arp: insect rights activist
@arparparp
36, it/its || expect friends at the table fanart, cloudy skies, and mediocre watercolors (mostly safe for work, adult art is here: @adoringswarm.bsky.social)
falling prey to temptation and playing with details that will be altered or obscured before i’m done, as is my nature
katonya… i cannot draw her (yet), but tonight i remembered .. i have other powers! tomorrow maybe i’ll figure out how the heck to visualize a canon on her 😈
💞i love you, rock that is tall enough to be a table while i’m submerged in the stream.💞 🙏save me from heatstroke, rock that is tall enough to be a table while i’m submerged in the stream.🙏
today’s is simple but i love this specific plant and endured a surprising variety of biting insects to paint it so,
two days, two painting sessions in a stream cut short by a sudden afternoon storm, and three bee balm paintings
i know we all know google sucks now, but as of this morning its only date filters are WITHIN the past year or less??? even in the advanced search settings i’m not seeing any options to view results BEFORE a date?? am i blind?
AND the fire pit had the same logs we’d left there last year… so with the permanent (now physically blocked) road closure and the lack of a direct route and zero cell service…. this place is mine now (as long as we don’t stay for more than 14 days at a time, etc etc)
proud of everyone for surviving 6 hrs of my driving on unmarked and unmaintained forest service roads (without cell service in pitch darkness) because the no-motor-vehicles-allowed “road” we’ve been taking to our secret campsite for years was finally physically blocked and we had to find another way
my son is undergoing a transformation…. puberty sure is wild
aaaugh - thank goodness for the online guides*, or i'd never have made it past this level! it feels like i've been staring at this loading screen for almost a year.... #friendsatthetable #perpetua (*and @mrmarielda.bsky.social, who colored the Little Snail and its occupants)
gotta double check that this isn’t actually ten times darker than i thought it was on my work computer but then maybe…. maybe this is done???
my creative drive is still not talking to me but we Are at least going to have a fantastic garden this year! (if you’re in the pittsburgh area and want vegetables let me know..! we accidentally started more than we can plant, even after digging out the back of the yard)
was excited to see my spiderwort blooming, so i set up a little shelter with my poncho strung between the fence and a step ladder and foolishly used watercolors in the rain (painting a flower in the rain: also not smart, the water really weighed it down & changed the lighting)
flood warning notifications on my phone constantly the past few days but all we’ve got so far is “stream reaches its typical depth for the first time this year” (it’s still been raining often enough to make ppl complain but it’s not raining Enough (in Volume) for spring imho)
had to get my car fixed today and didn’t want to pay for a ride so i wandered around the woods behind the mechanic’s shop and found some good flowers to paint all day
i love how your phrasing implies both that you’ve come close to seeing them enough times for notoriety and that they were disproportionately dashing away from you and your friend..! i get it though, the first time i was able to get a good look at a skipper it felt like i was hallucinating
i didn’t get any good bird pictures (in part because the screen made it hard to focus on them and in part because i wasn’t carrying my phone), but there was a Very Active bird feeder directly between the cabin and the river that i think you would have had a good time with!
yesterday it rained off and on, and i loved being out in it 💞 listening to it all around, seeing the bugs come out from hiding afterwards, and the glittering drops of water on the leaves..!!
did a lot of very mediocre paintings on my trip (too distracted by The World to put too much attention into painting), but also spent a few hours last night on this pawpaw flower that turned out alright <3
still shocked at how unbitten i am. i’m all sorts of scraped and sliced but no noticeable bites of any kind. there was a bully gang of flies that followed me around, but they were otherwise harmless. hm!!
was looking through the letters my father sent home from overseas in the months before i was born and look at this gift we found…
been painting plants again this year and decided to try out making my own watercolor block using cheap loose paper and binding glue…. and i think it’s maybe my favorite paper? locked in to art for more than an hour (my lunch break, when i do my little paintings) for the first time in a long while,