Putting On Eyeliner This Morning For The My Chemical Romance Concert And Thinking About How Many Other

Putting on eyeliner this morning for the My Chemical Romance concert and thinking about how many other fans might also be doing this at the same time; thinking about how many fans have done their eyeliner for a show over the years in the past. Thinking about Gerard doing his own eyeliner. Achieving spiritual union with the MCR fandom through slightly messy eyeliner.

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]

So, is the guy with whom Lucy wishes she could set Mina up the owner of the same insane asylum as the one across the street from the castle Jonathan found for our friend the Count, or are there just a lot of insane asylums around in 1890s London?

Putting on "The End" and wiping off my makeup in the sharp white light of the hotel room mirror as Gerard sings for me to do so. Thinking about them towelling the bloody bullet hole off of their forehead somewhere, either in a nicer hotel room than this or perhaps on the bus. Picturing all the makeup coming off all the faces of all the fans, rinsing down a thousand drains as adrenaline fades to weariness and the concert high fades to a vague, aching yearning for more. There is a mournfulness at the end of the celebration, but there is yet a celebration in the mourning, a togetherness even still. And after all, is that not what this band is about? The twinned emotions of mourning and rejoicing and the times when the two are inextricable?

Putting on eyeliner this morning for the My Chemical Romance concert and thinking about how many other fans might also be doing this at the same time; thinking about how many fans have done their eyeliner for a show over the years in the past. Thinking about Gerard doing his own eyeliner. Achieving spiritual union with the MCR fandom through slightly messy eyeliner.

I am in the pit for Badflower!!! I am so hyped!!