#Long post sorry!

[bioluminesced]

saw your last fanart (16 of january) and it's so good

it beats me how this kind of colouring/painting is done though. how do you pick the right colours? the right places? the value of colour and it's warmth?

i always have trouble with colouring because i have a very strict basic knowledge of shadows and colours and no visual imagination

sorry for such a long ask

hi anon!! no need to apologize this is such a kind ask and i still really struggle with this sometimes. i didnt start experimenting with color in my art until around summer of 2022 and before that it was so frustrating to color that i almost didnt produce any colored work.

i also have complete aphantasia so my visual imagination is very limited! this leads to a lot of trial and error in my work because i cant tell what looks good until i simply try it lol

i will try to answer about my process as thoroughly as possible! but a lot of it is seriously just vibes, and playing around. a lot of what helped me was studying how artists i liked used color in THEIR work and trying to work it into my style.

a lot of the vibrancy and harmony in my work comes from my base layer, which i put under the sketch like im “priming” the canvas. when im coloring later on i let this base layer inform my choices and also let it show through in places for unification of the colors. its a lot like doing an underpainting except i dont go crazy on the range of values

the hardest part for me is doing the base colors over this layer. i dont have a lot of guidance for this because i kind of just pick colors to start with and then edit them bit by bit until it looks satisfying to me/matching the intended mood and harmonizing with the base layer. i edit the colors mostly by using gradient maps and layer modes until i find a version i like and merge it to just create a normal layer with the colors i want. i keep this base layer underneath my sketch

i render on top of my sketch/lineart always so i can better define the shapes and have smoother edges. this is the part where i really go crazier with my colors - some conscious decisions i make:

- where can i make my highlights and shadows stand out more? i accomplish this by choosing warm colors on the cool base or cool colors on the warm base. theres blue in the flesh tones of the face and orange in the blue tones of the coat.

- where does the rendering need to be more “clean”? someone viewing an art piece will gravitate to places in the drawing with finer detail, so i put a lot more work into the shapes and colors of the faces and the fish, because this is where i want someone to look the longest

another thing i usually do is pick one really saturated color and place it throughout the drawing. for thos one its that bright red, around the eye, blood, and outline of the fish as well as the characters’ hands.

this part of my process takes me the longest and can be seriously frustrating at times! something i always force myself to do is to keep working on it. whenever im like ok its done! i go back and render for another half hour and it ends up looking a lot better

gradient mapping the final drawing! for further unification i have a gradient map i made that works for most of my warm pieces

and i put it on top with an overlay layer mode and then adjust the opacity

it makes a big difference in the warmth and unification of the final drawing!! so honestly i cheat a little with my colors :P

i hope this helped a little bit with your question! my general advice is to also do some color studies of movies or pictures you like it really helped me get a feel for harmonizing color (and not being afraid to use really vibrant colors!!) again thank you for such an ask and good luck to you!!

[cherry-blossom-qf]

all magos y did u steal the crown

💙: "Well amongst all of us... it was for revenge. Not the most favorable reason, but it was our reason"

🍏: "We're all the same species, except for that Digimon over there..."

🎩: *bro is staying quiet cuz he doesn't want to be involved*

🍏: "That means, 5 out of 6 of us had the same story... Although our beginning were completely different, if that makes sense."

🚔: "Abandon to the streets, everyone was an asshole to us. Because according to the law of our home planet, if you were abandoned, orphaned, ditched, etc, you were seen as garbage. No talent nor powers was ever gonna get you respect from the more privileged folks. Messed up rules on a messed up planet."

🦋: "At least it seems that we all got into school!! Tho, I wouldn't say it helped. Got straight As and was still seen as lesser than.."

💙: "You guys remember the cargo ship? The escape plan? The plan to explore the entire galaxy on that ship until we found a place to build a theme park... only to accidentally get stranded on Halcandra? Only surviving for three-ish years cuz of the Lor Starcutter that was abandoned yet still surprising worked? The computer logs about the tales of Master Crown from that tome in school being actually real and in Halcandra? The multiple attempts to get that crown from Landia? And the attempt to bomb Landia with cannons we gave to the Lor—"

🍏: "Yeah, yeah, I remember all, UT. I think we all do."

🦋: "Kinda funny how we're all talking about this like we went through this stuff together!! Even though we actually went through it separately in our on universes."

👑: "The moment we learned of the crown being real... We started hatching ideas. Thanks to being treated like shit, all we could think of is pay back. Take over the galaxy as it's new overlord, show our unjustly home planet how horrible we could be."

💙: "And then we got our asses kicked by Kirby!" :D

🚔: "Yeah! And then the thing that happened after that happened! I became apart of the freelance police, UT has a happy monster family, Apps got to be a heroic sky-hero-person, Blindolor is... blind.. but still in a happier place! And Mr Disney Princess got himself hitched to the crown itself in super gross unholy matrimony!!"

👑: "Don't talk shit about my spouse! Also I got more than just my spouse to be happy about!"

🚔: "And whats that? Riches? Servants? Some 18+ content the audience will never get because this is a PG13 friendly blog?"

👑: "Better! My own revenge!! By going back to my home planet and killing their government higher ups!!" ^w^

💙: "YOU DID WHAT?!?"

•

•

•

🩸: "This still all sounds like a skill issue."

🦋: "NO ONE ASKED FOR YOUR OPINION, SHITFACE!!"

[meddwlyngymraeg]

Excuse me while I abuse this blog a bit! I was listening to Radio Cymru today and Rhys Mwyn was on doing a series on music in decades, this one was on the 00s, he recently also did a Degawd y 90'au show with Cerys Matthews that I'm going to listen to after.

I wanted to keep this specific bit since him and Gai Toms are talking about the solo careers/"what happened to them?" of some prominent bands of the 90s' "sîn roc Gymraeg": bands like Super Furry Animals, Catatonia, Big Leaves, Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, etc., most of whom are actually enjoying fairly high profile careers right now!

SFA - Gruff is having the time of his life, a UK top 10 album with Seeking New Gods, to say nothing of his entire, super interesting solo back catalogue and the Mercury nominations with Boom Bip (and that was a full decade ago), his film scores etc. But every single member of SFA is still active and quite high profile in music, and all of the Super Furries bar Gruff do have a side project together too. Catatonia - Cerys has also had a very high profile career since Catatonia ended, with her solo work but also as a presenter, Big Leaves split off into Sibrydion after the band ended, though I'm not quite sure what happened after Sibrydion stopped. Gorky's - Euros Childs runs his record label and has been doing his solo work for a bit, and a couple of years ago he permanently joined Teenage Fanclub so that's great for him!

Etc. Anyway, my Welsh is only fledgeling so I didn't quite catch all of the chat Rhys and Gai were having, so I've put it up here so I can slowly pause and look up words in my dictionary. Ah, language is a slow process... Anyway, all this is to say feel free to scroll by if the alt rock movement doesn't really interest you, otherwise this is probably like. A good listening exercise. I've removed the songs played because Tumblr doesn't take mp3 files larger than 10 MB unfortunately, but played on the show were:

Pep Le Pew - Y Magwraeth Llwybr Llaethog - Satta ym Mhontcanna Gwenno - Môr Hud Sherbet Antlers - Bywyd Mor Hir Super Furry Animals - Ymaelodi Â'r Ymylon Anweledig - Gweld Y Llun

I cannot recommend Gwenno's new album, Tresor, highly enough! Most of it is actually in Cornish, not Welsh. On today's show it looked like there was a theme of playing artists' first single, so this song goes back a bit.

I can't really find the Sherbet Antlers' song online anywhere, so I've uploaded it if you're keen.

[willinghands]

i think r/BenignExistence is my favorite subreddit 🥲 i love these pleasant little glimpses into strangers' lives

[climbingthefloors]

obsessed with this baby hippo from thailand's khao khew zoo.. she has been so utterly betrayed by the world

[yumenikkii]

just another average day in gravity falls

[whiteshipnightjar]

Zoozve, my beloved

[bigskycastle]

school project, some drawings for my pretend game about a housefly girl called musca and her adventures in some creepy&wet place

[weaselle]

it was too much i had to make my own post

line cook here. ACCURATE

if you don't get the hate, here's what you don't understand.

it takes up to 2 hours to close down the kitchen.

The last 60-90 minutes before closing time you do almost no cooking because the restaurant doesn't have many people in it and you've already cooked most of their diners.

So if someone walks in during, like, the last hour, the cook is in the middle of an industrial deep clean of the kitchen.

(these numbers can vary quite a bit from place to place but i have worked several restaurants with these actual times and the concept remains the same)

Say the place closes at 10. If you wait til the restaurant is already closed to start all your cleaning duties, you'll be there until at least midnight.

More than that your boss knows that on an average night you can start your clean up as soon as the last rush ends and get out of there around 10:45, even 10:15 on a slow night if you get lucky. That means there are plenty of restaurants where if you do take until midnight the manager is going to come up to you at some point that week and ask you what went wrong that night, and you'd better have an answer.

So this example restaurant closes at 10 pm. The dinner rush ends around 8:30, and shortly after that the cook is going to start getting every single dish possible over to the dishwasher because the dishwasher always gets hit hard and late, and the machine runs for 2 full minutes and only holds so many dishes, so the way that works out is if you wait an extra 30 minutes to give the dishwasher all your stuff it can mean adding like 60 minutes to the end of his shift. And you're gonna KEEP finding shit to send to the dishpit right up until you leave probably.

all these little square and rectangle containers in this cold table have to be pulled out and changed over into new containers, replaced by new full ones, or in some cases filled from larger containers in the back, which can result in even more empty containers to send to the dishwasher.

while it's all pulled apart to do this, you have to clean up all the spilled food and sauce and juices and stuff from the joints and ledges and shelves and drip trays

Once you get your line changed over in this way, and fully stocked, anytime someone orders something that makes use of a bunch of that stuff, you have to restock and re-clean it some. It might already be covered in plastic. Some of it might already be stuck in the back to make room to take apart your cutting board counter to clean. To cook a dish isn't TOO much of a problem at this point, but you're really hoping for zero orders because you still have so much other cleaning to do.

Meanwhile the salad bar and appetizer section and server station and everybody are all doing the same thing. Even the bartenders are stocking olives and lemons and sending back whisks and stir spoons and shakers and empty 4quart storage containers that used to hold the back-up lemons and olives and things. Every section is dumping their must-be-cleaneds to the dishpit as fast as possible because early and fast is the only thing they can do to to help that dishpit not absolutely drown into overtime.

The poor dishwasher is always the last to clock out, soaking wet and exhausted.

Around this time you probably scrub the flat top, which has turned black from cooked on grease and is still about 500 degrees. Line cooks are divided in opinion on water-based or oil based cleaning methods for this, but they all involve scrubbing with (usually) a brick of pumice stone using every ounce of your strength while you try not to burn yourself

you scrub it from fully blackened to gleaming silver and now if somebody orders something that needs the flat top to cook, you can either fuck up your cleaning job or fake it in a couple frying pans and pass that tiny fuck you down to your dishwasher (who usually understands, especially if you help them take the garbage out or clean your own floor drain later)

If there's deep fried stuff on the menu then the fryers have to be cleaned out, which includes straining the oil out into enormous and super-heavy pots full of oil so hot that if you spill on yourself then it's probably a hospital visit and if you slip and fall face first into it it'll be the last thing you ever do.

Then you gotta scrub out the fryer. Like you gotta take the (hot) screen out and reach your arm down into the weird rounded pipes and curved areas (so hot, burn you if you brush against them hot) and scrub off whatever is down there

Depending on your kitchen you might have to do up to four of these. Then you'll have to pour the (dangerously hot) oil back in

oh, and if you didn't dry the pipes and get ALL the water out of the trap and tank?

water reacts with hot oil in a sort of mentos and coke way that can send a tidal wave of oil past the open flame of the pilot light ...HUGE dangerous mess and/or burn down the kitchen if the oil lights up.

Unless! If the oil has been used too hard and needs to be changed, it's time to carry those open topped super heavy pots full of will-kill-you-hot oil and dump them in the barrel outside by the dumpsters so you can put room temp fresh oil in the fryers. whew!

The clean up is not just some light wiping down that can be easily interrupted, is what i'm saying.

You might have to do some kind of walk-in duty (moving around 50lb cases of lettuce and 50lb bags of onions to get to the stacks of five gallon buckets full of salad dressings and sauces to move so you can reach the giant metal pots and bus tubs full of prep and get it all organized and make sure it's all labeled and i have to stop now i'm having flashbacks)

THE POINT IS

by 15 or however many minutes to close, the line cook is doing an intense deep clean and probably has the whole stove taken apart to detail.

For some industrial stoves this means lifting off large cast iron plates that weigh like 20 lbs each and are still quite hot. Whatever metal burners are on there, you gotta take off and clean, you can see here the lines that indicate the large thick cast iron rectangles that sit on top of the burners to allow heavy pots to rest on. Those five (each has one front burner hole and one back burner hole, see?) have to be lifted off and cleaned with soap and a wire brush usually, and then the underneath area also has to be cleaned because a lot of shit falls through the burner holes on a busy night.

if you didn't do it when you did the flat top you have to do the grease trap (which can be like a full five minutes and is always disgusting).. You gotta clean out all the little gas jets in each burner with a wire or something so the burners all flame evenly, and sometimes you have to remove some of the natural gas piping that connects the burners to access where you have to clean.

you gotta clean out the bottom of the oven and the wire racks, and, oh gods, you gotta take down the filter vents from the hood fans above the stove.

See all the lined parts along the top of the wall?

those are hood vents, and as they pull air up they also pull a lot of grease and they have to be taken down and cleaned, then you gotta climb up there and scrub where they go before you put them back...

And then there's the mopping and floor drains and...

Anyway, that's what the line cook is doing when you walk in fifteen minutes before closing and order something that needs to be cooked on that stove. They are doing an entire industrial cleaning of a professional kitchen.

In some restaurants maybe one or two of these jobs will be every other night or even only twice a week, but in many, possibly most kitchens, ALL of these things happen EVERY night. You don't want to leave any food mess that might attract insects or rodents for one thing, so a really good kitchen is as close to brand new as you can get it every night.

IF YOU ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO ORDER SOMETHING ANYWAY, HERE IS WHAT TO DO

open with an apology and ask the server to go ask what the cook would prefer you to order.

Any good server will already know what the cook is hoping for and what will make their line cook go into the walk in and scream. If it's significantly less than an hour to close and they say some variant of "oh anything is fine" they are either telling the lie their boss wants them to say, or they actually do not know what their line cook wants, and you can either use human connection and a conspiratorial just-between-us tone to get them to drop the customer-is-always-right act, or get them to actually go ask the cook.

It might be as specific as "the lasagna is easiest on the kitchen" or it might be a simple guideline like "nothing that requires the flat top" or "any of the sautés are easy" but a good line cook will probably have a system for if they have to make a couple of the most popular items after they start their close, so the answer is likely to include something most people like and you should be good to order that.

but for the love of all that's holy, please only do so at great need. Leave that last 30-60 minutes to the truly desperate and the crew's duties.

[soaked-doors]

happy birthday zoro 🎉🍾

[alectricblue]

the og post was way too long so I'm making a new one

thanks for the tag @lombolica !! :D

You're stuck in a room with the last character in your gallery how safe are you

very safe

the worst thing that could happen is him being clumsy, so I think I'm alright (unless monsters find him I guess)

tagging (no pressure): @flaretheidiot @lemonic-whimssyy @wibbly-wobbly-blog @cryptidanathema @virtualunease @aurlworthfightingfor @angrysheep @sugarplumanderson @time-travelling-chaos @fateisnotafactor @monstrousmaws @sinfulauthor @idkaguyorsomething @vampireopossum and anyone who wants to do this!

[egophiliac]

bring back zooterkins, the best 17th-century swear word

I don't normally do Just Characters Swearing, but. ...this kind of wrote itself and then wouldn't leave my head. it comes from both a piece of character-writing advice that has always stuck with me, and also my conviction that Leona is 1000% funnier as a character if his dialogue has to stay G-rated. let Kalim say fuck, but don't let Leona say bastard.

(I'm sorry)

[kensatou]

studio trigger understood the assignment. i would let her wreck me.

[inquisitor-apologist]

Ok I’m being so brave about it but a couple of days ago I saw this post claiming that the Jedi saying ‘this weapon [your lightsaber] is your life’ is emblematic of ‘the Jedi’s failure as peacekeepers’ (not an exact quote but pretty close) because why would a weapon be the life of a peacekeeper?

And like. The Jedi are a culture. They’re a religion.

You know that, right? You know that many cultures, including generally peaceful ones, have sacred weapons, right? You know that the bond between a Jedi and their crystal(s) is an extremely sacred thing that requires the consent of both parties and is integral to their way of life, right?

You know that lightsabers are not intended to be only for killing, right? That the first thing Luke learns to do with his lightsaber is to shield and defend? You know that a culture having sacred weapons doesn’t mean that they view killing as sacred, right?

Not trying to start shit, I don’t even remember who said it, but ugh

[emberglowfox]

Keeper -- a short comic about an angel meeting a robotic lighthouse keeper that doesn't know the world has already ended. Made in about 18 hours for a 24-hour 24-page* black and white comic challenge (that I arrived late to, ha.)

*the actual submission does not include the cover, which was created after the fact for this post.

This was a really great learning experience as someone who's... never really made a completed comic. I ended up really attached to the story by the end of the project (possibly due to all-nighter deliriousness lol) and ultimately am very proud of what I made.There are some things I'd still like to change, particularly text placement, but in keeping with the spirit of the challenge I've elected to leave it as is.

[officialspec]

so we just moved, and the house we moved into has been abandoned for a few years so weve discovered some fun little secrets scattered around as we explored. for example, theres a little room downstairs with graffiti on the door dubbing it 'the dog box'

of course we were intrigued. aside from some storage and a place to put a washing machine, the dog box seems to exclusively contain this old ass piano, with a little window to see into it from outside

also pictured sitting on the piano is a little novelty dagger we found in the grass outside. its all very funny and novel, right? we thought so

that was when we found The Stain

of course, we immediately jumped to some conclusions. the knife outside, the abandoned house, 'do not enter' written on the door. whatever it was, it had dripped through the floorboards from upstairs, from approximately just outside the bathroom. we decided to wait until we finished moving and then grab some peroxide to test it just in case

still, the dog box bloodstain remained a hot topic, and the curiosity was killing me. after figuring out where upstairs the stain wouldve dripped down from, we noticed it had also seeped up through the newly installed flooring, and i decided i couldnt wait to investigate

looking around the dog box, i noticed that there was a section of the ceiling/underfloor that was noticeably newer than the rest of it, meaning the place the stain had leaked through had been pulled out and replaced just before we moved in. suspicious

im using my phone torch to look around in the dark, and when i shine it on the bloodstain it lights up in a distinctly.... glossy way. when i get closer i can see its not matte, but sticky. so i decide to touch it, and immediately im hit with a STRONG smell of something deeply familiar. all the pieces fall together at once, and using my superior investigative prowess i have deduced the culprit

it was bees. there was a fuckoff massive beehive in the floor that got taken out before we moved in and it leaked honey up through the floorboards and onto the floor of the dog box and the landlord didnt feel like cleaning it up. mystery solved