#I got tired of coloring it so I’m just gonna post the lineart

[vethsbignaturals]

In love with the new url and also very jealous I didn't snatch it first!!! A very good joke. You are very lucky :D.

I just knew I had to snatch it up 🤣 here’s a Veth pondering her orbs in consolation

[artificiary-fr]

ok so arti’s unnecessary opinion time

Just wanna give a disclaimer that these are just my sort of thoughts in general, and are in no way an attempt to demean, attack, or cause drama about any artist or staff member, or community member. Just kind of what I’ve observed and come to the questions/conclusions of. I got a little opinionated at the end but I tried not to single anyone out save for I think, one unnamed example? 

I’ll put everything under the cut here, because I know I have a tendency to get wordy (and spoiler: It did. This is a super long post, I’m sorry). So, here we go...

TL;DR: I like the gene, I’ll wait for the revamp before giving a concrete opinion, there were definitely some issues, I appreciate that staff took note/action, more communication like this or the dev streams is good (though communication between staff/community is a Thing unto itself of which I probably have a Disliked Take on and that was the really long part that isn’t necessary to read)

Okay before anything: the familiars. They’re super pretty! I like the recolors, and now I’m gonna have to grind the Kelp Beds for those boss fams. Dang. I love the kitty golem recolor.

With that out of the way, here we are - the subject of today’s discussions... Glowtail.

So, my first opinion: It’s not a bad gene! I can see some curious use for it, certainly. But there are some problems with it (and yes; I am aware staff has addressed this and pulled it to fix those problems! That’ll be more relevant later on here c: )

Note One: I think I do understand why it is a gem gene. Yes, design/thematically it does appear to fit the bill of a Baldwin Gene more. But I’d like to posit it’s the completion of a gem-gene set - Wasp/Bee/Glowtail. So in that regard, it makes sense!

Note Two: My personal opinion with the gene is that I like it, but it feels... hm. Plain isn’t correct. Like it’s missing something, I guess? I wish the segmenting was a little more prominent, and that the glow or gradient had a little more glitz/glamor, maybe some glitteries around the hips, to really sell it as a gem gene. I do like the glow we have on the other bits of dragon like light reflection, though, because it adds a little bit of dimension! All in all however even so, I do like it, and I won’t cement my opinion until we see what their updated version looks like in the future.

Note Three (The Problems): The art errors. What... what happened here?

As we’ve noticed, male snappers and male tundras are the two big offenders, with large chunks of color erroneously sitting outside the lineart quite noticeably. There is also part of the ‘glow’ (the aforementioned light reflection) that doesn’t make sense - being on parts of the dragon where it shouldn’t be, like on the front of wings where the tail is not in front of said limb, but behind.

But like... how did this not get caught before it got posted? Was it a time crunch, or it just... didn’t get quality checked before this happened? It’s really unfortunate. :c

Something I do with my art - and this is just my own process/thoughts - is when I’ve put down the base color, before I do any shading/highlights/big details, I pop a layer underneath the entire drawing and fill it with a high contrast color to the palette. That way any bits where I missed coloring in - or didn’t clean up outside the lines - becomes super noticeable, and I can fix it then instead of being a problem later. Maybe doing something like this before throwing the gene through the color automation process would’ve helped?

Last Note:

I feel like part of why these errors went unnoticed is because of how often, and sometimes how rushed, some of these updates have been - and this has been more noticeable in this year than otherwise. Is it because of community dissent with wanting more updates creating more crunch? Due to low-attention reticence creating a need for pushing more ad revenue / more “come to the site there’s new”?

I’m unsure, but it’s unfortunate nonetheless. I think staff, and FR as a whole, would benefit from like... hm. How to word this...

Maybe taking more time on updates / a more extended schedule so things aren’t as crunch (of course this being said, I don’t know what the workload is like so I can’t even say if crunch is applicable), and more open communication? Like how the dev streams were going - that was pretty well liked and everyone I know got pretty excited to see em and how the art was doing. It also opened up the avenue for more open communication / more nuanced opinions or thoughts.

---

But herein lies the huge issue, I think, with communication. This is the part where I’d like to reiterate, this is just my observations, and is not intended as an attack, a vaguepost, or deliberate callout at anybody. There’s no malicious intent here. This bit could also be construed as drama I suppose, and I apologize for that because again - not the intent. Just my take.

I’ve noticed posts going ‘no drama please’ or being tired when new updates come out of like, ‘oh boy here comes the negativity’ so I don’t think it’s just me who’s seen it, but have you guys noticed when anything new comes out, there’s an immediate rush of extreme salt and negativity?

And I don’t mean posts where its like “it’s not for me” or “I don’t like it but here’s [detailed/explained reason why]” - those are the nuanced opinions I mean. Those are fine. I mean the ones where people in forums, or on the more prolific drama blogs, are just.... mean/empty? Like “FUCK staff I hate how lazy they are with this it’s shitty looking” - that really vocal generally super salty in general minority of the community. Just hate without explanation, or just kind of aimless generalized attack/complaint.

I think that’s where communication with Staff fell off the bandwagon. The really loud, really vocal minority of folks who throw super salt or yell “This Sucks You Suck” completely overshadow the people who are well intentioned with sharing their opinions or problems/criticisms. The toxic bits and really vitriolic words are what gets seen and noticed. I think this is the majority of what gets heard, which is why communication got so closed off / shut down unless positive, in recent times. Do I agree with that? No, I don’t either - but I’m just looking at this from the outside. Idk how staff feels or thinks.

And this goes for both people who don’t like the content, and people that do.

Remember that the Keel thread got locked because someone who was white-knighting started getting real nasty with people in the thread, and going to extremes insulting artists who did mock-ups to help visualize their thoughts/opinions and was just being a real douche?

What I really wish was that we could have more open communication. Some of the things I really liked to see were like: Dev Streams, Community Updates/Q&A, Opinion Polls, That Update Progress on Breed/Gene Progress from a while back. All of that was excellent. And I like to see the community responding in well thought out ways! I like to see staff more hands on too! We’re only human and love this site and our dragons and want to see it at it’s best - but they’re also only human, and make mistakes, and we don’t know what’s goin on in there, just out here.

Trello is a really good way to kind of show that communication, and is transparent, but isn’t free-to-use for businesses, so... of course I also don’t know how Stormlight Workshop runs their business/hours so I’m just blowing hot smoke. But anyway, I think everyone would benefit from slowing down and opening up. If things are going slow, that’s okay - if Staff opens up to the community and says “This is taking longer than expected, but here’s upcoming releases / current in-progresses” I think we’d be like oh okay things are happening and it’ll be nice! As compared to everyone gets super antsy, nothing’s happening, no-one is talking... and then we get hit with a bunch of updates, some of which, like today’s, have... issues.

Of course then I worry that with more open talking or “we’re experiencing delays” the more vitriolic will get even angrier/saltier which doesn’t... help... but I mean... yeah. 

ANYWAY so I’ve written a full dissertation essay here without really intending to (see? I warned y’all! I ramble/don’t shut up ahahaha) so I’m gonna just stop myself here before I start going in circles. This last chunk I don’t really know what the meat of what I was trying to say was, now, I think. Sorry about that. It was just “here’s my stream of consciousness” apparently ^^;;;;

Have a good evening y’all! Thanks for listenin’ to my (rant?) if y’all made it this far. You’re appreciated and thank you for letting me bend your ears! Stay safe in this crazy world, hang in there, and have a good one!

[odilekuronuma]

Berserk: What went wrong?

 Art by Kinzoshi.

Hello again, it’s a me.

If you haven’t guessed it by the title, this post will try to address some issues that Berserk supposedly suffers from. Because even though it is generally viewed as a masterpiece, some will find some recurring issue with it, whether it’s the pace, or the tone that has changed etc.And in light of the last chapters it seems relevant now more than ever to make such a post.

But how dare you criticize Berserk? It’s perfect!!

Hold your pitchforks, while I don’t think  Berserk suffers too much from the same woes that are common to “lesser” titles, especially shounens, there are definitely some issues with it.My aim with this post is to address the most common complaints about Berserk (the manga not the anime,there’s no point talking about that tbh, it’s just bad) , and what imo are the challenges that face Miura now and in the future.

This post isn’t aimed to be a rant either, since I’ll try to be as unbiased as possible while adressing the issues that are brought up in this post.

I-The pace

So first thing first, we have to address the giant elephant in the room. The most common complaint about Berserk is the frequent and endless breaks. Though we could argue that ever since the announcement about the Berserk anime, we saw the manga resuming publication after it went through its longest hiatus period. 

But Miura, knowing how he is, always takes a break, which is pretty much standard at this point, even when he commits to a schedule. So while that itself might be bad, the fans eventually got used to it, and don’t expect him to go for very long before he takes a break.

But that might have a much more significant impact on the manga itself. Namely the pace. And here I’m taking the last 4 chapters as an example.

While I don’t expect the Caska issue to be dealt with in one chapter, it definitely is that it felt a bit dragged out, and the break doesn’t help. Had there not been any break, we’d prolly would have been able to get to the heart of this matter, instead of having to wait till Winter to finally see the resolution to the Caska dilemma.

II- The tone

Many Berserk fans argue that the tone is much lighter now, ever since Guts decided to let go momentarily of his revenge to look for Caska. Some place the shift in tone much further down the road, around the time he acquired new companions, some of which are kids. In fact many outright blame the kids and Miura’s supposed wish to make the manga more kid friendly.

While it’s true that the tone is a bit more lighter now, due to the fact that Guts isn’t a raging lone wolf only obsessed with killing apostles as part of his revenge...I don’t actually think that the kids are to blame, or Miura is trying to make this into a kid friendly manga (as if), not even one bit.

Because there’s still some pretty gruesome things happening, even as Schierke and co got introduced. In fact quite a few of them witnessed those horrors, with the trolls and whatnot. And the tone was definitely darker on Ganishka’s side, who used women for his experiments on the daka and the man made behelit. There’s still a good amount of violence in the manga, especially towards women, but somehow we also saw the introduction of strong female characters (Schierke, Flora, Farnese after reformation,Sonia etc) who counterbalance that, and they definitely act less like damsels in distress.

And on top of that, the tone can get quite dark, as seen in the latest chapter. While it is to be expected since it’s Caska’s dream, Miura didn’t shy away from representing her anxieties in their full glory, and he went even the extra mile to portray them without the usual shading that pretty much censored genitalia in the past.

So all the dark and edgy stuff is just around the corner, and if the tone feels lighter it’s just because Guts isn’t acting like a beast anymore, and actually has companions he cares for and relies on. And even he is aware that it might not last forever.

III- The quality of storytelling

This one will be short, because it’s tied to the previous point. Basically some argue that the storytelling isn’t as great, because the tone has changed. I absolutely cannot agree. Miura is still a great storyteller, and if you believe that violence and gore are what make a good story, or just Berserk, then you prolly shouldn’t be reading it in the first place. Imo that is completely missing the point, Berserk is great because of the characters and the story that is carefully crafted, and Miura is a genius since he can make all the loose ends meet. Which is more than I can say for other authors.

Even if we take a scene as average as a bunch of men drinking alcohol while watching the cherry blossoms, Miura manages to make such a scene super interesting, by giving us access to the characters inner thoughts.

My only gripe with the story is when it becomes too big in scale, and when it’s not centered on the characters themselves. That is particularily true for Griffith’s side, not so much Guts. Guts’ journey is closely related to his own personal struggle, whereas I feel that with Griffith there’s some grand scheme that he plays a role in. It’s not just about his own wish, but what fate has dictated for him. 

IV- The art

Ouch now that’s gonna hurt.As much as I don’t agree that the quality of storytelling has decreased, I can’t help but find that the art has been affected quite significantly.

Now to be fair Miura’s art is always changing and evolving. Miura seems to like to experiment with his art, and we saw the art go from a not so great place in the early volumes up to volume 13-14, then become really good if not amazing in the volumes 16-17 which are my favorite period of Miura’s art. Miura even tried to be draw his characters in a more realistic fashion, around Griffith’s rebirth, and the art just got even better and bigger in scale, to the point that it becomes hard to believe it’s just a drawing, and not one of Gustave Doré’s prints..

At any rate, Berserk features some of the best art in the manga industry, and beyond imo. However there is a clear downside to that, it is time consuming, and prolly even tiring. And as Miura gets older, that task won’t get easier. So simplifying his art is inevitable, and I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner.

But more than just simplifying his art, Miura made a gamble of sorts, by switching to digital. Many still try to argue that he hasn’t, but if you compare his illustrations in the Grunbeld novel, to the last chapter for example, it becomes clear that Miura uses digital techniques to add some effects to his lineart. Mainly atmospheric effects (fog, light etc).

Credits to Ryu Osaka on Facebook

So there’s some clear difference between Miura’s traditional ink and pen art, and the more recent art featured on the manga that also uses digital techniques to do the backgrounds mostly. And while that’s not bad in itself, you can tell that Miura hasn’t quite mastered digital art. So he has a long way to go before seeing the same quality as his traditional art, if not ever.

I’ll admit I’m a bit biased towards that, because traditional art is more challenging, and time consuming, while digital art and the different softwares it uses are much more practical, and allow you to easily edit your drawing and not worry too much about the placement of the lines or colors for example.So I pretty much hold traditional art in a pedestal, and Miura’s traditional art is simply one of the best I witnessed, period.

So I definitely do see the change in the art direction if you will, and I’m not too happy about it. But I chalk it up to Miura or his assistants not being too familiarized or good at it yet.Things might improve once they get the hang of it, and learn how to make the traditional and digital art blend well together.

Conclusion

So to conclude, I would say that Berserk has overall a few challenges, mainly the pace and the art. The manga would greatly benefit from having a much more consistent release schedule as well as a better pace. The art is still a work in progress I guess, and either way it wouldn’t prevent me or others from  reading the manga. We just invested so much time in it, but as someone who has an artistic background it definitely is something that catches my eye and it’s interesting to see where Miura’s art goes from here.

But I definitely think that the manga is doing good overall, there hasn’t been a significant decline in quality, especially when it comes to storytelling. The tone might have changed a bit, but I definitely see it as something that isn’t written in stone, and things could get dark again. And either way Miura still has a boner for drawing dick monsters.So it’s still as edgy as it used to be, just not as much as in your face as in the past.

Hope you liked this analysis. And don’t forget this only reflects my opinion, not two people will share the same views.

[blackthornass]

Do you have any art tips?

Uhhhhhh Funk im not The Greatest Artist ™ but I’ll try to bestow some Wisdom on you. Keep in mind Art is Subjective and I’m no expert and all that so take everything with a grain of salt but that being said I’ll try to give u Tips and Tricks

-listen so if you have a boring class at school just draw in it. School is great because you have 1. Access to paper at all times 2. Incredibly boring lectures. If you have a study hall that’s the Drawing JACKPOT. Basically what I’m saying is practice all the time when you have energy but like that’s such boring art advice. It’s important but “practice! uwu” is like what people with Natural Art Talent say when they didn’t have to figure everything out from the ground up so it’s kind of aggravating

-There’s gonna be people better than you. Chances are you have a friend who’s better than you because this is Tumblr we all draw. Try Not To Compare Yourself ™ which idk how to do but it’s bad don’t do it

-unless you find a terrible person with worse art than you in which case FUCK DUDE COMPARE YOURSELF TO THEM! THEYRE HORRIBLE AND THEY CANT DRAW FOR SHIT LOOK WHOS LAUGHING NOW!

-“work until your idols become your rivals” is absolute bullshit because your idols are working at it at the same time you are. You fool. You imbecile. I feel like this works better for writing when your idols can become irrelevant or straight up die between you being an aspiring author 8 year old and a tired 30 year old who just wrote The Great American Novel ™ or just kind of. Leave the fandom if you’re writing fanfic. Anyway

-ok that’s all the preachy shit, time for Real Art Advice ™. Keep in mind I do digital cartoony shit with Strong Lineart and cel shading for the most part and I pretty much only draw people so my knowledge is limited to that. if you wanna be a professional artist maybe do other things and Expand your Abilities ™

-Ok first off if you’re using Gimp or Photoshop please love yourself and download Firealpaca or illegally torrent Paint Tool Sai or something. I swear by Firealpaca it cured my depression but like. Photoshop is Trash for drawing. Get Firealpaca it has Line Correction ™

-Keep Line Correction ™ at like. A 5 when you’re sketching and at a 19 (the maximum) when you’re lining, coloring, shading, highlighting, doing literally anything that isn’t sketching

-Sketching digitally can be hard if you’re used to sketching on paper and I find it easier to do a sketch on paper, take a picture of it on my phone or scan it, and line/color it digitally. You do you and figure out what works best

-speaking of which I refused to use sketchbooks until I was Worthy ™ of not drawing on notebook paper and uhhhhhh that’s dumb just get a sketchbook they cost a little more than a notebook at Target it’s not super expensive. Although if you’re not financially in the position to buy a sketchbook anyway, just hoard notebooks from school that you didn’t use much. Bam, that’s your new sketchbook

-the Head Circle Cross Thing and the Spheres For Shoulder, Elbow, and Wrist Thing are good and important and will save you

-hands are hard so use references but bullshit your way through it. eventually they’ll look good (I haven’t gotten there yet)

-HAVE FUN WITH NOSES OH MY GOD. Noses are super fun and cool because there’s, like, infinite variety with them, they can be as long or short, thin or thick, rounded or pointy as you want, you can make them be, like, triangles or circles or more squareish or diamond-shaped, the base of the nose can be about as high or as low on the face as you want, you can make the nostrils prominent or not really there at all, they can add another Layer to a character’s design, oh my goodness noses are so fun. They’re like, severely underrated and oh my god I could gush about how fucking fun noses are

-same with facial expressions. Where you put the pupils and how big they are, how much of the eye is covered by eyelids, the way the eyebrows are, the mouth, tons of other shit. There’s loads of variety and so much you can do and honestly having fun with the facial expression is The Best Part. There’s tons of Face Art Chart Memes floating around, you know the ones, save it to your phone/computer and practice those on your own time it’s fun

-if you don’t know how to do something, avoiding it won’t help you. Just kind of draw around with it in your sketchbook or in a “I’m not posting this” file until you feel confident enough to do it in your Real Projects ™.

-Ok for lining did you know..… it isn’t illegal to erase parts of the lineart to clean it up.… just be careful and draw it back in to the best of your abilities if you erase too far and use a smaller eraser brush/lining brush for this… I know it’s tedious nobody likes lining it’s okay you can do this put on some good music

-use mcfucking references

-eyedrop character’s official colors but adjust said colors based on the color of your background to make them look less funky is my general rule for clothing, I usually pick the hair/skin by myself or from something I’ve already drawn though

-for flats, make sure your lineart is all closed off and there aren’t any “holes” cuz that’ll mess up your coloring

-so how I do flats is I use the magic wand tool to select whatever I want to color, expand selection 3 pixels (in firealpaca you can set it to do this automatically), pick the color I need, turn up the brush to as big as possible, and color it in. It saves the time you’d spend with cleaning up where the color gets outside the lines

-you can do the flats on one layer, but I personally like to do every Object on a different layer so when I do shading, I know what goes on top of what

-if a color is darker than the lineart it looks ugly so pick your line color with caution (or just use black! Unlike shading black lineart tends to go with pretty much everything)

-SHADE YOUR GODDAMN ART. Like, what makes people go “wow holy shit that’s good!” is the shading + highlights, don’t be lazy ya fuck.

-I’d take a break before shading to Refresh Your Eyes ™ but also I constantly forget this is a good idea

-don’t shade with black oh my god. Unless you’re doing Strong Punchy Dramatic Stuff or monochrome black and white stuff, don’t shade with black, and if you’re doing that it’ll probably be drawn into the lineart. Don’t shade with black please we can tell you’re doing it and it looks bad

-highlighting with white isn’t too bad though, especially with the eyes, but it might look too strong in some places

-As a general rule, shading is darker and more saturated, highlighting is lighter and less saturated. Whether it gets warmer or cooler depends a lot on what color or thing you’re shading or what you want the feel of the picture to be and I’m not 100% sure how to do it myself so uh. Trust your gut and change the color if it looks wrong I guess.

-where exactly the shadows or highlights fall depends on lots of things, just kind of. Look at how things work irl maybe? This is the kind of thing that you just have to practice, and it’ll look like shit until suddenly it doesn’t sorry I’m not sure what to say

-One Medium Sized White Dot on a layer above the lineart where the pupil borders the Iris (or the whites of the eyes if you’re like me and you make the pupil and Iris one thing) works for a glint in the eye that makes a person look less dead and more cute. How big you’re gonna make it depends on how adorable you want the person to be

-SMOOTH BORDERS FOR THE SHADING ARE REALLY IMPORTANT IF YOURE DOING CEL SHADING which is why firealpaca is my best friend thanks line smoothing. If you’re doing like. Soft shading or painterly shit or other kinds of shading it’s less Super Important but like. Still be sort of neat. Unless being really messy and sketchy is what you’re going for but even then you still need to be sort of careful

-for simple backgrounds, it’s like. Easy to make it interesting. Add polka dots to the background or a big old square or a gradient or a cloud filter or something the possibilities are endless. Another option is to straight up make it transparent and write a secret message in white on the side. But uhh never do a blank white background at the very least fill it with a solid color

-ok style is kind of hard because I never had to struggle to find my style? I just “drew in my handwriting” so to speak and then if along the way I realized something looked shitty I just changed how I drew it slightly? I guess a thing you could do if you’re in tune enough is look at the styles of things you do like and things you don’t and figure out why you do and don’t like it. “I like how *2010s cartoon* does Eyes!” great take that general concept. “I hate how this shitty yaoi has enormous hands!” great then don’t do that. It’s all Personal Preference my dude style is Your Own Thing

-notes aren’t everything but fuck do they feel nice. Self reblogs are fine but don’t overdo it, I’d say reblog it Twice to account for time zones and tag it as self reblog so as to not be a dick

This got long whoops. That’s all I can think of but I hope this helps it’s All I Know