birthday art

So I made BB a couple of art pieces for his birthday. First, I made him a birthday card with a smiling cupcake and strawberries and blueberries. As a companion piece, I drew his New Blue House, except the house and garage are cupcakes, accompanied by ice cream cones in the backyard and a blueberry car.

HGR was like “Nice art, but he’s three years old. He’s not going to care.” I figure he’ll probably care for at least several seconds before moving on to whatever new toys Grandma and Grandpa got him. I admit the gift is somewhat performative. He already has a million billion toys (positive, affectionate) and I’m sure he’ll get plenty more this weekend, but I didn’t want to show up empty-handed, so handmade art it is.

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I recently saw a LMA video where Sarah said she wanted to combat the popular perception that art is only worthwhile if it has Societal Significance. That surprised me. Do people really say/think that? Not in my corner of the internet, anyway. When I think of the quintessential artist, I think of this: There’s a high schooler in LD chat named Rebel who’s obsessed with the Cookie Run gacha and often posts fanart of his favs. “Artist” is too broad a category to have a single Platonic ideal, but “anime fanartist” is definitely a core archetype.

That’s how I got my start. Drawing cool anime guys was the whole point. Somewhere in a box in the basement are stacks of probably terrible Cloud Strife drawings. At some point I did a cyanotype of Zack which is still pinned to the corkboard in my childhood bedroom, although it's very much not lightfast and is in a pretty ragged state by now.

I’ve drifted considerably over time. I like the anime aesthetic as much as ever, but for whatever reason, my own art has diverged. Though I frequently doodle people, my 2026 folder of “good”/”complete” pieces doesn't have a single person. Lots of trees and flowers. Lots of creatures and houses, sometimes realistic, more often not. Art is just about the simple joy of making cool stuff. (Which is also the LMA view. We are on the same wavelength.) It runs the full gamut from fancy landscapes to shitposts. Actually I'm very fond of shitpost art, like the time HGR was going on and on about a particular slime in a particular Mina room and I did a painting of it. That's the power of being an artist.

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An incident from first grade: I drew a house. I thought it was pretty good. The teacher, Polly, criticized it for lacking a chimney. She said if I drew a house like that in fifth grade, I would lose points.

I'm still salty about this. We didn't even draw houses in fifth grade (and if we did, they wouldn't have been graded; the teacher said he couldn't grade art and gave everyone E for Excellent).

Nowadays I draw all kinds of houses and they don't always have chimneys. But they are a nice visual element, and I gave BB's cupcake house a candle chimney.

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Saturday night was the unveiling of presents. It turns out I did not even get several seconds of interest. Mom was like "Look at this card-" and BB was already running past her to the basket of toys.

It's fine. The birthday haul: From Mom and Dad, he got a set of sandpit toys, a set of squishy bao, number blocks, a mosaic tile block thing, and sticker books. From his parents, he got a sandwich play set, an ice cream play set, and I think there was more but he was already overstimulated so they decided to save the rest for tomorrow. Also there were TWO birthday cakes. I can hear his parents upstairs right now trying to get him to go to sleep. Good luck.