#.......................yikes..................

[ancharan]

this is a really nice guide! I like it a lot! I feel like it also bears mentioning that each of these stages theoretically be the final step in your process.

what I mean by that is that when I was in Middle School I drew hundreds of comics with stick figures. for years and years that's all I drew... then for years following it I only drew les mis chibi comics. the things I wanted to do and represent with my art got more complicated, so my art had to evolve to become more complicated with it. like, if I wanted a dramatic close up in my comic if somebody's eyes, I needed to learn how to draw eyes.

the point at the end of the day is to have fun doing. it you don't have to draw a fully-fledged person to complete something. if you have a funny fanart idea - or even literally any kind of idea that can be represented artistically at all - you already have the tools to communicate it. there is value to be gained from doing hundreds of stupid stick figure comics. sure, practicing anatomy and shape language and doing targeted exercises all have very clear value - I'm not saying don't do them in the slightest - but don't feel pressured, or like you're not learning if you're not doing anatomical drills lol. you're still training the muscles in your hand, you're still developing a familiarity with the tools you're using.

@dimiclaudeblaigan asked for a tutorial on how to begin drawing. Good news! If you can draw a funky looking stick man, you have already started!

I think that stick people are a great starting point for artists because of the things you can learn from them that will be important later on.

If you are able to draw a circle and a couple of lines, you can easily put together a stick person.

Congratulations! You have started to draw. :)

A stick person is a very minimal artistic representation of a real life person. It is simple yet recognizable, and is widely used in art, media, and signage.

But what can a stick person teach us about drawing people that look more like… well, people? Lets have a look!

By simply adding a few more lines, we can add a pair of eyes and a mouth. Maybe even a little triangle nose! Or half circles for ears. We can now draw a face, which provides a basis for all sorts of expressions.

These simple additions can allow us to explore the wide range of human emotion and individuality.

This may seem like the basics of the basics. But that is what we want! In order to get to the point where we are able to draw complex, elaborate representations of humans and objects, we will need to start with simple shapes like lines and circles and build our understanding from there.

For instance, lets give our stick person some cool new features, such as hands and feet. I chose little squiggly circles to represent hands, and triangles to represent feet.

We can go a step further and modify the body of the stick person to include shoulders, hips, elbows and knees. These parts of the human body are quite complex in real life But here, all we need to do is add a few simple lines and dots to our stick person.

The lines provide some additional structural elements to our stick person's body, which are the shoulders and the hips. The dots indicate the points of articulation - elbows and knees, the places where the arms and legs bend!

Now we can use our stick person to show us an even wider range of human movement, action, and expression.

Our little drawing of a human being is evolving! All it took was adding a few more lines and shapes here and there.

By elongating some of the existing lines and making the head an oval instead of a circle, we can give our stick person proportions that resemble that of a real life human.

By this point, we have managed to add more complexity to our stick person simply by using our ability to draw lines, circles, and other basic shapes!

These basic ideas are the building blocks that will enable us to create more complex shapes.

The next part may be a considerable step up if you are absolutely new to drawing, but I have decided to include it in order to show you how complex objects like the human body can be built from shapes that are a bit more complex than circles and lines.

For example. Two ovals and a rectangle can be combined to create a cylinder.

Six squares can be combined to create a cube, or a box. Here, each square is distorted slightly depending on which way the cube is facing.

Note that the back faces of the cube and the bottom of the cylinder are hidden. These shapes allow us to visualize that which should not normally visible.

A sphere from all perspectives can be represented by a circle. But we can make it more like a sphere by adding lighting and shadow if we so desire.

Cubes, cylinders, and spheres are examples of 'solid shapes' because they consist of 3 dimensions.

Lets see how these solid shapes can be used to compose the human body.

By stacking three cylindrical objects, we can create a torso. Two spheres have been added to form shoulders, while a smaller cylinder forms the neck.

An arm is an alternating sequence of spheres and cylinders connected together. Note that the hand has been simplified for this example.

We can apply these solid shapes to the rest of the body to give us a more recognizable representation of the human form. It doesn't even have to be perfect. And just like that, our stick figure now has a silhouette that is unmistakably a person!

In the above examples, notice that we kept the stick person at the beginning while building up the shapes and solids around it. This is because the stick person serves as a guide for positioning the body and its various parts -> also known as posing.

You can do the same thing to everyday objects! Here, I drew a wine glass by stacking these three dimensional solid shapes.

The cup and its contents are two ovoid shapes that were cut in half. The stem is a very thin cylinder shape. The base is a cylinder with a slightly wider bottom.

Solid shapes help inform us how objects and parts of the human body may appear from different perspectives.

For example, a sphere can be used to demonstrate how the human head appears when looking up or down, turned to the side, or tilted at an angle.

With these examples, I hope I have managed to convinced you that if you can draw a circle and a couple of lines, you can draw a person! You just have to train your eye to recognize the simple shapes within complex objects. Try it with everyday objects as well! Or even your favourite media! A drawing subject can be as simple or as complex as you envision it to be.

Once you have mastered that, there are many aspects of drawing you can explore from here that may require you to seek additional resources or a fellow artist's advice.

Last of all, remember that drawing is an iterative process. Even if you draw something correct the first time, you will need to draw it again and again to get it right all times! And by making small changes like the ones we explored in this tutorial, your drawings will gradually transform!

I hope what I've demonstrated here are enough to provide the basics of how to get started with drawing objects and people, and also to help refresh more experienced artists. :) Hopefully I didn't go too off topic with what was requested, and let me know if there are any more questions I can answer.

Cheers :3

[vrepit-salt]

[doctorsiren]

Day 20 of Sirentober / Doctober

Hands / Journal

You can tell who never made a deal

Available as a print on my Etsy Shop

[housederiva]

When Veilguard comes out, please keep it in the back of your mind every single time you interact with Varric and Lucanis that their writer got laid off with little to no warning and that she is and always will be a Dragon Age legend and one of the reasons why the franchise has stayed afloat for as long as it has

[kermitspussy]

like where did it come from i was literally doing a silly little art and craft

[elfgrove]

New Things to Beware on the Internet

On May 3rd, Google released 8 new top-level domains (TLDs) -- these are new values like .com, .org, .biz, domain names. These new TLDs were made available for public registration via any domain registrar on May 10th.

Usually, this should be a cool info, move on with your life and largely ignore it moment.

Except a couple of these new domain names are common file type extensions: ".zip" and ".mov".

This means typing out a file name could resolve into a link that takes you to one of these new URLs, whether it's in an email, on your tumblr blog post, a tweet, or in file explorer on your desktop.

What was previously plain text could now resolve as link and go to a malicious website where people are expecting to go to a file and therefore download malware without realizing it.

Folk monitoring these new domain registrations are already seeing some clearly malicious actors registering and setting this up. Some are squatting the domain names trying to point out what a bad idea this was. Some already trying to steal your login in credentials and personal info.

This is what we're seeing only 12 days into the domains being available. Only 5 days being publicly available.

What can you do? For now, be very careful where you type in .zip or .mov, watch what website URLs you're on, don't enable automatic downloads, be very careful when visiting any site on these new domains, and do not type in file names without spaces or other interrupters.

I'm seeing security officers for companies talking about wholesale blocking .zip and .mov domains from within the company's internet, and that's probably wise.

Be cautious out there.

[sarahthecoat]

what we need is something like glaze or whatever, that comes in a little lapel pin emitter, which will pixellate the wearer in any photos.

can people please stop filming the entire fucking world around them for public consumption? and especially random fucking strangers who you did not ask???

I work at a park and man the front desk. and I'm photographed and filmed a lot. I'm talking easily 20+ times per day. most of the times, it's parents filming me swearing in their kids as junior rangers. which. they're intending to film their kids. what they get is me and the back of their kids' heads.

there's this recurring problem that like. people forget we're real people? like yeah you're filming your kid, but you're filming me interacting with your kid. I could count the amount of times someone has asked me permission to do this in the past year on one hand. and sometimes that's after they already start filming.

Like, I'm not an actor. I did not agree to this. You could be a dick and make the argument that I'm a public figure, but I'm not. This is not a persona and my uniform is not a costume. I'm a person trying to do my job and help people and teach them about science and history. And you know what makes it harder to do that? The knowledge that anything I say or do could end up shared with thousands of people. The fact that if I fuck up the wording of this kid's junior ranger pledge, or I sneeze, or make some basic mistake, it's not just a funny or embarrassing moment for me and this one family. It could end up on tiktok.

And okay, those are the people intending to film their own kids and not thinking or caring about the collateral. What's worse is the people who film everything. A few times a week some guy walks into the visitor center, phone already horizontal in front of their face, narrating what they're doing and seeing. They come up to the desk and ask me questions, phone in my face. They take wide establishing shots of the visitor center and every visitor in it. None of us agreed to this! None of these people consented to be in your youtube video! We are not the fucking set dressing of whatever travel instagram story you're making!

I don't know where I'm going with this. This is really only the tip of the iceberg. Sometimes people ask us to repeat what we just did - swear in their kid, or explain a detail, or hand them a fucking map - so they can get a second take, and they're already filming so if we say no we look like the asshole. Sometimes we're asked innocuous things like to point out a landmark, and next week there's a photo of us in the 15,000 member Rangers Pointing at Things facebook group (yep, real thing). One time my entire 45 minute evening program was filmed without my permission and I was informed after the fact. This happens all the time, and I'm giving park ranger examples, but this happens to so many people in service work or public positions every single fucking day.

I guess just, next time you go to film in a public space, take a second. Think about who you're about to film, if they agreed to that, what might happen if a video of them went viral. there's a reason I'm not out as trans at work. And then, maybe. don't. or at least fucking ask.

[utilitycaster]

"why should I get invested in shows if they'll just get canceled" I was deeply invested in Heroes (2006) and it was not canceled, it just got really terrible. I also got really invested in the sandwich I had a few weeks ago despite it only lasting like 15 minutes. You must embrace the ephemeral. You must be willing to love things that may not love you back, that might betray you, or that may die an untimely death. As the great philosopher Mr. Mitchell Lee Hedberg said "I'm not gonna stop doing something because of what happens at the end."

[froopa-coopa]

seeing it through 🖤

[sixth-light]

Holy shit someone finally leaked what went down with the Hugos and from a quick skim it appears to be the worst possible scenario: that is, Western award-runners PREEMPTIVELY censoring anything they thought the Chinese government might not like. Clownery AND fascism.

[imanalbertross]

Sometimes your cassette player would malfunction and pull the tape out of your cassette. In some cases, the tape was irreparably damaged. This was called eating a tape. And it sucked.

Also, the mechanism that read the tapes could become dirty, and then it wouldn't play the tape correctly and could lead to an eaten tape. That could be prevented by getting a head cleaner, which looked like a cassette, but didn't have tape. Instead it had a band inside that you could add a provided cleaner to. The head cleaner then had a number of uses (sometimes for a few months) before it needed replacing. If your heads got dirty, you'd just reach for your head cleaner and play it to the finish in both directions. It made no noise except the sound of the mechanism playing the tape.

Younger writers. Please, just know that you could not skip to different songs on a cassette tape, that’s CDs. With tapes you pressed fast forward or rewind and prayed.

Also, VHS tapes did not have menu screens. Your only options were play, fast forward, rewind, pause, stop, or eject.

Y’all are making me feel like the crypt keeper here, I’m begging you 😭

[taiyo-tenebris]

My two pieces for the 2024 Pokemon TCG Illustrator Contest! I didn't place in the top 300 but I still had fun drawing it anyway.

[mollysunder]

All the concept art of young Silco really drives home how thoroughly Vander destroyed him. It's like night and day where young Silco is relaxed, healthy, handsome, and genuinely happy, older Silco is rigid, guarded, scarred, and his condition is actively deteriorating. Even though Vander failed to drown Silco, he really did kill him in every way that mattered.

It's even worse when you think about Silco and Vander through a shipping lens as the concept art and the peacetime au does. When you do, you see Vander committed a horrific act of violence on his partner, and the community took Vander's side years after the fact.

[markscherz]

why are you skeptical of the current explaintion for Brachycephalus's landing issues? 👀

Basically, Brachycephalus are the only miniaturised frogs that seem to have these problems, and there are other frogs with equally small vestibular systems that work fine. I have seen tiny Stumpffia jump over a metre and then jump again moments later, which Brachycephalus are apparently incapable of.

Moreover, the behaviour we see in Brachycephalus is not just disorientation, which I think should be accompanied by wild flailing, but more closely resembles the spontaneous myotonic stiffening that occurs in fainting goats. Compare:

We also know that the entire otic capsule of Brachycephalus is, to use the scientific terminology, fucked, leading to the seemingly impossible but apparently confirmed consequence that they cannot hear their own calls. This is dramatically different from most if not all other miniaturised frogs.

So basically, I think Brachycephalus are a special case, and that the current explanation that supposes that the fluid of the semicircular canals cannot travel fast enough to allow orientation, is at best genus-specific and not miniaturisation-determined, and at worst simply wrong. Hence, I have a grant application seeking to test it in other miniaturised frogs. It has been rejected before, so I am not holding my breath, but it would be nice to be able to look into this.

[slitherpunk]

Surely this won't lead to more issues with accounts getting hijacked, or impersonations, or username hoarding, or getting messages from randos, or etc etc etc . . .

really hoping they don't go through with this, I think I'll leave feedback

[boomposhpow]

i dont think he liked it in there