#''I like the art but if the subject of the art and the artist who made it ask that I not make a weird comment-

[thepookainthehat]

I know that it's contentious as well, but...

If people do not buy a commission, I don't write it. I have a slightly harder month. I pay my bills because I have a day job, but if I did not, I would be a little hungrier.

I know that there are some artists who can get $700 for a commission, and that is through skill, self promotion, a legacy of good work, and frankly, complex and high value commissions. There are plenty of people on the market who get considerably less.

If you want to say "commissions are too expensive", then you should start cooking up a scheme by which people who make their living from the generation of art can live comfortably and do it for the joy of creation. (It is very likely that certain, very niche subjects will suffer, and others explode.)

Instead, if your take is "I will use a machine that raises the world temperature, pollutes the skies, creates derivative and shittier product, and steals its core materials from people I did not wish to pay", then you're just an asshole.

Can’t say I can trust any online communists who go out of their way to devalue the concept of labour.

[dead-lights]

nibbles // the devampiros

I was supposed to be making embarrassing old-timey pictures of the DeVampiros for the Vatores to make fun of, I got distracted, and now it's a whole thing. here's some lore!

operation high fang

After the end of Operation Eternal Flame, a group of Vampires came out of hiding to start the initiative. Through a successful propaganda campaign, they branded Vampires as refined and classy, boasting of what they offer through their historical knowledge and charismatic ways. At the same time, they smeared Werewolves as dirty and dangerous monsters, lacking in control. The results were catastrophic for the new Werewolf communities who were still maturing as an occult.

(i compiled all game quotes about the century conflict/surrounding events here - the high fang stuff is at the very bottom, my headcaons are below the cut. also if you don't recognize the guy, he's the vampire Elle bat- and coffin-fucked in the trailers/the guy from the painting over Vlad's fireplace)

My hc is that Elle is originally from Aria, the coven of the arts. Aria had very pointedly decided not to get involved with the Century Conflict - they were artists, not combatants, and few made it past the rank of Prime (which is largely why Elle left - she was hungry for prestige and wanted to grow her power). The result was that the overwhelming majority of the coven, including Elle's parents, were slaughtered by werewolves and spellcasters.

After the war, vampires found themselves in a weakened state and with no allies to speak of, and were terrified of the day when spellcasters and werewolves would rebuild their numbers. To secure their futures, they needed to break the alliance between spellcasters and werewolves. Vlad's conquest of Forgotten Hollow showed how easily humans could be manipulated to be used against their enemies, so they decided to utilize his old techniques to wage a propaganda campaign known as Operation High Fang.

Elle rallied the surviving members of her coven of origin to join High Fang. With their cultured upbringings and familiarity with human art, they were uniquely well-suited to promote this new, classy image of vampires. They were also pretty mad about spellcasters and werewolves slaughtering their kin, and were determined to take their revenge. Also, they were a bunch of classy snobs who did just like going to fancy parties, eating fancy foods, and talking about fancy things.

The first part of this plan required that they infiltrate mundane high society. In the beginning, they mostly played human, gathering information and forming strategies. By the time they started revealing their true natures to humans, they'd built up the social skills and relationships to ensure that they were well-received.

Once they'd rehabilitated the image of vampires in mundane society, they were able to move onto the most vital part of their plan: convincing spellcasters that they're better than werewolves, but that is a subject for another render.

As I've mentioned more than a few times, I really hate making faces in CAS. Since most of the faces in this scene were either not visible or out of focus, I got REALLY lazy about making background sims for this one, with this result:

what makes this even worse is Caleb/Lilith/Lily's moms are identical twins because I couldn't be bothered to make 2 sisters...

1920s clothes by @happylifesims

ferronnière and flower hair ornament by @the-melancholy-maiden

elle's hair/accessory by kiara zurk

blender scene: classic art deco hall

[bonesmarinated]

Last year I done some outfits for Lacazette (x) including casual and stage gear, I wanted to do some armour for him but undecided between buhurt or LARP. After spending more time learning how a set of armour work and look into a lot of fabulous manuscripts I decide jousting is his hobby now :))) 🦢🦢 He's not a professional jouster but he's well served in the sport, an intense opponent who loves wreaking people. He has logged thousands of hours in his armour, run thousands of joust courses, fought on foot and in the tourney. The Norwegian 🦇 The Belgian 🦢 The Arbëreshë 🐬 The Brit ❤️

[kipsa-hoy]

Etho and his weird eyes, even the normal one, yeah it's weird to

[bella-rose29]

there is literally no reason to use ai

none at all

I'm going on a rant I'm sorry but it pains me so much to see people using it because where are your critical thinking skills??? this is the point of being human, is thinking and creating for ourselves so that we can also create joy. not just joy for us, but joy for others, because whatever work you put out someone out there will enjoy it.

as a writer and someone who dabbles in art it makes me so sad when I see ai based work, because these things are what make us human!!!!

we've been telling stories since the beginning of humanity!!! we've been creating art since then too!!! it's how we communicate and interact and express ourselves, and best of all it doesn't cost the planet.

there's one specific post that always comes to mind when ai is mentioned now, and it's someone saying "I will never understand how high schoolers managed before chat. your telling me you sat here and wrote a 600 word essay by yourself..."

yes, the wrong your was used. yes, the caption said "yet I'm still failing".

600 words is nothing. I can sit and write 600 words in about half an hour. yes okay I'm a fast writer and even faster typer, but 600 words is nothing, and the reason I can write it so fast is because I developed the skills for it. if people use ai for schoolwork then people will get dumber, because they won't develop the things they need to be able to write properly. and I don't just mean essays and stories (because yeah I'm predominantly a fic writer), but basic things like problem solving and writing a simple email.

my uni degree is classics so I have to write super long essays (6000 words is the longest I've done, the rest are between 2k and 3k words), and I have to use my brain for it. I can't just plug the question into chat gpt and hand that in, not just because we have ai checkers but because I need an opinion and I need to analyse and debate and think. 600 words of essay is nothing, but it sets you up for doing longer pieces like 2500 words of essay. I'm aware that not everyone will study a subject that needs essays, and not everyone will go to uni, but this stuff is important.

as an artist (ish) it upsets me because I know how much work and time and effort goes into creating a piece. my mum does a lot of painting and she spends hours and hours and hours on one piece, and feels so great about herself after because she can look at it and say wow, *I* did that. art has done wonders for all my family, and it does wonders for me. it doesn't have to be perfect but that's the whole point, because it shows that a human created it. by using ai it diminishes the artists who work so hard to get their pieces out there for people to see and enjoy

so yeah, there's no reason to use ai. not ever, not even a little bit. I have no idea how coherent any of this is, but oh well

[ink-the-artist]

You draw mouths like people who like vore do

[misternibbs]

tell me that I still have stars in my eyes

(jashzine art! read under cut to find link to twt post :3)

EYYYYYYYY JASHZINE IS OUT BAHBAY THAT'S RIGHT. HOLY FUCKING JASHBALLS. I'LL LINK IT WHEN I FIND THE POST FOR IT ON HERE BUT UNTIL THEN HERE'S THE TWITTER POST yyyeeeeEEEEAHHHHHHH CHAT WOOOOOOO

in all seriousness I feel so honoured to be featured alongside some really, REALLY TALENTED PEOPLE. LIKE HOLY BALLS. MY ART DOESN'T NEARLY COMPARE TO . EVERYONE ELSE'S DUDE LIKE. OUGHHHHHHHH FUCK EVERYONE'S SO FUCKIN TALENTED AND TOTALLY TUBULAR I CAN'T. honestly I shouldn't be here, think I walked into the wrong building. I suck balls this art fucking. I fucking loathe this piece anyways here's the progress

(^^^^ alt colour version. should've gone with this everypony we were ROBBED it fits the song more. Aughhhhhh)

and before you get on my ass for his body type being so fucking wrong here's a doodle I did around the time I was working on this with a more correct body type. I unironically think it's better (plus you get closeup on face)

again, please check out the jashzine, AND FOLLOW !!! FOLLOW THE ARTISTS !!!! WHO DID THE ART !!!!!! PLEASE THEY'RE SO SO SO SO COOL AND TALENTED OH MY GOD PLEASSSEEEEEEEE thanks for reading this btw comment "teapot" down below if you reached this point in the video hhahah fucking . kill me

[amtrak12]

After a conversation with a friend about this weird trend of fic readers who only want epic length fics (and also what seems to be a massive misunderstanding between parties on terms and their definitions), I went searching for the fandom sources I cut my teeth on. I don't have much bookmarked from those days anymore, but googling got me to this fiction length/terminology breakdown from a Livejournal blog. (Which also has good fandom definitions for other terms like A/N and fanon too, so if you're super new to fandom, go check that out.)

The definitions come from the publishing world (hence the page counts), but fandom and fanfic has always borrowed heavily from official publishing terminology. Flash fiction (aka, anything less than 1k words) is called a 'ficlet' within fandom. We call everything else a fic until it reaches the novella mark -- which may start at 20k words but as synecdochic breaks down on their Dreamwidth blog, there's a lot of overlap between short stories and novella word counts. Because, when you're not constrained by physical page counts, the real dividing line between short stories and novellas are the number of plots and themes you're using. (Seriously, go read their meta on this topic. It's fantastic!) Either way, once you're hitting tens of thousands of words, you're in longfic territory. And then if your fic is even longer than that -- 100k+ like shown in the screenshot above -- it's called an epic fic.

And these terms, longfic and epic, are important because they're used to differentiate these stories from the average fic. Because, at least in the 2000s up until the 2020s, the most common fic lengths you ran into were between 1k-20k words. "Fic" made the reader assume only a few thousand words at most. It's only when you changed the term to drabble or ficlet or longfic that they would realize 'oh this is going to be shorter or longer than normal'.

I don't really understand why that baseline assumption has changed amongst the newer demographics (and maybe amongst some long-running fandom members too?). I've seen a lot of theories and 'tiktokification' complaints, but I honestly don't know what's true. And I don't want to start a fight or even try to change anyone's minds if they are dead set against reading short story length fics. You can do what you want!

Just maybe shift your attitude about it a little bit? Remember that it's a personal preference the same way tropes are, and that one story length isn't better than another. Just like tropes, each story length serves its purpose. Some stories are best told in 1-2k words. Some are best told as 100 word drabbles -- or even a single sentence! And then, yes, some stories do need to be 100k+ in order to be told properly.

But that's not every story. And it shouldn't be expected of fic writers to pad a 1500 word plot into some sprawling epic just because they left it on a cliffhanger. The cliffhanger is probably the point of that fic! Short stories are an entirely separate art form to novels and as such are able to cover different topics than novels can or cover the same topics differently. And that's what makes them special!!

And look at that word count breakdown by genre! That's mainstream publishing standards! Now, go back up there to the definition of a novel and notice that the average published novel is 80k words long.

Let me repeat that:

The average length of a published novel is 80,000 words long.

Could a novel go longer? Sure! And if you're dipping into adult sci-fi or fantasy, absolutely it will be longer! But does your fic need to be longer than the average novel in order to be good? In order for you to feel satisfied when you finish reading it? Why does the length of the fic matter more to you than the content?

idk just some rambling food for thought, but I guess too long, don't read:

~✨~ Every story length is valid ~✨~

It just depends on the plot you have and the structure you want to use to tell it.

[thatskindarough]

My actual only request and probably unpopular opinion for season 3 is that they tone down the color grading. I think season 1 looked a lot better. Season 2 was way to saturated. Crowley’s skin looked orange.

[sergle]

Do yall see the kind of stuff I gotta read in my notifications on a regular basis

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Hi!! I love this series so much, and as someone who hasn’t really drawn since they were a kid but wants to start as a hobby, do you have any advice for sort of learning to doodle on paper and get better at it? I want to start but I don’t really know how/where

The most important step in getting better at any skill is Persistence and Consistency. Practice and keep practicing! The best way to do that is to keep it fun! Picking a project helps generate ideas (e.g. drawing Pokémon, or characters from a series you like). There are also a ton of monthly prompt lists out there!

I also highly recommend scheduling in a 'drawing/practice' time in your day. For me, I started with 30-60 min before bed (bonus: its a good 'no screentime' activity), and the habit took root there.

There are a lot of 'technical' things to study but find the fun first. At a certain point you will discover you've hit a wall, and have a specific aspect/goal you want to target (colour theory, anatomy, lighting, comic layout). Then it's time to go looking for resources.

Once you have the habit and some goals, go collect some inspiration! Find people who inspire you and study their work!

Another little 'art skill builder' I recommend is the Shrimp Method! Only if you find technical challenges like this fun though (Example of one of my studies below)

[royaltea000]

burnt out sorry - do ya wanna see my ocs (not giving you a choice)

Old designs -w-

[genericpuff]

working on my biggest fix-it / "foefic" project ever

and i'm already stuck on the 'chronically overthink what style to draw it in' stage because ofc

[zetsubobu]

if you see this, what is a topic that you would love to talk about but no one ever asks you about it?

[longagoitwastuesday]

Every day I am haunted by the fact JJK could be amazing but it will be just idk Bleach or something

[mortimer]

if youre wondering what criteria i use to decide to tag/categorize something as either painting or illustration, the answer is that it's almost completely arbitrary