Study Buddies!

Back again to expert cursed book hunting duo, Gerry and Mike, cause I just enjoy having an excuse to get the avatar and avatar-adjacent characters to interact. ✨ Also experimenting with short hair Jon, I realized I've never actually drew him like that.

Like man, I know I've been here for a long time, through the ups and downs of Tumblr, but it's a big number!! And it's nice to celebrate! This runs for the next two weeks, between the 16th of April to the 30th of April 2025, and the prizes are: - One of my warm up style comics in which you get to choose the subject and - one of my full figure commissions I'll be choosing the winners on the 1st of May on a spin the wheel Gen, which I'll record! I'll message the winners too and make sure you know you won! (If I don't hear back from you in a week though, I'll re roll the wheel!) So, the rules: - Got to be following me here on tumblr! - You get two submissions, liking This Post and reblogging it! - For the figure piece, my commission rules apply (See my pinned post for more info!) and it can take up to two weeks for a final piece. Okay, I think that's it! Thanks again guys, for sticking with my art and supporting me! Lots of love and Good luck!

I first started writing this story for a friend way back in 2014, at which point it was just a couple thousand words long (and not very good, in all honesty, but I forgive myself). After a dozen revisions and rewrites down the years I finally finished working on it in late 2022. Somewhere along the way it grew to be about 220k words, and it remains to date the largest piece of fiction I've ever completed.

It was always my dearest ambition to try and bind it by hand as a gift, but, you know, time passes. Unfortunately my friend and I fell out of touch around COVID but the characters (a mixture of hers and my own) are still very dear to me and I wanted to make a physical copy to commentate the special place they will always occupy in my heart.

I was aiming for a look similar to Everyman's Library / the style of some 19th century half bindings and I'm pretty happy with the result. Used rather a lot of open source woodcut illustrations for the chapter headers and the title page, and the whole thing is bound in red leather and some 19th century reproduction marble papers.

731 pages and typeset in 10.5pt Crimson Roman

Four of Swords. Art by Jesse Lonergan, from The Unveiled Tarot.

The Reluctant Victor, inspired by The Reluctant Bride by Auguste Toulmouche - I just thought that this painting was SO perfect for Katniss and I had to draw it!

Lenore dove oh my love…😭💔💔

a tired mime on break leaning against nothing and smoking an invisible cigarette

I've had a hard time articulating to people just how fundamental spinning used to be in people's lives, and how eerie it is that it's vanished so entirely. It occurred to me today that it's a bit like if in the future all food was made by machine, and people forgot what farming and cooking were. Not just that they forgot how to do it; they had never heard of it.

When they use phrases like "spinning yarns" for telling stories or "heckling a performer" without understanding where they come from, I imagine a scene in the future where someone uses the phrase "stir the pot" to mean "cause a disagreement" and I say, did you know a pot used to be a container for heating food, and stirring was a way of combining different components of food together? "Wow, you're full of weird facts! How do you even know that?"

When I say I spin and people say "What, like you do exercise bikes? Is that a kind of dancing? What's drafting? What's a hackle?" it's like if I started talking about my cooking hobby and my friend asked "What's salt? Also, what's cooking?" Well, you see, there are a lot of stages to food preparation, starting with planting crops, and cooking is one of the later stages. Salt is a chemical used in cooking which mostly alters the flavor of the food but can also be used for other things, like drawing out moisture...

"Wow, that sounds so complicated. You must have done a lot of research. You're so good at cooking!" I'm really not. In the past, children started learning about cooking as early as age five ("Isn't that child labor?"), and many people cooked every day their whole lives ("Man, people worked so hard back then."). And that's just an average person, not to mention people called "chefs" who did it professionally. I go to the historic preservation center to use their stove once or twice a week, and I started learning a couple years ago. So what I know is less sophisticated than what some children could do back in the day.

"Can you make me a snickers bar?" No, that would be pretty hard. I just make sandwiches mostly. Sometimes I do scrambled eggs. "Oh, I would've thought a snickers bar would be way more basic than eggs. They seem so simple!"

Haven't you ever wondered where food comes from? I ask them. When you were a kid, did you ever pick apart the different colored bits in your food and wonder what it was made of? "No, I never really thought about it." Did you know rice balls are called that because they're made from part of a plant called rice? "Oh haha, that's so weird. I thought 'rice' was just an adjective for anything that was soft and white."

People always ask me why I took up spinning. Isn't it weird that there are things we take so much for granted that we don't even notice when they're gone? Isn't it strange that something which has been part of humanity all across the planet since the Neanderthals is being forgotten in our generation? Isn't it funny that when knowledge dies, it leaves behind a ghost, just like a person? Don't you want to commune with it?

Astraeus sweater!! Pattern by Bad Wolf Girl Studios. Knitted up with Malabrigo Arroyo, my absolute favorite yarn.