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tiel with it

@theoldaeroplane / theoldaeroplane.tumblr.com

i love to sin
Anonymous asked:

Idk if this means anything to you but I'm a comic artist who's had a hard time doing art for a few years. The first four was because of life hardship and lack of time/chronic pain, but now lately I've had time but a mental block. I'm creeping up on 30 and felt bad about myself for "missing out" on my opportunity to be a comic artist. It was really validating to see you post about being 41 (correct me if I'm wrong) especially since you have such wonderful comics that I've been following for a while now. It makes me feel less like I'm wasting my time putting my things in order when I "should" be drawing.

Hopefully this doesn't come across as offensive or anything. It was just comforting and validating. Anyway, big fan! Love your characters a whole lot and hope you have a good day!

Dear Anon

I am 41 years old. I have wanted to make comics my entire life. before my dad got sick, and my childhood kinda fell apart, all i did was draw. after that, i used the stories in my head to cope. life moved on. i was convinced not to accept a partial scholarship to an art school in California. life got hard. i worked at a hotel, and after i escaped an abusive relationship at 22 i hitchhiked/bused far far away to start over. i tried to make comics again, but i had to survive, and so i got another job doing the only thing i knew how to do, hotels. and i worked. and worked. and life got harder and times got heavier and i didn't get time to draw and i worked double hours, 15 to 17 hours a day. and i went four years without drawing a single thing.

i kept working myself into the ground. i was 29 now. i picked up a pen again and drew a red haired boy. he had a hard life and no love and no friends. his problems were on the outside, for everyone to see. he ran away but his problems went with him.

i was 32. surely i was too old now. my time to be an artist was gone. i had no school. no hope. i was so far behind the younger gen i saw online. i cried. all the time. i wrote stories in my email drafts while i worked shifts. i stayed up late trying to learn how to draw again. i cried some more. the boy grew. i called him Fiach. worthy. a raven. later i renamed him Avery. he was like a bird, he had wings, he was my hope. i started writing some friends for him. the people i wished i had around me.

i started finding time and space. i got a new job, something where i was lucky enough to set my own hours. for the first time i had a partner who believed in me. things were hard. but i was drawing now. and that helped.

i went on a road trip and i started drawing pages of an unnamed story on 6 by 8 paper in a sketchbook. i drew 20 of them. 'what could i call this?' i thought. Nothing Seems as Dark...no says my partner. Seemingly Dark. he made me a logo. i was 35. i bought an ipad, i cant do this on paper, its too much story i have too much to say. so i learned how to draw digitally by tracing my own trad art pages.

I spoke to my dad for the last time on June 17th, fathers day that year. he said 'you're good. i'm proud. and you're gonna do amazing things. none of this is your fault. and we will speak again soon.' i didn't know id never hear his voice again. he died a week later.

i turned 36. i kept trying. i'm old, i don't understand the internet. how can i share this?

i stumbled across Lore Olympus. i was introduced to webcomics. id read comics online before but the thought never occurred to me. i opened an account on Tapas. and then i stared at it. what if no one likes it. what if its bad. my art isn't good. i should wait til i'm better. but will i ever really be better? or will i always believe that tomorrow is better? do it now. if even one person gets something out of this story, this story about a boy who is you, a boy who looking for hope, a boy who might make it, then that is enough isn't it.

June 17th 2018 i launched Seemingly Dark.

SD's five year anniversary is in a week. 0ver 700 pages. leaps and bounds in progress with my skills. a printed comic under my belt as of monday. i was always a storyteller. but i was always an artist too.

I am 41 years old, dear anon. I did not truly embark on this journey til i was 35. life got in the way. even now, chronic illness gets in the way. but its worth it. its never ever too late. i believe in you the way my dad believed in me. i reset my life again and again. but I was always an artist. and if thats who you are, and who you want to be, even if things dont go the way you wished they could, you're an artist too.

im 41 years old. i speak about my age, even though i often feel too old to belong in spaces, cuz really, in this case age is just a number. take care of yourself. do what you need to do. and little by little, when your able, carve out your space until it becomes more of a habit. sometimes i think about all the years i lost not drawing or creating. but there's a lot of factors that make me believe had i made my story then, it wouldn't be the story it is now, i needed to live a bit. i needed to find myself. i know this was long, but i just wanted you to see i also had to put my life in order, and getting notes like this reminds me it wasnt at all a waste. im glad i could offer you some comfort. thats honestly the best compliment i could ever receive.

TL;dR I was 35 when i sat down and seriously started making comics, because life always got in the way and so did my confidence. i always feared being too old. im 41 now, still going strong.

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I was gifted this shirt like 7 years ago by I think @briknerd featuring art of the arsonist by @wonderarium and it is maybe a little careworn now

Seven years, several homes, a couple of new genders, and one absolutely incredible wife later, Sparkler still lives on my bookshelves. Said bookshelves are just twice as packed now.

It means a lot to me to see how thoroughly worn that old shirt is. I'm so happy to see that it brought you comfort.

omg I didn't know if you'd see this!!!! I'm so happy! I love the shirts and I love you ❤️

Remember in 1993 when Jurassic Park was like…the end all, be all of special effects?

not gonna lie that still looks intimately real

I’m still somewhat convinced that someone sold their soul to create the special effects in Jurassic Park because that shit is over 20 years old and it still really, really holds up, better than the stuff in a lot of current movies, even.

Fucking witchcraft, man. 

fucking look at this shit though

Literally see this post flying around with a few different responses added to the bottom each time so I’ll say it for this one myself:

THEY ACTUALLY BUILT A GIANT MASSIVELY DETAILED FUCKING ANIMATRONIC T-REX FOR ALL OF THIS THAT’S WHY THE EFFECTS ARE SO GOOD. CAUSE IT AIN’T CGI. AND IT AIN’T GUY IN A COSTUME. IT’S A BIG FUCKING ROBOT DINOSAUR. AND EVERY PART IS DESIGNED TO MOVE. IT COST LIKE HALF THE BUDGET OF THE FILM.

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amazing

And they had the film it in small increments, especially in the outdoor scenes, because the rain fall kept soaking into the ‘skin’ of the rex and would slow down and mess up its movements. So they would stop filming and have a crew out there drying off this massive, fake dinosaur, and then they’d start filming again until it was too wet. Repeat until the end of the scene.

They used animatronics and detailed costumes for most if not all of the dinosaurs in the first movie.

The triceratops for instance, was also animatronic.

And the raptors were dudes in suits. I shit you not.

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One of my favorite anecdotes I’ve read on tumblr is how the t-rex robot from Jurassic park would malfunction while it was drying out. How did it malfunction, you might wonder?

Motherfucker randomly started moving.

So apparently if you were on the jp set you would sometimes hear people screaming bloody murder even though they were all well aware that it was a giant animatronic puppet and wouldn’t actually, you know, eat them.

Did not know this, had to reblog for awesome movie history insights.

So, I knew about the animatronics bit but I did not know the raptors were guys in suits and the malfunctioning t-rex sounds terrifying.

And i just googled malfunctioning t-rex and was not disappointed. Apparently in order to put the skin on over the steel frame a guy had to crawl inside the t-rex while it was turned on and glue the skin down. And if somebody turned the t-rex off or the power went out the guy in the t-rex stood a very real chance of getting mangled and killed by the hydraulics.

So of course, the power goes out.

And this guy is still in there gluing the skin down.

Apparently the way to survive getting sheered to death by huge sheets of metal while you’re inside a giant t-rex robot is to curl into a ball and hope for the best.

And this guy hoped for the best and got it.

Some other people on stage pried open the t-rex jaws and glue guy crawled out of its mouth and was totally okay.

This is getting better and better.

I think they only had like 6 minutes of CGI

I’m just waiting for the T-Rex to come to life and leave its stand.

@spinosaurus-the-fisher is this the kind of content you love?

Realism comes at a cost, it seems.

i mean ok but why has nobody posted this:

It’s a three piece raptor suit.

Old movies had the best special effects

The thing about this that gets my special effects nerd going is the fact that EVERY single dinosaur was sculpted by artists based on the current existent archeological evidence of the time.

Even better than that, this movie ADVANCED our best understanding of dinosaurs at the time.  They were blowing out a budget bigger than anything Hollywood had ever seen, and along with employing almost the last hurrah of incredible physical FX, they had a bank of those newfangled digital SFX computers.  Nobody’d ever really created convincing dinosaurs in a movie before.  It’d all been stop-motion animation, and even when the models were exquisitely crafted, you could just tell there was something OFF about them.  Spielberg wanted THE BEST DINOSAURS EVER, and he figured on using the cutting edge of digital modeling and animation technology to build them for him.

So they got hold of some of the best paleontologists they could find and said, “We want you guys to take this tech that your labs could pretty much never afford and use it to build us the most realistic, accurate dinosaur models the world has ever seen.”

The paleontologists knew an opportunity when it bit them in the ass.  They plugged in everything they knew about dinosaurs, all the skeletons and their best guesses about soft tissue and all that.  And when they’d created those dinosaur models, they had the computer start moving them as they realistically would with anatomy like that.  One guy took a look at those walking t-rexes and velociraptors (really utahraptors, but whatevs, fam), and he said, “Wait a minute, I’ve seen movement like that before.”

He called up film of a chicken walking.  Everyone in the room said, “Holy shit.”

Prior to 1989, the idea that birds were descended from dinosaurs existed–we knew about archaeopteryx, we knew there was some minor connection there–but the idea that DINOSAURS LIVE IN THE MODERN WORLD AND THEY ARE CALLED BIRDS was not pre-eminent.  Jurassic Park changed our scientific understanding of dinosaurs.

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That paleontologists’d be Kevin Padian. Who is awesome.

This post just gets better and better with time

Retro Style Pride Flag Shirts from Sabor a Libertad

image

No 💕

These shirts are not from the target pride collection. These are designed and made by a small queer owned indie business. If they made them any cheaper they wouldn’t be paid fairly for their work and costs would need to be cut somewhere meaning the actual shirt would be made less ethically.

Also. 45 dollars for a shirt is pretty affordable.

If items like this aren’t affordable to you right now, that’s fine and I’m sorry you’re in that situation. I have very much been there. But ffs stop putting shit like this on posts.

It’s pride. How ‘bout y’all actually support some queer owned businesses this month yeah?

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I know the Star Wars extended universe treats “spice” like it’s this big scary drug, but I kind of like to imagine that it’s basically just space weed, and the only reason Han got in trouble with the Imperials over Jabba’s cargo is that he was evading import tariffs.

If we’re just looking at mentions in the original trilogy, is there evidence it’s even a drug and not something you put on bland food to make it taste like something? What if Han was just carrying a cargo of like cilantro, mint, etc, none of which grow on Tattooine and are thus highly expensive and heavily taxed commodities?

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I am fully prepared to believe that the infamous Han Solo ended up in a life-or-death vendetta with the most notorious crime lord in the galaxy because somebody didn’t want to declare taxes on three thousand kilos of cilantro.

Every who pays a certain amount of attention to Star Wars knows this story already, but I was lucky enough to hear it recounted first-hand last year, so I’m gonna give it yet another retelling.

So The Husband and I were at Sci-fi Weekender (a British based annual Sci-fi and Fantasy convention) last year, and one of the guests that year was Kevin J Anderson, one of the very notable Star Wars Expanded Universe writers. During one of the events, a quiet little interview in a cafe on the event site, he fielded a question from an audience member about what it was like to write for a franchise like Star Wars which often had lots of cooks working on one broth, and he had the following to say (wording recounted as best as I can from memory):

“So in one of my stories, Han Solo, he, he travels to this asteroid planet called Kessel, which is where a lot of Spice comes from, these Spice Mines of Kessel, and I got to really describe the effects of this Spice, this terrible drug and the addiction and all this and before publication I get this call, I get this call from the lawyers, and they say “Kevin, you say in this story that Spice is a drug, you can’t say that, you can’t say that Spice is a drug”, and I say “What? What do you mean it’s not a drug, of course it’s a drug”, and they say “Han Solo used to smuggle Spice, and you cannot, let us be clear, you cannot imply that the Hero of Star Wars used to be a drug dealer”. And I just stood there, at a loss for words, and I eventually said “So what is it then?” and they said to me, very sternly, “It’s a food-additive”. Now, now obviously this is ridiculous, and I won’t back down, and they won’t back down, and none of us will back down, and the book is very close to getting pulled, which I don’t want because I worked hard on it and they don’t want because they already paid me the advance, and eventually, with this great air of superiority they say “OK Kevin, we’ll take this to the top. WE’LL TAKE THIS TO GEORGE”. And they go to all this trouble, this was a long while ago when such things were not so easy to arrange, they go to all this trouble to set up a conference call with all of them and me and with George Lucas and they say “George, Kevin is trying to say in his new book that Spice is a drug, it’s a food additive, tell him it’s not a drug, George”. And there’s this long silence on the other end of the line and eventually George says “It is a drug, though. It’s, it’s a drug, it’s a food-additive? What? Of course it a drug, it’s space heroin, what else would it be? What?” And that was then end of that.“

you ever look at your WIP like "yeah I might be going through some shit with this one"

I adore my novel WIP. I'm incredibly proud of what I have so far and I think it's going to be a great book. However, I always feel like I have to bring my A game when I work on it, I have a whole little ritual I do when I start (a candle and a playlist), and it's hard work sometimes.

On the other hand my LoZ fic is just singing out of me complete with themes and scenes and no expectations and I really needed something like that right now

tipsy swiping thru the dating app and my opening line for tonight is "Alright who would win in a fight between Oscar Wilde or Virginia Woolf"

my toxic writer trait is I REFUSE to use sans serif fonts when writing on desktop, and I REFUSE to use anything but courier prime when writing on mobile