When I Was A Kid, My Mom Was A Judge And My Dad Was Starting His Solo Practice, And They Both Worked

I just discovered the ultimate hand drawing technique during class today. I call it, the FOOT METHOD observe,

So first we draw the sole of a foot like this:

Than we add three circles (like toes)

Now we add a "flap"

And a little oval

And the thumb

the rest of the fingers:

the best part of this technique is that it works almost always, like so

Now I'm leaving a more in depth explanation for this under the cut

alright so the hand is actually two separate pieces, the palm and the thumb.

The palm is kind of foot shaped and the thumb is a triangle

So I figured it would be easier to draw if I were to simplify it into two shapes instead of one it'd be easier to foreshorten.

And I was right!

The "foot" doesn't really move at all so if you want to foreshorten it all you got to do is change the size depending on the pose.

Where as the "flap" often changes completely, but at it's core it's mostly triangle shaped, So keep that in mind.

If you're doing a side view, then if we're looking at it from the thumb side it's usually a triangle and if we're looking at it from the pinky it's usually a rectangle.

Fingers are a whole other ordeal, but the main thing I noticed is that they start out thick, are thinnest in the middle and thick at the tip.

Thumbs are two joints connected to the "flap" opposed to the three joints of the rest of the fingers.

Aaand that all I got! I hope this helps somebody :D

TMR Fic Idea

Galatea Merrythought was the dark arts professor during Tom Riddle’s school years, retiring when he graduated. 

In this fic, Merrythought becomes Riddle’s mentor and was the one to introduce him to the many creatures (vampires, werewolves, giants, etc) who would’ve made up Voldemort’s ranks. Instilling in him a sense of adventure and treasure hunting that gave him the knowledge to find the lost Diadem in the first place. 

Merrythought takes him on wild adventures that are only possible because she has an illegal time turner. 

Tom accidentally becomes friends and fellow adventurers with Muggleborn Hufflepuffs Nobby Leach and Margot Doope, and Ravenclaw underclassman Myrtle Warren.  

Nobby being a blunt, angry little gremlin who says what he thinks no matter what others may say about him. He has no patience for his bloodpurity spouting Pureblood classmates and will throwdown for his fellow Puffs anytime, anywhere. Despite his rude, brash personality, his fellow Muggleborns still find him a compelling leader. Now, Tom and Leach together...they’re practically unstoppable. 

Margot is a cold, logical upperclassman who would likely fit in with the Ravenclaw’s if not for her dedication to her work. She refuses to believe magic and muggle technological advances can’t be combined and experiments with both. They often explode in her face, but she refuses to give up. 

Myrtle is always popping up where you least expect her, and annoying the hell out of Tom. She’s far sharper than her boy-crazy tendencies would have you believe, but she usually arrives at the wrong conclusion and still somehow manages to be right. (Much to Tom’s frustration.) 

Basically the Muggleborn friend squad you never knew you wanted. This time with an extra helping of the ignored and overlooked Hogwarts Houses, aka the not-Gryffindors. :D  

A group of friends working together to figure out wixen culture, their identities, and their place in the world. 

Also they’re all LGBT+ of some kind. You’re Welcome. 

TL:DR

Tom Riddle Hogwarts AU where he gets a supportive professor and muggleborn friends who go on wacky adventures together and figure out how to be human. 

And yes Tom is still messed up, but so are they. It’s not gonna be all sun shine and roses. See my other tom riddle posts for reference. I’ll likely be addressing most if not all of them. 

Short DPXDC Prompts #489

Johnny 13 and Dash as Roommates in Gotham. 

Don't skip out on the bullying batman statement. Danny deserves to spook some bats

dp x dc prompt #58

danny and a couple rogues, maybe his friends from amity, or just by himself starts up a haunted house in gotham. the reviews are stellar and you can hear the screams from across town.

everything goes smoothly until the joker tries to escape through his building.

the bats get spooked, danny bullies batman, and the joker comes out at the end babbling nonsense about the ghost king trying to eat his soul.

A general cane guide for writers and artists (from a cane user, writer, and artist!)

Disclaimer: Though I have been using a cane for 6 years, I am not a doctor, nor am I by any means an expert. This guide is true to my experience, but there are as many ways to use a cane as there are cane users!

This guide will not include: White canes for blindness, crutches, walkers, or wheelchairs as I have no personal experience with these.

This is meant to be a general guide to get you started and avoid some common mishaps/misconceptions, but you absolutely should continue to do your own research outside of this guide!

The biggest recurring problem I've seen is using the cane on the wrong side. The cane goes on the opposite side of the pain! If your character has even-sided pain or needs it for balance/weakness, then use the cane in the non-dominant hand to keep the dominant hand free. Some cane users also switch sides to give their arm a rest!

A cane takes about 20% of your weight off the opposite leg. It should fit within your natural gait and become something of an extension of your body. If you need more weight off than 20%, then crutches, a walker, or a wheelchair is needed.

Putting more pressure on the cane, using it on the wrong side, or having it at the wrong height will make it less effective, and can cause long term damage to your body from improper pressure and posture. (Hugh Laurie genuinely hurt his body from years of using a cane wrong on House!)

(an animated GIF of a cane matching the natural walking gait. It turns red when pressure is placed on it.)

When going up and down stairs, there is an ideal standard: You want to use the handrail and the cane at the same time, or prioritize the handrail if it's only on one side. When going up stairs you lead with your good leg and follow with the cane and hurt leg together. When going down stairs you lead with the cane, then the good leg, and THEN the leg that needs help.

Realistically though, many people don't move out of the way for cane users to access the railing, many stairs don't have railings, and many are wet, rusty, or generally not ideal to grip.

In these cases, if you have a friend nearby, holding on to them is a good idea. Or, take it one step at a time carefully if you're alone.

Now we come to a very common mistake I see... Using fashion canes for medical use!

(These are 4 broad shapes, but there is INCREDIBLE variation in cane handles. Research heavily what will be best for your character's specific needs!)

The handle is the contact point for all the weight you're putting on your cane, and that pressure is being put onto your hand, wrist, and shoulder. So the shape is very important for long term use!

Knob handles (and very decorative handles) are not used for medical use for this reason. It adds extra stress to the body and can damage your hand to put constant pressure onto these painful shapes.

The weight of a cane is also incredibly important, as a heavier cane will cause wear on your body much faster. When you're using it all day, it gets heavy fast! If your character struggles with weakness, then they won't want a heavy cane if they can help it!

This is also part of why sword canes aren't usually very viable for medical use (along with them usually being knob handles) is that swords are extra weight!

However, a small knife or perhaps a retractable blade hidden within the base might be viable even for weak characters.

Bases have a lot of variability as well, and the modern standard is generally adjustable bases. Adjustable canes are very handy if your character regularly changes shoe height, for instance (gotta keep the height at your hip!)

Canes help on most terrain with their standard base and structure. But for some terrain, you might want a different base, or to forego the cane entirely! This article covers it pretty well.

Many cane users decorate their canes! Stickers are incredibly common, and painting canes is relatively common as well! You'll also see people replacing the standard wrist strap with a personalized one, or even adding a small charm to the ring the strap connects to. (nothing too large, or it gets annoying as the cane is swinging around everywhere)

(my canes, for reference)

If your character uses a cane full time, then they might also have multiple canes that look different aesthetically to match their outfits!

When it comes to practical things outside of the cane, you reasonably only have one hand available while it's being used. Many people will hook their cane onto their arm or let it dangle on the strap (if they have one) while using their cane arm, but it's often significantly less convenient than 2 hands. But, if you need 2 hands, then it's either setting the cane down or letting it hang!

For this reason, optimizing one handed use is ideal! Keeping bags/items on the side of your free hand helps keep your items accessible.

When sitting, the cane either leans against a wall or table, goes under the chair, or hooks onto the back of the chair. (It often falls when hanging off of a chair, in my experience)

When getting up, the user will either use their cane to help them balance/support as they stand, or get up and then grab their cane. This depends on what it's being used for (balance vs pain when walking, for instance!)

That's everything I can think of for now. Thank you for reading my long-but-absolutely-not-comprehensive list of things to keep in mind when writing or drawing a cane user!

Happy disability pride month! Go forth and make more characters use canes!!!

*proceeds to drink the whole bottle*

Yeah Alastor you're gonna be loved and appreciated wether you want it or not :)

Not to mention, you have the narrative struggle of being pulled in two different directions.

Tom Riddle, as a half blood in Slytherin, is pulled between these two extremes of the wizarding world. Abraxas being the elitist pureblood rhetoric of protecting the status quo and Leach representing the muggleborn movement for equality.

If you want to draw an even bigger connection between Leach's fall and Voldemort's rise, you could say that Tom wanted to believe that things could change. He wanted to believe Leach could do it. And when it didn't happen...well it's time for Riddle to take the reins and force the purebloods to change it themselves.

Riddle: You want to uphold the status quo? Well I'm gonna hold it up SO HIGH you'll beg for me to stop.

And they did.

I mean when you look at Voldemort's ranks it really shows just how much he's likely changed the concept of blood purity.

I mean, would post-Grindelwald purebloods be willing to work with werewolves, vampires, giants, etc? I doubt it. And then you have the half bloods who joined.

Would those post-Grindelwald wizards turn against eachother and actively torture and kill other purebloods (ex. The Longbottoms) from their already limited gene pool? I very much doubt that.

Voldemort limited the concept of blood purity to be against muggleborns and anyone who disagrees with Voldemort. And you can even argue that he would welcome muggleborns since he canonically attempted to get Lily Evan's on his side.

Riddle over here sneakily making the Death Eaters more tolerant by upholding the status quo he defined and placing all of his supporters on an equal level when it came to receiving his approval and being in danger of wizard jail.

So I suppose Riddle found a middle ground after all.

Its supremely unfair how under utilized Nobby Leach is in fanfic.

He's a blank slate! The 1st Muggleborn British Minister of Magic but we know very little about him personally or even the circumstances of his election.

Voldemort rose to power in the late 60s-early 70s. Leach was minister sometime between 1962-68. And Leach was supposedly threatened from returning to his position or possibly assassinated.

Do you think poor, working-class, assumed Mudblood of Slytherin Tom Riddle didn't see these shady dealings and go "Okay so taking the legal route to power won't work."

If having power was Tom's only goal then he absolutely would've taken a quicker route to it. But instead Nobby Leach's failure just proved the system was too broken to fix from the inside.

(Quick disclaimer, I think Riddle only used the blood-purity thing to get an in with the purebloods who were running the country. There are better posts that expand on this idea in detail so I'm not going to get into it too much here. Okay? Okay.)

We know so little about Leach that he could conceivably have gone to Hogwarts at the same time as Tom Riddle. Did they know eachother? That's up to you, but if they went to school together then they definitely knew OF eachother.

So here you have Nobby Leach who hit the ground running after graduation, who clawed his way to being the FIRST muggleborn Minister of Magic in a government made up of bloodpurists, and then he just...resigned? Fuck that. That doesn't fit at all.

And anyone with half a brain would've picked up on that. Tom Riddle could not have missed how uncharacteristic this would be if he knew Leach, or heck just noticed the sheer will and patience it takes to become THE Muggleborn Minister of Magic.

On that note, there might've been some sort of Muggleborn movement happening in the background following Grindelwald's defeat. After all it takes more than one person to achieve this kind of victory.

So Tom Riddle watches (or is apart of 👀) a fast-paced, determined movement place the FIRST Muggleborn Minister of Magic and then watches as this victory silently tumbles down into forgotten history.

Meanwhile Tom builds the Death Eaters who also work outside the system via raids and murder despite the fact that they all work inside of it already. Theres already lots to unpack with THAT decision but moving on... Once the Ministry finally gets its shit together and arrests the (clearly labeled with Dark Marks) perpetrators, throwing them in wizard prison eventually reaching the point where they would be thrown in without a trial (Sirius Black), the Pureblood lawmakers all of a sudden realize "oh fuck, this is getting real."

And now what do they have to do to avoid suspicion in this very Red Scare-esque era of spying and tattling on eachother (it worked for Karkaroff) to avoid wizard prison? Play nice with the Muggleborns.

TL;DR

Nobby Leach: went the legitimate route to making change by working WITHIN the system. He rose fast and fell silently.

Tom Riddle: went the shady route to power by working OUTSIDE the system, painstakingly working for decades to build a support base, and falling in notoriety.

There needs to be more fics with them as foils to eachother. And if it has to be me, I warn you it will take YEARS to finish.

Dumbledore's version of the events that Tom Riddle -record breaking top student who graduated with special merits to the school- ended up working at Borgin n Burkes, England's shadiest dark wizard pawn shop, as some sort of step, part of a multi-level evil mastermind plan instead of... because the british wizarding society is incredibly nepotist and built entirely of connections and favours that an apparent muggleborn could never achieve, says more about who he is as a person than anything he actively did in the books or even the fact that he dated wizarding hitler and agreed with his ideology until he got personally hurt.

Your headcanons are so scrumptious I want to crawl inside your brain.

All jokes aside, I love all of the detail and thought you put into this!!! And all of the historical references, I'm definitely going to look them all up in more detail later.

Human Alastor (FTM trans headcanon)

Full size image

Commentary below:

Here, Alastor is shown at four different stages of his human life:

Childhood - around 12 years old

“Voodoo Killer” - late teenage years

Jazz Musician - early 20s

Radio Star - later adulthood to time of death

His career as a serial killer started when he was around 12 years old and continued up until his death.

The three stages of his adult life are supposed to correspond with different aspects of his demon form’s hairstyle.

During the “Voodoo Killer” stage, he straightened his hair and styled it similarly to his demon form’s hairstyle. However, he did not have an undershave. If viewed from the back, it would look like a simple bob. His appearance is inspired by Clementine Barnabet. I intended for his tignon to be tied in a similar manner to Clementine’s. Additionally, the bandages wrapped around his legs are meant to make him look a little like Voodoo Queen Lala from the 1930s. I gave him bandages instead to make him look like more of an edge lord (lol). The cross worn was originally his mother's. After she died, he painted it black in mourning. He wears it at all times, up until his death, to remember her.

During the “Jazz Musician” stage, he kept his hair short in order to pass for male. This is supposed to correspond with the back side of Alastor’s demon form, which is shaved short. His appearance is inspired by Jelly Roll Morton, one of my favorite Jazz musicians, who also happens to be Creole. Not visible in this pose, but Al wore black gloves that match the color of his hair. 

During the “Radio Star” stage, several aspects of Alastor’s appearance are inspired by the late, great Cab Calloway. Like Cab, Alastor styled his hair in a conk. His suit is also inspired by the iconic white suit worn by Cab Calloway.

That being said, creative liberties were taken with Al’s white suit, which is anachronistic for the 1930s. Cab famously wore zoots, but I don’t think that would be Alastor’s style. Since I know so little about 1930s fashion, I gave up and didn’t attempt to give him a historically accurate suit. Instead, his tuxedo is based on the one he wore in the pilot. There are several anachronisms present in Alastor’s canon design, so it might actually fit his character to wear a suit atypical of the 1930s. This could preserve the otherworldly, “Willy Wonka”-esque presence that he has, even on Earth. Still, it’s a pretty glaring historical inaccuracy. Once we get to see Al’s canon human form, I might redesign him.

Since Alastor would have more than one suit, I didn’t worry too much about the inaccuracies present in his clothing. The one thing I refused to compromise on was his microphone.  In the TV show, Alastor’s iconic microphone is a vintage ribbon mic. However, this “pill capsule” style looks more similar to models that were only invented after Alastor’s death. Here’s an example of a ribbon mic that was rolled out shortly before Alastor’s death: The RCA Type 77-A. As you can see, it’s a lot larger in size than Alastor’s microphone.

My first attempt at drawing human Alastor gave him a ribbon mic, seen here: https://www.deviantart.com/thegirlwhodidntsmile/art/Human-Alastor-ribbon-mic-1035514228

In order to be more historically accurate, I discarded this design. Instead, I gave him a spring microphone, technology that is more iconic of the 1920s/1930s. 

Here’s an image of Cab Calloway in front of a spring microphone, one year after Alastor’s death:

I took some creative liberties with the flag of Alastor’s microphone. Normally, it is supposed to say the radio station. Since I don’t know what radio station Al’s show aired on, I just had it read “ON AIR” in red.

Importantly, Alastor’s suit has to match the design of his microphone, which is an extension of himself.

It’s a little awkward how Alastor is holding his microphone, so here is how it looks from the back: https://www.deviantart.com/thegirlwhodidntsmile/art/Human-Alastor-back-of-mic-1035514255

The backside of the microphone is supposed to look like an eye, and have a bit of an ominous presence.

A headcanon I have is that Alastor had a severe case of stress-induced vitiligo. Because he was very egotistical, this was a source of shame for him, so he hid it with makeup and clothing. Here is how his face would have appeared shortly before his death: https://www.deviantart.com/thegirlwhodidntsmile/art/Human-Alastor-no-makeup-1035514264

Al’s colors are mostly browns, whites, and black, to keep with the deer theme. The black tips of his shoes are supposed to look a bit like deer hooves. I pictured his height as 5’10, one inch taller than Michael Dillon. Since the average male height was around 5’7, Al was still taller than most men, which made it easier to pass for male.

Bonus image:

https://www.deviantart.com/thegirlwhodidntsmile/art/Alastor-kill-count-1035514155

That moment when someone verbalizes your experience AND SHARES IT

Sometimes I hyperfocus so hard on something, I forget I’m a person until someone interacts with me. I feel like some wild animal seeing a human being for the first time. I’m like “oh yeah I’m supposed to speak and stuff”