cheapsweets

[cheapsweets]

In my headcanon/theory of orcs:

Orcs are uniformly tone-deaf, no exceptions. But they do sing. It just doesn't sound so good to anyone who isn't tone-deaf.

(Melkor, if he noticed, appreciated the dissonance, but Sauron was Not A Fan.)

Also their sense of rhythm is fine and orcish drummers can get quite sophisticated.

Common subjects for orc songs:

Fear Us

We are doing a task [which isn't very interesting and this at least livens it up]

We are going to kill you and destroy everything you love and have fun doing it

A 'and then there were none' backwards-counting song of elf-princes, some verses inspired by real events

A prince of cats got his ass kicked by a girl and a dog, definitely not inspired by real events, honest, but also definitely not to be sung in Mordor

We've been marching a long time and it's annoying

The Sun is a bitch

I Fear Nothing Except The Sea Which Is Fucking Terrifying

My warg is the best warg, she's eaten lots of babies

Behold my gruesome trophies

My body is the most fucked up and uncomfortable but I make it work

There's Something In These Caves (It's A Dragon And Planning To Eat Us)

These Orders Indicate Our Senior Leadership Has Shit For Brains

I Wish I Was Back In Goblin-Town

Today Is A Terrible Day To Die But I Guess That's What We're Doing

#lotr #lord of the rings #headcanon #orcs

[cheapsweets]

#lesbians #lesbian wedding #team rocket

[cheapsweets]

Oh, that is so cool!

OK I've taken pictures before ironing bc who knows when I'll get round to ironing. Some months ago I fell down a weekend research hole with some antique needlework books and read a Bunch about jacobean embroidery.

And then I drew a rocket. All the stitches are found in actual 16th century embroideries. The flame and tree of life are my own interpretation of designs that were a common motif.

I tried so many different things in this piece, and I can't decide what my favourite part is.

#fiber crafts #fiber art #jacobean embroidery #embroidery #textile art #crafts #awesome art #rocket #rockets

[cheapsweets]

blogging

#kiwi #sound on #birds #wierd birds #cool birds #cute birds #new zealand #aotearoa

[cheapsweets]

Happy Lesbian visibility day to all lesbians, saphics, and wlw (and Xena fans)!

Item: Xena cereal. If eaten in late 2001 when it was released or soon after, grants 1 hour of expertise with throwing circles and ridiculous flipping skills where if you make a successful Dex check you can do a sweet flip to any spot within 200 ft. (If eaten after it’s expired, 1 hour Nauseated.)

Note: “A Taste of Honey”? They really managed to find a name for a cereal that sounds like the title of, y’know, what back then we called a Lemon FemSlash

#xena #lesbian visibility day #lesbian #saphic #wlw #cereal #a taste of honey

[cheapsweets]

Underfist Jeff from the original promo art I made to sell the show. I altered the contrast to make it more visible since it was a pretty light drawing. Back then, I'd hand these off to our delightful cleanup artist Frank Homiski, and he'd put the final line on it. I did one of these for each of the characters and then assembled them in photoshop.

#underfist #jeff the spider #grim adventures of billy and mandy #cartoon network

[cheapsweets]

absolutely enraptured rn

#spiders #dreaming #cute

[cheapsweets]

And the second one (that I've spent way too much time thinking about);

🎶✨when u get this, list 5 songs u like to listen to🎶✨

So here goes;

Toriena - CQC

Khirki - Father Wind

Let's Eat Grandma - Levitation

Onuka - Zenit

Konvent - Puritan Masochism

Thanks again @sweetlyfez for the ask, any excuse to talk about music 😅

Also, videos...!

Two music asks for the price of one:

shuffle your favorite playlist and post the first five songs that come up. then copy/paste this ask to your favorite mutuals <3

🎶✨when u get this, list 5 songs u like to listen to, publish. then, send this ask to 10 of your favorite followers (positivity is cool)🎶✨

Okay, first one for starters;

Shuffle your favorite playlist and post the first five songs that come up

Hoaxed - The Call

潘PAN - Space Bird

The Hirs Collective (feat. Nø Man, Thou, and Jessica Joy Mills) - Sweet Like Candy

John Fruscianti - Amethblowl

Sleep - Marijuanauts theme

Have a bonus video of the first track to pop up;

#music asks #music #konvent #onuka #let's eat grandma #khirki #toriena #Youtube

[cheapsweets]

rise, lesbians!

#lesbian visibility week #lesbians #sapphic #pride

[cheapsweets]

A dobsonfly and her little pseudoscorpion buddy.

#dobsonfly #pseudoscorpion #arachnid #insect #bug #cool bugs #hitching a lift

[cheapsweets]

The anthropophagous Mlekragg

My response to this week’s BestiaryPosting challenge, from @maniculum (thank you again for running these!)

Pencil sketch, then lines in Pentel brush pen, and colours with Derwent inktense paint.

As ever, reasoning under the cut...

"In India there is a beast called the Mlekragg. It has a triple row of teeth, the face of a man, and grey eyes; it it blood-red in color and has a lion’s body, a pointed tail with a sting like that of a scorpion, and a hissing voice. It delights in eating human flesh. Its feet are very powerful and it can jump so well that neither the largest of ditches nor the broadest of obstacles can keep it in."

Now, I'm 90% sure I know what this is, and if it is the case, it's interesting to read the original descrption… With that in mind, I figured I'd go with exactly what the authors wrote...

The first thing I wanted to work out was how the face worked; I looked at lion skulls, cat skulls and human skulls, and tried to combine the three - that's the drawing in the top left of the image. The rearmost (and longest) set of teeth are those of a lion, the middle set are those of a human (with the squared-off incisors), and the front (and smallest) teeth are those of a domestic cat. I used this as a reference when drawing the face of the creature. The ears were a little tricky to work out, but I figured I'd just stick with a lion's ears here, since they's almost part-way between a domestic cat and a humans's ears.

The eyes, I didn't have a grey paint, but I wanted to make them shaped more like a human. It felt like it needed a bit more going on, so I added some thick fur (almost a mane) on the back of the head and the neck; I really want to look at some other brush pen art, to get a better idea of what it's possible to do with this medium (I was hoping to get more of a flowing look to the hair actually like a lion's mane, which didn't pull off, but I feel this works with the general vibe of the creature…)

To reflect it's jumping prowess, I have the Mlekragg leaping straight up in the air. I really liked the idea of the image flowing like an 'S' shape, so that heavily informed a lot about the image. I did look up some reference from leaping cats (particularly snow leopards), but the size of the page and the decisions I'd already made meant the pose was kind of stuck - I feel like if I were to revisit this type of thing, I'd have it making a horizontal leap, arms outstretched. A lot of the proportions were taken directly from lions, but the unusual pose makes it look a little weird.

@sweetlyfez made the very valid point that at this point, its a running joke that we can't trust bestiary authors to know remotely what a scorpion looks like, so as long as there is some kind of 'stinger' we could go in any direction with the tail. However, I really wanted to draw a scorpion tail, so that's what we ended up with (scopions are rad). Did you know that in some lions, the tuft on the end of their tail conceals a sharp bone spur? (Lions are also rad)

It's red, it's got a very clear colour guide, what encouraged me to pull out the inktense paint blocks, and which was a nice change of pace too. I also think that next time, I need to draw the outline in pencil, ink with the brush pen, then colour - I painted the colour on before inking the lines, which meant it was really hard to see the pencil lines…!

#mlekragg #maniculum bestiaryposting #bestiaryposting #my art #art challenge

[cheapsweets]

When they realized women were using their sacks to make clothes for their children, flour mills started using flowered fabric for their sacks. The label was designed to wash out.

#fashion #fashion history

[cheapsweets]

GET YELLED AT

photos by carl bergstrom

#heron #cormorant #birds #cool birds

[cheapsweets]

Two music asks for the price of one:

shuffle your favorite playlist and post the first five songs that come up. then copy/paste this ask to your favorite mutuals <3

🎶✨when u get this, list 5 songs u like to listen to, publish. then, send this ask to 10 of your favorite followers (positivity is cool)🎶✨

Okay, first one for starters;

Shuffle your favorite playlist and post the first five songs that come up

Hoaxed - The Call

潘PAN - Space Bird

The Hirs Collective (feat. Nø Man, Thou, and Jessica Joy Mills) - Sweet Like Candy

John Fruscianti - Amethblowl

Sleep - Marijuanauts theme

Have a bonus video of the first track to pop up;

#asks #music #music asks #hoaxed #the hirs collective #潘PAN #John Fruscianti #Sleep

[cheapsweets]

I actually… love this

#star trek #star trek the next generation #data #star trek tng #poetry #neurodivergence

[cheapsweets]

For what its worth, I listened to the episode in question, and I just assumed it was another one of those weird things that kept coming up in bestiary descriptions (animals ressurecting each other comes up almost as much as animals hating on snakes... this is all religious stuff, isn't it...).

I was also half convinced that this was going to be a cat (as an aside, if we ever do get a cat entry, I'm going to have to post a picture of my kitty 🐈‍⬛ ).

I feel like @wingedtyger might have something with their suggestion that ferrets or polecats might be the 'house' hreksong (when I was about 6 years old, my neighbour kept ferrets 😆 ), though humans do like to try keeping pretty much anything as pets, and hreksongs are pretty cute and awesome (as well as being fearsome predators - stoats and weasels often take down prey far larger then them!)

Bestiaryposting Results -- Hreksong

Slightly awkward timing on this one: the animal in question happened to come up on a recent episode of our podcast (We literally quoted a line from the Bodley MS 764 entry, because it was relevant to the story we were reading). So any of the artists who listen may have gotten spoilers. (I say "may", but I've already seen one art post that references the episode.) Sorry about that, artists. Kind of a bizarre coincidence, actually -- it's pretty rare that we happen across bestiary material in a narrative text, and the fact that we did so shortly before the relevant entry came up in the rotation... well, the odds are against it.

Anyway, anyone who doesn't know what this is about should check out https://maniculum.tumblr.com/bestiaryposting. You can also check the "maniculum bestiaryposting" tag to see what beast is the current prompt. The entry for this week's drawings can be found here:

Art below the cut, roughly chronological, as always.

@silverhart-makes-art (link to post here) decided that the best interpretation of the information given was that this was a sort of arboreal mongoose that practiced mouthbrooding. If you want to know what the reasoning was there, you should read the linked post -- it all makes sense there. I absolutely love that the one in the picture is opening its mouth to show the baby riding inside. Silverhart indicates that this is a quicker sketch than usual, but frankly their animal-drawing skills are so good that even a quick sketch is impressive from my perspective.

@cheapsweets (link to post here) did separate drawings for the large outdoor version (upper image, carrying its young) and the small indoor version (lower image, stealing someone's food). The linked post, which explains the design in some detail, indicates that CheapSweets was thinking along similar lines as Silverhart -- i.e., what kind of animal is known for hunting snakes? I like the pose in the first image, and I really like the scene depicted in the second one. On one hand, I'm sure having little creatures live in your roof and steal food literally out of your hands is quite frustrating, but on the other hand, it's very funny. Look at that little guy just brazenly stealing some chicken (or whatever type of bird). The idea of them using their back legs to grip rafters for exactly this purpose is excellent.

@strixcattus (link to post here) decided these could be birds, and has drawn these owl-like creatures for us. They look a bit surly, but that could just be the feather pattern on their faces. As always, I strongly recommend checking out that linked post, as Strixcattus writes brilliant interpretations of these entries in the register of a modern naturalist to accompany the illustrations.

@pomrania (link to post here) has noted that cats live in houses and eat mice, and given us this charming domestic scene. They also note the issues with this interpretation in the linked post, which of course you should read. I think the poses of the cats are very well done here; one of those kittens looks like it wants to paw at the monk's belt but can very much not reach.

And now for the Aberdeen Bestiary:

I'm not sure about the head proportions -- I'd suggest that the flattened snout is because the artist ran out of space, if it weren't for the fact that they were fine letting the back foot extend into the border -- but that is recognizably a weasel.

A few things to note from this:

1. Medieval people apparently had not only mice in their homes, but weasels, which I'd never really thought about. I'm not sure what the distinction they're drawing between the type you find in your home and the type you find in the woods is about, though.

2. The weasel's healing magic crops up in multiple texts, including the Lais of Marie de France and Volsungasaga. It's less common than you might think to find overlap between bestiary-weirdness and narrative-weirdness, so that's pretty notable.

3. I have no friggin' idea why anyone thought they gave birth through their ears. Baffling.

#maniculum bestiaryposting #bestiaryposting #awesome art #hreksong #stoat #mustelid #marten #weasel

[cheapsweets]

MY SCIENCE TEACHER CAUGHT THE TABLE ON FIRE AND HES JUST STARING AT IT

#science! #fire #is it really a chemistry lesson unless something is on fire?