#and obviously drawing it is another thing

[icantspellthings]

I need people who do not understand what AI is to stop commenting on things going "thank god it's not AI" or "ew it has AI" because first of all not EVERYTHING is generative AI (the one that steals art and writing) and some AI are actually useful because there are DIFFERENT TYPES of AI like oh my fucking god it's an umbrella term for machine learning. People keep thinking that all AI is generative AI when it ISN'T and it's fucking annoying. Translation software is AI, Virtual Assistants are AI, Video game NPCs are AI, Medical software uses AI. Some AIs are trained to do simple menial tasks! It's called machine learning for fuck sakes.

Please stop demonising a word that you don't even know the proper definition of.

[eydilily]

I absolutely love your art and how detailed it is! If you don't mind me asking, how do you draw/break down faces? Your style is like exactly what I'm hoping to get close to when I draw them

OKAY so huge disclaimer. im self taught and i dont know what im doing most of the time! frankly i have a long way to go with shape language and character design so i will always suggest people to go to actual professionals and masters LMAO.

i am NOT qualified whatsoever, but, i tried to breakdown my thought process in how i currently draw things!!! for my mcyt designs, obviously i take huge inspirations from the actual ccs.

tango has similar hairlines and beard patterns to cc!tango. joel's hairstyle is very much inspired from his younger hairstyles, and pearl has a similarly long oval headshape from cc!pearl.

all of which are completely personal preference. some people take shape inspiration from personalities, voices, or whatever prophetic visions they have in their heads!

this would be the case for my cleo and etho designs. Cleo to me has a sharper voice & personality so i tried to incorporate that into what id think their face would be! etho is kind of . wet cat, but his voice for some reason gives me... round?? shapes?? so he has floppy hair and rounder eyes and ears in my design.

(another disclaimer: looks does not equate to personality, but like. its a lil easier 2 draw. and theyre shorthands and associations)

^ cleo has a higher eyebrow arch, sharp inner eye corner. etho has ears that stick out, uneven haircut, and his roots are darker :D

so its basically 2 big steps! Picking the face shape and then picking out details that would be unique to that character. to make characters different, i try to always pick something different between each person. so more contrast!!!

pearl and gem are easy since theyre opposites visually -- oval vs square, sharp vs round. for skizz and tango, i draw their eyes very similarly. but i decided my skizz would have a longer face and rounder cheeks, whereas tango has a bushier mustache and flatter face.

i am personally very fond of super stylized artstyles,,, i think cartoony / stylized artstyles take a lot of skill and a lot of character design thought into creating unique silhouettes that are still very recognizable! (for instance, huge fan of @/wasyago and @/alienssstufff)

unfortunately my artstyle isnt geared towards that lol, and alot of my face shapes tend to be very similar. so instead, i try to change up eye shapes (very common method of separating characters) and hairstyles! i have a long long way to go and i have a lot of bad habits lol but i hope this shows a little bit on how each of my characters are detailed differently.

[wheneverfeasible]

Wiggly Wednesday?

The brain worms are here again.

I honestly hate Christmas and avoid doing too much for it. However, an idea came to me suddenly and I can’t stop thinking about…

Secret Santa Steddie AU.

In one of Steve’s high school classes senior year, they’re assigned a Secret Santa project. They all put their names in a Santa hat and have to draw one out (returning it for another if it’s their own) and that’s the person they have to secretly give a gift to, either homemade or purchased, but there’s a cap of like…whatever the equivalent of $20 today is back then. Idk.

This is supposed to be a team building type of exercise, something to foster camaraderie, after say maybe a huge argument/fight broke out between Tommy and his group and the Freak, Eddie Munson, as well as some other nerds. Steve is exhausted and doesn’t care for Tommy’s bullshittery anymore, so he didn’t really get involved, though Eddie did throw a few digs his way. Which was hurtful but probably deserved.

Anyways, Steve draws out Eddie’s name.

For the next week or so the last fifteen minutes of class are devoted to questionnaires and such where the students answer questions about themselves directly or they fill in answers to widely asked questions, all used to let the Secret Santas learn about their recipients. Some people take it more seriously than others.

Steve gets to know more about Eddie, who is more blasé about it all, obviously not expecting anyone to give him something good (if they give him anything at all) since he has no friends in the class and most people don’t like him. So Steve, who has never paid Eddie any amount of attention before in the past but has been now and finds himself intrigued, starts observing Eddie outside of class.

Steve knows he could buy Eddie something music related. An easy cop-out gift. But the more he observes Eddie, the more he gets to see the tiny cracks in the Freak persona whenever he spies on him, sees the nerdy but also kind person beneath the leather jacket. And…okay…maybe he starts to develop a sort of crush without realizing that’s what happens.

Maybe he bribes other nerds about Hellfire Club and Eddie and makes certain they don’t squeal about him asking (he doesn’t realize he comes off as threatening, he just thinks he’s being urging), maybe he hears Eddie mention things and then he goes and asks Dustin what they mean, learning it’s from a book series about midgets and some jewelry or whatever, and so an idea forms.

While shuttling the kids about after school, Steve asks Will if he’d be willing to draw something for him, which Steve would pay him for. Will, obviously excited because it’s his first commission job and Steve pays him fairly, agrees.

(Steve may also purchase a patch at the record store they stop at—Will’s request as he wants to buy something for Jonathan—because it reminds him of Eddie, but that doesn’t matter.)

Yadda yadda ya, it’s time to exchange gifts. The teacher has allowed them to drop them off leading up to the Friday before winter vacation to keep the mystery alive.

When Eddie gets his, he’s expecting something more like a prank gift. Instead, he’s gifted a colored drawing (sadly not enough time for a painting) of Eddie dressed as someone named something like Spider or Arrow Gone or whatever, Steve doesn’t really know, but it’s him fighting off a horde of monster things with a flaming eyeball in the background and further back is an erupting volcano.

Steve doesn’t know what the hell is going on, not really able to absorb the massive info dump Dustin gave him, but Will assured Steve that the dude was cool and the battle depicted was awesome and important when he dropped off his old yearbook for model reference. Will’s opinion was enough for Steve of course. He just hoped Eddie liked it, and the patch that he rolled up with the picture.

Eddie is, of course, gobsmacked and trying his hardest not to show it. He scans the classroom to try to figure out who could have given him such an amazing gift, but no one even looks at him. There’s no way he would ever suspect the truth.

Steve ended up getting a can of Farrah Fawcett spray, which everyone laughed at and assumed was a joke gift for a jock, but Steve noticed a small twitch of a smile on Tommy’s face, the only one besides Dustin now who knows his secret.

Later, Eddie’s battle vest is adorned with the patch he received in his gift, a red and black Leviathan cross, but Steve doesn’t know what happened to the drawing. He hopes it didn’t get trashed.

It’s not until later, after everything with Vecna and recovering what was salvageable from the trailer, that he found the picture safely secured behind a glass frame hidden in Eddie’s room. It’s only then that Steve realizes that he might have been a little bit in love with Eddie “the Freak” Munson all this time.

~

Aaaaaaaah sorry this is a little bit of a nebulous ending here. Does this story follow canon and Eddie is dead, never knowing who his Secret Santa is? Or is Eddie recovering from his injuries, fated to recognize Will’s art style and thus learning the truth behind one of his most prized possessions? Who’s to say 🤷

I’m just gonna tag my perma list because I’m lazy. Anyone can be happy to consider this a tag for their own future brain worms tho!

Hostage Hotties:

@derythcorvinus @katyawriteswhump @honeii-puff @scoops-aboy86 @dotdot-wierdlife

@everywherenothere @bumblebeecuttlefishes

[ofdarklands]

i originally handwaved away mitr'a knowing how to write despite the fact i don't think keepers have much use for it, being reclusive nomads and all; but now i think i'm leaning towards him finding or scavenging an eorzean book and being told that 'each symbol is a sound,' and then making himself his own writing system out of that.

to write about plants, obviously. what if he accidentally gets too high while testing or hits his head and forgets something? you can't trust memorization for everything, especially when you're on your own and can't ask anyone else to confirm. also the easier drawing is pleasing

this means how to write actual eorzean together with the local languages is another thing he learnt in the 2 years before arr. fufucha looking at his notes like "what in the goddamn are you writing. what language is that." she works so hard and the realm owes her so much

[bluecapsicum]

hi Blue! I am absolutely IN LOVE with the "Reports From Unknown Places" series. If you don't mind me asking, how did you learn to draw the clouds and the sky so well? I've always found the prospect very daunting, but you draw them in a way that simply amazing! Do you have any tips for brushes/practice?

Hello!

Thank you so much for the message, and your kind words! I'm so glad you enjoy Reports.

I completely understand how one might find drawing the sky daunting. I still regularly give myself headaches when working on reports. Everyone has their own issues when it comes to drawing, though.

For instance, this might sound a bit absurd, but one of my main issues as an illustrator is that I don't think well in 3D, and I ended up realising that I was unconsciously thinking about the sky as a flat image. When I started drawing clouds as objects moving in space, everything became a little easier.

(This is the kind of epiphany that I had. Truly a revolution in my mind. Now I can totally rotate clouds in my brain.)

This all came about as I kept on drawing more and more, sure, but the most important part really was watching clouds for myself, as much as possible, and to try and notice things every time. It's mostly silly stuff, especially at first, like oh yeah, I guess clouds produce shadows on other clouds too. Wow! Or, huh, this cloud doesn't have the same density throughout, so the light scatters differently inside of it.

Because it's all fundamentally physics, it ended up sounding incredibly simple once I had noticed it. Of course! It's all logical! I had just never connected the dots before I saw it in person.

So I also bought some books, and watched videos (all those airplane videos are fantastic), read websites, looked at pictures. Everything was helpful in one way or another. Listen, I knew about cirrus and cumulonimbus and that was pretty much it, at first. So looking at diagrams about how high cirrus are in comparison to stratocumulus, for instance, was a revelation. Looking at the life cycle of cumulonimbus explained so much for me.

These are studies I did on the side of Reports, in November 2020, then April 2021, and the third one in September 2023:

I think I'm able to look at these and tell that I got progressively more confident because I understood what I was drawing a lot better.

If I had to say, a few concrete things I learned that work for me is being bold, not to be afraid of contrast and sharp edges, and to treat light as an actor of its own. I can't find it right now, but I once read a quote by (I think!) Cezanne that went something like "I'm not painting the mountain, I'm painting the air between me and the mountain". I think it's the most helpful thing I've ever heard for painting and drawing. It's obviously especially relevant here. The air changes everything.

Anyway, I could go for ages more, I'm totally rambling, so I'll just leave a few references I find helpful:

The International Cloud Atlas

The Cloud Appreciation Society

What's This Cloud

In the end it's just fun, and good for the soul, to spend quality time with clouds, so nothing is ever lost!

[misterxsamsa]

I don't think people who like/draw Jimmy try to erase that he's a rapist, even if they don't mention it every twelve seconds. Well, at least I don't. They just believe that a character can simultaneously be criminal and irredeemable, while still being an interesting tool for narrative exploration. They're a character at the end of the day; that's their entire purpose. This isn't a new concept. Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights is a rapist and yet his source is upheld as a classic, and he's talked about and picked apart over a hundred years later. He's actually a really good example, because there are sections of that book where he experiences abuse, and is put in sympathetic positions, and yet that doesn't diminish anything he's done, and nobody within treats it like an excuse for his actions. It's the same logic with Jimmy. Horrible people can go through bad things, and that doesn't vindicate them, but it's fine to explore that nuance of human experience through a harmless medium where no real rapists with victims are being portrayed in a sympathetic light.

This is a really strange argument coming from anybody who passively engages with Johnny as a character. You know, the guy who's been confirmed by Jhonen Vasquez himself to use his murderous tendencies as an outlet for his repressed sexuality? That guy who has canonically traumatized and assaulted people [yes, sexually, even if it was throwaway gags]? I don't care, obviously, but talk about glass houses. I'm pretty sure that's what OP was getting at bringing up Johnny in comparison to Jimmy. People will downplay Johnny's crimes and enforce this double-standard just because they find him more personally appealing, when the whole reason Johnny killed Jimmy was because he saw too much of himself in him.

I think a lot of Jimmy-haters just genuinely don't understand his appeal and probably think we're all a bunch of woobifying, canon-ignoring, crazy rapist-lovers or something. If I had to explain the appeal of Jimmy the best I could... For myself, I'm really fascinated by the mechanisms of parasocial relationships, especially where it evolves to something like full-blown serial murder, and revolves around another equally damaged party. Also, what you see as him "not really listening to Johnny" is what I see as him being able to critically evaluate Johnny's character, and accurately notice that a lot of his monologuing is self-serving, contradictory, ego driven garbage. That brings a lot of nuance to his seemingly blind reverence of him. There's much to think about there, but if I go on longer this'll turn into a character analysis post.

Call me a liberal snowflake but I think it’s kinda weird to draw mmy

[kaitaiga]

One of these days I gotta lay down some rules for my blog 💀

[paintedcrows]

Assorted Gravity Falls doodles!

[formulanni]

Lewis Hamilton as The Emperor:

The Emperor tarot card symbolizes the ultimate male ego and absolute ruler of the world, with a sign of sterility of regulation and unyielding power. This card is often associated with a strong sense of authority, control, and structure. It can also represent a need for order and stability in one's life. It is your hard work, discipline and self control that have bought you this far.

While the Empress represents the archetypal mother, the Emperor represents the father. He exudes authority - and though he is stern, he is also filled with wisdom and understanding from his years. He signals structure, stability and the rule of thought over the heart.

Tag list: @st-leclerc @rubywingsracing @saviour-of-lord @three-days-time @the-wall-is-my-goal @albonoooo @ch3rubd0lls

[sumirerin]

No es la locura, 🎶 It's not madness,

En realidad es el amor! 🎶 in reality it is love!

Also thank u tumblr for decimating the quality 💀

[pushing500]

Bold to start a fight when you're immediately postpartum, you're relying on your opponent's (already very limited) hospitality to keep you and your new baby alive, and you have a horrendous melee ability.

Brown's religion is a nudist, cannibal, high-life cult. Not sure it'll be the best environment for Wombat to grow up in, tbh, and it certainly isn't helping Brown recover any faster.

A fight on one side, a shuttle crash on the other, a deathly ill newborn baby lingering in the back of his mind... What a day for poor Kwahu.

The sole survivor of the shuttle crash was an Avaloi named Yuki. She's very pretty and looks to be healing up fast, thanks to Kwahu's expert care. Hopefully she'll leave quickly, as her genetic dependency on alcohol might be tricky to manage in a colony that focuses all its beverage-production on coffee.

Of course, once Randy starts he just doesn't stop, so he decided the Jones boys needed a nice psychic drone on top of everything else. Very rude.

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[laurzvahll]

that godforsaken drawing on the right was so hard and took me so long I might never color it so here you go

[canadianlucifer]

Sometimes I get a fictional little guy in my head and I have to draw them to release them

[skydreamplayzz]

Amlost going to Start using dulpicate names :'D..

(sorry for not drawing much undertale rn. But it's fun rn creating other stuff)

I'm starting with some simpler Designs, complex stuff aint working too well yet. (gonna start creating facts tomorrow.)

[zecoritheweirdone]

i am being so so normal about these guys right now

[marcmorrigan]

its @wh0rehound 's birthday and since he is the gaymer to my mafia slut obvs i had to draw our boys 🍫💕🎮 everyone say hbd sam!!! 😤🎉🎂