Thorns

I feel weird making a post about this as a super pale white person, but I keep seeing other artists draw dark characters really badly in the sort of flat colouring used in animation and comics etc, and don't know of any better guides. So here's what I've figured out. If people know of better techniques or guides, or if I've inadvertently said something wrong or offensive, please let me know.
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So, Pictures for Sad Children is a webcomic full of wry, self aware melancholy about dysfunctional people. I get linked it a lot but have always found it hit and miss.

The creator recently put up a post on his Kickstarter saying that he had been pretending to be depressed this whole time because that's just what artists do. Cue many depressed fans who had really connected with his comics feeling betrayed, and many ableist fans rejoicing at a chance to go on about how depression isn't really a thing.

But it was apparently all a joke, which anyone who was friends with him or familiar with his other work would have recognised, so all that outrage was for nothing HAHA TUMBLR. (The other, much more understandable "ARGH TUMBLR" reaction is to all the people who have been told that it's a joke but are still acting like it was meant literally, and the inevitable death treats etc. ARGH TUMBLR)

This attitude really pisses me off. I'm all in favour of satire and sarcasm (see: the title of this post, the previous paragraph), and not all humour has to be accessible to everyone. But if you tell a joke where it would be really bad if people took you literally, and most people DO take you literally, then you told the joke badly and you are responsible for the consequences.

Sure, there's only so much you can do about overly literal minded people, and it I think it's justifiable to cause SOME pain with art/humour, or we'd never get to use them at all. But having patchy reading comprehension or "not being a true fan" doesn't somehow make a person unworthy of compassion. Afaict most PFSC readers thought this was real, and a great many were deeply hurt. This could have been avoided if he made the satire more obvious, and I can't see any real advantage to being so opaque except...making the joke funnier for the people who get it? Being more effective on the tiny sliver of bigots who got the joke? Woo.

And even if we decide that everyone who doesn't get the joke is a humourless moron unworthy of respect, think of all the bigots who took it as support for hating on depressed people. Not actually being on their side doesn't magically make the pro-bigotry effect go away.

This is not someone's private blog that got taken out of context. It was a public and actively promoted kickstarter aimed at people who read PFSC, and it clearly failed at being clear to it's intended audience.

Since this apparently does need to be said: I'm not saying we should all go chasing after John Campbell with pitchforks, and the people who are harassing him need to step down. I do think he's a bit of a pretentious douche, but to be honest I kind of thought that anyway. Mainly I'm defending the people who are fans of PFSC and felt hurt from having their feelings dismissed.

So, the politics of fanworks panel at Swancon got me thinking. I left a comment on cupidsbow's post on the subject with some further thoughts, and one of the things I noticed while writing that comment is that despite most of my fanworks being fanart I was having real trouble thinking of transformative fanart with an overt political message that weren't race/gender/etc swaps. (Not that's anything wrong with such swaps, but surely there had to be more variety I was missing)
( And then I thought about it some more… )

The problem:

I make fanworks (fic, art, and comics) which (since they're about people) touch on issues like race, class, gender, sexuality, disability etc. There is always the danger with these works that I've inadvertently made something Very Hurtful that I won't notice until someone points it out to me. If I just chuck stuff online based on my own judgement it could do a whole lot of harm before someone points out the Fail, and then I have to figure out how to fix it. (If your response to this is that I shouldn't worry about it, this post is not aimed at you but, for example, Racefail: same shit, different day is. I do not feel like arguing with you)

One common solution offered for this problem is being beta-ed, but this doesn't work for me. (Research and mindfulness etc do a most of the time, and thus I do them, but they're not entirely reliable by themselves)
( Possible solutions )

So something I wonder about sometimes is the ethics behind giving references for the reference images used to make art, and how much use one can (legally or ethically) make of an image that is copyrighted rather than creative commons or public domain.

Apparently the FBI don't worry about this so much.

EDIT: I seem to have expressed this really badly. I'm not against ALL satire involving stuff like racism. I'm not even against all satire which offends (some) people from marginalised groups. I'm against a very particular brand of "satire", as described below. See the comments for further clarification.

A lot of the time I'll find something angry-makingly Xist etc and when I complain people say "But it's satire". And I'll admit, sometimes I really am being obtuse, but a lot of the time I think this is crap, because it hurts the people it's supposedly helping and is amusing to those it's supposedly challenging. I've been trying to articulate this for ages, there's probably holes in my argument.

I'm going to talk about racism since this seems to be where it comes up the most and I want to cut down on my "etc"s, but it comes up with disability, sexuality etc all the time too.

So. An action is racist or not based on it's effect, not your intention.

If your satire:
-makes POC feel attacked
-makes very racist white people think you agree with them
-makes less racist white people laugh at the more racist white people and thus feel good about themselves

How is it in any way anti-racist? Or even racism neutral? (since not all art needs to have a positive social effect) How is it less racist in effect than a deliberately racist action intended to make POC feel attacked and agree with very racist white people?
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Yes, even more on this topic! I think I'm running out of subjects I feel like venting about though :) I'm using "artist" in a broad sense which covers writers etc.

I don't think there's such a thing as a Real Artist, not in the sense which is in opposition to Wannabe Artists. I think that if you want to be an artist and you put your heart into creating Art then you are an artist, and that's it. Now not everyone is a good artist (though obviously judging the line is very subjective) and certainly not everyone is a professional artist. But that's about all you can say.

The Ideal Artist spends their whole life wanting to be an Artist, and goes to Art School(*), and the moment they can they quit their day job to Create Art all day, and that Art is brilliant, and they make all their living expenses off it.

But a HUGE proportion of people that noone questions the Real Artist Status of don't fit that description. There are people at every space on the continuum between Ideal Artist and Not An Artist At All. This is particularly evident if you hang out in places where there's no common explicit marker of success like being published. Where do you draw the line for Real Artist for webcomics?(**) Or fanfic?
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As the child of two art school dropouts(*) this is a topic which both fascinates and irritates me. I wrote a bit about it in More thoughts about Art and responsibility.

Anyway, ithiliana collects some recent discussion in writing, ART, responsibilities, powers, contexts which capture a lot of my annoyance. (She also has a lot of interesting things to say for herself, but they're less relevant to my rant)

I guess I see "challenging" yourself and other people, and art, as two separate things. Not orthogonal, but not all art challenges and not all challenges are art(**). I also get Really Annoyed at people who claim that the quality of a piece of art is directly proportional to the strength of the response it creates, since then they rely on cheap easy gimmicks to get strong responses (Religion+violence+children+excrement, say)

And if the point of your art is to be challenging: what are you challenging? Does it actually need challenging, or are you again taking cheap potshots? See, for example, all the "edgy" comics who poke at political correctness but not at the genuinely unquestioned aspects of their society, since audiences would much rather laugh at the oppressed than themselves.

Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with taking the easy way, but if you do you can't get all high-and-mighty about how Important and Unique your work is.

(*)Who, afaict, feel much the same way I do. And between them they do actually have all the courses for two fine art majors, but being True Stereotypical Arty Types they just never got it together enough to graduate :)
(**)And any artist who justifies their art by saying it's challenging, then freaks out if anyone challenges them about the assumptions and subtext of their work is a hypocrite. EDIT: I mean freaking out at the idea of being challenged, obviously you can object to any given challenge if you think it's wrong.

Yesterday, watching Xena I was inspired to draw this picture of two princesses. Yeah, totally self indulgent, live with it :)

I was also inspired to make this attempt to capture the weird visual distortions I was getting at a work party yesterday morning, normally it would lead to a migraine but for some reason it didn't. (Huzzah!) Picture by QuintanaRoo via Flickr, and as per her CC rules it is open to remixing/reuse with attribution itself.

I should point out that the work function spread was not anywhere near so healthy or vegan :)

An artist posting to cfids_me (with a quite effective painting of fatigue) led me to Pain Exhibit, artists with chronic pain expressing their experiences. Chronic pain isn't my main symptom but it's definitely there, and since I know a lot of you have chronic health issues I thought you might also appreciate it.

I'm not suprised there isn't a "FatigueExhibit.com", being too sleepy to do anything kind of makes you, well, too sleepy to do anything, including painting your feelings.