reminder to myself and anyone who needs it that i’m not responsible for anyone’s feelings and if they have expectations of me, that’s their problem and not mine
So my therapist has been helping me get to grips with my ADHD, and also the concept that I’m not shit at being an adult, I just can’t do things the way everyone has always told me to do them. Like every single “organize your life” books have always left me wanting to cry with frustration, and after I got hold of a copy of Organizing Solutions for People with ADHD
by Susan Pinsky I realized that was because they primarily focus on “aesthetic” over “function”. And the function of most standard “organize your life books” is to “make things look Show Home Perfect”.
So the standard “hide all your unsightly things by doing xyz” may look nice for the first week or so, but by the end of the week it’ll look like a tornado made of pure inhuman frustration ripped through the house as I try to find the fucking advil.
To give you an example of the kind of hell I’ve been fumbling my way through the last 20 odd years: dishes will be washed and left in the drying wrack but never put away. Which means I can’t wash more dishes, which means dishes pile up, which means I can’t make food, which means I don’t eat, which means my CFS gets worse, which means I don’t have the energy to put the dishes away, and so on so forth until I have a meltdown, cry to ETD (who also likely has ADHD but has never had it confirmed) about how I can’t cope with life, and then we fix it for a while, but inevitably end up back at square one within about a week.
Pinsky’s solution to this was “remove an obstacle between you and your goal, if that means taking all the doors off your kitchen cabinets to make things easier, so be it.”
And lemme tell you, fucking revolutionary.
Laundry never ends up in the hamper??? why???? is it a closed hamper??? Remove the lid. Throw it out the window. Clothes are now miraculously finding their way into the hamper??? Rejoice????
Mail ends up spread out over every available flat surface? Put a sorting station right where your mail arrives. Put a shredder or “junk” basket under it. Shred or dump the junk immediately. Realize you only actually have two real letters that need attention, feel less overwhelmed, pay your bills on time.
Like I’m not saying this book is miraculous, but it did help me realize that I was effectively torturing myself by trying to conform to certain ideals of “perfect house keeping”, and presenting a certain image rather than just allowing myself to live in my space as effectively as possible. And why? Why was I doing that? Cause people with different lives and capabilities are perceived as the norm? Fuck that. If this was a physical problem I wouldn’t be forcing myself to conform to an ableist standard, so why am I doing it with this?
My lived space will never look a certain way, and that’s okay. It will never look show home perfect, and that’s okay. It will likely always be cluttered and eclectic where nothing matches, and that’s okay. Sometimes I will have odd socks on because sorting them out required too much mental energy, and that’s okay. Actually fuck sorting socks, just buy all your socks in the same color. Problem solved. Boring sure, but also one less thing to do, which means more time to hyper fixate on fun things. Which really, what else is my life for if not to write screeds and screeds of vampire shit posts, I ask you.
Late last year I wanted to start a series of short tutorials called Tip Jar, as a way of saying thanks to my fans and giving back to my patrons. This is the first of the series I have made, showing my technique on quickly filling in lineart so you can get to painting without coloring outside the lines faster.
Someday I hope to turn these into video tutorials when I have the income and the time, but for now I hope that I will be able to share useful tips in this infographic format.
Worth sharing because this is exaaaaactly how I do my flats! I get this question all the time when I post my process videos, and this explains it far more succinctly than I ever could. 🙂
This is also how I do my flats but unfortunately with lines that are see through (or sketchier) you get a lot of jaggies all over the place. So I play with channels!
So alternatively step 1.5 is to click on the channels tab, and create a new layer. Fill the areas that you magic wand(ed) with black (leaving the characters/whatever you want to fill white). Click out of the marquee and use gaussian blur (i use 3.0 on a huge image, sometimes you need to go down for a smaller image)
Then you go to image/adjustments/levels and put in–and this is where I sound like a mad scientist–88 1.42 and 122. Which cleans up the edges so they’re pretty clean!
Then all you do is click on the circle at the bottom of the channels area (”load channel as selected) and then go back in to layers and click on a layer to load your original view again! and then do the rest of the steps. It will cause you to clean up corners a lot but it saves me a whole heck of time since i have a rougher inking style. This step takes all of 3 minutes at most but otherwise I’d have to base everything by hand :I Or spend a good 40 minutes cleaning up jaggies.
TL;DR alternative step if you have rougher/sketchier lines.
Oh! Since my lines often don’t join correctly, I create a layer underneath and fill any holes before i do selection (with “select all layers” ticked off) which is admittedly tedious but again. Way quicker than doing it by hand! So yeah if you see this and are like oh gee whiz this doesn’t work with how I do stuff, try this added step?
(this is also how to do a stroke around an image that is cleaner than what you get from the layer styles box– I adapted these steps originally from a DA tutorial on how to get clean strokes!)
if your female character doesn’t look like she has lived the life she leads and you can’t get a sense for her actual personality by looking at her because you’re too focused on making her pretty and perfect and palatable it’s bad character design and you should feel bad
queerlybeloveds 