pleasure to meet you.

Designs for most of the Minecraft animals <3 planning to implement them when I'm finished with the monsters!

I’ve never seen you cry before…

Joy/Jobu tupaki is who I am rn and Evelyn is who I’m afraid of becoming.

Joy/Jobu tupaki perfectly encapsulates that specific existential crisis you have when you know your adolescence is ending and you know you have to start being an adult soon, but you still feel like a child that’s been thrown into open waters with no clue how to swim, drowning in the sea of expectations you set for yourself and your family holds you to. You still have no frickin clue where the hell you’re headed as you have little to no plans for your future and it is all too overwhelming to think about. Not to mention how her experience as a 2nd gen asian american child in an immigrant family has already got her feeling like she’s inferior; her inability to speak her parents’ language, her “americanized” and more progressive western views clashing with her mother’s traditional eastern views, her being gay, and overall the pressure of trying to be the “perfect” daughter for her parents because they deserve someone better than who she is, someone who is failing/has failed every aspect of her life (or at least feels like it). In essence, the future is shrouded in thick fog that you feel completely and utterly lost in.

Then there’s Evelyn, a character who has already lived a long life and is weighted down not by the possibilities of the future, but the regrets and mistakes of the past she continues to hold. She is quite literally the worst version of Evelyn to exist and that every decision she made has been the “wrong” one, and hearing that…it’s terrifying to have confirmed that every single choice you made in the past was the worst possible decision and literally doing anything else would’ve made your life better. All that time, lost forever and feeling like you’ve wasted your entire life, that it’s too late to change and nothing matters anymore because it feels like there’s no more life left to live.

Both feel like they were late to everything in their lives; too late to choose a path towards their future, too late to change anything about their lives, too late to find their own happiness. It made them feel stuck in their own heads, blinded to the present(s) they were already living.

And yet, it was Evelyn, the one who has already lived so much of her life, who learned that it’s still worth having hope and being kind, not just towards others but to herself. She’s already lived a lot of her adulthood, yes, but that doesn’t change the fact that she is still living, she is still here and can still make a change in her present. She’s the one who learned that life is still worth living when you have people to love and the future possibilities of finding people to love. I’m so glad that it was Evelyn who learned this because it’s common to fear that you’ll regret the life you lived, yet despite Evelyn being literally confirmed she is the worst version of herself, she still finds the hope and power that she can make her life better no matter her age.

The future is still scary, the past can still be a haunting memory, but what’s important to remember is that you still have a present. You still have people and things to love rn and you can still do so much more. Live for your family, your friends, your partners. Live for the anime you have yet to finish, the games you still have to play. Live for yourself, for the notion that you’ll be okay because there’s always time to make things okay and for things to turn out alright.

There is no such thing as being “too late” to anything, and I am so so thankful that this movie came out when it did when I’m at such a pivotal point of my adolescence because it felt like this movie patted my head and told me it’ll be okay, and honestly it’s just what I needed.

Hello everyone! after a couple of months of work on this beast of a thing, the first draft of my promised writeup on understanding composition is finally ready! This badboy is almost 15,000 words, and over 150 pages long. In these images, you can see a couple of examples of the kind of subject matter I’ll be covering, but it’s very comprehensive. 

This is currently available on my Patreon starting at just $2!

I think what I offer is a pretty unique take on composition, and it’s geared to be understood without a lot of consideration for the more finnicky technical elements of drawing, so if that’s part of art you have trouble with you might find some answers in my approach. Using my own art and examples from various disciplines and eras, I break down how to understand why a composition does - or doesn’t - work, all building to a toolset that lets you have control over your own compositions with precision and intent. 

A sincere thank you to anyone who takes the time to look at it, and at the end of the day, always remember one fundamental rule of art:

imo the multiverse in EEAAO is such a perfect metaphor for some very specific types of asian american immigrant trauma that hit so close to home… on the one hand, evelyn is leaping into all these universes, even the absurd ones, and thinking… these are all people i could have been, lives i could have lived, i could have Been Someone but instead i’m only just evelyn. she’s an exceptional person with so many talents and passions back home, and then she came over to the states to be taken for granted and cut down by everyone around her into a stereotype and a nobody. but even as the film is recognizing all the abandoned dreams of immigrant mothers, at the same time, for Jobu tupaki, each universe isn’t something new she could have been, it’s something she HAD to be, even if she didn’t want to. her mother pushed her past her limit and she was forced to be every single version of herself at the same time… people she didn’t want to be, things she’s not cut out for, to the point where she wants to blow it all up and be nothing at all. it really nails imo a pretty common 2nd gen experience of feeling like you have to be perfect at everything and live out all your parents dreams for them for so long that eventually you snap and look back on everything you used to be and think… that was fucking bullshit. that was pointless, none of this fucking matters. and then the only thing that can save you from the nihilism is your mother telling you “all those absurd things you used to be don’t matter to me, all i need you to be is you” 

from makeup artist michelle chung's instagram

jobu tupaki is such an effective way of depicting that specific depression of being in your 20s and knowing you can do anything but also knowing that knowing that means any decision you make cuts you off from an infinite number of possible realities… like every step forward also feels like a step in the wrong direction because it technically is when you’re juggling every potential consequence at once and it narrows your life down to just a matter of surviving and trying to focus on the few things that don’t make you feel like a failure and you start to see the loss of will to really live as the inevitable result to your own unstoppable loss of potential. and of course being a gay child of immigrants makes it even easier for joy to feel like there’s no future she can pursue where everything turns out okay enough to have made the effort worth it. and then contrasting that with evelyn’s reality that she is the version of herself where every decision has been the wrong one that has led her away from doing anything remarkable with her life but it’s still a life where trying is worth something, as long as she can still find people to love and things to fight for… yeah

they r so in love actually

silly wolf man

I can't wait for the newest movie from DreamWorks animation to be released in Japan too😭🫶

I keep forgetting to post 🤡 but anyway I love the ship-

Since it's alredy October 3rd at Japan, happy fullmetal alchemist day 🧡