Rue Sparks (They/Them)

Video of the #artprocess if anyone was curious. TBH this one gave me some grief because the initial design just didn’t work, but I got there in the end… Sorta.

Illustration of two characters, facing opposite directions. Colored in blues, purples, yellows, and pink. An eclipse covers the middle.

Been fiddling again with the #characterdesign and style for Eclipse (Visual epistolary #book but also #queer AF.)

There’s a lot of sun/light/day vs moon/shadow/night allegories and leveraging the idea of heroes & villains being a matter of perspective. So playing a lot with color and contrast.

And the funnest part? Even those income streams are dying.

If you wonder why your artist friends feel jaded, well.

We’re not good fam.

a black and white photo of a man with the words " i just wanna sleep forever " on the bottom Alt: a black and white photo of a man with the words " i just wanna sleep forever " on the bottom

Was just thinking to myself “I just want someone to pay me for the #art I WANT to make”-

Then realized that’s what being an #artist used to mean for a lot of creators.

But in 2026 we’re so deep into hustle and content creator culture that if I’m not pivoting to a new trend each month it’s “cringe”

High five for a fellow myth nerd who is too specifically nerdy for most nerds 😂

I’m in the middle of Larringtons “The Norse Myths that Shaped Us” and “Trickster Makes the World.”

So many rabbit holes . Not enough days left in my life to go down them all…

Working on a visual epistolary novel. Includes comic panels, prose, letters, interviews, etc & multiple POVs

Leveraging friends/enemies/lovers tropes, hero & villain archetypes but uno reversed, and a wide view on how the narratives written into history shape our lives.

Aka: I’m a nerd.

Oftentimes if I’m vomit drafting its because I’m processing what I want to say as in write.

I tend to think of it as when you’re doing your concept development/editing more. If I plan, I’m doing a heap of my editing before. If I just write, I’m doing all of my editing after the fact.

This is such a mood 🥲

hiccup from how to train your dragon is giving a thumbs up while standing in the grass . Alt: hiccup from how to train your dragon is giving a thumbs up while standing in the grass .

Glad you were able to figure out what you wanted!

And hey, if you’re getting into it and reeeeeeally doesn’t work you can edit later. I know it sometimes feels like wasting time, but sometimes you need to try something unsuccessfully to know what you want. You just need to start somewhere

I’ve started (and finished) novels with no characters, no plot, no setting, just some silly fun fact about birds or holograms or origami because I write like a chaos gremlin 🙃

It’s the vibes for me. My brain makes weird connection so I let it cook and clean it up later 😂

Not targeted at any particular event but our slow descent into authoritarianism while the internet leaps closer to the Dead Internet Theory, one half of our world burns while the other falls into the ocean, and oh yeah we now have the D-grade version of “AI” guzzling our water and making us dumber

In other news:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH-

(but the 2026 Version™)

Thank you!! Different than my usual style but I’ve been digging it

Sure, go for it!

Ppl be thinking we need to use Generative AI for cool images and crows and photographers be chaos gremlins everyday 🙃

DID YOU KNOW COMMAS HAVE NAMES? OXFORD COMMA THE COMMA BEFORE AND IN A LIST WE READ FICTION, POETRY, AND NONFICTION. APPOSITIVE COMMA ADDS EXTRA INFO ABOUT A NOUN MS. LEE, THE LIBRARIAN, VISITED OUR CLASS. INTRODUCTORY COMMA COMES AFTER AN OPENING PHRASE AFTER READING, STUDENTS SHARED THEIR THINKING. INTERRUPTER COMMA SETS OFF WORDS THAT INTERRUPT THE SENTENCE THE LESSON, HOWEVER, TOOK MORE TIME. DIRECT ADDRESS COMMA USED WHEN SPEAKING TO SOMEONE BY NAME ASHLEY, PLEASE LINE UP.

Learning is lifelong!

Artists 🫵 QRT with your Sketch vs final

Everything has been said & done before but it hasn’t been done by you.

In everything we make we carry the echo of our history- the people we’ve loved & lost, our beliefs, our traumas, our joys & suffering, what we’ve learned & what we’ve unlearned.

It’s humanity and that’s why you should write it.

-honestly I feel like the only reason I ever watch anything nowadays is fan edits lol

-message.

And yet. No one knows what it’s about??

Elementals, Wish, and now Wonder Man. Nimona for Netflix

Either they barely advertise at all or advertised them as a completely different movie than they are.

The fact that these all have a more diverse cast than typically seen is skeevy.-

To be clear, I’m not saying don’t do public protest, or that you shouldn’t be willing to put your reputation on the line if you get the opportunity.

Only that in this era with our lines of communication and tech, protest has many faces. Many of which we never say a word about, we just do it.

-our personal knowledge and experiences, where we’re at in life at the time, etc

All that to say. I don’t even think there needs to be intended subtext for people to read it that way.

Fandom is kinda built on subtext and expansion. The whole point is to broaden canon.

-a reader she encountered who had interpreted a relationship very very differently from one of her books, and became the catalyst for the reader to have the bravery to leave her husband.

She didn’t correct her because what mattered was how the reader reads it. And that is always informed by-

-What stood out to me was in an interview a novelist asked her about the symbolism of such and such.

She responded (paraphrasing) “I wasn’t thinking about that, I just thought it’d be cool.”

Another more recent example, there’s this section in Gilbert’s book Big Magic where she talks about-

The OP kind of confuses me on what they’re getting at here tbh. It sounds to me that they just don’t agree with the subtext being assigned to it by fans. And that’s a losing battle.

I can’t remember the artist, but in one of my early art classes introduced this woman artist my teacher loved.-

If one more person says “it’s Pandora’s box” imma rip a Greek mythology sized hole in the fabric of time and space.

I grew up in the era of “hole in the ozone layer.” Look up the Montreal Protocol. We can and have successfully legislated tech.

So the question is, who is benefitting from us not?

I had never before heard the title being used as a verb before today but I dig it 😂

Seriously that movie was a canon event for me. Altered the course of my personal philosophy and has some of the most quietly powerful lines based purely on their context

I got reeeeeeeally into Vulture Culture for a novel I was drafting 🙃

^ Well put.

Being nice isn’t always kind, and being kind isn’t always nice.

It’s not “nice” to call a parent out on a homophobic comment they made to your sister. But it’s unkind to them both to stay silent.

Niceness is the tool of the status quo and kindness is the tool of love and progress.

Mine are just… weird?

- immortal jellyfish
- genetic diversity crisis GMO
- forest bathing history
- wire sculpture with bones
- thunder snow
- (then) lightning on saltwater
- (and THEN) tree hit by lightning burning inside only
- em dash (shuddap my keyboard is awkward so I copy paste it)