So Ive Been Thinking Ill Probably Do Sharpie Tatts Again For My MCR Show Next Week, And Its A Little

So I’ve been thinking I’ll probably do sharpie tatts again for my MCR show next week, and it’s a little soon yet to be drawing the ones I’ll actually have on for the show, but it’s gotten me yearning to draw on myself again, and with all the excitement about Badflower tonight (or last night now I’m posting it, but they open again tonight too), I thought, what if I just... gave myself a Badflower sharpie tattoo. For funsies?

So if you’re unfamiliar with their band logo, it looks like this:

So I started by attempting to draw their signature flower on my wrist. I decided to do it in blue rather than black just because I prefer to have some color in my sharpie tatts, even if they’re monochrome. It didn’t exactly turn out super accurately, but, well... the band’s not called Goodflower now are they? Lol. Then it just worked out that I put their name underneath rather than attempting to go on top of the flower, which would’ve required more planning and less coloring in the center. So then it looked like this:

but I wanted to do a little bit more, and incorporate some lyrics into it too. I started looking through some of the lyrics of my favorite Badflower songs, at which point I remembered, oh yeah, a lot of these are really quite grim, lol; I did come up with a few potential selections, but none of them were Vibing just right. But then I was looking at 30 and I saw “so raise up your glasses to going out of fashion!” and it just clicked into place. I mean, one of the great things about doing sharpie tatts instead of real permanent tattoos is that the things one draws on don’t have to be your only all-time favorite absolute best picks from all possible options; I considered going through more options after that, but I felt good about that line, so I went ahead and added it in. 

It felt energizing and defiant, full of weird-and-proud energy; it also seemed a bit appropriate after the night’s twitter dramas. Of course, I have trouble planning spacing and I’m just freehanding this (all the more reason I’m glad this isn’t a ‘real’ tattoo), so the “to going out of fashion” part wound up on two lines, and my script is kind of funky and hard to read in places, but you know, it’s probably not going to last a full week, and I like it. Actually I fell asleep while writing this earlier and I just woke up at like 5:30 and looked at my arm and went “what the-- oh yeah I did do that,” but this is another good thing about sharpie tattoos, that it’s okay when they just sort of appear on your arm in the morning, lol. The text in a circle around the roughly circular logo also reminds me of the Red Hot Chili Peppers logo, come to think of it, but that’s not a bad thing I suppose. Anyways, I am really quite fond of it, so I wanted to go ahead and show off my pics while it’s fresh. “Raise up your glasses to going out of fashion” indeed! I love Badflower, I love their music, it’s 6am now and I want to get back to sleep and this post is probably messy and in need of editing, but I’m going to go ahead and post about my funky little Badflower tattoo now because it’s weird and I like it. 

You guys they've started regularly playing Foundations of Decay on my local rock radio station (which I have never previously heard play MCR) and anyways it just came on the radio and I'm currently sitting in my car at our town's drive-in ice cream stand blasting it, which I know we've been having that conversation about not playing your music loudly in public but. This feels like my duty as an MCR fan. Lol. Anyways, I don't know how to handle this being a song I just hear on the radio at random now, I'm not prepared for this, lol.

Like when I was first listening to it, I did think to myself "this has a bit more of a mainstream rock sound to it. I wonder if the rock stations will play it" but like I'm still a little surprised that that actually happens now and I can just hear MCR unexpectedly outside of a Hot Topic.

(And I don't mean it as a bad thing one way or another that this is more mainstream rock sounding than the other stuff of course; it's just a difference I noticed. )

Anyways in other news I met another roller skater at the tennis courts tonight, making her the first fellow roller skater in my town I've met, and I friended her on facebook, so I officially have a roller skating friend!! So I'm having a pretty rad Friday night overall :)

You know, I'm the kind of person with like 80+ ongoing projects at any given time, and I rarely ever post things on here about them because I'm always waiting until they're finished and trying to get things perfect first and then I wind up never posting them. But I have to remind myself there's no law against showing off WIPs, and in fact, that's actually like a normal thing to do on tumblr. So, I thought I'd show off my progress so far on my Danger Days phone case insert I've been working on!

[Image ID: a tall narrow painting roughly the shape of a smartphone. The background is a rainbow watercolor fading radially from one color into another, starting with red in the top left, orange in the top right, yellow down the right side, green in the bottom right, blue in the bottom left, then purple shading from blue violet to red violet heading back up the left side. The watercolor has been textured with a salt resist technique creating small floral shapes of lighter paint. On top of this background, “Look Alive Sunshine” is written in tall wavy block letters in an assortment of colors meant to contrast the background, such that the “L” is light green, the “A” is yellow, and the “S” is orange and so on. Some letters are fainter, written in sharpie that has faded into the paper, but others are brighter, having been gone over in acrylic paint. There is a ring of poked holes in the top left roughly where the phone’s camera sits and a bit of uncovered background space to the top and bottom of the text design, which covers the majority of the piece. End ID] (*If there’s anything you’d like clarified about this description feel free to ask, I found it tricky to describe clearly. )

I tried to copy the comics font here--wait, actually, I'm just going back through my reference images, and I think the text I copied from for this is actually from something by @tapefish that was itself based on the comics font. Yeah, this is based on a design that's on their redbubble actually, though I didn't trace it specifically, but that's what this is drawn from. In that design, both words in "look alive" are on the line above "sunshine", so because of the way I've done it here, "sunshine" wound up being twice as narrow, hence why letters are all really squished, but hopefully it'll still be more or less legible!

I went over the letters in sharpie initially, but they were really hard to see, so I'm gradually painting over them. I'm also probably going to put more pictures and/or text on here, like a Danger Days spider and/or an eye like the one on the mailbox, and possibly "keep running" and/or "art is the weapon" in the space at the top or bottom.

As for the color scheme, I just went "how can I make this as colorful as physically possible" and ran with that, lol :) Well, to be more precise, I did a rainbow ombre in the background and then tried to make each letter roughly the complementary color to the part of the background it was on, but I tried to still have a variety of colors in the foreground as well.

Mostly, I'm just happy I've finally gotten around to making some progress since I first did the watercolor for the background literally like 2 years ago in our first pandemic summer, and that's just the rate at which I work on things sometimes, lol.

Anyways, I could ramble about my design and my plans for this for a while yet, and I could definitely proofread and edit this post some more, but I'm trying to stop myself from spending all afternoon on this post now instead of actually continuing to work on my phone case insert. Feel free to ask me stuff about this, though I can't guarantee anything remotely resembling a quick response haha. But hopefully someday before another two years have passed, I'll be posting a finished version of this! For now, enjoy this rare glimpse into my artistic process, hahaha.

Occasionally I check twitter, and occasionally there are interesting things there...

[Image ID: A screenshot of a tweet by Gabe Saporta reading "Pretty stoked about Riot Fest. Any special requests?". The first reply is by kal (bat emoji) @/DecaydanceBats and reads "Snakes on a plane with William. Do it for the gays Gabriel this is our last shot". Gabe Saporta replied "You know I would do anything for you, right?". The first tweet in the exchange is from 4:41 pm on 17 May 22 and the replies are marked 1 hour ago. End ID]

The show I’m currently in with my theatre company opens tonight (I almost missed making my customary opening night eve post, but I think it still counts as long as I do it day of!), but since it’s an original work written by our director, I couldn’t just search up the show on here like I usually do. So, since the show explores themes of home and what it means to be home, to go home, to have a home, and what makes a home, I decided to search up pictures that remind me of the place I still think of as home--the Blue Ridge Mountains. 

I haven’t lived amidst them for nearly a decade now, but there’s still something in me that only settles when I feel the arms of the mountains wrapped around me. I still felt it immediately last summer when we were driving out through Ohio--there’s a point in the state when it passes from flat lands to hills to the edge of the mountains proper, and the embrace of the mountains always feels like a homecoming to me. When we moved while I was in high school, I was sure I’d move back to Virginia as soon as I became an adult, but now I’m 26 and I still live in the Midwest. Most of the people I know back home have moved away; all my closest friends from the street I used to live on are now off in New York or California or Oklahoma seeking their own life dreams, and though I still love the place, it’s harder to return when I no longer know the people. The things that made up my home have been scattered, divided and strewn across the country, leaving me to choose between the places and the people I’ve thought of as home--and often, I choose the easiest thing, staying where I was planted. Home is a difficult thing to find. I don’t mean to get too philosophical and sad; where I am has its own charms, among them the theatre family that sparked this whole post, and there are things I’d miss about here too. 

But when I think of home and what it means to me, I can’t help seeing images like this in my mind’s eye--softly rolling mountains bathed radiant violet in the setting sun’s light, fading to misty periwinkle in the distance beneath pink clouds. If I could stick my face through the screen and breathe that crisp mountain air, take a sniff of those pretty flowers (phlox I think?)--well, my nose would already be deep in the screen, haha. When I mutter wistfully to myself “I miss home”, this is what I’m picturing. I love this gorgeous photo :)

Anyways, we open tonight, and two people dropped out of the show last minute so I’m going to be doing a quick change to a scene that I have only rehearsed with the other actress twice now, so... wish me luck and broken limbs! 

Oh I have a youtube notification wonder what it could be--

Oh My Chemical Romance -- they -- um -- oh -- new music. New music happened.

Um... It's good... It's really good... I'm...

*Explodes*