Iris the wonder blunder

Love transcends barriers 🥰

(Source)

Information Wall (with Hat)

a wasp made this post

A jewel box of a book ✨ This 19th century French sales sample book contains very thin metal ornaments, made of foil over card. These would have been used like fancy sequins, and adorned everything from cards to clothes! They’re sometimes called Dresdens after the town in Germany where many were made. I know I say this a lot, but this book really floored me 🤩 Part of col. 838 in the Winterthur Library 📚

Here are two poems by Maksym Kryvtsov, a Ukrainian poet, who was killed defending Ukraine back in January. One of the poems is dedicated to a ginger cat that followed him around faithfully and later died with him. Please read his words, don't let them die too.

I Am Not Your Asian American Doll: a comic for AAPI Heritage Month 2023

I usually spend a lot of time editing and fine-tuning my comics so that they come across as polite and inoffensive. But honestly, I’m really tired of the way Asian cultures and countries are treated / talked about while Asian people themselves are excluded, and thought it was about time I really let my rage out lol.

id in alt

bumping one last time before AAPI month ends!

I was very nervous posting this because of my decision to not restrain/limit my tone in writing this comic, but I don’t regret it one bit. Thank you for your support 💖🇵🇭🇰🇷

“I Am Not Your Asian American Doll” turns one year old today! To honor its anniversary and this year’s Maysia I’ll share some of the artistic choices behind the comic.

My main inspiration was the work of feminist artist Barbara Kruger, who you may know from “your gaze hits the side of my face” and “you construct intricate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men.” I wanted to pair really shocking, striking words with high-contrast monochrome images as she did.

I chose eyes (and lack thereof) as a central motif. In conversations about art and media history, the “gaze” of the audience is a way to exert power. Who is made into the passive subject, and who gets to be the all-seeing viewer? Who is the subject being portrayed for? Hiding the Asian figures’ eyes demonstrates their lack of agency and establishes them as the subject rather than the viewer.

The skyline on page 5 includes Namsan Tower, as some readers pointed out. (You may have also been clued in from the page’s respective alt text, which describes this as the Seoul skyline.) Though numerous Asian countries have been victims of imperialism several times over, Korea was specifically in mind here. It was Western powers who Korea was split into the North and South, and their colonization and exploitation has led to extreme poverty even today, despite the country’s glamorous facade and rising international stardom.

As many guessed, pink was chosen for its association with sexualization and femininity, although of course fetishization of Asian cultures affects all genders. I also wanted to pick a dark, shocking pink that reminded the viewer of blood; in fact, it is used to color blood here on page 6. I was really happy that the color palette was limited but still legible. (But drawing the large food spread on page 4 with only three shades of pink was definitely a huge challenge.)

Here are some thumbnail sketches I made when planning the comic. You can probably recognize some of the final pages — and see how others evolved!

I want to thank everyone for their overwhelming support for this comic. I never could have dreamed of such an amazing response. To my Asian siblings across the world, you made me feel less alone. To non-Asian allies who lent me their ear, thank you so much for standing with us and listening to our struggles.

Usually I’m extremely careful to write my comics in a palatable tone, but for this piece I decided to not restrain my anger. I understood that by making this decision I would be sacrificing readership, and that many people would be much less willing to listen to me because of my tone. Nevertheless, I truly believe that any and all of the harassment I received was a small price to pay for such an honest piece to be seen.

Thank you all, again! Please consider supporting my most recent fundraising project, an Inumaki Toge themed fundraiser for aid in Gaza.

Final note: THIS COMIC IS NOT FOR TERFS 🏳️‍⚧️

THIS IS EXCELLENT!!! HAPPY AAPI HERITAGE MONTH!!

CREATURE????

just when you think it couldn’t be worse, you have to battle a creature

I’m choosing to believe him because I think there should still be mystery and adventure in the world

Okay I looked this one up. He said he talked to God, made up some songs, and lost nine kilos during his 20ish hours in the water. He was also completely nude when he was rescued.

hero’s journey

and this man? Odysseus

he also ate some kind of stick

heidiwranglescats

btw.. Baa is apart of a litter with equally exceptional names

Spot on 😆

This was shared as a "bad" joke but I was so charmed by it I've been thinking about it for days.

@copperbadge

[ID: Top image, a cartoon of an owl sitting at a table in a fancy restaurant; he is holding a menu and speaking to a human waiter. The cartoon is captioned "It seems to be misspelled on the menu, but I will have four of your 'mousse'," which he clearly believes is a misspelling of 'mouse'. The second image is a screencap of a comment by tumblr user kla1991, which reads "Orca at the next table: they serve moose here?!" referring to how moose swim often enough to be prey for orcas.]

Ahahahah, oh lord. The wildlife cafe just keeps getting wilder.

i think this is really cute. it also escaped containment from a fetish forcemasc blog. both things can be true.

It wanted out, so let it out

Our Lady of the Damp and Rain

Look upon this mighty work! Our Lady resplendent in gold!

it's funny, I was talking to someone last night who didn't really know what an illustrator was. so when I introduced myself as one, he gave a speech that would've probably gone over well with a gallery artist, but which was precision-tailored to make any illustrator within a 50 mile radius go into eyes-glowing-red kill mode.

his speech was about how there is a difference between craft and art, and how people can practice craft (as in, skillfully execute a painting) without it having any artistic merit.

so I'm someone who gets paid to paint waffles for restaurant menus and dinosaurs for museums exhibits, and AHHHHHH! AHHHHHHH! you can't make art without it being something something you've made. does that make sense? like every illustrator I know has an individual way of approaching any given imagery that is informed by a lifetime of inspiration, and of passive intake of culture, and of the specific mistakes they make because of whatever their particular mass of grey matter deems as important thing to render or unimportant, just fuck it up.

I can make something that is informed by both a century of Canadian print-making and by my own particular neurosis, and it can also be commissioned commercial imagery that I regurgitate without care because I want to pay my mortgage. everything is art, nothing isn't art, art is something sticky and impossible to shake off of you.

anyway he got very wide-eyed and said "I'm sorry if I offended you," so today I feel a bit bad for having gotten so, uh.... excited.

also here's my waffle drawing, I'm really happy with it

Voice actors are SO FUCKING COOL and can completely make or break any animated sequence and I feel that movie and game companies need to remember that

One of the funniest failures of US school system is the fact they are legally obligated to teach us all the states but they never actually show how big Alaska is like I have actually had teachers tell me that Texas is the biggest state. We have all just convinced ourselves that Alaska is that small shrunken down thing on most US maps and the people that know it's the largest state can almost never accurately describe how large it is.

For context here is a picture

what

It has a national park that’s bigger than maine. Or Switzerland. A park. 

I lived in Alaska for two years and I will never get over the sheer overwhelming bigness of it. 

Nights where the sky is clear you can see clusters of stars or the Northern Lights dancing. When the lights are rippling especially strong and fast you can hear a static crackle in the air. When the moon is out after it’s snowed, you don’t need flashlights to see. Everything glows and glimmers like polished quartz.  

But when the sky is clouded over so you can’t see the stars, you can kind of almost sense the mountains towering over you and helping to block out the light, these giant monoliths acting like this void darker than your soul. I’ve never experience night like Alaska night. 

Everything is big, the mountains, the sky, the valleys. 

And the dark. 

what the fuck