Why should you stay home and be a stone, alone,

The 39 icons I've recently made for icon_promptly! Mix of fandom and stock.
Fandoms: Tangled, The Lion King, DuckTales (2017), Pokemon, What We Do In Shadows, Moana, Fire Emblem: Awakening, Pop Mart
Stock: Popsicles, Baby Sea Turtles, Water Parks, Fireflies (Warning: Bug image!), Fruit
Feel free to use with credit to orbble!
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A rare public post, 'cause your boy is looking for information! Specifically, as the title suggests, I'd love to know what resources y'all who make icons and other graphics find useful for learning. I've started to really enjoy making icons for different communities and events, and I'd love to make other graphics as well, but I definitely recognize that my skillset is really limited so far. So I'd love any resources y'all use/know of for learning different skills, be it tutorials sites, videos, whatever! Maybe I'm getting old and Bad At Googling, but I've been having a hard time finding things that aren't out of date and mostly contain broken reference images... But I'm going to keep looking on my own too! I just wanted to see if anyone knows some good resources off the top of their heads! Resources like textures, filters, etc, are also welcome!

As for what I'm working with, I usually use an - ahem - totally legit version of photoshop cc 2017, and also have used gimp before. Not looking to buy any new programs but I am open to sailing the high seas if it's things like adobe products...

Also feel free to point folks you know this way if they've got resources they'd be down to share!

The Art of Murder feels like an especially fitting thing to recommend for Fannish 50, as - despite its ominous title - it's all centered on the experience of being a fan and creating fanworks. It's an indie animation pilot (there are some truly amazing indie animation projects on YouTube, it's a rabbit hole I highly, highly suggest hopping down), and the premise is so charming: When young artist Pip goes to sleep, the characters she draws fanart of in her sketchbook always come to life for the night.

These characters really set the tone of The Art of Murder: not only are they all aware they're fanart of fictional characters, with all of them taking pride in the popularity of their source material, but they're all pastiches of existing character archetypes. There's Winn, a young girl who primarily draws from Adventure Time's Finn, but also generally represents that high-energy kid hero type in a lot of similarly quirky cartoons. Albie draws from the library of traditionally-animated Disney Princesses, and is insecure about the rise of 3D animation, (and one of my favorite jokes in the pilot is when her character is used to poke at the way princess media like Disney's make money selling dozens of differently dressed merchandise for the characters). Sousuke the anime ninja draws from, well, Sasuke from Naruto - and speaks entirely in (captioned) Japanese, a fantastic touch - and finally, Giorgio is a detective from an dating sim game, and his hamminess delightfully plays up the tone of many of those games.

The story starts on a night where someone new has been drawn: Not a character from an existing IP, but Pip's own original character. The other characters welcome the aptly-named OC to "The World of Pip's Sketchbook" in a super-catchy musical number As dawn comes, the characters return to the sketchbook... And then the next night, a page of the sketchbook has been torn out - one of the characters has been, effectively, killed.

The pilot mostly sets up the characters and story, but I do believe there's more in progress. While I don't think the mystery is exactly hard to take a guess at solving, I kind of love that, because the direction I see things going just further highlights how this is a show about the experience of being a fan, but also just being a creator! And who knows, maybe I'm entirely wrong!

If you check out The Art of Murder, let me know what you think - it's really got some great self-aware, tongue-in-cheek humor. It feels like a love letter to loving things, and I think that's so fun!

I've signed up to participate in Fannish 50 at goals_on_dw in 2026! I'm looking forward to it! I don't have a clear plan or specific theme in mind, but I'll most likely post for it once a week in the coming year, and some of the things I'd like to post include recommending small-fandom canons, revisiting canons and writing on that experience, sharing some of my fannish collection items and/or "holy grail" items, and mini ship or character manifestos! (I don't know how much people still do those, stuf like lj's old ship_manifesto comm, but I love the concept!) That said, who knows what I might come up with! My Fannish 50 posts will also be public, to spread the fandom fun!

I waffled a lot on making this post, as my post about Jinks got very little traction, and she's arguably the character at the center of my main storyline in Lurra. (Well. Storyline might be a strong word? I go back and forth between "I don't want to do a whole plotted story for this" and "there's a clear start for a plot here, and it's exactly the kind of story I love" - I'll get into that in the content under the cut.) But, ultimately, that's kind of the nature of OCs. You can't expect people to be instantly interested, that's really rare! And even if sharing more information doesn't generate interest, that's okay! I love these guys and having information about them on-hand is helpful for any kind of writing I do with them in the future.

So, without further ado...

( ...let's meet the rest of the crew! )

So, you can probably see where there's a window for the "taking down the corruption" themes that my Persona 5-loving heart adores, but... We'll see! Anyway, if anyone reads about these fellas, thank you so much and I hope you like 'em!

Here's some of the worldbuilding I've been working on with themagpieapologues, specifically the lore of the world's origins, and a look at what it's like there now. If people are interested in this - which, hey, no harm no foul if not; that's the way it can be with OCs! - I'll make a post about my actual characters for this setting. I just didn't want to get into that yet since there's art for those guys, and this post is already... really long... Oops

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