#Y'all will not silence me

[savior-of-the-ink]

Leith Pierre: I had to turn my boyfriend into a TV.

Alastor: That's rough, buddy.

[micahsawyer]

rising from my tomb for a sec to let y'all know that i'm working on a heavy revamp of the multi because i'm trying something new and i'll be moving micah there to better focus on him!! i was going to give one of my older muses a solo blog bc i'm hyperfixated and have the urge to pick him up again, but we all know i can't handle more than one blog and i refuse to abandon ur favorite slimy guitarist. ♥ he was only supposed to be a seasonal muse tbh but uh... that's not happening. he's not going anywhere. there will be a slight rule change too just for my comfort, so i'll make a post when i'm done and y'all can decide whether or not to follow over there! i'll be moving over threads, too, of course!! also ... i have been avoiding disco like the plague (i'm so sorry y'all, i'm not even logged in rn) because it's been making my anxiety flare and i desperately need a cleanout before i start up messages again. thank y'all for being patient, i love y'all sm!! xoxo

[madwomansapologist]

kaladin just appeared but i know that if something happens to him i will kill everyone and then myself

[schwarznummer1]

WIP not Wednesday

Soft is good, soft is sweet, soft is what she liked, what she is.

[xenocorner]

Art Resources 01 [Facial anatomy]

Hi! First post of the Art Resources thing I mentioned a while back :) Figured I'd start with something people generally want to know more about- or something people think they already know about but could still used some lesser known tips!

Resources, break downs and tips under the Keep Reading thing :]

1. The Basics

There are thousands of methods to constructing the face. The most popular one is the little circle with the cross in the middle, and sometimes a few more lines for the jaw. While that can be a useful guideline, if you're just starting to learn the ropes it might be better to use a method that has more structure decomposition and land marks to help guide you. Here I'll leave two methods of deconstructing the face that I believe are the most useful to draw faces in different angles and perspectives as well as identify where exactly should each element be placed.

REMEMBER: All of these methods are just guidelines. In order to get different facial features, you can adjust proportions for each of these and play around with sizes.

1.1 The Loomis Method

A structural approach to drawing the head, based on first: simplifying general forms and second: identifying landmarks for the face elements. Pretty good for beginners, helps you understand the head from a more tridimensional stand point to be able to draw it from different angles.

1.2 The Reilly Method

Also a structural approach, but this one is based on understanding the rhythms of the face (proportions, harmonies, and even some general muscular anatomy). It can be a bit harder to understand and use as a building block for beginner artists, but it can serve as a way to check your proportions after an initial sketch.

Here are other two methods, a bit less known, but that go a bit more in depth about the head. If you're a beginner, I'd recommend watching the Loomis method first before diving into these other two methods. Note: these are playlists covering each method, and the videos are longer, but worthwhile.

1.3 The Michael Hampton Method

1.4 The Steve Huston Method

And here's a hybrid of a visual and structural approach too if you're interested! (Again, this one is recommended mostly if you already have a good grasp of the general structure)

Having trouble finding that reference of the head from that specific angle? Here's a 3D model that can be used as reference from any angle. Bonus: It has a built in light feature that allows you to understand which planes of the face the light would hit!

There's also a version with more feminine features.

Here's a website that lets you pick a head angle and then searches for reference images with that angle too. Allows you to pick age, gender, and other features like glasses, facial hair, etc.

2. Understanding What's Below

When drawing the head and face, what most people think of is what we see everyday: the skin. However, there's more to the head and face than just that: there's a whole structure laying underneath that builds up everything on top. Understanding that structure can lead to better execution of skin level facial anatomy.

And what's that structure? Well, bones of course. And muscles. Even if (most of the time) we don't draw them, knowing they exist and how they are placed on top of each other can help with building what we do draw. Understanding the building blocks of the face will make it easier to avoid, say, making one eye bigger than the other. Or a forehead that's too small. Or ears that are too high. Or side profiles that cut off the brain.

Something I recommend for this is making study sheets of the bone structure, muscular structure, and skin structure. For this it's important to name the main bones and muscle groups. Not because you need to commit them to memory, but because if you name them on your practice sheet, it's easier to remember later on that they EXIST (even if you don't remember the name).

Here's a 3D model of the skull

Useful guide for the names of the bones of the skull

Here's a 3D model of the face muscles with names

3. Elements of a Whole

So we now understand the general structure of a face and some useful guidelines to build it. Good! But now, a face has a bunch of individual elements with their own individual structure and stuff to look out for. Those are, of course:

Eyes

Noses

Lips

Ears

3.1 Eyes

It's important to note that the eye has a volume of its own- it's not just a sticker laying on top of the face. It can be helpful to think of the eyeball inside the eye socket when drawing it (taking into account the bone structure we learned before). When understanding the eyeball as a sphere, it becomes easier to place the skin above: the eyelids. This can help with drawing the eye from any angle.

This can also help when drawing the dreaded Other EyeTM, specially if you are still a beginner artist. If you start by constructing the eyes with spheres and approach it from the perspective of "placing" the skin above that sphere, it's easier to get sizes and proportions right.

3.2 Noses

Again, spheres can be your friend.

3.3 Lips

Spheres part 3

A funny thing with lips that often gets over looked when one is just learning the ropes of anatomy is that it also wraps around the volume of the face. Just like the eyes aren't stickers laying on top, the lips aren't either. It's important to take the curvature of the face when placing the lips from different angles and expressions. For example, when we thing of a smile, its usually this idea that comes to mind:

Which yeah, that's fine! ...As long as your subject is facing straight to the camera.

But when we have even a bit of perspective, the way the mouth looks changes, and we often don't think of that and just draw what we think the mouth looks like... which can lead to odd looking mouths, like they're pasted on. So, it's important to keep in mind the volume of the face:

This is true for all features of the face: keeping in mind the volume. But, it can be more noticeable on the mouth.

3.4 Ears

Spheres part- no.

Even if the ear is one of the "flatter" parts of the head, it doesn't mean they don't have volume. Depending on the angle of the face, it'll change how much of the ear is shown- or which parts.

All ears are different and have their quirks, but they all can be divided in three major segments, colour coded in the image. If you deconstruct the ear in these three major parts, keeping in mind they have their own volume, it should be easier to figure out which of those parts will be seen depending on the angle of your face.

4. Expressions!

Now that we understand the elements and construction blocks of the face (bones and muscles), we can play around with them a bit more. So, time to make expressions!

When playing with how the skin moves, it's fundamental to understand the muscle groups of the face and how they move, relax and tense depending on the expression. Knowing that these muscles exist and how they interact with the skin above will help you know where the eyebrow should furrow, where wrinkles would form.

A BOOK I widely recommend is Anatomy of Facial Expression, which you can find here for purchase

Or here as a PDF

This book also covers skull anatomy, so it's a useful tool to study the structure talked about in 02.

There's also an ArtStation account that uploads a bunch of useful 3D model resources for anatomy (facial or otherwise).

Scott McCloud's book, Making Comics, has a section dedicated to facial expressions too (great book in general, not only if you're interested in comics!). You can find it in PAGE 80 (or 88 in the document).

Another thing that can be helpful is studying from life! You can do that by making different expressions in front of a mirror and pay close attention to which muscle groups tense and relax, where wrinkles appear, how your skin moves. Or, if you're like me and hate staring at your face, you can also study from video references.

Here's a link to a PLAYLIST containing various videos of people making different expressions.

The previous playlist contains real people, thus, REALISTIC ANATOMY. It's important to note that even if your drawing style is heavily stylised (like anime, cartoon, etc), it's still fundamental that you understand real world rules so you later know how to bend and break them properly to implement those to your own style.

However, that doesn't mean you can't study STYLISED EXPRESSIONS too! It's actually a great idea to see how other people exaggerate certain anatomical aspects to their own work so you can also understand how to do it in yours. Here's a list with various videos of EXPRESSIONS IN MOTION for animation tests. Study them the same as the previous ones: paying close attention to how the face and muscles MOVE.

Pause the videos you study as needed! While all of this might seem more useful for animation, it's also incredibly useful in illustration, and studying things in movement can help with understanding them better, thus putting them to paper (or tablet) becomes easier.

Finally, here's some videos in a sort of CLASS FORMAT that can help with walking you through drawing expressions more effectively than a text post could lol

[necrotic-nephilim]

for the choose violence ask game: 3, 8, 16 :D

for the choose violence ask game!

3. screenshot or description of the worst take you've seen on tumblr

i was going to be kind enough to not screenshot but i lied i'm choosing violence. this is less of a take and more of an incorrect quote i suppose but. every time i remember it exists i stare at a wall for like 20 minutes.

most posts under the "chaotic tim drake"/"unhinged tim drake" tags do. get to me. they are all liable to make me spontaneously combust but something about this one. the way Tim's fanon kill count magically gets higher every time it's brought up. the way it directly contradicts Tim's internal deep-seated fears about turning into Bruce and that's why he has always planned to retire after being Robin the *entire point* of Tim Drake of Tomorrow is to show how horrified Tim is and how future!evil!Tim will always go too far. like i genuinely do not know what character ppl are talking about with the "Tim is most likely to become a supervillain and somehow this a cutesy headcanon" sort of thing. it plagues me. consider me plagued. i could go on and on about it for hours and how deeply it contradicts Tim's character to his core. also just why does the fandom want to make him a villain so bad? i don't understand.

8. common fandom opinion that everyone is wrong about

i already gave one answer to this question here, but worry not i have endless answers to this one. a bit one for me is: the idea Cass should use ASL. it icks me out. i will close a fic if Cass is using ASL i will not lie. firstly, she does not canonically know ASL. secondly, it doesn't make *sense* for her to use it bc her disability has nothing to do with the ability to speak, it has to do with her language learning skills. and ASL is, *still a language*. and would be just as difficult to learn, if not more-so bc it could set back her learning of English and would not be as easily applicable as English to her daily life. it's a headcanon that ranges from well-meaning misunderstandings to just downright ableism that infantilizes Cass and infantilizes ASL. honestly i get touchy in general about fandom using ASL when not written by a Deaf writer/someone who knows ASL bc... you can tell. you can always tell. (hearing fans stop trying to come up with sign names for the Batfam i'm gently begging you.) there are many good posts breaking down why this headcanon doesn't really work but i'm just salty and feral about it.

16. you can't understand why so many people like this thing (characterization, trope, headcanon, etc)

the headcanon/fanon concept that Tim has lasting psychological trauma due to the Titans Tower incident, or that it has caused him to be afraid of Jason. (the same can be applied to Damian cutting Tim's line being something that Matters to Tim longterm or causes fear of Damian) like? beyond the "that is not canon, that event really didn't bother Tim and Tim was a cocky little shit the whole time", i'm unsure how this... fits into the fanon version of Tim? like i don't *understand* it. how it is that fandom likes "Tim has a super high kill count and is going to be a supervillain" but also... thinks one bad fight that roughed Tim up a bit has made him terrified of one person specifically? these feel contradictory. either he can Take The Heat or He Can't. this weird waffling where he's both the biggest badass around but also somehow a wilting traumatized kid confuses me. i don't necessarily mind the exploration of Tim being angry or pissed off about these events, or even him being more injured than he was in canon and dealing with that, but him being like. so afraid of Jason it influences their relationship has always eluded me. it contradicts everything else about fanon!Tim and makes him seem... sort of cowardly? like not that events like these can't be traumatizing but in his field of work they're not unique events. these are normal Tuesdays for him. why is it affecting him so much in fanon.

[ticklepinions]

I promise you that you will not get arrested for changing your mind y'all. You can GROW and and rethink some of your past actions! Its normal, it happens. Easier said than done but you really don't need to publicly shame yourself for thinking a certain way. I get how internet culture has us overexplaining literally anything we do but you owe no one but yourself justification. It's okay to breathe and say yeah that probably wasn't a great way to think, change and move on 😭

Its so easy to go down the rabbit hole and turn a growing moment to a "I'm a horrible no good human being that deserves the worst things imaginable". Not saying that you're exempt from taking responsibility for your actions if they harmed other people but there are other ways of going about it that don't involve beating yourself up.

There's a post going around and I'm not gonna speak on it, but some people who really aren't the target audience are taking the brunt of it all and rethinking themselves as a human and I'm there like oh! That post really wasn't calling you out but okay! That's okay. We realized we need to change some things but it doesn't mean you're a terrible human. And these are literal sweethearts who keep to themselves panicking cause they thought they did something wrong. TRUST me the people that particular post is calling out is not about you. The fact that you're self reflecting is a huge sign you're not like that i promise you. Be kinder to yourselves y'all

[michaelisamenace]

I've been posting a lot of sex headcanons, but today's soft headcanon (au idea? Canon divergent?) would be Clarice as a mommy. A single mom at that, frankly, most likely (except not really lol)

Mom! Clarice who had her first born and never told anybody (except for Ardelia, maybe) about its father. I like to picture it as a boy, because she just strikes me as the boy mom type. Who still works in the FBI, but late at night comes home to her baby.

Mom! Clarice who is very, very protective of her child, and was very wary of how her unresolved traumas and connection to Hannibal could affect them, yet couldn't bring herself to think of ridding herself of the baby when she found out there was one, whether it was borne of her ever-present desire of having a family again after being orphaned, of belonging in a unit besides work, or because of the circumstances- the person- who'd made her a mother in the first place.

I think it's an adorable and bittersweet idea, having a tangible part of him with her even as she devoted herself to duty. And truth be told, knowing Clarice's romantic attachments, it wouldn't be too much of a lonely motherhood (*every breath you take* starts playing).

[anghraine]

Today's unhinged "good God I hate how much extreme generosity I'm expected to extend to the Peter Jackson films by people who make wildly bad faith arguments about things I like" rant:

I am very deeply tired of people insisting with zero evidence that of course the LOTR films are imperfect, but the difficulties of adapting LOTR are such that it wasn't possible for them to be better than they were—in, apparently, any respect. They just couldn't be done better, at all, because it was so hard to make something watchable at all.

This is always just like ... really? Really?? Just what prevented them from making better decisions about anything? What exactly made casting every actor of color as barely differentiated villainous hordes in the twenty-first century so necessary and unavoidable? The glamorization and vast expansions of battle scenes and insertion of "heroic" war crimes was the highest film as a medium could aspire to in the early 2000s because of what insuperable force?

What made it impossible to give Arwen a coherent character arc? The films could not have been made without the underlying assumption that most of the cast are NPCs who will only do the right thing, when they will, if prodded or manipulated or influenced by main characters? In what way is this an inevitability of adaptation or film that simply couldn't have been conceptualized differently, much less better?

There is zero explanation or justification for why any of this stuff (or the myriad other flaws) had to be that way and couldn't have been done better in any way at any point. It's just stated that the films that exist must be the best films that could have existed because they're the ones that do exist and are popular. QED.

That doesn't make any sense, though, and it doesn't convince anyone who doesn't already agree. The idea that they could not have been better in any way (including their worst quality, which again, is the extremely racist casting), that some force was preventing not only the actual filmmakers but any filmmakers that could possibly exist from doing anything better just seems patently absurd.

You can like them and respect what they did achieve without demanding that everyone buy into a baseless and irrational argument that their pop culture success means nothing about them could possibly have been done any better. Look, I was in my mid to late teens at the time. I remember the early 2000s quite well. It wasn't now, but we are not talking about an age so divorced from our own that any of these things were somehow fundamental to the media landscape.

There are ways in which the LOTR films were very good that were essential to their popularity then and now. This does not require anyone to accept that it was literally impossible for them to be better than they are or that some defense is required against every criticism of them ever.

I am not, incidentally, talking about removing Bombadil, an entirely understandable and defensible decision that the film defenders in my notes somehow always feel the need to bring up. I know that changes had to be made, that adaptation is not a word for word transcription, that it would always be a difficult text to adapt, that structurally minor elements had to go, that they are cinematically beautiful films that a lot of work and love went into. I know this. EVERYONE knows this, because for the last 20 years it's been impossible to criticize anything about them without being reminded. Their accomplishments, and their existence, do not mean that any choice made by the filmmakers must definitionally have been the right call and could not possibly have been better in any way.

[spencerdisventurecamp]

"do disventure camp fans even like the show" oh. oh god, no. half the time, no.

[extasiswings]

Do not cite the dark magic to me, witch. I saw what Sera Gamble did on SPN AND The Magicians.

[ghostinthegallery]

Speaking as someone who was a nerdy teenager in the 2010s, whoever put the Silence and the Storm on the TV Tropes 40k fanfic rec page is my personal hero. I spent way too much time on that website back in the day and thanks to you I have come full circle 🙏 Appearing on a website that was (for better or for worse!) deeply formative to me as a youth.

(now if we got a full page together 👀👀👀 truly our power would be unlimited 😈)

[unpersoniverse]

I don't know if I was desperate for a little silly serotonin boost, if I am too unserious or if people are just straight up haters to everything but like...

I swear the ATLA la is not nowhere as bad as many are making it to be, like, this isn't a carbon copy of the og series, nothing will ever top of ATLA and if you wanted it to be the same just go watch the show again?

I've watched ATLA so many times in my life, it's my comfort show as much as yours. But the live action isn't the cartoon, that I understood right away. And of course it has a lot of flaws (and tbh I blame today's way of media consumption at that, trying to squish complex storylines in the least time possible, and also mainstream media performative activism but that's a war for another day) but as a stand alone thing I thought it was pretty solid? I felt like the essence of the show was brought to justice after the unspeakable movie. It felt familiar, at least to me idk.

I don't think this was for the fans honestly, it's been 19 since the og aired. Many things in the world have changed but many are still the same, I think this series was meant more to catch onto the new generations and public. I'm giving you a personal example but I've always recommended the show to everyone I know and despite all my efforts, there are still A LOT of people who disregard animation as something only for kids and wouldn't see it (boludos pero bue) and guess what? They're seeing the live action, and they love it.

Also the fact that there's a show with a cast of mainly asian and native-american actors at last? sign me tf up.

Overall, even if I didn't like some changes they made I still enjoyed it and mostly I want this series to succeed. Mainly because the ATLA story is always going to be relevant, even if it is fantasy it has the representation about people and feelings we don't often see in things. (like, as a girl from a south american country, seeing stories about fighting colonial and imperialists little shits are always gonna hit close home)

Don't get me wrong, it is completely valid if you didn't like the live action. Criticism is great, we need it a lot actually if there's going to be a S2.

But saying is straight up shit and garbage (even before seeing it) just because it's not a frame to frame copy and then go online complaining making 5839 posts about it? Grow up.

[avid-adoxography]

Gripping the counter till my fingers bleed, consumed by lust. I have to talk about my wife or I'll go insane (<- already beyond salvation).

[laugtherhyena]

Continuing the rant-iness of last post's notes onto this one i think (I appreciate if they're read, i think I'm too self-conscious to have them in the post itself)

[mortifying-macaroni]

Love how as soon as I start a new project, I IMMEDIATELY get an idea for another one...