#I took an hour long break

[supremeromanticizer]

Seeing this after my post rant is pissing me off

[sunglassesmish]

some funny and some cute moments from this extremely long podcast episode with lou. i watched this because i saw his post with this picture

and he said he’d talk about why he doesn’t have a girlfriend and i wanted to find out why. he didn’t actually do that, in fact, he basically said ‘i don’t need a girlfriend’. so that’s neat.

[ghostlyheart]

How I (roughly) imagine this scale:

1- I see myself as a faster reader than the average person. I can breeze through a text quickly and still understand almost all of it

2- I read at a "normal" speed. I need to pace myself but can consistently read and comprehend a text in a reasonable time frame

3- I see myself as a slower reader than other people. It takes me a long time to get through a text and if I try to go too fast I won't understand it

Obviously this can vary by your mood, the type of text, etc. and this is a very imprecise scale with some overlap, I'm just casually curious!!

[jessaerys]

sun visits the moon at spk headquarters and gets so so so sleepy

[rosesofenvy]

Happy 1 year to the Rise Movie! I dream that one day they will release the official soundtrack, but until then I will just cry!

This took over an hour of watching this scene on repeat before I 1) lined my playing up with the movie and 2) recorded a take that I didn’t massively mess up in. Technically I could’ve recorded the next minute or so because the notes repeat themselves, but I decided not to torture myself any further.

Also yes, my tv stand is just my shrine to my tmnt merch.

[seirindono]

[sound on]

Mel is a bit tricky to draw, especially after a long break, so I figured I'd do some lipsynch warmup before getting back to the comic.

Sharing it here before I forget about it, enjoy the wonky in-betweens (*￣▽￣)b

audio by Sarah Lyoness (yt)

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[ying-doodles]

drifting closer

a comic based off @lloydfrontera's post about touch averse javier slowly becoming clingy to lloyd after the end of the novel! :> although the touch averse part didn't make it in lol,,

[freddy-owo]

Hey guys how we feeling abt mizu5?

[catdrawinfs]

woah...goign to think abotuthis for years

[turtleplushi]

Got bored (without text under the read more thingy)

[tsukasageorge]

day 30: dive back in time

unglitched ver under the cut!

[autisticaradiamegido]

day 38

it was 3 hours. i had to lay down immediately.

[breadslice2257]

Still putting off some other projects don’t mind me. I wanted to do something really simple that would let me do dramatic cell shading so here we are

[e-adlirez]

On the Twelfth Day of Christmas

12 Geronimos and a tiny little Benji :D

I didn’t think I’d be able to finish it in two days, but here we are :D a little project where I interpreted the artstyle designs of twelve Geronimos in my artstyle :D

We have in order

2000-2005 G

TV show G

my G :3

@skrunklymice’s G

@toastypencils’s G

@2deadkat’s G

@ratonahat’s G

@thisispoggers’s G and Benjamin

@glitchygorge’s G

@agcnt3’s G

@soda-gremlin’s G

and @alloutblue’s G :D

Behold, closeups :D Merry Christmas, Geronimo Stilton fandom

[ferronickel]

Hail, flatter! This one, who is a layperson of the arts and comixcraft, has a query for you:

So like, what is flatting?

I've seen your flats in Wifwulf, and I've read about the flats in Looking Glasses, and generally get that it results in an image with similarly coloured areas sharing the same false-colour.

But like, how is it then used? The final images seem to contain more colours and shading, so why not just go straight to this? Why do false colours get used instead of the real ones? How do you pick the colours and how many get used?

How come this is a thing that a whole other person can do separately? I guess that's because it's time consuming - so it saves time somehow?

Thank you! I come in the spirit of humility wishing to relieve my ignorance of your noble craft!

OHOHOHO!!! You've activated my trap card and now I get to ramble about comics craft! And in my area of professional expertise, too! Be prepared for a long post

I'm going to start with the last part of your question:

How come this is a thing that a whole other person can do separately? I guess that's because it's time consuming - so it saves time somehow?

So the thing about comics is that it is one of the most intensely time consuming mediums to create. One person can make comics on their own fairly easily, but it takes forever to produce. Consider that I've been working on Looking Glasses for 18-19 months and have drawn about 87 pages. Now, the western comics industry expects issues to be produced monthly, generally 24 pages in length. It's very difficult for a single person to work at this rate, so the labor of producing comics has been divided. Generally these jobs become:

Writer (writes the script)

Editor (edits the script)

Artist (draws the lineart)

Colorist (colors and renders the art)

Letterer (adds balloons, dialog, and sfx)

Flatter (sometimes 'color assistant' they take the art and prepare it for coloring)

This isn't comprehensive though, there are a bunch of other jobs, like designers and layout artists. Occasionally the artist job gets broken into Pencilers (who sketch the art) and Inkers (who ink the sketch). Basically, by splitting the work amongst a number of people you can produce comics much faster. Not all of these jobs are required, and creator-owed books might have artists do their own coloring and lettering, while big work-for-hire books might have twice as many people working so they can pump out a spider-man book every other week.

Okay, so why Flatters?

Flatting at it's most basic level is just coloring inside the lines. You take a black and white page of art, and you have to fill in every part of the page that will eventually be colored. It's a pretty time consuming task depending on how involved your lineart is.

Flatting a page of Looking Glasses doesn't take me all that long, usually less than a half hour, which is pretty quick. Looking Glasses pages tend to be... optimized for flatting though. There are only ever a few characters and there aren't a ton of background details.

You mentioned Wifwulf (created by my longtime friend and collaborator Dailen Ogden), here's one of it's pages:

Basically everything that's a different base color, (every tree, plant, bit of moss, character, etc.) needed to be picked out separately. Each page of Wifwulf took me a few hours to flat. If Dailen had been doing that themself, those hours would have really added up, but instead they could spend that time drawing and coloring. Now, that said, these pages have a lot of texture, so it's hard to see exactly what I did.

Here's an example from a comic I worked on early in my career. (Lineart by Patrick Custodio)

The writer for this comic loved to put in these incredibly complex crowd scenes, which is something the artist excelled at drawing. I was coloring and flatting at this point on the book, and before I could even start coloring properly, I would need to flat for like eight hours. (I have a much more efficient method these days) It was frustrating because I just wanted to work on the actually creative part, but the majority of my time was spent on something monotonous. As soon as I got the writer to hire a flatter for me, coloring a page would take me only one or two hours, not nine or ten.

So that's why flatters exist, mainly to ease the workload on colorists.

But like, how is it then used? The final images seem to contain more colours and shading, so why not just go straight to this?

Flatting serves a couple of purposes. It's main function, like I said above, is just coloring in the lines. After finishing your lineart it has to get colored in, so in a layer below the lines, you add colors.

The secondary function is preservation. I like to work in a way that is non-destructive, basically, at any point in the process I can restore an earlier version of the drawing if I make a mistake or don't like something. Flats are integral to this.

In digital art, there's this thing called anti-aliasing, where the edges of a line or shape have a drop off of pixel color or opacity. It makes the edges look smoother or blurrier. The three dots on the left are Anti-Aliased, while the one on the right is Aliased, there's no drop off, just hard pixels.

Anti-aliasing is fine until you need to change the color using the paint bucket, or select using the magic wand...

See how the anti-aliased art doesn't play well with these tools, but the aliased art does? So with something like Wifwulf, the final art is going to be full of texture that makes it impossible to select anything again once it's painted. By having a dedicated aliased flats layer under the rest of the artwork, you can always re-select any part of the image you want.

I always leave my flats layer alone, and do any detail work in layers above. For example when I was painting this, it really helped to be able to select just the titan so I could work on those paints without worrying about brushstrokes overlapping the rest of the characters.

One of the other things you can do with flats is quickly selecting certain elements. On most pages, I flat my panels, figures, and background elements separately. Later, with a single button press, I can select just the characters in the scene, or entire panels at a time, which makes things like shading a whole lot easier.

Why do false colours get used instead of the real ones?

If you're flatting for other people you often don't know what the final colors are going to be, so you just pick random ones. Garish colors can be helpful because it makes it obvious that they're not the final colors. Why don't I use the correct colors on my own pages when I'm flatting? Habit, mostly. It's also faster to grab random colors than to track down the correct ones. Sometimes two different things will have the same final color but I like to flat them with different colors so I can select them individually if I need to.

You can see the process a bit here. In my flats, Lancer's spade (eye? eyes? thing) is a different color from his tongue, even if they end up being the same white in the final image. This would help if I ever needed to select just his eyes for some reason. You can also see how I select his body fur color and then add details on top, like his colored fingers and the grey on his arm. Those elements have blurry anti-aliased edges, and it would be impossible to re-select them without flats.

How do you pick the colours and how many get used?

I use the default "additional color set" palette in clip studio and just work my way through it. I pick row and work my way down (for a change of pace I vary which row I start with). How many is mostly dependent on the artwork. You just keep going until you run out of individual objects to color. I have worked on pages where I've run out of colors on this palette and had to start making up more. Typically a page of Looking Glasses only needs around 20-30, though.

So! That's flatting! It's a little known job, and it's how I got started with my comics career, so I have a lot of thoughts on it. I was trying to be concise (lol), so I hope this all makes sense, but I'd be happy to clarify or answer any other questions about this process. I know I didn't really go into how I flat my work, so I can make that post if anyone is interested.

[shadowblade8192]

well let it be on record that i was asked for this (insert image for ask that was send cause it got deleted somehow. the original asker has said they didnt do that so it was probably on tumblrs end. in the reblogs there will be a screenshot of the original ask)

so, most of this is gonna be out of chronological order because i cant remember the order i got a lot of these in, though i do remember the first two physicals. first one i got was pc steam version. most playtime in this one due to getting it first and still going back to it cause multiplayer is easy, and also free unlike consoles) gifted it to quite a lot of my steam friends.

then my grandad introduced me to gog (and gave me fallout 3 and nv) and i got the gog version of terraria (identical to steam except its drm free and doesnt contain any steamworks stuff like steam multiplayer (though you can direct ip connect) or steam achievements (there are ingame achievements) or steam cloud) we'll get back to this one later as i have more to say

so, onto the physical copies i will not be going in chronological order as i only remember the first two chronologically (also i will note i got the steam and gog versions before any physicals)

Nintendo Switch

so like 2 years ago now i got a switch for my birthday, first console ive ever owned (i was a pc girlie), whats the first game i get for it? Wrong! it was mario kart (thats why i wanted a switch). naturally when i got the switch it did not come with a game packed in so i ended up cycling a couple miles to go and buy mario kart. shortly after i got terraria cause hey i liked the game on pc itd be nice to play it on the go (my laptop was shit and also it stopped working properly shortly before i got my desktop pc the year before my switch). also the third game i got for it was breath of the wild which i thought was worth mentioning

Xbox 360

second one i ever got was the xbox 360. i found this while on holiday in a cex for £1.50 (same time i got botw for the switch, see i said it was worth mentioning), and thought itd be neat to start collecting terraria physical copies for all the consoles because well a £1.50 game is a good place to start. havent played it yet, only verified the disc works since i dont have an xbox 360. it was a couple months (and collected terraria copies) down the line before i decided "hey this collection is cool why dont i get the consoles to play them on and eventually 100% each of them" which lead me down buying broken consoles and repairing them which is how most consoles i own came into my possession. if theres anything notable about the repairs ill mention them alongside the game. you can clearly tell i have no plan on how this post is going im just rambling as i remember something anyways this is where things stop being chronological and im just gonna group similar consoles together, which leads us to

Xbox One

the xbox one version has two different box art variations. why do i have both despite only being able to use one at a time? because theres two of course! the later one (right) is what i got first before hunting for the second one i got (left) because the right one is more common in cex and the left more common on ebay for.... some reason i dont know. nothing much to note otherwise except 100%ing this one was a fucking pain in the arse i didnt actually do it until about 9 hours ago. id basically 100%ed it some months ago (the standard 115 ingame achievements as of 1.4.4.9), but of course the ps4 and xbox one versions dont just have the standard ingame achievements like steam has, nonono thats to easy. they have their own that are more relics from the old gen consoles (ps3/vita/xb360/wiiu), and are xbox live/psn achievements. most are unique but some are just ingame ones (but not all 115 for.... some reason). and now we get to the achievement i was never able to complete until today. pet collector. most of these were fine, easy, completed alongside the others. except pet collector. now it requires you to "get all the pets". this is thankfully untrue, it requires you to get all the pets that were in the game as of when that achievement was introduced. a few i could get easily by looking up "<pet name> seed xbox" and getting the ones from chests, the rest i just got naturally, except, the zephyr fish. random chance from fishing, if you have insane fishing power, the maximum possible in the game, it wont even hit 0.5% chance, and its lower with lower fishing power. thankful xbox one has rolling recording so i was able to quickly capture the moment that i caught it (i was checking the wiki to see if there was anything else i could do to get this fish easier, then returned to the game and caught it there and then): (there was a video here but im cutting it in the hopes that i can actually send the post. its on my blog somewhere). i had a much easier time with this achievement on ps4. speaking about playstation,

Playstation 3

ha you thought i was gonna talk about ps4 werent you, or not i dont know what youre thinking. anyways this one was another cheap one, i got the ps3 version [on the right] for about £2, checked the disc works, and i still dont have a ps3 so i havent played that yet. also found a japanese ps3 version for a couple quid that comes with inlays and all that. cant read a word but its cool to have

Playstation Vita

This was one of the more pricy versions, with it [the english version] being about £15, played on a modded vita that i bought. notable things about that vita, the rear touchpad came broken but it was just unplugged, also the previous owner didnt wipe it and their memory card was just, full of porn (no i wont share it i factory reset it all) japanese version i got from someone selling it from japan, cheaper than the english version which was pretty funny to me

Playstation 4

so. a lot here. first one i got was the (boxed) playstation hits version, which came with a... original print disc? someone somewhere has bought a ps4 original box with the playstation hits disc from a random cex in some city. maybe ill meet them some day. anyways, next i got the original print with original print disc, nothing really of note, then found out there was a newer print without playstation hits on it (this doesnt exist for xbox one i checked trust me), tracked one down and paid a surprisingly low price. it had the right disc. now the odd ones out of the ps4 lineup, the disc in the jewel case is a standalone playstation hits disc (which came as a disc i provided the case myself) because i wanted one since i got confirmation it existed after getting that middle box art variation with its own disc. now, unique thing here, its the usa version. the ps4 is region free with discs, so i could play it. but. different region versions are different applications with different save data and different achievements trackers. i have only played this one to test the disc works im not doing 102 hours all over again to 100% the american version (yeah it was about 102 hours i did on expert mode this time, plus two minutes that i went into a journey mode drunk world to get a kite since it wasnt windy at all on the main save). finally, the bonus collectors edition. this has the box ive shown in the image, plus in the plastic wrap its stealed in theres an original print of the box art in there too. inside the big box is the stickers, poster, and... drum roll please.... the terraria branded pickaxe 2gb usb-2.0 flash drive. its by itself on ebay for like £30 or more and i got this whole bundle for under £20. i do not want to break the seal just for a 2gb usb drive ill use once and never again (american one is cropped, wouldnt upload if it was separate and i cant retake the pic for reasons. i think theres an image limit? or limit for images on separate paragraphs?)

Wii U and 3DS

these were also on the more expensive side, £20 and £15 respectively. nothing much to note about the games themselves, except the wiiu version can be played with the wiiu gamepad or pro controller... and also the fuckign wii remote with nunchuck. this isnt on the wiki. if i knew how to edit the wiki page to add that control scheme in i would. discussion page on the wiki talking about it here and if anyone wants the full inputs so they can put it in PLEASE message me i just want it on the wiki. nothing much to note on the repairs for my wiiu, but the 3ds. well. lets start by the fact that i bought this during a college day when i didnt have a lecture, and one of my friends (coincidentally an ex) had their 3ds xl with them, so i asked if i could just check this game works and it did. played about 5 mins and didnt touch it again. then i bought a broken new 2ds xl off ebay. broken (i knew this) not fixable by me (i wasnt aware till i tried). big problem, it wouldnt boot and also the shoulder button switches broke off and my soldering iron is too big to fix that, and also it was homebrewed and i didnt have the original nand backup cause it wasnt mine. it rotted in my electronics drawer for about two and a half years (maybe three and a half). onto the new 3ds xl i got, the only problem with that was a nonfunctional sd card reader. hey wait a sec i have a 3ds sd card reader on an old broken 3ds (2ds xl) so i swapped those out and its worked fine since. homebrewed it and i have the nand backup for that. so this was early this year. now. lets go up to last month. ive just built a computer monitor using the lcd panel and top case from my old shit laptop, a controller board for the panel i got off aliexpress, a cardboard box to store the aforementioned controller board, the laptops charger (fit perfectly into the dc port on the controller board and also was the right voltage), and some speakers (theyre shit but they work), and thought "hey my electronics repair skills have improved, lets go back to that old new 2ds xl, i found a motherboard replacement. its also a special variant one i have so i could sell it if i wanted to make money". so i bought the motherboard (and a new volume slider cause i lost that little bit of plastic), put it all together, and it worked! it all booted up! and i was so caught up in the euphoria of all that i failed to notice that the top screen was cracked inside that i could only notice now that the rest of the console worked. back to aliexpress, new top screen arrived, some broken glass, a ripped ribbon cable (of the old top screen) and some superglue later and i have a perfectly functioning new 2ds xl. which i am not playing terraria on cause my new 3ds xl is better. but hey i can streetpass with myself now that was worth the £40 i spent on repairs

PC Collectors Edition

first one i got here was the one in the middle, backed up the bunny.exe that activates the collectors edition and then shelved it. that one and the second one i got (left) were both used and thus the steam keys were already used. the later one i got (right) is sealed (thats why i have two of the same box art). there are more i am trying to find, theres one box art variation where the orangey red info box is massive, and one where its not present at all (so yeah theres still more, theres also a japanese 3ds and wiiu version but theyre like £60 and £100 on ebay and im not spending that much on a videogame. im sure the fact im specifying videogame will not come up later) its good, if you can get a good deal on one and want the bunny pet id say its worth it, though since all the exe does is change 1 bit in the registry its easy enough to manually do it even if you dont have the physical collectors edition if you know what youre doing (and on linux and mac you have to do it manually as theres no linux/mac versions of the script) speaking of linux like i did in the brackets, theres a fun bug where mouse4 and mouse5 cant be assigned ingame and arent registered at all which sucks cause i used those to grapple and quick mount. naturally using the windows version via proton does fix this, but provides us with fun new bugs such as all key presses in text boxes are doubles so trying to type anything including world seeds eennddss uupp lliikkee tthhiiss and also steam overlay is just completely broken, though i did find a fna update script for the linux port that updates the engine allowing mouse4 and mouse5 to be used, i got it off github somewhere.

now thats all the game versions, lets move on to some other cool stuff. firstly (and no pic for this because the frame i got makes any pictures look complete pants but its sick as fuck in person) is the "heroes of terraria" poster from the terraria.shop site, also some pins from the same site which i keep on a cork board thing on my wall next to the transgender tardis dr who pin i got, plus a hoodie (the world of terraria one in green and gold) plus some tshirts (like 4 of them, one was a heroes of terraria on a tshirt). theyre cool but you know whats cooler?

Terraria Official Handbooks

if youre my age or a bit older (or a bit younger i dont know) you might remember those minecraft handbooks. well, around 2015 terraria got their own for version 1.3.0.8. these arent really wiki replacements, and i think theyre aware of that (hell they even link to the wiki, and being 2015 they link to the official gamepedia one (before fandom fucked it up) and the unofficial wikia one (which i think became fandom. fuck that website. use the wiki.gg wiki its the new official one)), theyre more "hey show this to someone to get them into the game like a parent or friend or other person". theyre pretty cool, i got the bundle of these for quite cheap in very good condition, i did give them all a read through and you can tell theyre 1.3.0 guides, theres a LOT thats changed. maybe after 1.4.5 relogic will commission more? id like that but then again we have a wiki thats very comprehensive so i doubt it and now one more thing what i would personally consider the pride of my collection the single item i am most proud to have yes, even more so than handbooks and sealed game copies let me show you:

Terraria OST Vinyl

this released in 2021 (and as a result only has the first four volumes, also unrelated to the time it doesnt have the otherworld ost, related to the time it means theres no deerclops and no aether, and no 11 or more tracks that are coming in 1.4.5 which will presumably become volume 5. will they do a reissue of the vinyl if that happens? my wallet hopes not) and is SO EXCEEDINGLY RARE i have only seen a handful of listings, going for £150/160. until i found one for about £100 so i didnt think i just clicked buy and id personally say it was worth it due to rarity and being also SEALED so i havent touched the seal on that (i also dont have a vinyl player and i ripped the .wav files from the game files (i also paid for the .mp3 files from steam) so i dont really need to use the vinyl), and i really wanna get it framed. honestly this is just the thing im most proud of having. anyways i said id get back to the pc version (i think) so now im gonna mention the gog version

GoG.com

gog.com is a website (woah) that sells exclusively drm-free games. tl;dr if you have downloaded the games backup installer (or installed the game from them its still drm free) they cannot do SHIT you OWN that thing you can do whatever you like. install it on one of your pcs. install it on every pc you own. steam wont let you use windows 7 now? thats cool i can use the gog offline backup installer on any os (that the game itself supports). why am i mentioning this? well i thought itd be cool to collect backup installers. downloading them whenever new versions drop (was only really doing it with windows until last year so i only downloaded 1.4.4.9v4 on other oses myself) but i only started playing on steam with 1.4.0.5, and gog with 1.4.1 or 1.4.2 i cant remember which, how can i get older versions now? i can only download the latest version via gog, plus patch exes to patch older versions to slightly less old versions given that i already have older versions, and even then i can only currently download patches for 1.4.4.8 and onwards (i was grabbing patches as i went). so i contacted gog support. they were able to give me linux, windows, and macos backup installers for 1.3.5.3 and 1.4.0.5, which was very cool and 1.3.5.3 was one of the two versions i most cared about since they were right before 1.X.0.0 updates. the other being 1.2.4.1, since gog terraria did release with that version as the first one it released with. even going back to support a year later going "hey i was allowed access to older ones before, do you have 1.2.4.1?" and they could only give me 1.3.5.3 and 1.4.0.5 (and the latest version direct from gog.com being 1.4.4.9v4). so began my hunt. eventually finding the gog version of 1.2.4.1 lying around on the internet archive (thank you internet archive youre a real one), alongside a couple other misc versions i didnt have. i also found a couple i had to torrent (i wish gog let me have them all so i didnt have to resort to pirating a game i paid for but media preservation is at the heart of piracy so thank you media preservers youre also real ones. that includes internet archive im thanking you twice), so bringing me to now where i have basically every 1.4.4.x on windows, a handful of 1.4.x.x on windows, and 1.4.4.9v4, 1.4.0.5, and 1.3.5.3 on all platforms, and 1.2.4.1 on windows (linux/mac didnt get native versions till the beta on 1.3.0.7 and then fully on 1.3.0.8) oh i also have the mobile version but theres nothing really interesting of note there. switch versions better portably (and steam deck too)

and thats my full collection basically. at some point im hoping to get the 2 collectors edition box arts i dont have and 2 japanese game versions i dont have, but waiting for listings to show up online/reasonable prices respectively. if youve made it to the end of this... well done. maybe in the future ill talk about my dr who dvd collection, or the turnip boy robs a bank wii version i have (its real only haters will say its fake). anyways post ended thats all i can think to talk about.