Minnesota under fire again

z.m. celestaire  Art!, Emotional Breakdowns, MicahxAndrew  Leave a comment

Well, just like in 2020, Minnesota finds its sanctuary state invaded. Torn down. My neighbors are being kidnapped. Queer moms like me are being shot in the face for showing up and dissenting (RIP Renee Nicole Good).

I’m donating to gofundmes. I’m giving food to food shelves. I’m signal boosting reporters and activists in my area.

But I still cannot. Fucking. Believe this.

I don’t even think I’m entitled to be angry, I’m realizing. I feel stunned into silence, and I hate that. That’s not to say that I’m not spending every waking moment of the day looking for ways that I can protect and nourish my community. But I have not resonated with the white rage of my peers. It feels hollow and meaningless, like when people turn their profile pics black or “wear special bracelets”. The anger feels like it doesn’t recognize the folks that are getting flashbanged at Whipple or the Native aunties who watch their teenage nephews get punched and dragged out of their cars despite their compliance.

I’m fucking terrified, too. I don’t wanna get hurt and I don’t wanna wind up in the middle of anything like Renee. But I know that part of me is selfish and self-preserving. This is the reality. And after they have wiped out the populations I’m not a part of, they’re gonna come for me as a queer and neurodivergent person. That’s the thing. It’s not gonna end.

I couldn’t exactly get back to the regular bullshit online, and as I was thinking about all the lost momentum for Forget Me Not, it hit me how this is happening in my real state that is also fictionally Micah and Andrew’s home.

It hurts me to think about it and fall into my daydreams about these guys a little because it feeds a yearning for a savior to come in and put a stop to this. The politicians aren’t saving us, and democracy isn’t saving us.

Well, these guys wouldn’t stand for this lol. Micah would make problems. And that thought gives me a little bit of happiness during some very dark times in Minnesotan history.

We should have known being a sanctuary state wouldn’t mean shit against a tyrant.

But we’ll get back there. He won’t beat us.

The land will revolt against him. The people will be more powerful than him and his fucking thug bullies.

happy holidays

z.m. celestaire  Art!, Holiday Drawings, Original Characters, The Heartwood Trilogy  Leave a comment

Happy holidays from these drunk morons. I think this is one of the only pictures of Andrew smiling with his teeth that I’ve ever done unless he’s being a goblin. And I guess since he’s drunk this isn’t really an exception…

Chami’s too busy putting the Santa hat on Ingrid to notice the GIANT SPRIG OF MISTLETOE she’s hanging next to Chami’s face lol.

Also I’m really excited about Micah’s Balls of Holly shirt lol. Micah’s antlers are a play on his antler crown and balls of holly are because of his plant affinity so like TESTICLES MADE FROM PLANTS there I spelled it out for you idiots

Time for a review of holiday pics from years past!

This one is obviously not an xmas pic but it was another one of Micah, Andrew, and Ingrid drunk as fuck hahahah

2025’s a year in review (and a look back)

z.m. celestaire  Art!, Original Characters  Leave a comment

I thought these would take longer, but between my Drive and 5 years of Apple photo storage on my iPad, I was able to throw together a year in review for this year in addition to 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, and 2019 lol. I didn’t upload 2019 though so…yeah that’s not going in here because I don’t care enough haha.

2025 was the year of…

Unifying line art and painting in the way I’ve wanted to do since I first started doing digital art in 2006. Working on powerful portraits. Practicing lots of different brushes to create the best sculptural, blended coloring as well as more depth and color variations. Really getting to create some of the compositions I’ve always wanted to make.

2024 was the year of…

Wry smirks, novel characters, and upping my portrait game.

2023 was the year of…

All the OCs, painterly rendering and line art incorporated into the coloring. Rich browns, experimentation with more decorative backgrounds

2022 was the year of…

Micah apparently lol.

2021 was the year of…

Stringy hair, dark shading, Ingrid and girls

2020 is the year of…

Micah’s green gauges, Micah and Andrew getting together for the first time!! :O

Halloween and whatnot

z.m. celestaire  All To Paint You Broken, Art!, Emotional Breakdowns, Holiday Drawings, MicahxAndrew, Original Characters, Writing!  Leave a comment

Ah, so, it was a very bleak and unproductive October honestly. Well, I guess, I thought it was – but then when I was putting together this post (on time for Halloween, but then I never finished it…), I realized that some of my criticism was the fact that, despite how hard I pushed myself to attach to paintwip, it just never took off. Draft is done, character designs are more or less decided, but I can’t get myself excited about any of it. When I finally decided to move on and focus on other projects or crafting a new one, it was like I had permission to have fun again. I’m not sure if it’s ongoing hangups with my own sapphic shame, or if Sepia just wasn’t a strong enough narrator. Not me wondering if I should rewrite it from 3rd person…

Anyway, here’s an art dump!

Art dump!

Spooky Kasi. She was my runners-up for best Halloween art but they were meant to be posted on my socials and I felt weird not having introduced her basically at all.

I was never excited about Pumpkin Micah, sorry bb

All Time Low lyrics obvi

Had to do a classic pic with lyrics from the new ATL album. I wanted to practice doing something colorful and delicate so I did butterfly studies. All five of them are real species lol.

Kasi’s a weirdo lol

Heartwood bois

Ok so hear me out

Gummy bears

I got a handful of them from a client and was like “These would make a pretty color palette” and here we are, Gummy Bear Andrew lmao

MY PRETTY BABIESSSS

Oh and this is the pic I did end up posting for Halloween haha

TUM!!!

Eripmav Kaehn of the FHV lmao

z.m. celestaire  Art!, Original Characters, Redraw  Leave a comment

So a few months ago I pulled up some old drawings to mess around with redraws and started to undertake redrawing one of my classic “heartthrob pictures”…see below lol

I did a draft of an update a few months ago but he suffered from Big Chin syndrome and kinda looked like he was in drag?

But I was bored this week and was stuck on making my nonman characters into Sailor Scouts, so I tried again and even Ryan was like “that’s quite a glow-up”

and hngggg

reprise (again)

z.m. celestaire  Art!, Myoku Needs a Tag, Original Characters, Redraw  Leave a comment

I DID IT! It’s been a while but I was browsing old art blog posts and came across ye olde paint boys drawings. The first one is from 2007! Can you believe it? Fucking ancient. Almost 20 years ago man. Almost 20 years ago this trio was being little dumb babies.

The 2019 redraw I did was SO awkward haha. Like technically not bad, but what was up with everyone’s body shapes? And MICAH’S FOOT? HELLO?

I know I was trying to make the boys really cute and it is just not it hahaha

2007 and 2019 boys

2019 was also a time in my digital art when I thought that the only effective way to color would be to make things as neat and clean as possible, but earlier this year I started doing things backwards – doing the painting first and adding lines to finished shapes. I think that let my brain rearrange how I approach color. Plus, I’ve been working with some line art brushes that I think let me create a lot more well-rounded shapes that end up cleaning up a lot better. It’s been odd with these line brushes because it’s reminding me of some of my first methods for finished art where I’d sketch it and then use ballpoint pen to line and then erase the lines underneath, only I’m using the same brush for both parts of the process, allowing me to keep the most graceful marks.

Wellp I got overstimulated tonight and ran out of steam bye

art art art

z.m. celestaire  All To Paint You Broken, Art!, Original Characters, Redraw  Leave a comment

All To Paint You Broken art

I present to you…my first sapphic pairing EVER! Oh my god eEXCPET FOR THIS ONE I FORGOT LMFAOOOoo

IN MY WEIRD CHRISTIAN SHORT STORY ABOUT SINNERS AND I MADE MICAH’S SISTER A SLUTTY LESBIAN SO HE COULD MAKE HER FEEL GUILTY FOR HER SEXUALITY LOLLLLLLLLL

Well Kasi and Sepia are in a queernormative world where there’s not even a question of labeling yourself, they’re just into each other and everyone’s here for it

Here’s some other earlier art of them before I nailed down the one above, which I feel like was the first official character art since I’ve settled on their designs

All Time Low art

I was listening to TMIA again today and decided to redo the Sleepwalking art of Micah I made, so enjoy this angry Micah from Rend Me.

Here’s the first, he looks 10

a reevaluation

z.m. celestaire  Emotional Breakdowns  Leave a comment

Hi! This is the best place for this braindump.

At the beginning of the month, I had sort of a disastrous maker’s market that, while it started out well, ended with a colossal downpour and coupled with realizing that I haven’t enjoyed a market in ages, and that’s like… not how everyone feels about doing book promo.

I also started drafting my next project, which is a sapphic urban fantasy. As soon as I got into a new project, I completely lost interest in my past body of work. This always happens, and I don’t really mind, but it’s a bit more public now that I am published and have a small following. I don’t owe anyone anything, and I’ve moved pretty quickly into “I don’t actually need to post anything, huh… that feels good” and that’s been a relief. But I’m sort of waiting to disclose this, like I can’t relax until I speak to my silence.

I think I’m just noticing that I felt like I was in a race to keep up with folks. I felt like I was in a competition with myself. Anything about my projects was a failure unless it made a sale. Even though–what does a sale even mean? What really matters is having people read and fall in love with my books. if it weren’t crazy to do so, I’d make ’em free all the time. (The crazy part of that would simply be that that would mean that plenty of people have my book whether or not it’s “meant for them” or not).

I’m thinking that when I come back I’m going to focus on posting in a more authentic way. More like I’m posting to my friends rather than to grow my audience. Informal, more fun. I think that’s how things started, but I saw someone post recently about how Instagram has just become advertisements and promotion and I think that might be part of what killed my inspiration to post more is that it just feels soulless. If I can’t talk about how I actually feel about my books or art, then I’m not going to enjoy it.

Anyway, that’s sort of it for that… it feels like a bigger feeling in my head, but when it all comes down to it, I’m over events, I’m over promotional posts. It’s time to focus on events I get invited to, and posts about why I’m doing what I’m doing and why I love it.