Hello fellow toads,
Happy Toad Tuesday!
Here’s how my week has gone so far: snowed again…enter the depression bog, obsessively consume otome where MC is currently dating a man named Shelby Snail, sit in front of space heater, listen to Celine Dion, practice karaoke songs and dance, vaccuum down revenge manhwa where sparkly-eyed royals plot, read Lady Chatterley’s Lover, practice French, pay $3.99 to rent Barbie Fairytopia.
Here’s a quick Shelby Snail (and the otome is Cupid Parasite, btw). I still have to draw the MC, but I want to spend more time on her scarf-braid hairstyle and I’m up against several deadlines right now!
I also drew this pic of Bibble.
Ugly
Why do buildings, influencers, coffee shops, gyms, homes, and websites all have such an underwhelming case of sameface these days? Where has all the flamboyance gone? Where’s the sense of personality and place?
I, for one, am tired of every person having the same beige website, beige home, and beige candles, all bathed in a beige filter and posted online #thatgirl #cleangirlaesthetic.
I live for the interestingly ugly and the bright and the brash and the too much; the strange roadside attractions housed in puzzling shedlike structures announced with bold WORLD’S LARGESTs and AMERICA’S BESTs dotting the highway in advance.
I love weird art—bright colors, strange scales, no attempt at being realistic or beautiful. I strive for grotesqueness when I’m drawing, especially myself. Some people mistake that for low self-confidence, but I think to love something is to see its ugliness fully and embrace that. I also think that self-confident, in-your-face-tacky ugliness can be very hot.
One specific genre of weird (and maybe ugly) that popped up in my life this week is the 90s and 2000s computer room. Everyone with a computer used to have a setup, and often, it was UGLY. Big black swivel chair (we all had the same one). laminate desk, huge blocky monitor that lit up the room with a blue screensaver at night.
Computer wizard art has become, unironically, one of my favorite genres. It invokes pulp novel covers and the computer room of days gone by in one fell swoop—truly powerful.
Anyways, dear reader-toads, I hope you have a magical, weird, ugly, non-Instagrammable week. Feel free to join me in mentally chanting “I AM NOT A BRAND I AM NOT A BRAND I AM NOT A BRAND” several times a day and maybe setting up a designated “computer room” with dope wizard art.
Related Reads
Why is Everything so Ugly? by n+1
xox MM