Killjoycore - Blog Posts

You know, I'm the kind of person with like 80+ ongoing projects at any given time, and I rarely ever post things on here about them because I'm always waiting until they're finished and trying to get things perfect first and then I wind up never posting them. But I have to remind myself there's no law against showing off WIPs, and in fact, that's actually like a normal thing to do on tumblr. So, I thought I'd show off my progress so far on my Danger Days phone case insert I've been working on!

[Image ID: a tall narrow painting roughly the shape of a smartphone. The background is a rainbow watercolor fading radially from one color into another, starting with red in the top left, orange in the top right, yellow down the right side, green in the bottom right, blue in the bottom left, then purple shading from blue violet to red violet heading back up the left side. The watercolor has been textured with a salt resist technique creating small floral shapes of lighter paint. On top of this background, “Look Alive Sunshine” is written in tall wavy block letters in an assortment of colors meant to contrast the background, such that the “L” is light green, the “A” is yellow, and the “S” is orange and so on. Some letters are fainter, written in sharpie that has faded into the paper, but others are brighter, having been gone over in acrylic paint. There is a ring of poked holes in the top left roughly where the phone’s camera sits and a bit of uncovered background space to the top and bottom of the text design, which covers the majority of the piece. End ID] (*If there’s anything you’d like clarified about this description feel free to ask, I found it tricky to describe clearly. )

I tried to copy the comics font here--wait, actually, I'm just going back through my reference images, and I think the text I copied from for this is actually from something by @tapefish that was itself based on the comics font. Yeah, this is based on a design that's on their redbubble actually, though I didn't trace it specifically, but that's what this is drawn from. In that design, both words in "look alive" are on the line above "sunshine", so because of the way I've done it here, "sunshine" wound up being twice as narrow, hence why letters are all really squished, but hopefully it'll still be more or less legible!

I went over the letters in sharpie initially, but they were really hard to see, so I'm gradually painting over them. I'm also probably going to put more pictures and/or text on here, like a Danger Days spider and/or an eye like the one on the mailbox, and possibly "keep running" and/or "art is the weapon" in the space at the top or bottom.

As for the color scheme, I just went "how can I make this as colorful as physically possible" and ran with that, lol :) Well, to be more precise, I did a rainbow ombre in the background and then tried to make each letter roughly the complementary color to the part of the background it was on, but I tried to still have a variety of colors in the foreground as well.

Mostly, I'm just happy I've finally gotten around to making some progress since I first did the watercolor for the background literally like 2 years ago in our first pandemic summer, and that's just the rate at which I work on things sometimes, lol.

Anyways, I could ramble about my design and my plans for this for a while yet, and I could definitely proofread and edit this post some more, but I'm trying to stop myself from spending all afternoon on this post now instead of actually continuing to work on my phone case insert. Feel free to ask me stuff about this, though I can't guarantee anything remotely resembling a quick response haha. But hopefully someday before another two years have passed, I'll be posting a finished version of this! For now, enjoy this rare glimpse into my artistic process, hahaha.

Let’s go on a trip

I would like to present: Pirate Killjoycore! I’m pretty sure I’m not the first person to suggest pirates in the Danger Days ‘verse*–after all, we know that east of Battery City, the desert is full of runaways fighting BLI, but there’s all that ocean to the west unaccounted for. Why wouldn’t some ‘joys run off to sea instead of the desert, steal some boats, and carry on the fight on the other front? 

So, I wanted to try and capture how the Killjoy vibe might play out on the pirate side of things. I figure some ‘joys steal big yachts and graffiti them up and manage to run them off of the same mystical fuel source cars in the Zones run on. Maybe others who can’t get the magic gas thing to work for them or who don't want to rely on fuel patchwork together sails from scraps of fabric, graffiti those, and cobble together some rigging--and maybe some were lucky enough to grab up actual Tall Ships for that authentic Pirate Vibe.

If you’re a pirate ‘joy, of course, your boat will also be your crew’s home, so I figure they’re pretty cozy and colorful inside, too (and probably pretty cluttered, but in a homey way). As far as Pirate Killjoy fashion, I imagine it’s as bright, chaotic, and colorful as its counterpart Zones fashion, except naturally more pirate-inspired, with long swishy coats and big hats. 

I have a lot more Pirate Killjoycore pictures saved that didn’t make it into this moodboard, too, so let me know if there’s something specific you’d like to see more of! I can always make posts with individual pictures, too; my standard moodboard formatting wasn’t working this time since I needed my pictures to be different widths and heights for this one, so I had to make it elsewhere, hence why it’s all one image, but if you want to see one or more pictures closer, let me know. 

Seriously though feel free to ask me about Pirate Killjoys and related aesthetics! I am very slow about answering asks but I do have many thoughts about this :) 

Sources and more below the cut.

*I thought for sure at one point I’d seen a headcanon post about pirates in the DDverse, but I haven’t been able to find anything in the tags. If you have one, feel free to tag me in it or otherwise send it my way! 

Sources: x  x  x  /  x  x  x  /  x  x  x

Disclaimer, I don’t necessarily go through all of my sources, I just grab the pictures and links from image searches; that said, I did happen to click around a bit and the image on the flickr account the bottom left picture came from is right next to a picture of a dead person so I felt like I should give fair warning in case you decide to look through that flickr at all. It appears to be some part of a funeral procession in India but the dead person is clearly visible so, fair warning. 

Also I did watch the video on La Preciosa (top left, the boat with the smiley face) and that was pretty cool (and had definite Killjoy vibes). :)  

Also technically I found the first graffitied tall ship here but I did a reverse image search to find my sources and the artist’s page has more information about the painting. Now that I look at the original post though, you can actually see the details of the painting better there I think.