heya!

sorry to anyone offended by the concrete stuff that can be found in the steven universe art book that recently came out.

i drew concrete during a little writing exercise we usually do when we’re planning stuff for the next season. we were given a few minutes to come up with a design, then the drawing is passed on and someone else writes a description. i won’t say who that was as i don’t want to open them up to harassment.

the person who wrote the comment brought what was going on with this character online to my attention a few days ago. they expressed regret over being careless and not really thinking of how it could be seen as a negative thing. they made a mistake. we talked about it and they’ve learned from this experience.

as far as concretes design goes, i drew her pretty expressionless. i think all i used was a stylo and a warm grey copic to give her a little more detail. i hadn’t really thought about her since that writing exercise. if i had more time i woulda drawn her cuter. i wanted to get across the idea that her skin would be dark. i get how the contrast with her lips could be seen as a racist caricature. if she was ever to be in the show i’m sure we would’ve developed her into a great character.

we do our best to approach the characters on the show in a thoughtful way. we’ve made some mistakes and missed some things. we’re always learning along the way, tho…we’ll continue to make mistakes. we’re not perfect and there’s no such thing as a perfect cartoon.

something we talk about on the crew a lot is how excited we are for the future. we’re excited to see what people who were into SU end up creating 10 or 20 years from now. the mistakes we’re making now, hopefully people continue to discuss them. hopefully people learn from our mistakes. they’ll probably make some new ones along the way, but the people that come up after that will hopefully learn from those mistakes, too.

i’m very sorry to anyone that was hurt by the images and comments. if you’re discussing things online, i hope you can do so in a caring and understanding way. i hope you have people around you that can understand your feelings.

thanks for reading <3

lamar