Winter
Holiday Lights
©2019 by Multyashka-sweet | Source
Here on Joshiba I have a folder under my Seasons Collections folder named "For Consideration," and it is the saddest folder of them all because even though I do find candidate imagery for these Seasons entries throughout the year, I never go to the trouble of noting them down, argh! So, like usual, I found myself shopping around for this year's Winter image just this week.
I'd originally been thinking to find some neat art(ists' concepts) of Jupiter as seen from the surface of Io, like this delight, but it wasn't large enough for my purposes, and none of the other pieces I found on the Internet had the warmth or wonder. I was even willing (after much deliberation!) to make peace with the fact that Jupiter isn't that large in Io's sky (but it is pretty darn large!) Also, in the comments, I saw someone asking if the art depicted Io being terraformed, which made me smile: You can't terraform Io! The tidal forces churning within it can't be quelled without relocating the whole moon (or, if you're feeling especially spicy, Jupiter itself).
Having been failed by the Bringer of Jollity on this jolliest of solstitial occasions, and recognizing that my Seasons color palette has skewed impersonal and (physically) blue in recent times, I decided to look for something warm and personal, bonus points if it involved a topiary decked out in faerie lights (or "holiday lights" as I put it on the googles), which is what my log-in screen on Computer Frand is currently showing: a much warmer composition of this sight from the Boston Public Garden. Sadly my google fu failed me again, so I made my search more generic, cutting out all the qualifiers and just keeping the "holiday lights" part of my query.
Well, one of the top results for that was the incredibly well-done artwork you see in the photo above, which just so happens to be titled "Holiday Lights." This was so realistic that I initially thought the background was a real photo. But upon zooming in I realized that, nope, it is fully drawn.
The figure in this piece, a commissioned drawing of a character named Riko by the artist Multyashka-sweet, is pretty much the platonic ideal of what I think most people think of when they hear the word "Furry." He has that certain look to him, doesn't he? I don't think I've said anything about Furries or Otherkin in years, but I still support the community and its people as an emphatic ally and wish I still had friends among them! They still deal with shit and ridicule to this day, yet on the whole they are a cut above the general population. (Isn't that how it always goes? Haters gonna hate!)
It's a beautiful photo, and warms me up inside. I am also horribly amused at the fur lining Riko's coat collar. Did he take it from the flayed corpse of his nemesis as a perversely fluffy trophy? Hee hee...! I hope he stays toasty all winter.
As may we all!