted to do it quickly. You have once again chosen your stock holders over your users. And we have had enough. 

You have already started to ban “Adult” content with a new algorithm. Here are screenshots of just a fraction of the posts you have flagged as containing adult content:

Your new system of simply tackling everything at once is not working. At all. And each of these screenshots is proof of your utter incompetence. None of these posts contain pornographic acts, “female nipples”, or any community violation of any kind. 

We, the users, have been asking you for months to deal with these problems - particularly, the porn bots and bots that spam. In order to block a bot from a side blog, I have to do it manually, even though they are in my side blog’s feed. This is a huge issue for mobile - only users. They keep cropping up in droves, taking over our posts and tricking google into making it look like a legitimate blog linked to a pornographic website. We have complained to you for months and months now, and your solution to simply “ban all adult content” is ineffective. I agree that children should not be able to access pornography - but this is not how you tackle a porn bot problem. Your system is utterly useless, allows for racists, pedophiles, porn bots, and Nazis to remain untouched. It also harms sex workers and real people who may use this website for some forms of adult content responsibly. Moreover, as seen above, it harms plenty of users who have in no way violated your terms of service.

 If you keep this up, you threaten your website and company as a whole. Many of us are backing up our blogs and planning places to go to. 

You already have a content filter for “sensitive” content (content inappropriate for younger viewers). You could have improved this, instead of attacking your entire user base. It seems to be a very lazy “solution”, if you could call it one at all, and one that harms your entire userbase.

If you are going to keep this filter in place and make Tumblr, a website that has never been known for being family friendly and has never claimed to be, you are going to lose millions of your users. We are already planning our exodus. It isn’t hard to follow. Censor us, and we will go somewhere else. That is not a threat. It is a promise. 

Sincerely, 

The users of your website. 

They flagged this post immediately and I’ve submitted it for review… this is… quite a week.

If you believe these words, reblog it, please. I want this to be right in their face because I couldn’t email them directly. 

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paenepaene

It’s hard for my roomie and I to visually parse the default official sheets, so I redesigned them. Also wanted a spot for pronouns and disabilities (with and without option for modifiers), as well as a bigger character portrait spot, because I love my boy so much I got an eye enlargement surgery to look at him more.

If that’s your thing, check it out- if you purchase, feel free to use as much as you need, just… please don’t reupload anywhere without permission.

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maswartz
jelloapocalypse‌:
drakatha‌:
toffeeatoms‌:
theinturnetexplorer‌:
Arthur and Hazel.
Noooooo Please stop, This is beautiful, I loved this film as a kid. I’m literally tearing up. 
FUUUUUUUCK
This was literally the only scene I remembered from the one time I saw this movie as a kid and I just remember thinking “dude that squirrel is cute keep her”
Image

This is ssoooooo cuuuute

I felt soo bad when I watched this part of the movie and the squirrel got her heart broken 😭😭😭😭

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hixxiart

Pricing your Art

So @dreriart made a post about commission pricing and I thought since it is doin’ the rounds I’d copy-paste this thing I wrote on DA over to Tumblr because for some reason I … never … did that … before?? So one recurring thing I see a lot in the art community in many different formats is ‘how much should I charge for my commissions?’ What normally follows is a lot of bad advice. Terrible advice. So I’m here to give you some good advice and tell you all about how to value your skillset and price accordingly. This guide has been written with the intended audience of folk who are just starting out with commissions, but I hope it will encourage other artists to give themselves a fair wage and, of course, a lot of this can be transposed over to other creative professions as well. So let’s answer the question of ‘how much should I be charging people for work?’ The answer to this is deceptively simple. Here are the questions you need to ask yourself to form an appropriate response:

  1. Where do you live?
  2. How old are you?

For obvious reasons I cannot assist you with these. But once you have these you go to Google and you type in the following: ‘minimum wage per hour in <location name>’ Which is more than likely going to bring up an official government page for your area. Here is the one for the UK since that is where I live.Now what? Well. How old are you? Because some locations have different rates for those in different age brackets. But essentially all you need to do is get the following info: How much is the minimum wage per hour for my age in my area? Now that you have this, how long does a piece take you? You do not need to be exact. A rough guesstimation will do. This will form your base price of: Minimum Wage x Estimated Hours Therefore if I take five hours to paint a portrait and my min wage is £7.83 then my base price for a painted portrait is £39.15.

That is the absolute minimum you should be charging for your work.

And please take into considerations the following:

  • Working outside your comfort zone will up times taken on a piece.
  • If you’re working with traditional materials, how much for paper/canvas/paint/pens/etc?
  • Minimum wage is quite often garbage anyway.

Whenever I say this though, I often get a variety of responses in the negatory for this method. I have answers for each of them. So, let’s run a sort-of-FAQ on this method shall we?

I’m not good enough to price that high.

Yes you are. Who says? Your government, for starters. Also me. Here’s the thing. No matter the quality of your art, you deserve a fair living wage for your work. There are lots of people out there with no understanding of the time, effort and tears that go into honing artistic skills. Digital art, making comics, mastering musical composition, sculpting, or whatever it is all takes time to learn and we are constantly growing and improving. And if someone wants to hand you money for what you are producing guess what? You ARE good enough. That is the proof right there. Another human being wants to give you cold hard cash for something that only you can make. If it puts a different perspective on things for you, think of job roles that would be traditionally minimum wage. Probably the one most people will go to is ‘burger flipping at McDonalds’ as an example of a low skill occupation that is stereotypically easy and for those who failed in life etc. etc. (spoiler alert: it isn’t, but that’s a journal entry for another day). Why should this theoretical failure of humanity earn more than you doing a job that ‘anyone can do’? Because art is absolutely more difficult than cleaning out a McFlurry machine (that’s a legit fact by the way: I’ve cleaned one of those and art is way harder). Also, art is a luxury product my friend. No one needs to be buying commissions of their MMO character. They want it? They can play by our rules. And they will.

My family member/friend/random internet guy said that’s too expensive and I should lower my prices.

Your family member/friend/random internet berk is a fucking idiot at best, or intentionally trying to get you to undersell at worst. Firstly, I’d be willing to bet that the person who said this to you is not an artist. If so, what makes them more qualified than another actual artist to tell YOU how to price yourself? Because you trust their opinion? Yeah, but what if their opinion is formed on a factually incorrect assumption of how much art costs/the time it takes to produce because that is a HUGE deal in our community right now. And what if they just want you to stay cheap because it threatens them? Or, as a consumer, want you to stay cheaper for their own selfish purchasing habits? What then? Tell them to fuck off.

But there is someone better than me charging less! Why should a client pick me over them?

Spoiler alert: there will always be someone better than you charging less. There are thousands of mega quality artists out there. I’m considered expensive for what I produce, especially as I live in a country with a currency that translates highly to other currencies. Yet people constantly ask me for commission work. So what gives? Here are some reasons why a prospective client might chose you over someone else:

  • You are nicer than they are.
  • You are faster than they are.
  • You’re working in a niche sector.
  • They know you personally.
  • They like your art style better.
  • You have lots of good feedback.
  • A friend recommended you.
  • They aren’t even open for commissions right now.
  • They had a bad experience with that artist in the past.
  • You’re easier to purchase from.
  • You have a larger following and purchasing from you exposes that audience to them by proxy.

There are lots of other reasons but price isn’t necessarily often the deciding factor for a lot of clients. Don’t spend your life being concerned with how other people are better than you or you’ll never be happy.   I’m nervous about pricing so highly! What if no one wants my art?If a client doesn’t want to pay you a fair living wage for their luxury item purchase then that’s a client you can probably do without to be honest with you.Someone complained about my prices being so high! What do I do? Refer them to this:

Something worth noting is that minimum wage is normally used for people who are employed (not self employed). So people who work contracted 16, 24, 37 or 40+ hours per week for an employer.

Anyone who is not guaranteed work for a set amount of hours per week is absolutely within their right to charge well over the minimum wage, to cover those hours that they are not guaranteed.

Ever wonder why the plumber is so expensive? Or the electrician? The pc repair guy (£60 to transfer my data? Really? All you do is plug it in and leave it for a few hours..)

That’s why. Because most traders/self employed people don’t have work lined up 9-5 mon-fri (though it’s great news if you do!). If my lovely pc repair tech only charged me £20 to transfer my data, or £5 labour (half an hour) + >insert price of laptop screen here< to repair my screen, he’s never going to make enough money to stay open, because he doesn’t have people coming and going in his shop all day every day.

If you’re considering being a part or full time artist, then perhaps consider not just how many hours it takes you per piece, but how much of your time you want to spend on commissions. If you plan on spending 20 hours per week on it (not just the art itself, but consider things like liasing with customers and promoting yourself as well) then calculate the hours with the minimum wage (in the above instance, it would be 20 x £7.83 = £156.60). Then you figure in that week you can hopefully (and realistically) complete let’s say, 3 commissions. That would be £52.20 each. Already that’s more than the base price stated above (which I am not saying is wrong at all). But you’ve covered yourself for the additional work and downtime hours, and given yourself a real expectation that of what income you’ll be earning per week.

This is a TOP QUALITY addition to my post.

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