this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2025
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The Grind & Bind Art Alchemist's Guild

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This is a dark place.

Most art will leave you feeling inspired, maybe even joyful — if not a little thoughtful. But not this art.

This is a place of paint drinking gremlins with caustic burns on our hands and ink stains on our feet. A dark, damp basement smelling of bleach and burning and bioplastics, of empty wallets and ephemeral passions, of education, of science.

Most art makes people better, but this place can only make you worse, poorer, stained, and consumed by the craft.

Welcome to The Grind and Bind Art Alchemist's Guild.

An artist's community for the kind of people who don't just paint, they scavenge pigment from rotten leftovers. It's for potters who build their own kilns and dig their clay up from river beds, and for weavers who spin their own wool from the fleece they sheared that morning.

All flavors are welcome. Talk about your materials, your processes, post art lore, discuss art-adjacent topics, and share your pieces for questions, praise and critique.

How it goes:

Be kind

Do onto others with kindness and civility. Be curious. Follow the instance rules.

Images:

All posts must have an image, even if you're asking for advice. Post your cat, or your neighbour's cat, whatever.

This isn't the community for AI unless you built it yourself and trained it off your own work.

Please attribute appropriately. Tag NSFW if necessary.

Tags Required

[Show and Tell]— Show off your finished or mostly finished pieces, your DIY art-making materials such as paints, spun wool, brick kilns, bioplastics reactor, etc.

[Advice Wanted] — "How do you...?" and "Please help, something exploded," kind of thing.

[Info] — Free, online information on DIY media. Please include a webarchive link if a site asks for personal details.

[Discussion] — In the huddle of stained alchemists, debates and hugs are equally encouraged.

(Mods only) [Challenge] — Try something new or show off your niche skills.

[Misc] — Anything that doesn't fit in the above categories yet still vibes with the community.

On Self-Promotion

We all need to put food in the ferret bowl, but let's not talk money here. If someone asks to buy something, please take it to DMs.

!artmarket@lemmy.world is geared toward self promotion.

Icon drawn by Wren

Banner image taken by Cottonbro on Pexels

This is a new community, the structure and rules may change without notice. All things are ephemeral. Go head and shoot Wren a DM if you have any ideas for this place or want to help out.

founded 6 days ago
MODERATORS
 

Photo: The gum wall in Seattle, Washington, U.S.A. by Hudson MacDonald on Pexels.

Cicada exoskeleton jewelry? Pop can tab armor? A wedding dress spun and knit from plastic bags?

What was your weirdest inspiration?

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[–] Wren@lemmy.today 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Maybe not the weirdest, but the most interesting was sound. I helped a friend make recordings of herself saying different phrases, like "I love you" and "You betcha," edited colours and backgrounds for the waveforms so they looked cool, then printed and framed them as gifts for her partner.

[–] GrantUsEyes@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Very creative. I enjoy when a process has layers like that, my stuff in contrast tends ti be very literal.

[–] Wren@lemmy.today 2 points 1 day ago

It was sorta literal, in the sense that we turned "I love you" into a gift. I suppose it's more thinking about different ways to convey a message.