#anyway this was fun and i actually learned new photoshop skills

[lasbrumas]

“misery loves company”

SYMPATHY (2023) dir. darren aronofsky ↳WTW SECRET SANTA for @sympathyhouse​

[steve0discusses]

S5 Ep6: Joey Wheeler is on Fire, Yet Again

Came down with a little sickness-not the biggie, just a little sly guy. But I took some meds, I’m a little floaty, I’ve only been listening to baroque music all morning for some reason? And I hate baroque music usually? But I’ll leave it to bro to tell me if this is fluid enough.

Just so you know, these caps were kind of a hot mess for a while and some of them read like that Garfield in of hot eat the food comic until...today. So pls don’t judge me, Judge my damn DMV where no one was following Covid regulations because I’m pretty sure that’s where I got this damn cold.

We start off with Roland getting more attention than he ever has in his entire life. Like honestly, I don’t know what Roland’s job really is...but he’s got a very diverse set of very useless skills. One of which, is knowing how to announce sports games that aren’t really a sport, while those games he’s announcing slowly fall into chaos.

Anyway, Roland’s taking so long cherishing his sweet time before everything goes to hell, that he’s boring Joey, who’s kinda turned into a ball of stress in the waiting room.

A lot of this episode is us watching them watching Joey having a break down moment by moment, TBH.

(read more under the cut)

Yugi telling Joey to study his cards and straight up--what?

Like at this point they know what’s on the cards, right? Like there comes a point where even Yugioh cards have a finite amount of words and I’m just going to assume that like...Joey probably knows them all in his own deck, right?

(bro note: they have no limit on what they will put on a card)

Then again, maybe Yugi doesn’t know what “study” means?

Also, appreciate how some artist crosshatched the hell on Joey’s nose there and I zoomed out and ruined it.

Now for some reason every duelist is hanging out in the duel lodge, including our current arch-villain guy who’s brought a book. I want to know what book this guy even reads so no one could suspect he’s actually a hacker who uses computers. He’s reading romance, right? And I don’t think he’d even be into Twilight, I think he’s straight up into hard core Mom romance like a lame ass Nicholas Sparks over there reading “Dear John” for the millionth time because he is completely un-phased by anything else happening in this room.

Joey, our hero, just out there being an asshole for no reason.

After Tea is pushed into a locker or something screaming about her need for female friends (which she screamed in earshot of Rebecca again, who I figured was on friends terms with her after last episode...but I guess not) Leon hops up to remind us that we should be caring about the fact that his character exists.

And like, I love Leon’s hair color--that’s a good choice, and legit that is the color I tried to dye my hair at the beginning of the epidemic (it didn’t work PS, my hair cannot take dye for the life of it) but also like...he just kinda feels like a weak Rebecca as far as characters go. He’s young, he’s good at cards...I think he goes to a private school? That’s all I can think of about Leon.

He mostly just reminds us that the big prize of this tourney is to duel Yugi, who anyone could have dueled at any point even without the tournament.

On the way out of the...duel room? lounge? Area? Joey decides to like...make peace with Zigfried, and I gotta tell you, I kinda have to side with Zigfried, because Joey spent the last ten minutes being a freak in the dressing room/lounge/bathroom and at one point looked like he was going to hold the entire locker room in a stranglehold.

I would also want some space from Joey Wheeler, is what I’m saying.

After insulting Joey’s style (which honestly, Joey...has a style? He pops his collar, that’s his entire style.) Zigfried assures us that Joey’s gonna lose and like...

...probably, right? Just looking at the plausible direction this season will go.

Anyway, Joey is such a mess (which is the theme of the episode, that Joey needs to learn to chill in order to win at card games) that Rebecca is like “I understand if all of you leave me to go help our poor baby Joey.” And no one felt bad for her.

Mokuba comes over to tell everyone all of the Kaiba family secrets because Mokuba has no filter.

Seto has devoted himself to staring at a computer screen for the rest of this episode. I guess he’ll put their names into Google, realize that social media hasn’t been invented yet, and then just lie his head down on the desk and take a power nap until the tournament is over. Much like I did after taking Dayquil this afternoon.

I like how Seto dressed for success and then locked himself in the server room for most of this arc so far. Maybe he’s just...really tired, I dunno. I don’t really blame the guy, he’s had a hard time.

And then Yugi was like “DAMN IT MOKUBA, JUST ONCE CAN YOU NOT INVITE THE ILLUMINATI???”

And we had a weird scene where Yugi just started talking to the ghost and it was while he was talking to everyone else, and the show didn’t treat it like that’s a weird thing to do...but it was a weird thing to do.

This show does that sometimes, where I guess they imply that Yugi’s Pharaoh conversations are split second conversations but...they’re not, right?

Also this chick ain’t gone yet, and Mokuba is just failing at his entire job for not zeroing in on vibes coming off this chick like stinky cheeseman.

So listen.

Did the Kaibas make like 3 types of Blue Eyes Caboose to one up Noah? Because Noah made one choo choo dragon, and then Mokuba and Seto were like “how dare” and then made sure that everyone ride every single version of the blue eyes caboose just to see how proud of them they were.

How many months of troubleshooting was the train? Like how long in development did Seto and Mokuba spend on these? A lot right? Like most of the time?

I did not check the subs to see if Roland said Jumping or Champion but I like to believe that Roland thought it was a cool new name he gave him.

Then these guys all showed up.

Hey so...can we talk seating arrangements?

Tea decided not to sit next to Yugi after complaining about not spending time with him for like how many episodes? Or was it too awkward to sit on top of what was probably Pharaoh?

Or did Mokuba go like “please, Tea, I cannot sit next to the others because I’m pretty sure one is a mole that is about to go cray” and was Tea like “Good, I need female friends, these ones are driving me crazy!” and then was Mokuba like peering desperately over the edge of his self made dragon train prison realizing he has to listen to Tea complain about boys for the rest of his ride across molten lava?

Headcanons abound about this weird seating arrangement that the animators drew for the reasons they did...but reasons I cannot fully understand. That and the Dayquil is making me overfixate on random stuff.

And also, Tea is kind of the Kaiba’s security’s understudy. Just there to always protect Mokuba with her ass because she’s the strongest woman alive.

PS I missed the tumblr wars because at the time I was trying to like...run a proper business on blogger. When Blogger died and I jumped over here it was like a weird ruin where everyone was like “tumblr is the most toxic place alive” and...I’ve had a really nice time here, actually. Completely missed that civil war period and I have no regrets.

Now I was there for the Petz wars (warz, I guess) where people were very militant about Petz abuse (abuze?) where apparently people were using the spray bottle on their catz too much and people were very, very upset about it to the point that they were like campaigning about it on their angelfire websites with the most bizarre grassroots campaigns that I still recall, to this day because they were like...well they looked like this:

PLAPA. Not only am I 100% positive that only this one guy ever called this movement PLAPA, but I’m 100% positive that not only are Catz not real people, but also this wasn’t actually happening and we never had any proof that it was. Either way, if people knew or suspected that you hadn’t deleted the spray bottle from your game (which at the time I had no idea how to do because I was a wee child) they would basically assume you were on a one way road to being a mass murderer in real life.

In real life we were 7 years old so like...thanks?

But that’s the closest I got to toxicity and at the time I was too young to make an email account and actually converse with these people. I was just there to download their Petz hexes, and I already made a post about how wonderful and incredible Petz Hexing was.

And y’all, I heard, just now after a little deep dive into the Petz Abuse debacle (which yes, is on the wiki), that apparently, like gardening, Petz Hexing came back in a big way during the epidemic--and I have found an active Petz forum in this the year 2021. The only problem is that I no longer remember how to use old timey forums...and I think I’m locked out of seeing most of these threads (and like this forum is so old I think I have to send them a letter in the physical mail to apply). But, I’m pretty sure they’re hosting a picture contest for who’s dogz poses the best. And I’m pretty sure someone created a hexxed Pickle Rick. Or it’s a photoshop that was made to look like a hexxed Pickle Rick.

Dammit why did it have to be Pickle Rick? That’s not worth re-installing Petz and getting it to run on Windows 10...

Guys is this the Dayquil? Is this really happening? I feel like I’m losing my mind for so many reasons...

Anyway, speaking about useless hexing it’s about time that our villain did something that was actually dangerous, so Zigfried decided to install a new virus that does more than turn off the lights. (it still turns off lights)

the Spreadsheet Virus!

Confounded by the spreadsheet software, it...um...it does this:

Straight up how does Excel make a volcano erupt? Is that why I have to pay for Microsoft office now?

All this because Joey made fun of Zigfried’s naturally pink hair? Which is the most normal hair on this series outside of like...Tristan?

Hey guys...Joey’s fine, right? Like how many times has Joey been on fire? And once in an iron cage next to like...a Fire Golem?

Joey’s fine.

MAN I miss Fire Golem. He had a good mug.

And then we just kinda watch chaos go across the park, chaos that includes: Too many ghosts in the haunted mansion (which honestly--you’ll get your money’s worth, sounds great!), the Ferris wheel goes kinda fast and thus might accidentally be fun, the lights turn off at some concert stage that only had 2 people on it (so it might just be motion detector lights and not even a virus), and um...literal fire and magma are going to set Joey Wheeler on fire.

Just...one of these events does not seem like the others. In fact most of these things sound like good improvements to the park and they should just hire Zigfried at this point.

Roland puts down his microphone and jogs across the stage, about a mile through the audience bleachers, and into the staff lounge, to go and bother Seto Kaiba, who is in a room that has a hi-def classical painting copy-pasted on the wall and I can’t look away from it.

I almost did a Google search on this painting but then thought better about it. There’s like...a billion classical paintings that look exactly like this, and they wouldn’t use like a Monet, they would have to do something that’s harder to catch to avoid copyright issues (because yes, even old ass paintings have copyright issues, but no one tell NFT’s which are going to be so freakin screwed and was such a bad idea, that I can’t even start).

Anyway, I have no idea who it is and it is legitimately driving me up a wall, but I’m on too much meds to do the effort of putting it in a reverse google image search.

Plus, a reverse google image search would only pull up Seto Kaiba.

So Kaiba takes us on a little flashback to his weird ass past, a weird ass past that just...doesn’t follow any of the established timelines, but I assume was shortly after adoption but before Seto got into a phase where he wore his school outfit everywhere and tried to shove his MMO off onto his Dad as a business model.

Seto is like 8 for some reason. I don’t know why, they kinda drew him younger this season anyway, like maybe they got a lot of fan mail and realized “Hey I think we made the 16 yo boy too sexy?” And they just toned Seto the hell down. That, and it’s a different animation team, and maybe they looked at Seto’s character design and were like “we don’t get paid enough to draw this well.” So...since Seto actually looks like a teen again, I guess his 12 year old self has to look like he’s in Elementary school.

Also, I only recognized this, because at some point in S3 as I was roasting Noah Kaiba’s weird fashion:

I remember distinctly roasting that little bow tie. I don’t remember when I wrote it, I think there was a version of this outfit that was in color...but I don’t remember where.

Anyway, it’s not the same jacket...but man that’s kind of awkward, ya? Like the maid who dressed Mokuba deffo got fired?

He um.

Turned the lights off a little bit.

Guys this villain is like...

...why does he think lights are scary? Like look at little Seto here. The boy is already bored. Seto duels on the edges of cliffs...he doesn’t care about the freakin dark.

We had a guy who killed everyone on the planet last season, and this season we have a little fashion gremlin standing in the corner and flicking the light switch going  “wooooo you never catch me!” and it’s like...

...I’m starting to think this guy isn’t a witch.

Like we’re at Episode 6, there’s still time for this guy to be a witch...but I really am starting to think this guy is just...straight up not a witch. It’s everything Seto wanted, a rival who isn’t a freakin magic person...and sets Joey only fake on fire instead literally on fire like last time...

and Seto is just completely unhinged by it.

Anyway, I’m off to go drink a bowl of soup and pass out. If you’re new here, this is a link to read these in chrono order.

https://steve0discusses.tumblr.com/tagged/yugioh/chrono

[maleksrami]

gif tutorial ✨🎥

I got a few requests to make a gif tutorial so here it is. hope it helps :) It’s quite long so I’ll put it all under a read more. If you have any questions, feel free to ask or PM me directly for help!

Alright....sooo, I don’t remember the last time I made a gif tutorial on this site, but I figured I would even though I use the same method a lot of gif makers have been using for years. I have never strayed from this process and I’ve been making gifs on this site for a decade. 

There are a couple methods to making gifs. You can import your video directly into photoshop and cut your gif there. OR you can use a separate video player that has a screencapping tool, then import all your frames into photoshop; this is the method I use and it’s how I’ve adapted and perfected my giffing skills over time. 

This post will be long, but I want to be as detailed as I can and explain it step by step. It’s really NOT difficult once you get the hang of it, which is probably why I’ve always done it this way. 

Disclaimer: There are three programs I use and I highly suggest you look for reliable links yourself if I’m not able to provide one. I use pretty old versions of KMPlayer and Photoshop (I’ll explain why later), so be careful where you go looking for downloads. There are some photoshop downloads here, but I can’t vouch for them.

Let’s start :)

DOWNLOADING VIDEOS

I use a program called 4k Video Downloader to rip HD videos from Youtube. 1080p is the way to go, but obviously that’s not always possible. It’s ridiculously easy, all you do is click the “Paste Link” button and it’ll download your video. Clicking the “Smart Mode” button will let you set the default quality and the folder you want all your videos to be saved to. 

As you can see, here are all the videos I’ve downloaded recently for my gif posts. You can clear this download history list at any time.

SCREENCAPPING 

After your video is done downloading, I open the video in KMPlayer. Now, I use an OLD version of this program because this was exactly how I learned to do this back in the day. You can find old versions online, I don’t really know exactly which version mine is because I’ve had it forever, but it’s the old school one that looks like this.

When you open the video, it might stretch the player to full screen so I always adjust it by dragging the corner of the player inward so it shrinks to a more medium size. This will also make your screencaps not so GIANT, which will take longer to load into photoshop. 

Anyways, you’re gonna open your video and right click anywhere on the video to select Capture > Frame Extract... (or Ctrl+G on Windows). This window will come up. Make sure all your settings look like this to ensure a really smooth gif.

The first thing you should do is click that little “G” button next to the window size at the bottom. That’ll lock in the dimensions of however big you’ve made your video window, and if you stretch it you’ll see these numbers change. If you start capping without remembering to push that and you make your window smaller/bigger, your caps might be a wacky size or look stretched and you’ll have to go back and do it again. Also note the extracting location at the top. All your caps will go directly to a default folder titled “Capture”.

Once all the settings are ready, go to your desired section of the video, pause it, and hit “Start”. Play the video, pause the video when you’ve got all your caps, then hit “Stop”.

Locate your “Capture” folder and doublecheck you got all the caps you want. This is where I take a moment to delete any caps I don’t want in my gif, that way you don’t bother loading them into photoshop and making it take longer than it needs to. 

MAKING THE GIF

You’re gonna open whatever version of Photoshop you’re using. I hilariously still use CS3 to make gifs because the next script I’m gonna run doesn’t work in the free download that I have of CS5, but that’s what you get sometimes when you don’t pay for stuff. Hopefully whatever more recent version of PS you use, you have no problems.

Go to File > Scripts > Load Files Into Stack...

This window will come up. 

Hit “Browse” and locate your capture folder. Highlight all your caps and press OK. You’ll see them all come up in a list as shown above. Press OK again. Your caps will start to load into one big stack of layers. This will take a minute or so.

When it’s all loaded in, you’ll see them all stacked in your Layers window (Windows > Layers). You’re gonna open your animations timeline (Windows > Animation) and click the little drop down button in the top right corner of the window and select “Make Frames From Layers”. 

Click that drop down menu again and hit “Reverse Frames”. Click that drop down menu again and hit “Flatten Frames Into Layers” (this is so our sharpening action will work later). Click the drop down menu again and select “Select All Frames”. All your frames will be highlighted. This is where you’ll set your animation speed. Under each frame you’ll see “0 sec.” Click on that and select “Other”. Type in your desired speed. I usually go for 0.04 if it has a lot of frames. For less frames, 0.05 or 0.06. This is honestly entirely up to your preference. I actually made myself a photoshop action doing all these repetitive steps so it saves me a few precious long seconds of clicking around over and over. I just run the action after my caps are loaded. If you make gifs a lot, I recommend it.

Next it cropping. The reason I don’t crop right away after the files are loaded into a stack is because I like to see where the subject in the gif moves before I decide where I need to crop. I don’t want to accidentally cut anything off. The subject might sway in and out of frame or be off center if I crop it blindly before seeing exactly where the object moves around. So I’ll play the gif first to see exactly where to crop.

Anyways, you’re gonna set your desired width x height of your gif. I’m making this a big gif so you can see the details better. 540 px is Tumblr’s width for big horizontal gifs. If you’re making a photoset with two gifs side by side the width for Tumblr is 268 px.

Go ahead and crop your gif. It’ll resize itself as well. Play the gif back so you can see if anything gets cut off or it’s not where you want it. You can undo the crop and do it again until you’re satisfied.

Here is what my gif looks like animated and cropped. 

As you can see, it plays nice and smoothly due to our screencap settings from before in KMPlayer and with our set gif speed (I used 0.05 here).

Next is sharpening the gif. I use a sharpening action that can quickly sharpen up to 120 frames. You can download it here. Open the action by going to File > Open and locating the file. It’ll be added to your Actions window. (Window > Actions if you can’t see it.) In order for it to run correctly, you have to have the first frame selected on your animation window, as well as “Frame 1″ in the layers window. Just like this:

Click the play button on the action and wait a few seconds for all the gifs to finish being sharpened. For any gif with less than 120 frames (which I hope is always, good God) a pop-up will come up when it reaches the end of the frames asking you if you want to stop.  Click “Stop”. 

Tip: If you think you want to delete more frames, run the sharpening action before you do it. Otherwise you’ll have to flatten your frames into layers again. The first frame and the “Frame 1″ layer should always be the same (the little eye will appear to the left of the layer to let you know it’s visible when you have that specific frame selected) otherwise the action won’t work. 

Here is what my gif looks like now that it’s sharpened.

COLORING THE GIF

This is where all the fun (or pain) comes in. All your coloring will be done by using Adjustment Layers (Layers > New Adjustment Layer). I usually go in the same order of adjustments, but this is where personal style comes in and you do no have to do it in the same order I do. You can practice with this part all you want and see how you like to do it.

I start with brightening the gif first and fixing the white balance if a scene needs it. I chose this video specifically so you could see this next handy trick that a lot of people don’t even know about. It’s a dark scene and the white balance makes the subject look quite blue. 

I can fix this by starting with a Curves layer. By clicking the third eyedropper tool, you can go and click on a white point in your gif (in this case, I clicked on a white square on his shirt) and bumped up the input number a bit for a little contrast (optional). My curves look like this. Click OK.

My gif now looks like this.

It’s much better, right? The white eyedropper tool will become a lifesaver sometimes, but it’s not always needed. 

Next, I go in with a Levels adjustment to do some more brightening. This is all up to preference, but you can play around with this. I typically like to add more contrast with this layer. I just adjust the sliders until I’m satisfied.

Here is my gif now.

Onto yet another brightening layer. Brightness/Contrast. A couple teeny tiny more positive numbers and I now have this.

Next is Selective Color. I wish I could explain this in a way that makes sense, but this is the layer that takes a bit of practice getting down and boils down to how you like the colors in your gif to look. I personally don’t like a lot of yellow in mine, so I focus a lot on the Yellow and Black sliders in each specific tab. I start in the Reds, then Yellows, Whites, Neutrals, then bump up the Blacks a tiny bit.

Here is my gif now. It’s a bit more cool toned, which is what I like.

Next I’ll go in with a Color Balance layer and play with the Midtones and Shadows. 

Here it is now.

This is usually my last step unless I want to adjust the brightness again (which I do), so I might go back into my Curves and Levels layers to bump it up.

And you can totally stop there, but I would like to mention a few more optional layers to add depending on your gif. If I wanted more saturation, I would add a Hue/Saturation layer at this point, but I think it’s colorful enough so I’m not going to.

Another layer you can use is Gradient Maps. 

Setting a black and white gradient map overtop your gif and setting the layer to Soft Light and lowering the opacity to your heart’s desire (you might need to go to the little drop down menu in your animation timeline and hit “Match Layers Across Frames”) can give your gif a very contrast-y look like this.

Or you can change the black color to something else for a different tone, like a dark blue.

Here is my final gif. 

If you want to add a caption to your gif, you can do so with your font of choice (Arial and Calibri are good) and add Stroke or a Drop Shadow to it by going to Layer > Layer Style. You can make sure the text is perfectly centered by clicking on your top frame layer under all your coloring adjustments, hitting Select > All, then clicking your text layer again and going to Layer > Align Layers To Selection > Horizontal Centers. Then hit Select > Deselect and go to your little drop down menu in your animation timeline and click “Match Layers Across Frames”.

Here is what it looks like with a caption.

SAVING YOUR GIF

Go to File > Save for Web & Devices...

A big window will come up where you can preview your finished gif by pressing the play button on the right hand side. In the bottom left corner will tell you what size your gif is. Tumblr’s gif limit is a whopping 10 MB, so we’re good. 

Your gif settings should look something like this. 

We always want to keep all colors at 256 (the highest). Lowering this number will make our gif file size smaller, but also decrease the quality of the gif itself. If your file size is more than 10 MB, I recommend going back and deleting some frames or making some more curve adjustments. Some users also like to set their gif to “Adaptive” instead of “Selective”. This is up to you.

Click Save and you’re done!

[mcrmadness]

Madness draws: Behind the Scenes of the latest Farin&Bela pencil drawing.

Aka the one that’s also my icon, even when that was a big risk to take because normally I start hating the photos I have once drawn, especially if I have failed miserably. This is how the drawing itself turned out:

ATTENTION: The original post about that drawing, with better image, behind this link.

This post is solely about the process itself with lots of pictures and also plenty of gifs, because I promised to do one if people would like to see that and I got some comments saying that they’re looking forward for that. So, here’s now that post!

For starters I have to apologize for the terrible quality that is the photos. I used my phone camera only and never thought about posting them, I just took them as a reference for myself and to show the progress to a friend and only after finishing the drawing I noticed that the angle of the camera causes a huge impact on the perspective of the drawing, so I sometimes might have done useless work when I thought some perspective was wrong when it was actually the photo that was wrong and not my work! I mean, take a look at these photos of the finished piece:

You see that? I realized this when I took maybe the second photo of the Farin sheet and looked at it and couldn’t believe my eyes because I didn’t remember drawing his torsto THAT small! And then I looked at the drawing and was like “wtf???” because it looked nothing like in the photo and then it hit me...

Also, another thing that I learn was that I might need to pay more attention to the perspective of the whole thing also because when I draw, I sit at the table so I am constantly seeing the drawing from my perspective instead of looking at it from above so that’s probably also going to affect the way I draw. I try to keep that in mind in the future so I can avoid redrawing things again and again just because my perspective is different than the reference photo’s.

Also the giant forehead of Farin’s in the photo on the right might have caused me to laugh a bit too much but anyway, let’s continue~ Or more like: let’s start for real this time.

Here’s the reference photo to y’all:

What I did in photoshop was to draw a line between them to see how I can divide the photo on two A4 papers. I had been thinking about this photo for some time already because it’s one of my favorites (but now I just feel cringy looking at it after I have drawn it... goddamnit!), and I got this idea that I could try drawing it on two papers in case I fuck up so I can start over or try again without having to do twice the work! Which was actually a good decision because this was the first version of Farin:

And it was awful. I also realized I had never drawn Farin’s face from he front. I have drawn him before from the side a few times but maybe once it came out actually good so that was why I decided to do the 2 paper method - because I knew it was not going to be an easy job! Bela is relatively easy to draw so I knew already that I would not have too many problems with that one.

I struggled with Farin’s eyes the most, at first.

It took me a while to figure out how to do that white line in his lower lid. Keep in mind that this was my first face portrait in over 10 years so I was very, very rusty and I just didn’t remember how to draw like anything anymore. (The photo is tilted because Bela’s face is a bit tilted and my hand can’t draw anything that is not straight [lol] so I have to rotate the photo in order to even draw the sketch of Bela’s eyes.)

So I took my sketchbook and tried to do some eyes...

I was still struggling so much here until I remembered about blending. And I didn’t have my hopes high but grabbed the eyeshadow applicators (my fave tool for blending) anyway, and switched to my other sketchbook in case the paper was the issue and:

Blending. It was all about blending! So with that in mind, I realized I can continue and I don’t need to do these in my old way, everything doesn’t have to have a lineart done but some of the job is done not with the pencils but with the eraser.

Anyhow, the previous Farin looked really bad and was too big as well so I just discarded that and started a new sheet because the old lines were not coming off properly anymore. I don’t remember if this is the old face or new but I think this might still be the old one:

Yes it definitely is the old because look at those lines! This is the new sheet:

And in the photo you can see one of my pencils - I use Derwent Graphic pencils, it’s a 12 pencil set with very soft pencils, starting with H, F and HB and ending to 9B. With this one I used F, HB, B, 2B, 5B, 7B and 9B. The white pencil is actually my new love aka the eraser pencil Koh-I-Noor Hardmuth. It’s amazing, I recommend! I just didn’t order 10 new ones this other day. I actually used about 1,5 full eraser pencils on this drawing alone so that’s why 10.

Here’s a “little” gif of the process on Farin:

I felt crazy when I went for the shirt, and I felt like I was going crazy MEANWHILE drawing it but in the end I did it and I’m super proud of it!

Below is the reference photo, it was pain in the ass to follow all those lines with my eyes and try to find what was I drawing and where was I but I think I did good. That was a fun challenge.

Okay so, when I was done with the new lineart, I decided to go for the shading and blending because that’s what really makes the drawings to pop. I started with the left (his right, my left) side of Farin’s face because I’m right-handed, and in the first photo I had done just the left (right) eye and mouth and nose, but in the second there’s also the other eye done already:

Keep in mind this was not the last time I drew the eyes. Not even close.

Something was off with the right (left) eye so I had to do that one again and I noticed that when you blend but haven’t erased and cleaned it yet, it looks like a black eye :DDD So here’s the before and after images of that cleaning. (Cleaning = I draw, blend, erase, draw and blend more when needed and then erase again, and repeat this as many times as I need until it starts to look ready to my eye.)

So here Farin was “finished” but if you still remember the final piece or compare it to it, you might notice it looks quite different. And you’re right. But more about that later, because at this point I started to work on Bela.

It actually started really well - I also had to do the whole lineart again because it did not match the size of “finished” Farin. I don’t remember if this is the first or second eye but when I had drawn his eye for the first time, I noticed it was not in line with Farin so I had to redraw it. A gif of the progress:

What’s that brown paper I’m using, you may ask? Well I noticed that people have some sort of paper on top of their art to keep it from smudging and I have no clue what that is so here’s my poor artist recommendation: baking paper! I tested it and it works (if you just remember to keep it under your hand, that is...) so that is, in fact, baking paper! :DD

I have drawn Bela’s face a few times before and he’s just so much easier to draw. In fact I used 4-5 days on Farin but I managed to start and finish (this version of) Bela just in one day. And that means that out of 12 hours (because I literally used the whole day for drawing) I used maybe like... 5h or something on Bela. That’s how much easier he really is to draw.

I don’t know wtf is wrong with Farin’s face but he’s extremely difficult to draw and I’m not the only one who has been saying this. I guess he just looks so regular but still unique enough to be difficult to draw. Bela then again has features that are very unique and very... caricature-like? I mean that just by drawing his nose or chin you can make a comic book Bela look exactly like himself, and with more realistic style his eyes already do a lot, but Farin’s really the opposite. My comic book version of Farin is literally the most basic version I can draw, it’s how I draw those characters and the only thing that makes him look himself is the hair, and his nose in a side profile. So I think that’s why it’s so difficult to draw him because he doesn’t look too regular but still regular enough to make is a very challenging task to do properly.

So yeah, the same day as I started working on Bela, I was also “finished” with the drawing:

Also look at how different it looks like from this perspective:

With the reference photo open in photoshop and I don’t understand how Bela looks more like himself in my drawing than in the photo. Also when I showed the WIP to my brother, he said that I somehow had succeeded at making Farin look more like Farin than what he does in the photo even. It’s weird.

But we were still far from finished. I was going to use the fixative on this soon but it just kept snowing the whole week so I couldn’t so every time I walked past the drawings, I stopped to fix this and that. For days I kept telling myself “I’m done, I can’t do more than this, I can’t do better than this.” and considered the drawing finished but still kept fixing things. Every time I was “done” with the other drawing, I saw something to fix in the other one and once that was done, I felt like the first one wasn’t as good and had to fix something from it too. And that led to a cycle where the other drawing was always better than the other and the worse one needed to be fixed. In the end I was hating the whole process and myself and my skills and I was already ready to abandon this whole thing and call it a day and never ever show it to anyone “because I cannot draw”. The photo above, here’s a list of things I redrew after that:

Bela’s eyes, the right (left) one at least twice.

Bela’s nose.

Bela’s mouth a couple of times.

Farin’s eyes x588045028520

And a list of things I kept fixing and fixing:

Bela’s chin.

Bela’s neck shadows.

Bela’s hairline.

Farin’s whole face was tilted so I tried to fix that.

Farin’s face was too wide, which meant also partially redrawing the ear.

Farin’s hair was too long and wide too.

Farin’s nose.

Farin’s mouth might be the only thing I drew only once and I’m actually still extremely proud of how it came to be. I did the lips solely with blending so that was super exciting to notice how I can use it for drawing and don’t need the pencils for everything!

During Bela’s eyes and nose and mouth especially I was hating myself so much and I felt like I was taking the risk of ruining the whole thing and a few times I was certain that was what I had just done too, until I somehow was able to save it again. But because of that, I wasn’t able to make Bela’s mouth any lighter anymore, the color wasn’t just coming off the paper so had to use what was there and make it look like it’s how it’s supposed to be, too.

Here’s a gif about those changes on Bela - the first one has the old eyes and nose, the others have minor changed on the nose and mouth:

(The blacks probably don’t get any blacker in reality, I did add more color to it all the time but mainly it’s just the lighting and my phone camera changing the brightness.)

I did the final details on his nose without even using the reference photo anymore. The photo didn’t seem to make any sense anymore at all so I was just using my mechanical pencil and the blending tool and eraser to make is look better. To my eye it looked more like a very flat nose with a big tip of the nose and he doesn’t have a flat nose and I tried to get rid of that illusion. I still feel like it makes him look bit weird but I’m not entirely sure how. Maybe it was because of my improvisation, idk...

So, Bela was then finally finished for the last time. In the Farin piece his left (right) eye had been bugging me the whole time and I didn’t want to touch it but still I felt like I have to do something about it because it was bugging me way too much. I then figured I could draw the eye line by line and take a photo of it each time to see if it looks right already or not, maybe I could then avoid doing all the phases before I was sure what to think about it. I mean, now the only way to see if it was correct was to draw e.g. an eye from start to finish, I couldn’t see from just the lineart or unblended eye if it was in the right spot etc. And here’s that progress on a gif:

The gif about only the eye would look so nice if Tumblr didn’t make the gifs so HUGE - this one is actually only 300px or 400px or something:

Apparently I also wasn’t happy with the other eye because:

But good thing is: I really enjoy drawing eyes. I love seeing them to “come alive”, my favorite part was to eraser a bit of the color on the iris to make them look like they are actually shiny! It feels like something so small to do and yet it makes a huge impact on the drawing!

And here’s yet another gif of the whole Farin sheet with all of the changes, including the last changes that made his head narrower, and less tilted and more in line. Look at the left side of his head especially to see that:

I can also see his nose changing between the first few photos. I keep forgetting about that but yeah, I also fixed that a little at some point.

And last but not least, the whole drawing in some sort of a timelapse gif:

Last two are the same but just a photo and the scan of the finished drawing. I still keep seeing things I would do differently but no can do, I already used fixative on it, also to keep myself from obsessing with it any more :D And to use it as a study of some sort. I have never been able to draw a perfect pencil drawing and this isn’t one either. I probably never can draw perfect drawings from references.

I do enjoy the whole shading and blending process, so much so that when I was editing these photos, I just wanted to start drawing something so bad but I also figured that I start to lose motivation when I get to the point where everything should be finished but I just can’t make it perfect. Like the current WIP I have, all I should do is to get the proportions and perspective and the lines of their faces correctly and I would be ready but it feels more like a superpower some people possess and I’m not one of those. I don’t know what is it but I just feel that I cannot see. I don’t know how to explain it, but I can’t see what I try to do and somehow keep drawing everything the wrong way. Just like in this post’s drawing too. There’s still things that are wrong and I know what it is but I don’t know how to solve it. My hands just don’t listen to me and they can’t do what I think they should. I also think the reason I cannot draw perfect copies of photos is because you can always see my “handprint” in them. If I copy a photo, it will look like a photo and not like a drawing made by me. So I believe that in my drawing there’s always a part of me visible and I’m not entirely sure if it’s a good thing or not. On bad days it’s not a good thing, obviously. On good days? Well I guess it’s good then because it just means I have my own style which I really should appreciate. But I wish I had my style only when I want it to be visible, but I can’t control it. Just like I cannot write text by hand that would look like it was written with a computer, so I guess I should just try to get used to it, no matter how much it’d bug me sometimes.

[squarecarousel]

Interview with Caitlin Alexander

Well folks, we're nearly at the end of our Square Carousel journey, and there are just two interviews left – both with two of our longest-standing members! Today, we reconnect with Caitlin Alexander, who has been with the Square Carousel Collective from its very beginning almost 10 years ago. Although we've featured an interview with her here in the past, it's been so long that we are due for an update! When she's not freelancing or performing her duties as an SC admin extraordinaire, Caitlin works tirelessly on her craft, creating prints, products, hand lettered posters, and artwork that embrace the earthy beauty of nature. With a strong focus on environmentalism and a sense of community, her artwork exudes a warmth and complexity that draws the viewer in and invites them to stay a while. Read on for her gems of wisdom!

Make Earth Cool Again

Q: Comparing your early work from your first few years after college to your most recent pieces, you've kept a lot of the textural, playful essence of your style while refining certain elements. Has your process changed much since those early days, and if so, what do you now do differently? 

 A: Such a great question straight out of the gate! My process has changed quite a bit since I graduated in 2011 (almost a decade ago... yikes!). In college, part of my crafted identity as a brand-new illustrator was my traditional use of gouache paint. I actually, in all honestly, was kind of a snob about it, because so many people in our department worked solely digitally. I felt that digital painting was a crutch, which I suppose can be true in some cases, and possibly even more-so when you're applying that to college students, but I certainly had no ground to stand on. In reality, my snobbery kept me from learning critical tools, as I never took Photoshop or Illustrator classes, aside from the one that was required for graduation. This hindered my work a great deal outside of college, given that illustration is so often paired with graphic design, and editing work for clients was so much more difficult traditionally. In 2013, I got a job designing t-shirts, and lied to the company, saying I knew how to use Illustrator. Luckily it was remote, so I was able to teach myself without anyone hovering over me, but that was so foolish, looking back, given the expensive education I got at SCAD should have been my opportunity to learn those things. I introduced digital work more and more over the years, and by 2016 or so, I was primarily a digital artist. Gouache will always have a place in my heart, and I will still break out the tubes occasionally, but working digitally has allowed me to grow so much more as an illustrator, with the ability to edit, paint with more detail, and having more control over color and layering. 

Q: Of all the projects you've done in your professional career, which would you say is closest to your heart? 

 A: Probably the picture book I worked on a couple of years ago, titled "Cool For You." I had a lot of creative freedom for that project, and the subject matter of climate change is personally very important to me. Working with the author, Marianna, was really wonderful, as well. 

Cool For You book cover

Q: The Southwest influence on your work is pretty significant, and I think it's safe to assume you appreciate the majesty of the landscape in your region of the country. However, if you had to live in another state, which would you choose and why? 

 A: Funny you ask that, because I've actually considered moving from Texas to Colorado lately! The culture there is still very western, but I appreciate the liberal point of view (Texas has been grating on me lately, even living in Austin), and the landscape is even more stunning out there! I'd be close to so many inspiring National Parks. Plus, summers wouldn't be 8 months of the year and over 100 degrees for half of it! 

Travel West postcard (1 of 6)

Q: TV shows or movies? 

 A: Lately, Jordan and I have been watching New Girl on repeat. I'm not usually one to watch a show or movie over and over again, but I think we really just needed something light and fun, since life has been so very stressful over the last year.

Q: What's your favorite subject to draw? 

 A: This one is hard! I'm torn between people and landscapes. People are more fun and comfortable for me, and I could knock out a bunch of them quickly. Landscapes are always intimidating, and I'm nervous the whole time, feeling like I can't remember how I did it the time before. It's so strange, because it always ends up fine! But since I feel that way, the payoff is so much greater when I feel satisfied with the final result. 

Q: What would a perfect day look like for you? A: I probably would have answered this totally differently pre-COVID, but in this current world we live in, I would absolutely love to have what used to be a normal, uneventful weekend day for me: Jordan and I would sleep in a little, see an early afternoon movie at the Alamo Drafthouse where we'd eat lunch, then spend the rest of the afternoon browsing used book stores and estate sales, and then meet our friends at the neighborhood coffeehouse for dinner and Trivia Night. I will be so happy to have that again. 

Cover art for East Side Magazine

Book Lover Ladies series- The Book Clubbers

Q: What have you learned from your years at Square Carousel, whether organizing behind the scenes or as a contributor? 

 A: Oooof!! So SO many things! Wow... well, I'll go with the most obvious first: as a member, I learned how to continue to make portfolio-worthy work, even without jobs coming in. That was definitely the most valuable thing about Square Carousel, in my opinion, and hopefully what everyone else got out of it, as well. It can be so hard for fresh graduates to keep up that momentum, and the group saved many of us from becoming stagnant. In terms of running the group... it's been rewarding, but honestly very difficult throughout the years. There have been many ups and downs, and finding the right balance between structure and patience can be extremely challenging. I'm super proud of Elizabeth and myself (OG members!) for keeping it running through the messes-- we've been through some shit together! My major takeaway is the importance of diligence. Projects, businesses, organizations-- they all need at least a couple of people who just keep chugging along, always maintaining the structure (schedule and accountability) and balance (rules and lighthearted encouragement). 

Moth magnets

Q: As the readers are aware, Square Carousel drawing to a close soon. Do you have any plans for what you'll do with the extra time you'll have after our tri-weekly challenges end? 

 A: You know, I actually haven't thought about this too much yet. It's probably because I'll just fill it with more self-imposed projects and deadlines, since I was able to bring that skill I learned in Square Carousel into the rest of my career a while ago. (Or more real jobs! That would be ideal!) I'll miss the community though, and hope to find a way to keep that aspect of freelance life alive. Instagram friends, anyone? 

Q: What's your quirkiest habit? 

 A: Jordan told me recently that he found it weird and endearing that I joke-sing to my cats in the kitchen about really stupid stuff... so probably that! Official Cat Lady© status achieved.

Caitlin and Buster Keaton the Kitten

Q: What advice would you give to a newbie illustrator just starting out today? 

 A: I'd give them the hard advice that our professors didn't really give us in school: there is no way this is going to work out for you if you're not incredibly committed to pursuing it. Now, don't get me wrong-- I'm not telling anyone to have an unhealthy work/life balance because I think that's a toxic sentiment. But you have to keep illustrating and illustrating and illustrating, and arguably more importantly, keep networking and networking and networking. You're going to be rejected or ghosted more often than not, but if you really want it to work out, you're going to keep doing it anyway. And taking critiques if industry folks offer them, to grow and become better. Don't become stagnant in those critical building years.

Caitlin’s studio

Q: Anything else you would like the readers to know? 

A: Yes – thank you so much for supporting Square Carousel through our amazing ten years of challenges! We really appreciate everyone who has kept up with us, checking out the illustrations for each prompt and reading our posts and interviews. Y'all are wonderful, and we hope you'll continue to find us, wherever each of us fly from here! And on that sweet note, we say goodbye for now! Check out Caitlin’s website for more, and follow her on Instagram for new art when it drops.

Join us next time for our final interview!

[toxicsquad]

There is no better way to get to know someone than through a good question tag. In this case we have decided to make an Indie game dev question tag with the responses of our four developers. We hope that it will reveal many unknowns, but if you are left with any questions, do not hesitate to use our ask.

What part of game development are you responsible for?

Athe: I write and write, I melt in my seat, I correct, I cry and then I program. It’s an endless cycle. Occasionally I laugh like crazy while I eat Pringles.

Sam: I draw and color without leaving the lines (almost always) the sprites, the illustrations and the ravings that usually occur to us past 3 in the morning.

Illy: English translations.

Sher: I draw BGs

What tools do you use (hardware / software)?

Athe: Recently my desktop PC has passed away, so I’ve had to rescue my old PC from the garage. I also have a laptop that saves my life more times than I would like to admit. As for the software, I need, above all, drive documents, video editing programs, image etc (I have an Adobe package) and of course Renpy and Atom.

Sam: My main friend and companion is my tablet, a wacom intuos S (pistachio color, so cute). As programs I mainly use the Paint Tool Sai, because there is nothing in this life like its stabilizer. And less frequently than I would like (for details, texture brushes, effects ...) I also use Clip Studio Paint, which I only know how to use at about 2% of its capacity ... If someday I have time I would love to stop and learn seriously what can be done with it.

Illy: During the school year I live in a residence, so I use an old laptop, and when I return home I use a desktop computer that never has memory space. I translate the chapters in the same Atom where the complete script is and I keep them in google drive files where I share them with our beta reader. I also use editing programs like photoshop when I have to translate comics or procreate for when my artistic skills are required.

Sher: ipad+procreate+some final tweak in photoshop, I don't need much more

What is your favorite part of the job?

Athe: Would it be wrong if I say that is when we released the episode? During the whole production time everything is very stressful, there are times when it’s really uphill, but when we release a new chapter it feels soooo good. It's like saying to yourself, yeah, dammit, I can do it. Look at everything you've climbed by yourself. You're doing it right.

Sam: In general, my favorite parts are when the first scenes start to be programmed, and I can see the sprites with the backgrounds, the texts, and how the illustrations look. Everything always looks so much better when viewed in-game… I also really like being able to check out the script as it is written. And from the artistic part that concerns me, when I see that my hands capture the idea that I had in my head ... Especially in character designs.

Illy: Having to find a way to translate very spanish expressions into English, research vocabulary that I have never had to use and commenting on some translations with our beta reader (which we adore) to make it understandable without losing the original meaning.

Sher: I like to do the lineart when the sketch is complete, if I no longer have to think about anything else and it's just going through it, I find it very fun and relaxing

What is the most difficult part for you?

Athe: Offf, yes, I admit it, sometimes writing is the WORST. Other times I love it, especially when I can expand on the descriptions or stop at a part that is intimate or that I find interesting (for example, Hasiel's conversation from 6.3, small spoiler: P). But, I HATE having to paste scenes, often the protagonist moves between scenes and you always have to add lines to those transitions that really do not interest anyone, but that otherwise the text would be confusing. Anyway... It is a very wide world, with a lot of history, I have to deal with what I need readers to know to understand the facts, although sometimes it gets a bit boring.

Sam: What part does not... Rather who e.e Zihel and Ariel are a thorn in my side. Especially Zihel. I know it has to do with the fact that it has never been my strength to draw boys, and much less if they are more masculine in appearance... That's why I also suffer a lot from drawing muscles. Another thing that brings me a headache is the perspective of the illustrations. Every time I try to get out of the typical shot or poses a little... It doesn't work out.

Illy: Doughy’s  stuttering ¬.¬

Sher: chairs, sofas, tables... anything with four legs is my enemy

Anything to help or encourage you while you are working?

Athe: I need music, no, seriously, I NEED IT. I’m unable to focus without it. If, on top of that, I can get what I hear to act as a sounding board for what I write, the text is a thousand times better... But the muse is a pretty bad person.

Sam: Having a show/movie in the background that entertains me. The longer the better, so I don't have to stop to think what I want to put on next.

Illy: Eating sunflower seeds to trick my brain and not be tempted to do something else that distracts me.

Sher: I try to see other artists to motivate and inspire me before I start drawing, what I find most difficult is that initial push and that is where I need the motivation, then I usually have something in the background but it is not necessary

Something that’s a pet peeve or discouraging?

Athe: Some narrative climax moments. Generally, they are not important plot moments (that is almost entirely decided), they are often small decisions to go from scene A to scene B, but I can spend a LOT of time deciding which is the fastest and best way to tie those two ends. I'm the worst.

Sam: Many times when starting, I can't get the poses to fit the way I want, for example.

Illy: Finding many parts in a row that I find especially difficult to solve and that make me believe that I have forgotten how to English properly. And looking at how many lines I still have left.

Sher: When I don't know how to fill in some area, if I see something very empty but I don't know how to solve it, I can spend days looking at the screen without being able to advance, even if I have other areas that I could do in the meantime

What is required on your table or work surface?

Athe: Notebooks, sticky notes, pens… I’m a person who writes everything down, especially the tasks, but I also order the story by color schemes. The stack of sticky notes have 9 different colors, each one represents a character and I play a lot with them for a lot of nonsense. Besides, even though I have been writing on the computer for many more years than I wrote by hand, I still have a preference for the analogical.

Sam: Coffee, sweets, chocolate, cereals... And cats.

Illy: My phone, the sunflower seeds, a Capital America: Civil War 1L water cup, sticky notes that remind me of tasks.

Sher: I have nothing really lol all my things are for decoration

Your most productive hours?

Athe: Owl. Totally nocturnal. Although I have several crises a month to force myself to work at other times that always end... Wrong.

Sam: Also at night for the most part, although I can no longer stay awake as long as I endured before having a job (the good old days...) However, in the middle of the afternoon, when the zoo that I have at home is still taking a nap, I also manage to go a long way.

Illy: From when I finish eating until 7 or 8 in the afternoon, when I don't have to cook, clean, run errands...

Sher: I take over for Illy apparently, from 7 or 8 is when I start to get into the mood until bedtime

Do working hours make you forget to eat or make you eat twice as much?

Athe: It depends, in the past I ate a lot, now if I have stress I don't eat anything. If I'm in a normal productive phase and I'm not on my nerves, I'm probably eating by inertia.

Sam: They make me eat more, but especially junk food e.e And they make me forget healthy meals, especially dinner at night.

Illy: It depends on my mood, but I usually eat twice as much.

Sher: I'm generally a VERY distracted person so I don't usually get to focus on a task to get to either of those two modes but I guess when I am sooooooo much on the task, I forget. But that happens like a couple of times a year and "forgetting" is "I delay an hour."

What part of your set up would you improve / change (in aesthetics or functionality) if you had no money limit?

Athe: I'm trying to match some of my peripherals with the rest. They are all a damn different color, apparently I'm cursed... Now seriously, I wish I had a better graphic card that would allow me to make video captures, some speakers and a quality printer.

Sam: Actually, I don't think I need anything more complex than what I already have… But if I had to improve something, I'm curious about the most professional tablets, the big ones with the included screen and all that stuff.

Illy: A new laptop that lets me open 4 chrome tabs, Atom and photoshop at the same time without dying.

Sher: A pc screen that will not change the colors I use on the iPad would be nice, really

Which character are you most like? And why?

Athe: Phew I think the easy answer would be to say Akane ... But, Akane is a better person. : P

Sam: This is very difficult... They are all very different, but still I do not think I look much like any of them. If I have to say something, I could identify with Maske's tendency to avoid problems, and his more homey and calm side. And well… Since Akane has been an OC of mine for many years, surely I have something of her too.

Illy: I think I partly have Maske's instinct to stay out of trouble, and on the other hand Joe's shallowness, although tbh I wish I really did look like any of our awesome babies.

Sher: surprised because (unpopular opinion around here) is one of those who I "least care" about really but I would say that Pin because he is a little dumb, happy and probably has a Satanic room and proud of it

Favorite CG/art.

Athe: AT THE MOMENT. Maske chapter 1. It couldn't be more predictable. I know.

Sam: I quite agree with Maske in chapter 1. But I would also put Pin in chapter 5 and Akane in chapter 6.2 on the top.

Illy: Kyeran in Coco's tank ?? Is he even real? Being basic is my brand.

Sher: surprised again and disappointed but I would say that of angel Hasiel because I like pretty dresses, pretty hairs and pretty wings

Favorite BG/scene.

Athe: The Red Light District amazes me. I already liked the life of that place, its history, but the way of expressing it... Uggg Sher took it to another level. The dirt on the street, the night, the constricted buildings...

Sam: I think I’ll say Raziel’s square, I like it a lot from the first day.

Illy: I don't know if I can choose just one T__T but I would say that the Red Light District and Valefar's pub are at the top.

Sher: for not repeating the red light district that I also like very much, I really like the areas of Coco's laboratory, including the “main” area although the perspective is horrible and makes the characters look tiny, but I like how it looks :(

Your favorite chapter to date?

Athe: Ufff... The first and second one I assure you no, hahaha. I will say that the third one, but also for things that are not necessarily from the chapter, but of the production. It was a good moment. I felt that everything was flowing with ease. We all assumed a clear role, they were times that made us feel comfortable and capable of assuming what came next, I think it was a qualitative leap also, both in texts and in art.

Sam: Oh. Well let's see... Chapter 5 is amazing for me, for everything that happens but also because there are many personalized interactions and choices. I can't say I have a definitive favorite, but it could come close… Also from the last ones I really like the 6.2.

Illy: Chapter 5 has so many details, so many things happen, it's hard not to be my favorite. But the last ones with the specific routes are so great that if I stay with the 5 it’s with the  pain of my heart to have to choose one.

Sher: I would say 5 also because in the end when a lot of things happen is when you remember the most

Twitter​ | Instagram​ | Itch

🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧🚧

No hay mejor forma de conocer a alguien que a través de un buen tag de preguntas. En este caso hemos decidido hacer un Indie game dev question tag con las respuestas de las cuatro desarrolladoras. Esperamos que os aclare muchas incógnitas, pero si os quedáis con alguna no dudéis en usar nuestro ask.

¿Qué parte del desarrollo del juego llevas a cabo?

Athe: Escribo, escribo, me derrito sobre mi asiento, corrijo, lloro y después programo. Es un ciclo sin fin. Ocasionalmente me río como una demente mientras como Pringles.

Sam: Dibujo y coloreo sin salirme de las líneas (casi siempre) los sprites, las ilustraciones y los desvaríos que suelen surgir a partir de las 3 de la mañana. 

Illy: Las traducciones a inglés.

Sher: Hago fonditos

¿Qué herramientas utilizas (hardware/software)?

Athe: Recientemente mi PC de sobremesa ha fallecido, así que he tenido que rescatar mi viejo PC del trastero, también tengo un portatil que me salva la vida más veces de las que me gustaría admitir. En cuanto al software, necesito, sobre todo, documentos de drive, programas de edición de video, imagen etc (tengo un paquete de Adobe) y por supuesto Renpy y Atom.

Sam: Mi principal amiga y compañera es mi tableta, una wacom intuos S (color pistacho, muy cuqui.) Como programas uso sobretodo el Paint Tool Sai, porque no hay nada en esta vida como su estabilizador. Y con menos frecuencia de lo que querría (para detalles, pinceles de texturas, efectos…) también utilizo el Clip Studio Paint, el cual sólo se usar como a un 2% de su capacidad… Si algún día tengo tiempo me encantaría pararme a aprender seriamente todo lo que se puede hacer con él. 

Illy: Durante el curso vivo en una residencia, así que uso un portatil del año que reinó carolo, y cuando vuelvo a mi casa un ordenador de sobremesa que nunca tiene espacio en la memoria. Los capítulos los traduzco en el mismo Atom en el que está el guión completo y los guardo en drive donde los comparto con nuestra beta reader. También uso programas de edición como photoshop cuando tengo que traducir viñetas o procreate para cuando mis habilidades artísticas son requeridas.

Sher: ipad+procreate+algún retoquito final en photoshop no necesito mucho más

¿Cuál es tu parte de favorita del trabajo?

Athe: ¿Estaría mal si digo que es cuando sacamos el episodio? Durante toda la producción todo es muy estresante, hay veces, que se hace realmente cuesta arriba, pero cuando liberamos un nuevo capítulo sienta taaaan bien. Es como decirte a ti misma, sí, joder, puedo hacerlo. Mira todo lo que has escalado tú solita. Lo estás haciendo bien.

Sam: En general, mis partes favoritas son cuando se empiezan a programar las primeras escenas, y puedo ver los sprites con los fondos, los textos, y cómo se ven las ilustraciones. Todo queda siempre mucho mejor cuando se ve dentro del juego… También me gusta mucho poder cotillear el guión conforme se va escribiendo. Y de la parte artística que me toca, cuando veo que mis manos plasman la idea que tenía en mi cabeza… Sobretodo en diseños de personajes. 

Illy: Tener que buscar la forma de traducir a inglés expresiones muy nuestras, investigar vocabulario que no he tenido que usar jamás y comentar algunas traducciones con nuestra beta reader (a la que adoramos) para conseguir que se entienda sin perder el significado original.

Sher: me gusta hacer el lineart cuando el sketch está completo, si ya no tengo que pensar nada más y es solo ir repasando me parece muy divertido y relajante

¿Cuál es la parte que más te cuesta?

Athe: Ufff, sí, lo admito, escribir a veces es lo PEOR. Otras me encanta, sobre todo, cuando puedo explayarme con las descripciones o detenerme en una parte íntima o que a mí me parece interesante (por ejemplo, la conversación de Hasiel del 6.3, pequeño spoiler :P). Pero, ODIO tener que empastar escenas, a menudo el protagonista se mueve de escenarios y hay que agregar siempre líneas a esas transiciones que realmente no interesan a nadie, pero que de lo contrario el texto quedaría mal montado. En fin… Es un mundo muy amplio, con mucha historia, tengo que lidiar con lo que necesito que los lectores sepan para entender los hechos, aunque a veces se haga un pelín peñazo.

Sam: Qué parte no… Quiénes, más bien e.e Zihel y Ariel son mi espinita. Especialmente Zihel. Sé que tiene que ver con el hecho de que nunca ha sido mi punto fuerte dibujar chicos, y menos si son de aspecto más masculino… Por eso también sufro mucho dibujando músculos. Otra cosa que me trae de cabeza es la perspectiva de las ilustraciones. Cada vez que intento salirme un poco del típico plano o poses… No sale bien. 

Illy: El tartamudeo de Doughy ¬.¬ 

Sher: sillas, sofás, mesas… cualquier cosa con cuatro patas son mis enemigos

¿Algo que te ayude o anime mientras estás trabajando?

Athe: Necesito música, no, en serio, LA NECESITO. Soy incapaz de concentrarme sin ella. Si ya consigo que lo que escucho haga de caja de resonancia de lo que escribo, el texto es mil veces mejor… Pero la musa es bastante mala gente.

Sam: Tener alguna serie/peli de fondo que me entretenga. Cuanto más larga mejor, así no me toca pararme a ver qué es lo que quiero poner después. 

Illy: Comer pipas para engañar a mi cerebro y no tener la tentación de ponerme a hacer otra cosa que me distraiga.

Sher: intento ver otros artistas para motivarme e inspirarme antes de empezar a dibujar, lo que más me cuesta es ese empujón inicial y es donde necesito la motivación, luego ya suelo tener algo de fondo pero no es necesario

¿Algo que te corte el rollo o te desmotive?

Athe: Los nudos narrativos. Generalmente, no son nudos gordos de la trama (eso está decidido casi en su totalidad), a menudo son decisiones pequeñas para pasar de la escena A a la escena B, pero puedo tirarme MUCHO tiempo decidiendo cuál es la forma más rápida y mejor planteada para atar esos dos cabos. Soy lo peor.

Sam: Muchas veces a la hora de empezar, no conseguir encajar las poses como quiero, por ejemplo. 

Illy: Encontrar muchas partes seguidas que me cueste especialmente resolver y que me hacen creer que no tengo ni idea de hablar inglés. Y mirar cuantas líneas me quedan todavía.

Sher: cuando no se como rellenar alguna zona, si veo algo muy vacío pero no se como solucionarlo puedo tirarme días mirando la pantalla sin ser capaz de avanzar, incluso aunque tenga otras zonas que pudiera ir haciendo mientras

¿Qué no puede faltar en tu mesa o superficie de trabajo?

Athe: Libretas, post-its, bolígrafos… Soy una persona que lo anota todo, sobre todo, las tareas, pero también ordeno la historia por esquemas de colores. La pila de post-its tienen 9 colores diferentes, cada uno representa un personaje y juego mucho con ellos para miles de idioteces. A parte, a pesar de que llevo muchos más años escribiendo a ordenador de los que escribí a mano, sigo teniendo querencia a lo físico.

Sam: Café, chucherías, chocolate, cereales… Y gatos. 

Illy: El móvil, las pipas, un vaso de 1L de agua de Capital America: Civil War, post-its que me recuerdan las tareas.

Sher: no tengo nada realmente lol todas mis cosas son de adorno 

¿Tus horas más productivas?

Athe: Búho. Nocturna totalmente. A pesar de que tengo varias crisis al mes para forzarme a trabajar a otras horas que acaban siempre… Mal.

Sam: También por la noche en su mayoría, aunque ya no aguanto trasnochando tanto como antes de trabajar (qué tiempos aquellos…) Aunque a media tarde cuando el zoo que tengo en casa aún está echando la siesta también consigo dar un buen empujón. 

Illy: Desde que acabo de comer hasta las 7 o las 8 de la tarde, cuando no tengo que cocinar, limpiar, hacer recados...

Sher: le tomo el testigo a Illy aparentemente, a partir de las 7 u 8 es cuando empiezo a entrar en el mood hasta que llega la hora de dormir

¿Las horas de trabajo hacen que te olvides de comer o te hacen comer el doble?

Athe: Depende, antes comía mucho, ahora, si tengo estrés no como nada. Si me encuentro en un rango productivo normal y no estoy de los nervios, probablemente, esté comiendo por inercia.

Sam: Me hacen comer más, pero sobretodo porquerías e.e Y hacen que me olvide de las comidas sanas, sobretodo de cenar por la noche. 

Illy: Depende de mi estado de ánimo, pero normalmente comer el doble.

Sher: en general soy una persona MUY distraída así que no suelo conseguir centrarme en una tarea para llegar a ninguno de esos dos modos pero supongo que cuando estoy muuuuuuy dentro de la tarea, me olvido. Pero eso pasa como un par de veces al año y “olvido” es “lo retraso una hora”.

¿Qué parte de tu set up mejorarías/cambiarías (en estética o funcionalidad) si no tuvieses límite de dinero?

Athe: Estoy tratando de que alguno de mis periféricos peguen con el resto. Todos son de un maldito color diferente, al parecer estoy maldita… Ahora en serio, desearía tener una mejor gráfica que me permitiese hacer videocapturas, unos altavoces y una impresora de calidad.

Sam: En realidad, no creo que necesitara nada más complejo de lo que ya tengo… Pero por mejorar, me llaman la atención las tabletas más profesionales, las grandes con la pantalla incluida y eso. 

Illy: Un portátil nuevo que me deje abrir 4 pestañas de chrome, el Atom y photoshop al mismo tiempo sin quedarse tieso.

Sher: Una pantalla de pc que no me cambiara los colores que uso en el ipad seria bonito la verdad 

¿A qué personaje te pareces más? ¿Y por qué?

Athe: Ufff Creo que la respuesta fácil sería decir Akane… Pero, Akane es mejor persona. :P

Sam: Esto es muy complicado… Son todos muy distintos, pero aún así no creo que me parezca mucho a ninguno. Por decir algo, me podría identificar con la tendencia a evitar problemas de Maske, y su lado más casero y tranquilo. Y bueno… Dado que Akane es OC mío de hace muchos años, seguramente tenga algo de ella también. 

Illy: Creo que en parte tengo el instinto de alejarme de las movidas de Maske, y por otro la superficialidad de Joe, aunque tbh ojalá parecerme realmente a nuestros bebés geniales.

Sher: sorprendida porque (unpopular opinión por aquí) es de los que “menos me importan” realmente pero diría que Pin porque es tontito, feliz y probablemente tenga una habitación satánica y orgulloso de ello

Tu CG/arte favorito.

Athe: DE MOMENTO. Maske capítulo 1. No podría ser más predecible. Lo sé.

Sam: Coincido bastante en la de Maske del capítulo 1. Pero también metería en el top la de Pin del capítulo 5 y la de Akane del capítulo 6.2. 

Illy: ¿¿Kyeran en el tanque de Coco?? ¿Es siquiera real? Ser básica es mi marca.

Sher: sorprendida de nuevo y decepcionada pero diría que la de Hasiel de ángel porque me gustan los vestidos bonitos, los pelos bonitos y las alas bonitas

Tu BG/escenario favorito.

Athe: Me flipa el Barrio Rojo. Me gusta la vida de ese sitio, su historia, pero la forma de plasmarlo… Uggg Sher lo llevó a otro nivel. La suciedad de la calle, la nocturnidad, los edificios constreñidos...

Sam: Creo que me quedo con el de la plaza de Raziel, me gusta mucho desde el primer día. 

Illy: No sé si puedo elegir solo uno T__T pero diría que el Barrio Rojo y el bar de Valefar están en el top.

Sher: por no repetir el barrio rojo que también me gusta mucho, me gustan mucho las zonas del laboratorio de Coco, incluida la zona “principal” aunque la perspectiva sea horrible y haga a los pj parecer diminutos, pero me gusto como quedo :( 

¿Tu capítulo favorito hasta las fecha?

Athe: Ufff… El uno y el dos os aseguro que no, jajaja. Diré que el tres, pero también por cosas que no son necesariamente del capítulo, sino de la producción. Fue un buen momento. Sentí que todo estaba fluyendo con facilidad. Todas asumimos un rol claro, unos tiempos que nos hacían sentir cómodas y capaces de asumir lo que venía después, creo que fue un salto cualitativo también, tanto en los textos, como en el arte.

Sam: Ay. Pues a ver… El capítulo 5 es una pasada para mi, por todo lo que pasa pero también porque hay muchas interacciones personalizadas y elecciones. No puedo decir que tenga un favorito definitivo, pero podría acercarse… También me gusta mucho de los últimos el 6.2. 

Illy: El capítulo 5 tiene tantos detalles, pasan tantas cosas, que es difícil que no sea mi favorito, pero los ultimos de rutas específicas son tan geniales que si me quedo con el 5 es con un poco de dolor de tener que elegir uno.

Sher: Diría el 5 también porque al final cuando pasan muchas cosas es cuando mas se te queda grabado

Twitter​ | Instagram​ | Itch

[inejkaz]

i was tagged by @mollyweasly to answer the following 73 questions! thank you for tagging me steph ♥ 

on a scale of 1-10, how excited are you about life right now? i'm actually pretty content and the only thing that i'm rdreading right now is my upcoming finals so maybe 6!

describe yourself in a hashtag? #alwaystired

if you could do a love scene with anyone, who would it be? no one comes to mind but steph's answer was chris evans and i'd say the same tbh 👀

if your life was a musical, what would the marquee say? uh maybe "dumb bitch" or "chaotic mess" LMAO idk honestly my life isn't that interesting most of the time

what’s one thing people don’t know about you? that i'm lowkey depressed. most of my old friends know this but they don't rlly know how bad it makes me feel sometimes & i don't think i'll ever tell my college friends abt this except for one person!

what’s your wake up ritual? lay in bed for another 5-15 mins, check the time, and brush my teeth. next i'd either shower, workout, or attend online class

what’s your go to bed ritual? just on my phone looking at useless things and answering my friends' messages. i'll get tired soon so i'll just daydream and sleep. lately i've been listening to music to help me sleep!

what’s your favorite time of day? late night and early morning

your go to for having a good laugh? i love watching lip sync battles. my favorites are by emma stone, tom holland, anne hathaway & channing tatum!

dream country to visit? the UK! my cousin talks abt it all the time and now she's taking her postgrad degree there which makes me incredibly jealous 😢 but honestly i'm dying to travel europe as a whole!

what’s the biggest surprise you’ve ever had? probably when my high school friends bought me the doc martens shoes that i LOVE for my 17th birthday! i love them and miss them even tho many are not in touch with me anymore

heels or flats/sneakers? flats/sneakers definitely! i've never tried heels tbh i can only endure wedges and they alr hurt SO much

vintage or new? both

who do you want to write your obituary? probably my best friend!

style icon? taylor swift during the red era, noora sætre, orion carloto, ashley aka best.dressed!

what are three things you cannot live without? books, internet, family

what’s one ingredient you put in everything? salt

what 3 people living or dead would you want to make dinner for? taylor swift, chris evans, audrey hepburn

what’s your biggest fear in life? the unknown, anything horror & reptiles esp lizards (i can't stand reptiles AT ALL i'd literally cry and die if i have to touch one or sleep in the same room with one)

window or aisle seat? window

what’s your current tv obsession? haven't been watching any tv lately but i've been watching mukbangs on youtube a lot

favorite app? line (a messaging app mostly used by indonesians. i rlly like the stickers and themes i own lmao)

secret talent? i can play guitar just a lil bit

most adventurous thing you’ve ever done in your life? either drinking beers with my friends on a school field trip or not telling my parents that i went to the city alone during college just to hangout by myself

how would you define yourself in three words? introverted, chaotic, anxious

favorite piece of clothing you own? an adidas jacket that was on a 50% sale for international women's day!!! 

a must have clothing item that everyone should have? black pants

a superpower you would want? invisibility and mind control!!!

what’s inspiring you in life right now? since i was a little kid, i've always been inspired by my cousin. she's my role model!

best piece of advice you’ve received? to literally BELIEVE in yourself

best advice you’d give your teenage self? don't be so self-aware bc everyone's busy with themselves, make more friends, cherish your time in school more

a book everyone should read? harry potter series, the raven cycle

what would you like to be remembered for? for being a good, positive person

how do you define beauty? beauty is whatever that evokes a positive feeling out of oneself i guess!

what do you love most about your body? my eyes

best way to take a rest/decompress? skincare, listen to soothing music, drink a warm beverage, watch smth that's easy to watch, and just sleep! 

favorite place to view art? galleries, but i've only been to one sadly

if your life was a song, what would the title be? maybe "paradox" or "misunderstood"

if you could master one instrument, what would it be? piano! but it's expensive and not portable so if i'm being realistic, it'd be guitar

if you had a tattoo, where would it be? in the back of my neck! also maybe on any of my fingers or below my ribcage

dolphins or koalas? koalas

what’s your spirit animal? deer!

best gift you’ve ever received? doc martens shoes given by my friends!

best gift you’ve given? i think i wrote my friend letters to open when she's in different moods once

what’s your favorite board game? monopoly

what’s your favorite color? pink, purple, yellow, monochrome

least favorite color? i just dislike bright obnoxious colors

diamond or pearls? diamonds

drugstore makeup or designer? both, but i mostly can't afford designer anyway so..

blow-dry or air-dry? both

pilates or yoga? i've never tried any actually

coffee or tea? both, but i'm leaning towards tea

what’s the weirdest word in the english language? can't think of any right now..

dark chocolate or milk chocolate? milk chocolate!!!

stairs or elevators? elevators

summer or winter? winter

you are stuck on an island, you can pick one food to eat forever without getting tired of it, what would you eat? burgers!!

a dessert you don’t like? basically i won't like anything with fruits

a skill you’re working on mastering? photoshop i guess? i'm planning to learn coding too now that i have the time!!

best thing to happen to you today? probably finishing my gifset! but honestly, i was supposed to be studying lmao

worst thing to happen to you today? i didn't study lmao

best compliment you’ve ever received? i don't think it's anything that memorable so i can't really think of one

favorite smell? jasmine

hugs or kisses? both

if you made a documentary, would it be about? space, mythology

last piece of content you consumed that made you cry? i get a little teary eyed if i come across a touching content on instagram/twitter tbh lmao. but i'd say the last movie that made me cry so bad was her (2013)

lipstick or lipgloss? lipstick

sweet or savory? savory

girl crush? emma watson

how do you know your in love? don't think i've ever been in love, i've only experienced like a very long crush so...

a song you can listen to on repeat? there are a lot... but for now, woman by mumford & sons and anything by taylor swift

if you could switch lives with someone for a day, who would it be? taylor swift!!!

what are you most excited for about this time in your life? i've just been enjoying editing for tumblr a lot, i haven't really posted consistent content in my 10 years of being here so that's been fun. i also want to learn coding and become an overall healthier person by working out regularly & eating mindfully! honestly i'm trying to build my confidence and become healthier, both mentally and physically 

tagging: @dianaprincie @cllianmurphy @cinderllas @edgarallan @rosamunqpike @gamoora @nataliamaximoff (sorry if you've done this before, feel free to ignore!)

[seven-oomen]

First, I hope you’re enjoying your game.  One of my friends posted about how she’d just gotten her copy of it, and her husband’s response was basically “so, I’ll just bring you food occasionally and see you in a few days?"  Also, I hope you’re feeling better.  And man you are KILLING ME with these previews.  Oh god, Peter, what are you planning now?  How bad is this gonna hurt and for how long?  (Don’t answer that, I’m afraid to know. XD )

I think all those Hogwarts Houses are excellent choices.  I always think it’s fun to see how people sort various characters, because I rarely have any that I feel are firmly one House (maybe it’s because I’m a proud HuffleClaw, myself, doomed to waffle between Houses every time I take a quiz or read an analysis on the subject.)  Side not - can you imagine the furor that would have occurred about a Slytherin and a Gryffindor hooking up in Fourth Year (I think?), and then pulling an innocent little Hufflepuff transfer under their spell?  Would any of them have played Quidditch?  (Peter I feel definitely played, though I can’t decide what position.  Undecided on the other two.)

Poor Peter, having to behave himself.  Although debatably as long as he kept the fangs put away it wouldn’t necessarily be a risk, though I can see him being worried anyway.  That’s why he needs to find someone to spin his fur into yarn he can then make them scarves/gloves/sweaters/etc with.  And why he’s so into the clothes sharing.  Anything to get his scent on them as thoroughly as possible.

And I am so here for PTA Dad Peter.  Helping out at school functions so he can keep an eye on the younger kids.  Building new, supportive relationships with his older kids, helping them with college applications and essays, making up lists of stuff they’ll need for dorm rooms, finding apartments if any are going to the same or nearby schools and can share, making sure they all have pictures and mementos to help combat homesickness.  And now I’m thinking about the memory quilt again.  Goddammit I don’t want to make myself cry.  Again.  "Imagine Peter hearing their heartbeats for the first time."  Oh nevermind, I see you’ll do it for me.  Ugh, my feels.  Peter shifting to his wolf form and curling protectively around them all the time, head pressed up to their abdomen so that he can listen and scent at maximum effectiveness.  Them just gently stroking through his fur until one or both fall asleep.  (Also, how quickly do the other wolves in the family pick up on the changes in scent?  How do they react?  How do the older kids react to the idea of more siblings in general?)

And you know that whichever one wasn’t the one pregnant at the time would be super protective at the time, then turn around and insist they were fine and that the others were worrying unnecessarily when they were the one pregnant.  (Also, glad your brother was okay!)  I also like that it apparently took them nearly 20 years to learn about planning for this sort of thing.  I know you’ve mentioned Peter and Chris being the ones that do the stupid thing next chapter (or something to that effect), but really I feel the biggest moment of "what the hell, guys?” is Noah getting knocked up just two months after Chris.  It’s like, you guys had a huge, in your face, live example of why protection is important, and yet…  I’m also just going to assume that they have at least a king size bed to accommodate that many people, even if many of them are tiny people, and none of them mind piling.  That’s still a lot of bodies cramming into one bed.  (That much room would also come in very handy for…other reasons, which is why I feel certain Peter would insist upon it.) 

Also, omg, I was not expecting to be attacked by those pictures like that.  Tag your porn, dude XD .  But really, can you imagine the poor, unsuspecting college friends their kids bring home for visits getting a triple barrel of that with no warning?  Like they’ve just seen the goofy, weird pics that they have on their phone/on their walls.  They were not prepared for the sheer DILF power of that household live and in person.  But then, is anyone, really?

Loving all the names.  I actually know a guy named John who has a son named Jackson, so that one was particularly amusing to me.  I also noticed that none of the kids have been named after anyone in Noah’s family, at least so far.  And don’t worry, I wasn’t expecting to have those spoiled yet, though I’m happy to know you liked some of my suggestions :D .  Now if I could just remember which all ones I went with…  Didn’t really think to put it in anywhere, but for some reason I’ve always liked Alexander as a middle name for Peter, though I remain undecided on the other two.

And yes, loving the idea of more family cosplay.  Oh god, they would never get ANYWHERE at a con because they’d be getting stopped every 3 feet for pictures.  For Star Trek, I feel like they’d do groupings from assorted series and versions.  Chris, Peter, and Noah are totally OS Spock, Kirk, and Bones (Peter with strategically torn shirt, of course).  I think Melissa would be their Uhura, and Natalie would be Yeoman Rand (she wants to see if she can fake the hairstyle), because I dare anyone to tell them they can’t pull off dresses that short.  Since he has sword training from his hunter background, Melissa makes Julio be their Sulu.  Boyd, Derek, and Jordan would be Picard, Riker, and Data (Derek would totally figure out how to do that weird way Riker sits down, too.)  After much debate, I feel Stiles would be Kirk from the recent films (NuTrek, or whatever they call it), Jackson would be Spock, and Malia would be Bones.  I think Lydia would make an excellent Uhura for them, as well.  Scott would be Scotty because he can remember to answer to it, and it gives him an excuse to do a TERRIBLE fake accent.  I’m leaning towards Isaac for their Chekov, but beyond that can’t think what to do with everybody else, I’m not familiar enough with the different tv shows.

Marvel we’ve talked about some.  DC I have a few random ideas.  I always thought it would be funny to see Peter, Derek, Jackson, and Liam do the assorted Robins.  While I feel Peter is DEFINITELY more of a Jason personality wise, I think he’d be far more comfortable in Dick’s costume that Derek would be, and if Derek was Jason the heights would line up better.  Jackson would be Tim, and Liam would be Damian (because who else would play DC’s tiny and angry than TW’s tiny and angry?)  Also, don’t overlook the fun and variety of villains DC offers.  The last group costume I did was a cross between Bill & Ted and assorted Bat-villains.  We called it Bruce & Dick’s Excellent Adventure, and even photoshopped a sign to carry to help people get it.  Among our line-up was Cleo-Catra, Ivybeth the First, The Poison Queen, Harley Antoinette, Joker Napoleon, Freud Nygma, and Bane-thoven.  (I really need to do something with the various pieces of my costume someday.)  I know there are several girls in the Bat-fam now, too, depending on who all wants to be a part of it, or if they want to skew more Justice League/Teen Titans/Young Justice.

Oh man, Disney.  So many options.  I feel like Lydia and Allison as Ariel and Prince Eric is a given.  I also like the idea of Kira and Malia as Belle and the Beast, partially because of Malia’s issues about having to hide her nature, and also because I think she could absolutely rock that suit.  Ben could join them as Chip.  (Stiles would actually make an excellent Belle, but I feel that might just get weird.)  I can see Danny helping Erica rig up a Sleeping Beauty dress with strands of LEDs that keep shifting from pink to blue to green so the dress keeps appearing to change color (it’s a massive hit.)  I don’t know why, but I really want Stiles and Jackson as Elsa and Anna for some reason.  Scott can join them as either Kristoff or Olaf, depending on the mood he’s in.  Can’t quite decide for the other pack kids.  Since the theme is nominally just fairy tales, I think the dads could just opt for a classier, fancier version of their Red Riding Hood looks.  Maybe go for a steampunk edge or something (I would have included links here, but Google was not my friend today and I couldn’t find quite what I wanted.)  Rich velvets and wools in vivid scarlet and forest-y greens, black and deep brown leather and suede, lots of polished buttons and buckles, loose cotton shirts unlaced at the throat.  Mmm, yes.  And Peter could have one of those super fancy Victorian type nightgowns with the long sleeves and high necks made out of super soft and fine materials.  Instead of getting some kind of mask to wear, he’d just do his partial/beta/whatever you want to call it shift and let them add extra fur on with makeup to blend it in.  Everyone just thinks it’s amazing effects work.  He does opt for some cute wolf paw slippers since cons tend to get snotty about people going around barefoot.  (Applying and removing the fur is also how they learn his ears are particularly…sensitive…to a delicate touch in that form.)  

Lord of the Rings.  Yes.  Like, I can’t figure out who or any real details right now but.  Just.  Yes.

I feel like some years they enter the costume contest and some they don’t, just depending on their moods.  (They totally take the Jurassic Park group to a con and people adore it.  It makes for great skits.)

Random bonus thought for the day concerns dancing.  I was thinking about the whole drag queen thing, and whether Jungle was around in the 90s, and it sort of segued into what types of dancers they are.  I feel like Peter is a very good dancer.  Not quite competition level, maybe, but very skilled, nonetheless.  Like Malia, he’s just very comfortable in himself, in all forms, which helps with spatial and bodily awareness, in addition to his natural grace and balance.  I also feel he’s the most likely to have taken, like, ballroom lessons or similar as a kid, maybe at a parent or grandparent’s insistence.  With Noah I keep thinking about the various videos I’ve seen of Dylan dancing both outside of TW and as Stiles, and I feel his dad would have a very similar style of awkward disaster from the chest up, undulations worthy of a harem girl from the waist down (those Stilinski boys tend to leave a lot of confused boners in their wake.)  In Noah’s case, settling into his frame after that last growth spurt and learning self-defense/martial arts helped smooth most of the awkward out, but it resurfaces every so often.  Chris I think would be the least likely to dance, just because I feel his background would make him very self-conscious about it, whether he wants to feel that way or not.  He’ll dance if it’s just the three of them or just family, or for a slow dance, but that’s normally it.  However, if he’s drunk enough, or if Noah or Peter have dragged him into a dark corner to makeout for a while and gotten him all distracted and relaxed, he can be pursued out onto the floor to show off some actually pretty sweet moves once he lets go.

Anyway, gonna try and wrap this up, because I just realized it’s way later than I realized, and I should try and get some sleep at some point.  Enjoy your game, I hope it’s epic!

When this little paragraph made me realize I had a gaping plot hole in this chapter and I got to go back to fix it. My god my friend, you are a lifesaver!

I also like that it apparently took them nearly 20 years to learn about planning for this sort of thing.  I know you’ve mentioned Peter and Chris being the ones that do the stupid thing next chapter (or something to that effect), but really I feel the biggest moment of "what the hell, guys?” is Noah getting knocked up just two months after Chris.  It’s like, you guys had a huge, in your face, live example of why protection is important, and yet…

Because oh yeah I wanted to make it canon that wolves can detect a heartbeat of the embryo at 4-5 weeks. Which is about a week after the heart starts beating. And oh yeah, Chris is two months along by the time Noah gets pregnant... shit. I wrote something else in that flashback.

And now I got to fix that, so cheers!

I also finished writing my chapter today! Yay! All glorious 13K of it. And I’ll be editing and posting tomorrow (or technically later today as it is past midnight.) Oh, I’m so excited, I’m so excited to see what you think!

As for the game, my god it is awesome!!! I played a few hours today but my heart raced so much I had to pause after two hours because I was getting dizzy because of my heart. But it’s a great game so far, very accessible and it just draws me in completely. It’s so good.

Definitely what I needed after my day at work.

hehehe I’m happy to see my previews and writing and getting emotions, it sounds so bad, but that makes me smile because it’s getting the desired response and that’s awesome. 

“Cue Lego Movie music”

can you imagine the furor that would have occurred about a Slytherin and a Gryffindor hooking up in Fourth Year (I think?), and then pulling an innocent little Hufflepuff transfer under their spell?  Would any of them have played Quidditch?  (Peter I feel definitely played, though I can’t decide what position.  Undecided on the other two.)

I think Peter would’ve been a chaser or beater, somehow those seem to fit him well. Noah played but he was a keeper. (which would be funny if Peter was a chaser since they would get to battle lover’s disputes on the quidditch pitch) Chris I feel wouldn’t play quidditch, he’s too busy trying to keep track of his studies and really just likes to watch the sport but not participate. I think he’d be more into care of magical creatures and defends against the dark arts than any kind of sport. Though he does join and excel at the dueling club.

And the scandal of Peter and Noah dating from fourth year on would be massive, people can barely wrap their heads around it. But they’re happy and they’re just doing their own thing. And they don’t pay attention to anyone else but what they think and what Chris thinks of them.

Peter shifting to his wolf form and curling protectively around them all the time, head pressed up to their abdomen so that he can listen and scent at maximum effectiveness.  Them just gently stroking through his fur until one or both fall asleep.  (Also, how quickly do the other wolves in the family pick up on the changes in scent?  How do they react?  How do the older kids react to the idea of more siblings in general?)

<3 <3 it’s honestly an adorable image. The twins are very active when dad’s curled up around them, knowing just where to kick so Peter’s wakes up by a foot to the face. Though he doesn’t mind and just nudges back gently, letting out a low grumbling noise or whine that he knows the babies can hear in utero. As for how quickly, it depends on whether or not they smelled it before. Jackson, Ben, or Scott wouldn’t pick up on it. They weren’t wolves around pregnancies before. Malia and Derek catch on quickly though. They start noticing the scent change at around 5-6 weeks and hear the little heartbeats of the new family members.

Malia is moderately excited, she’s a little worried about her dad and how he will handle pregnancy at his age. (Although he’s like 35 when he gets pregnant, that counts as a geriatric pregnancy, dad... I’m worried.)

Stiles just flips between the two of extreme worry where he read up on pre-eclampsia and other pregnancy complications and birth complications and omg what if that happens. But he’s also so so excited because omg he’s finally gonna be an older brother!!

(He knows he’s Ben’s older brother, and he adores the tyke, but it’s different when you have a pregnancy close instead of a five-year-old sibling from one day to another.)

Jackson is pouty and a bit grumpy. He feels like he’s losing baby status in the family more and more and he doesn’t know how to deal. (Ben was a bit difficult to get used to for him but Chris handled it well by setting time aside for his baby Jackson. It helped. But now he’s a teen and there’s going to be two more babies and he’s- he doesn’t know how to feel. When Chris breaks the news he wants to have another baby he’s even more torn but he does come around, deciding that he will always be the baby of the family, even when he’s not.

It’s a good compromise. And the three parents set some time for each of their kids so everyone gets attention.

Allison handles it the best out of the teens, she’s very excited for all of them and immediately to volunteers helping with decorating the new nursery. She paints a few awesome looking murals of Winnie the Pooh or Bambi or some other cutesy Disney animals (Or maybe even a space/star wars or a fairy tale ala Fables theme?) and just goes all out. She also convinces Malia to quilt a blanket for the new baby and helps her knit a few cute hats. She’s just extremely excited and happy.

Ben is very happy too, he’s finally not the youngest anymore and he’s happy to be an older brother. He also finds it fascinating to learn how pregnancy works and how those babies got in there in the first place. They let him tell them how it works and explain some basic details, sperm, egg, you need both to have a baby and the baby grows in pops and papa’s belly. But they leave out any details that Ben doesn’t figure out or doesn’t ask about to keep it more age-appropriate for him. 

Though Ben’s smart and he figures out a lot on his own. Noah and Peter are honestly impressed by Ben’s deductive skills. They knew Jackson and Stiles had them, but they hadn’t expected Ben to show them too. He’s a quiet observer.

They were not prepared for the sheer DILF power of that household live and in person.  But then, is anyone, really?

Honestly, I don’t think anyone is. Nobody can resist the sheer DILF power.

Since the theme is nominally just fairy tales, I think the dads could just opt for a classier, fancier version of their Red Riding Hood looks.  Maybe go for a steampunk edge or something (I would have included links here, but Google was not my friend today and I couldn’t find quite what I wanted.)  Rich velvets and wools in vivid scarlet and forest-y greens, black and deep brown leather and suede, lots of polished buttons and buckles, loose cotton shirts unlaced at the throat.  Mmm, yes.  And Peter could have one of those super fancy Victorian type nightgowns with the long sleeves and high necks made out of super soft and fine materials.  Instead of getting some kind of mask to wear, he’d just do his partial/beta/whatever you want to call it shift and let them add extra fur on with makeup to blend it in.  Everyone just thinks it’s amazing effects work.  He does opt for some cute wolf paw slippers since cons tend to get snotty about people going around barefoot.  (Applying and removing the fur is also how they learn his ears are particularly…sensitive…to a delicate touch in that form.)  

I- this whole thing? yes. Headcanon accepted because it is that good. I can literally just see them going in steampunk hunter, red riding hood and the wolf. thank you for putting that image in my mind XD

I feel like Peter is a very good dancer.  Not quite competition level, maybe, but very skilled, nonetheless.  Like Malia, he’s just very comfortable in himself, in all forms, which helps with spatial and bodily awareness, in addition to his natural grace and balance.  I also feel he’s the most likely to have taken, like, ballroom lessons or similar as a kid, maybe at a parent or grandparent’s insistence.  With Noah I keep thinking about the various videos I’ve seen of Dylan dancing both outside of TW and as Stiles, and I feel his dad would have a very similar style of awkward disaster from the chest up, undulations worthy of a harem girl from the waist down (those Stilinski boys tend to leave a lot of confused boners in their wake.)  In Noah’s case, settling into his frame after that last growth spurt and learning self-defense/martial arts helped smooth most of the awkward out, but it resurfaces every so often.  Chris I think would be the least likely to dance, just because I feel his background would make him very self-conscious about it, whether he wants to feel that way or not.  He’ll dance if it’s just the three of them or just family, or for a slow dance, but that’s normally it.  However, if he’s drunk enough, or if Noah or Peter have dragged him into a dark corner to makeout for a while and gotten him all distracted and relaxed, he can be pursued out onto the floor to show off some actually pretty sweet moves once he lets go.

Malia definitely inherited Peter’s dancing skills, I like to think Jackson did as well. Those three are the best dancers in the family. They just move with natural ease. 

Allison is a decent dancer, her gymnastics training really helps but she’s not as fluent as her brother, sister, or dad.

I feel like Noah and Stiles have awkward flailing down to a T but every once in awhile there’s a hip movement worthy of a fucking professional dancer and it’s very confusing. But yeah, totally agree with that assessment of them.

Chris isn’t much of a dancer and neither is Ben. Both of them are very self-conscious. Chris gets better when he’s drunk because he let’s go of insecurity but even then it’s not great. He just doesn’t dance, it’s not his thing. Although he was a very good grinding and hip rotation move. He’s also pretty good at jump style once he lets himself go and just turns his mind off. but the rhythmic jumping just feels natural to him. He also likes to slow dance since he can just bury his face in Noah’s shoulder or nuzzle Peter’s cheek and just forget about everything else.

Also, I like to think they all love to sing. Chris’s voice is best suited for country I feel like. Noah’s more for singer-songwriter. And Peter just loves singing pop songs and he knows how to hit some high notes. 

And now I am going to bed because It’s almost three am XD And I need some sleeps. Thankfully I have the day off this sunday.

[comicteaparty]

April 4th-April 10th, 2020 Creator Babble Archive

The archive for the Creator Babble  chat that occurred from April 4th, 2020 to April 10th, 2020.  The chat focused on the following question:

What is something you’ve improved with in regards to writing or comic creation thanks to working on your story?

carcarchu

Oh this one i can answer definitively. it's 100% lineart. forcing myself to have to do lineart for hours everyday is definitely a way to force yourself to get better at it while i still don't like it it's something that i can do now without being scared about it

shadowhood (SunnyxRain)

Colouring. I had to get really creative in expressing emotion and hinting plot devices with colour. Also got much better with drawing gesture drawings due to looking at a lot of references!

Cronaj (Whispers of the Past)

Either writing dialogue or drawing/painting backgrounds... I used to be particularly awful at writing dialogue. It was too stiff and formal, and sounded a lot like old prose. Now, because of writing a comic and going through several scripts, the dialogue is a lot more natural, and the pacing is more realistic to actual conversations. And the other: backgrounds. I really used to not even draw them at all, and doing a comic forced me to have to think about environments in scenes. So I went from drawing floating characters to having to consider where they are and how it affects the story/mood.(edited)

Feather J. Fern

Paneling! That was my main focus to figure out how to do good paneling to have clearer pages

Deo101 [Millennium]

Honestly? Everything. It's all gotten better and I've learned so much. I would say my biggest improvement is probably in my time management, and art wise is probably composition and layouts. But it's hard to pick because I've grown so much in every aspect!

chalcara [Nyx+Nyssa]

Biggest thing I learned was to keep the story small and focused - and that the smaller, more human struggles are much better in creating tension than the whole default "the world's gonna end!" thing. Mind you, I still love a good "world's ending" story, but you gotta make people CARE about the people in that world first!

Holmeaa - working on WAYFINDERS

ohohohoooo I have done more drawing in photoshop in this short time I have worked on Wayfinders, than the rest of my life! That has given me some skills for sure! Coloring is another one, and generally just efficiency and flow in a comic

Nutty (Court of Roses)

For me it's been my use of color, and getting more confident in experimenting with it to really drive home a scene's mood!

LadyLazuli (Phantomarine)

The clearest improvement I always notice is my layouts - I’ve gotten more adventurous with panel shapes and placement as time has gone on, experimenting with more interesting designs for the whole page. Some of those experiments haven’t been totally successful but it always feels like a worthwhile try. I’ve gotten some really, REALLY cool layouts out of these experiments, and I love seeing how dynamic the panels have become compared to my first chapter. Also speed. I’m so much faster now. Thank gooooooodness (edited)

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

@LadyLazuli (Phantomarine) I've definitely noticed the experimental panel layouts! They're really cool.

AntiBunny

Planning. Book 2 is when I started using sketchbook thumbnails to plan ahead. The luxury of that first draft meant I could rethink panel layouts and how to best express the events happening if I first had an idea of what was happening laid out.

Also digital art by necessity since I switched to digital during the current arc. I was decent at lineart already, but other aspects have really challenged me to grow as an artist. I had to totally rethink the way I create backgrounds for instance. During this time the background quality actually declined a little while I got used to a new method, but experience has improved my skills greatly as I force myself into new methods.

DanitheCarutor

Hmmm maybe paneling, speechbubbles and backgrounds? My current project is my second real attempt at doing a comic, but I have learned a lot of stuff from the community and general art and story tutorials. Backgrounds and bubbles were the worst for me when first starting out, I only read manga before starting so the speechbubble shapes did not fit with how English is written. Plus I've only drawn wooded fantasy settings before making my comic, so using a ruler, figuring out perspective points and drawing buildings was very new to me. I still hate drawing cities and such, but I've gotten a lot better at it and it is easier to do now. Since I mostly stuck with B&W before my current project, coloring also kind of improved? Depending on who's looking at it. Lmao If I were to think about story/characters/dialogue, I have no idea if I've improved. Honestly, I don't pay much attention to the quality. Also my brain kinda says it's all bad regardless of what I make.(edited)

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

For my Improvements: I'm getting better at my comic panels, as I adjust to the vertical style. Before I've always drawn the standard format. It's more than just boxes, I try to keep a variety of sizes. I'm picking up roughly how much 'gutter space' I need per 2-3 panels.etc I'm also improving on choosing colors that fits my love of detailed linework.(edited)

OH! I'm also learning about Clip studio shortcuts, how to use the assets they provide which makes the process, abit easier on me. Things I need to change, is I want to get a good speedy coloring style, without referring to my usual coloring.(edited)

Tuyetnhi (Only In Your Dreams!)

the more I worked on the comic, the more I feel ambitious in making different angles and perspective. So it's really hitting me out of my comfort zone which is good! lol Though I'm trying to keep in mind of my speed, what I feel like I've improved a bit is trying to keep in mind of paneling and dialogue.

FeatherNotes(Krispy)

Process! Space and i have definitely figured out the most productive way to produce content at the rate and quality that also provides us with time for our own projects. Comics are a useful tool that helps you discover ways to better organize your creative workflow for sure!

sssfrs (JOE IS DEAD)

I think probably scenery. I used to dread drawing inanimate objects but now I feel more confident in filling in a scene & even look forward to it sometimes. Maybe also page composition and paneling but I still have a lot to learn there

eli [a winged tale]

One of the reasons I embarked on the webcomic journey is to push myself to improve not only storytelling but also utilizing art to create a reader experience that would be difficult to replicate with just words. I’d like to think that 9 months into making A Winged Tale, I’ve improved on deciding when is a good opportunity to invest more into backgrounds vs character dynamics and when should be focused more on sequences of panels and composition. While the comic is written in a four panel format, more and more I’m finding areas where the story could be told by breaking those rules (attached pic). It’s a balance and I hope going forward I will improve more in pushing the limits of panels and find ways to express the story in fun and interesting ways.(edited)

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

Wow that's a very good description @eli [a winged tale] I look forward to reading more of your story journey

eli [a winged tale]

Thanks so much Joichi! I’m eager to keep learning~

Capitania do Azar

I'm gonna go with planning and actually getting it done. I'm so much faster because now the process is much more streamlined to me

kayotics

My whole comic was started s an exercise to just get better at comics generally so I’d probably say every part I’ve improved at? The biggest things are probably colors and the upfront planning process

Phin (Heirs of the Veil)

Ooof hard question. I think my main improvement lies with page and speechballoon layouts and writing natural feeling dialouge. I'd say maybe also character acting?

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

I'm slowly learning how to create more engaging comic narrative. I read and research in the polished prem webcomics to see what makes them engaging? Like I'm going to challenge myself by creating a series of short stories with a reoccurring set of characters. Every new comic series I create is an experience, trial and error. Sometimes I skip the writeup and just go in blind, trust my own instincts. I'm glad to reach out and talk about it than in my own head. I hope by this year, I'll have at least 2 chapters of Hybrid Dolls out.(edited)

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

I've definitely gotten better at planning/ outlining multiple chapters ahead of time. I did not even do this when I was doing the first 10 something chapters. (I did attempt an outline before I began the comic, but the story changed significantly from the outline by the time I started the comic, and I did not try to do it again for a long while.) I can't remember when I started, but I do recall having a lot of trouble the first time I tried to do it. It's gotten a little easier each time, though. In fact, I just spent the past few days outlining the next few very important chapters, de-tangling some big tangles. I'm really glad my outlining (and overall writing) skills had leveled up, because HOO boy, I don't think my 2014-2015 self could have done this!

I also became friends with enviros. I had already become somewhat comfortable drawing perspective when HoK started, but I had a sort of mechanical approach to it, like "oh I need some enviro for these establishing shots, guess I'll draw them." But now I LOVE drawing enviros! (some types anyway...) It's my comfort activity, something I treat myself to after a long day! In the thumbnails for my next few pages, there's a few enviro-heavy panels that I have to remove, because I drew too many of them (and the pacing got too slow as a result). I have to stop myself from drawing too many of these.

My biggest improvement is probably I've come to understand my characters and my themes much better, but that's more of a "I got better at making HoK" than a "I got better at making comics." There's definitely a difference between the two.

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

@keii’ii (Heart of Keol) ah I totally understand I tried the outline method before I start but my story changed alot after I drew it. So it start to feel like a waste of time for me, but I'll still write an outline to make sure to plan where my story heads(edited)

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

Yeah! I needed to draw those first few chapters to understand the direction of my own story.

The drawing part is an essential part of self-reflection, to try to understand what it is that I want out of the story. The answer has always been there in my heart, but I'm not able to see it clearly from the get-go.

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

I end up breaking scenes and put them in for future episodes, since I want to get a certain flow in the story.

It could be tricky to see what it is you want out of the story until you are in at least 3 chapters in?

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

I needed way more than 3 chapters -- though granted, my chapters are short, so that could be a part of it

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

I see the early first script as testing the water. like a test to figure out the characters personalities. Unless you are bringing in old characters which you knew before?(edited)

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

Even if the characters have been with you for a while, unless I have made a comic with them, there is a big chance that the characters will completely change, too.

DanitheCarutor

You know, I was thinking about about this, mostly about how I wouldn't have been happy if I was able to finish my comic the day I started. Then I realized I'm happy that I didn't. The first chapter wasn't the best, I was just learning how to coloring a comic, still fleshing out my characters and was still brainstorming small kinks in the story. I also still didn't have as much of an understanding of perspective, or panel and bubble layout. Even though I still have a lot I need to work on, I've gotten a lot better in all those aspects. Even though my use of color is weird, I've definitely gotten much more confident in it, enough so that I experiment and take a lot more risks with style. Even though my panelling can be boring, I have a much better understanding of how I want a page to look. I've improved a lot with my planning as well, like even though my thumbnailing/storyboarding only takes maybe 30, I've learned to step away for a bit if I don't like a layout, or analyzing why I don't like it and brainstorming ways to make it better. If I had magically finished the comic all at once, it would look really bad and may have been less readable.

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

That is inspiring to hear about your improvement @DanitheCarutor

Natsu-no-Hikari

Chiming in! Just this week, Miko (my co-creator) and I were discussing how far we've come from when we started our first comic (https://liarsgotoparadise.com/) vs. where we are now. I think there have been a lot of learn experiences, such as art, dialogue, general editing - but especially with pacing and character interaction. We regret that we didn't stop to focus more on that interaction, as we wanted to move ahead in the story...and now we can't change that, except to start now and not allow ourselves to grow impatient. Take our time and enjoy the journey - that's our new motto. There's a time to rush ahead in perilous moments, but there's also definitely a time to catch our breaths and let the characters mingle and speak. It's an improvement that will become more noticeable going forward in Liars and our second comic as well.

[sims2shrine]

“This soulless game isn’t really ‘The Sims’ for me”

I am starting off this blog with a review for The Sims 3 from Amazon.com user Valentinegirl. Why The Sims 3 on a blog dedicated to The Sims 2, you ask? Because this review details just about everything about The Sims 2 that makes it so special and endearing. Whenever I come back to playing The Sims 2 after a long break, I like to re-read this review because it always excites and inspires me to play this game that I am so passionate about. Note that the opinions expressed in this review do not necessarily correlate with my own -- I do enjoy all of PC versions for the most part. I just believe that The Sims 2 is far superior to the others, hence why this blog was born.

“Like many of the other reviewers here, I have been a HUGE fan of The Sims franchises, losing many pleasant hours to The Sims 1 and its wonderful sequel The Sims 2. Even before The Sims came out I was a Maxis fan, playing games like Sim City and Sim Tower with pleasure. I can't say that The Sims 3 has ‘disappointed’ me because the more I heard about the new game over its development period the more I thought to myself ‘why are they including this feature or dropping that feature? It sounds like they are tampering with the heart of the things I enjoy about The Sims’. But I bought the game anyway in good faith. Needless to say I am now back to playing The Sims 2. The Sims 3 has no interest for me at all in comparison. Despite all the ‘improvements’ - and I admit there are some surface ones - the heart and soul of what The Sims means to me is absent from this game. Unlike other reviewers here, my negative review of this game is not due to any technical difficulties. Perhaps I haven't played long enough to experience any, and at any rate - every hard-core Sims fan has learned to live with the bugs shipped with the game and love it anyway. The modding community has always done a sterling job of cleaning up our games and making them more playable and enjoyable. So my negative rating is not due to bugs or crashes - it is purely based on my perception of the game's enjoyment factor, especially when compared to The Sims 2. To be fair, I will sum up what to me are improvements to the game compared to The Sims 2: - the ‘open neighbourhood’ - the ability to go from one place to the other without a loading screen is a fine idea and works well in principal. But I found that it really didn't impact my playing habits as much as you might think at first. While playing a large, busy family there would be very little time to go rushing off to the park or elsewhere and I found I was ‘household’ focussed in my game playing just as much as in The Sims 2. I actually prefer in some ways the way community lots worked in The Sims 2. If you could organise your sims enough to go off to a community lot, time would actually stand still in the meantime, taking the pressure off your enjoyment of this change in pace for your sims. - No doubt about it, the ‘Create a Style’ colour wheel/pattern maker is the one thing that is far superior to recolouring in The Sims 2. It's great fun and so easy to go through and match up clothing, furniture, wallpaper, etc in an obsessive fashion that suits my type of playing down to the ground. But even here is a caveat - there is no Body Shop type program to truly customise textures. You can recolour only which is hardly satisfying in a creative way compared to being able to extract a texture and import it into Photoshop, thereby putting your own personal stamp on the texture. For example, in The Sims 2 you could export a dress texture and by pasting on a texture of your own you could make the outfit appear to be a cardigan and skirt instead. I am sure custom content creators in time will come up with ways of importing new meshes/textures into The Sims 3, but it is obvious that EA is trying to limit this type of thing to the ‘regular’ user right from the beginning by eliminating a ‘Bodyshop’ program from their development tools. - The ease of angle rotation is an unmixed blessing in this game - something that I wish had happened in The Sims 2 - The outdoor scenery in The Sims 3 is gorgeous from the beach, the shimmering water, to the parks, rolling hills etc. But the limitations put on being able to make this neighbourhood your own again shows up the inflexibility built into this game. Whereas in The Sims 2 you could completely customise your neighbourhood, building it up from a terrain created in Sim City, to decorating it and laying out your lots etc, in this game, EA gives you this beautiful scenery and then severely limits your ability to customise it. You cannot create your own terrain, the community lot buildings are the same everywhere and are not even properly functional, and there are a limited number of lots for your houses. It feels like a ‘dumbed down’ version of a neighbourhood to me that even the ‘open plan’ of the game cannot make up for. - There are a lot more surface details to gameplay in The Sims 3 by the way of person and object interactions and the little missions/opportunities that pop up. I do appreciate the amount of thought that has gone into a lot of these things, like adding depth to the career paths and making such things as painting a picture personal to every different type of sim. But again, when playing a busy family (six kids!) I found that I would just click the opportunities away as an annoyance without even reading them. There was no way my busy mother or father could go running off to the town park for a chess tournament when they were caring for screaming toddlers at home! - The lighting of the new game is a nice update and beautiful. It is also flexible if you have the time or inclination to mess around with the many options provided So even the improvements included in The Sims 3 are mostly mixed blessings for me! Here are the things that have decided me against the game: - The sims themselves. Try as I might, I cannot bond with these weird looking people and that bond between the player and their ‘Simmies’ is the major factor that holds many Sims fans in thrall. For a start, these creations just don't look like sims to me. It is laughable that the creators of this game are claiming that the sculpting tools given to create a sim are more flexible and customisable than in The Sims 2! In fact the sliders are very limited in their scope and have less points of difference than those provided in ‘Bodyshop’. That round-faced, chinless look that we all noticed and wondered at in preview pictures of this game is there for the very specific reason that you can't provide your sim with a proper chin and all of them look blobby and quite fat in the face. The noses look like they are just stuck on anyhow and look very unfortunate in profile. And the empty-looking eyes roll in a very disconcerting and unappealing alien manner. The sims toddlers and children - one of my prime delights in The Sims 2 - all look very ugly and all look exactly the same. One couple I played had six children, just to check out the genetics and all of them looked like peas in a pod until they got to their adult years, and even then the differences were minimal. It was very unsatisfying spending so much time and energy raising these unappealing little clones! - Obviously, I have had trouble creating sims I like to look at. That wouldn't matter as much if I could love the way these sims act and interact. If you think back to The Sims 1 and The Sims 2 what charmed fans of these games was how cute, quirky, funny, unexpected and unique all these characters seemed to the player. I don't accept the criticism the developers of this new game kept stating that ‘all previous sims games had sims who were all the same and all they wanted to do all the time was go to the toilet!’ Well really - do they think The Sims 1 and 2 would have been such world-wide successes if this were actually true?? Of course not! Our sims charmed us, made us laugh, surprised us and often took their own little lives in their own hands and pulled the game in a direction all their own. The two things promised by The Sims 3 creators about how the new sims would behave were 1) There would be a lot more time to attend to the sims' lives and less need to run around after them caring for their basic ‘needs’ - such as sending them to the toilet or to bed; and 2) the new ‘traits’ system would ensure truly unique behaviour from the sims and open up entirely new vistas of personalities and interactions for sims fans to enjoy. I'm sorry to say, but I have to rebut both of these stated improvements. 1)I think every Sims 3 player, no matter how dedicated a fan they are will admit that you spend more time waiting for your sims to fulfil needs than ever before. You spend ages just watching them sleep every night. They seem to have bladder and hunger needs that are never satiated, and you spend more boring time staring at their work building while they are off at work. So between taking them to work, watching them sleep, fulfilling their needs and trying to skill up, there is actually zero time left in a sims' busy day to take them to the park, the beach or visit a neighbour! How is this the ‘new balance’ of life over needs that the developers were so proudly proclaiming?? 2) As for the ‘traits’ system - that has to be the biggest disappointment of all. Sure, picking different traits for your sims will give them some very superficial differences, such as different interaction possibilities with other sims, or different animations. but at a deeper level, each and every sim seems the same over and over again. I think the main reason I say this is if you watch a household full of sims who all supposedly have a unique set of traits, you don't see them acting differently unless you tell them to. In fact they barely interact with one another at all if you don't tell them to. They ignore one another and spend their time being boring - fulfilling the endless needs or perhaps using a skill object. They don't care to interact with one another at all! It is quite possible to have two sims living in the same house forever and they remain total strangers to one another. You have to force them to interact which I find really annoying - I had hoped that they might work out their own relationships as they did in The Sims 2. Another annoying thing is the lack of familial affection between sims. Unlike The Sims 2, you never see a parent hug, kiss or play with a child unless you tell them to. You just don't feel that these sims love/care about one another at all, and I remember that feeling that ‘love is real’ between sims being the primary and most striking point that charmed me when The Sims 2 came out. I am sorry to say, if I compare the depth of personality of a houseful of Sims 2 and 3 sims, the Sims 2 sims would win hands down. In Sims 2, they would take one another in like or dislike, be attracted to some and repulsed by others. The parents would hug their kids when they got home from work, and kiss them goodnight. Husbands and wives would find a quiet corner and canoodle in a very romantic way. In Sims 3 they all coldly ignore one another and act in boring and one-dimensional ways, totally uninfluenced by their so-called ‘unique traits’. This lack of true feeling for my sims and between the sims themselves is my primary reason for calling this latest instalment ‘soulless’. How can you feel attached to these ugly, alien-like people who all look and act the same? - I do not care for one of the key selling points of The Sims 3 - the so-called ‘story progression’. Which sim fan really wants to leave their playable family for a little while only to come back and find they've moved out of the neighbourhood, or had a family while you're not looking with kids you didn't get to name? Where is the appeal in that? Most sims fans love to micro-manage their sim's lives - who they love, marry, have kids with, what they name their kids, where they choose to live, etc. Even more frustrating, the ability to turn story progression off is broken!! Good one, EA!! Another one of my criticisms is that EA has written out some of the most enjoyable and endearing elements of The Sims 2. Eliminating these things really proves to me how little the developers of the game understood the things that true Sims fans love about their games. Here are some as an example: - Story mode is gone. Yes I know there is a camera and yes I know they have all this fancy equipment that enables you to easily upload stories and movies onto the web to share. But I bet 90% of Sims players are not all that interested in sharing stories on the world wide web. The Sims has always been a highly personal game - a fantasy world unique to each sims player, and making up and sharing sims stories is not the driving reason to play the game for most. It is to get lost in your own little self-created kingdom and fall in love with the little pixels that people it. In Sims 1 & 2, using the camera as I played and building up an album for each little family became a mainstay of my playing style over the years. Most of the time I would not even add text to the pictures. They would be safely stored in each family's little album and every once in a while I would choose to browse through this visual record of my sims' little lives and enjoy again the sentimental, surprising, funny little incidents that marked the passage of that family's life. I would record the unexpected or charming little things that made my sims seem unique, like when my prim little sim teenager fell in love with the neighbourhood ‘bad boy’ all on her own and against any of my expectations. Or when my shy, nerdy sim who lived with a party animal room-mate spent all her time in her room reading on the bed or, of all things - washing the windows! whenever her room-mate threw one of her wild parties! Not having this record at hand of the family's little story in Sims 3 is definitely a contributing factor to the feeling of the game having little forward progression - every day seems like the one before. - Eliminating memories from the Sims is another way EA has wiped out the sense you might have of the family's story and history. I know memories caused all sorts of trouble in The Sims 2 if you moved sims indiscriminately from one neighbourhood to the next, but I think for many of us, having that sim's little milestones recorded in their memories really gave the sim a feel of individuality and personal growth. After not playing a particular family for a long time the first thing I would do would be to flip through the family's album and check their memories. This would put me back in touch with where the family was in their own particular life story. - Another charming Sims 2 feature that was wiped out was the attraction system. I know the original Sims 2 game did not ship with this, but it was added early on in one of the expansion packs and I am sure every Sims 2 fan absolutely loved it. It was another way to differentiate sims from one another. You could create down to the finest detail two sims who you thought would be ‘perfect’ for each other, only to find they couldn't stand each other! Then two of the unlikeliest sims would get together all of their own accord, making you feel that these little people had minds and hearts of their own. I loved this feature so much that my playing style was to resolutely let each sim choose his or her own mate with no help from me. There are other reasons for me not to like this highly polished, highly superficial instalment of The Sims franchise. But in the end, it came down to these basic feelings about the game - I don't care how gorgeous it is to look at if the gameplay is shallow and boring - I feel like EA is really dumbing down long-time sims fans by trying to eliminate custom content, charging like a wounded bull for their sub-standard stuff and doing their best to stifle the creativity of the custom content community - The sims are cookie-cutter clones of one another, and have no charm either of physical appearance or personality. The life and soul has been sucked out of these pixel-people - There is no sense of story, no unexpected interactions, no story mode or memories to record the sims lives. They no longer care about one another at all - parents, children, lovers, room-mates, friends - it doesn't matter what relationship the sims have to one another, there is no desire for these people to interact or develop their relationships unless you force it. I am mad at EA for ‘missing the boat’ on this franchise upgrade. In fact, it no longer feels like The Sims at all to me. All the charm and spontaneity has gone out of the game. I suppose it's not surprising I feel this way - Will Wright and his unique Maxis team of developers are long gone and EA has taken over. EA have no idea, and do not care what made The Sims beloved of fans the world over and instead are forcing something on them that has only a surface relationship to previous games. Much in the same way they ‘improved’ Sim City out of all recognition of the original game (’Sim City Societies’), they have done this to The Sims and that, I think is unforgivable. Fortunately, The Sims 2 will always be here and I am gladly getting back to my cute, funny, irreverent, surprising little sims with the huge added bonus of all the expansion packs and custom content I have built up over the years. I doubt if I will ever come back to The Sims 3 even if they bring out boatloads of expansion packs. If the game has no soul, it cannot be loved.

This review was written on July 27th, 2009. Source: Amazon.com. Link to original review: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RCEHMW5QIIA7B/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B00166N6SA

[thisnerdsadventures]

I was talking with one of my friends the other day about how after graduation, people have time for hobbies /a concept/. For example, a lot of my 2018 friends play video games together as a way to socialize, and to be fair, they are all quite good now at League of Legends compared to me, who is stuck at level 30 since I play like once every five months.

But why do they play every day when I don’t? Obviously they have a bunch more time post-graduation to, but also I just don’t see myself dedicating all my free time to it. And this goes for other hobbies I see people in the real world doing, like dance or music or photography or reading or spin/yoga/running. Instead of fixating on one thing like it seems like real adults (TM) do, I do the cycling between the same six hobbies every two weeks until I am just about slightly below average to average at every thing I try. My friend says it’s from how in high school we spent all our time doing 12389182 things and in college, we continued to find new interests and taking on 129381928 extracurriculars and leaving that is just impossible for us. I kinda believe in this, but I also wonder if it’s because I haven’t found the one thing I truly truly love, but rather 10 things I kinda like doing every once in a while.

Comprehensive List of My Hobbies (and oh is it a mess)

Photography

I recently got back on this train by taking pics for the model UN chair shoot. We went and borrowed a camera from the library here (the libraries here have literally everything you would ever want, from recording equipment to nice cameras to xbox games you can play in-house), and then took pics from 3-7pm in the nano building to take advantage of the lighting. To be fair, the lighting was absolutely PRIME, and getting to use that 8th grade photography skills on an actual job was really fun. I also really love photoshopping and playing around with white balance and color levels, like I’ll really spend hours on stuff like this, but then ONLY EVERY TWO WEEKS

Music

This has been one of my largest hobbies in that I’ll compose, play, listen, produce, literally everything related to music, but I just don’t personally feel good enough to call myself a legit artist (u feel????) anyways, it also takes a lot of creative energy that I lack most of the time due to fatigue, so most of the time, my musical outlet manifests itself in playing the same chord progression on guitar because that’s slightly therapeutic whereas lying in creative mental block is not

Film/Vlog

This summer I had a lot of time to try this out, and just as I like photo editing, I also really like video editing. If you scroll down just a bit on this blog, you’ll probably find the NYC vlog and also some of the short films I’ve done for my house government. The most recent one is here -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zQY_Z4ufEY and yes it really is tik tok inspired, please don’t at me. but again, i feel like vlogging is a lot of effort in that you always have to be recording, and your girl likes doing crosswords in her free time, not thinking about the next nice shot lol

Baking

In high school I used to bake a lot, so I haven’t really done this in years, but I used to bake a TON in senior year. Granted this was one of those hobbies that I was far below average in terms of skill level, but I feel I really learned a lot in the process (for instance, 1/4th of an egg is not equal to a slightly smaller than average egg). Also I got really good at frying eggs in this whole process of learning how to cook/bake, so I guess this is quite practical. Perhaps I should get back on this train. But ingredients also cost money. (But then again, the friends you gain from offering baked goods are priceless)

Learning a Language

Every six months, I tell myself this is it, this is the day I learn Mandarin. And every time, it is, in fact, not the time. This happened once last semester around April where I had a whole burst of trying to learn how to read and then quit after two weeks, and then summer 2018 where I tried downloading all the apps for learning Chinese to practice on the bus (which consequently really died fast once I went back to school), and then summer 2017 also had an attempt, but again, that also died, and mostly what this led to was my conclusion that actually just talking with my grandparents in Mandarin over the phone was the best way to improve my Chinese. i have to say though, the notifications scheme on Duolingo is remarkably good, the guilt really is there

Sports

I think the amount of effort I put into trying to get better at basketball is really quite unfortunate because I actually don’t think I’m that natural of an athlete, I think I’m just slightly more tryhard than others when it comes to sport, which results in me just being a bit above the average beginner at literally every sport. For example, football?? I can kick the ball. And dribble and such. Tennis??? Yes, I can indeed return the ball and hit it between the lines (though to be fair, the majority of the time I’m playing tennis, I find I’m really just not trying to make a fool of myself, so the intrinsic motivators are really there). Basketball??? Ah I think I’m a bit more than slightly above average, but I’m still not really that good, mostly because I don’t actually move that fast. And I think that’s my issue in like every sport, like my body just doesn’t move that fast, so??? oof

Bonus Hobbies-That-Could-Have-Been (and I guess still could??)

Dancing 

In freshman year I really liked dancing. I also really liked dancing my senior year of high school, but once sophomore year hit me in the face, I just found other things to do in my life. But I still really love watching dance videos and I feel like if I were to join a dance team with a friend or two, I would really enjoy it. But only with a friend or two, I’ve tried going to dance workshops with people I didn’t really know that well, and it just hasn’t felt the same. But I feel like I could really dedicate myself to it if I were dancing with people I loved hanging out with.

Interior Decorating

There was this really strange three day period over the summer where I was really into designing my room down to the inch. and i actually did execute and my room looks great now - I have a small home office section of my room, I have decorations all up on the walls, and my closet organization is pristine. Unfortunately the process of interior decorating is a nontrivial amount of cost, so this didn’t hold up for long.

Gaming

Again, I was really into gaming summer 2018, but after that, I just lost interest and my skill level plateau’d out after that. Now I’m still pretty bad at League and very bad at Fortnite and acceptable at Smash (but only while playing Ike), and I don’t think I’ll be back on this hobby any time soon, which is a shame because my friend group’s main way of communication is through....gaming

As you can see, I am a mess. My last few I’ve gone through are photography and film, and I’m kinda in the language phase now (though things seem to be suggesting that I’ll actually follow through on this learning a language thing because it’s been a month now that I’ve been pretty consistent on Duolingo), so who knows!! Maybe I’ll produce a song (the one song that I make a year lol)

[arbitrarilymine]

Tuesday, 04.06.2019, 22:24

Liking something can be such a huge motivation. And such a big motivating factor to just learn and do things. Like -

Because I like dolls, I:

Figured out, at the age of 15, how to buy things online without a bank account or credit or debit card. (The answer is, buy through group orders, or someone else doing the order, and request to pay in cash.) But also, when I did get a bank account (and still no card), I figured out how to get paypal (properly, not the fake your age method), and how to buy things and get them shipped to me without my parents knowing (send it to a friend)

Figured out how to do faceups with online forum tutorials. Back then, photo and text explanations were the norm, video tutorials weren’t really a thing. But anyway, a totally new skill picked up. It’s helpful to have drawn alot before this, but still, pastel and painting were new grounds for me.

Figured out what a respirator is, why it matters, and how to use it properly

Figured out a way to manage my expenses (done on excel) even though back then it was just doll related

Figured out how to sew because I didn’t have the money to buy them clothes. Figured out how to make patterns even though I’m still not really sure how to do it. Also learnt how to use the sewing machine from my mum though I’m not that good at it.

Figured out how to sand and mod a doll. Sanding from rough to smooth grit, what to use, how to sand with water so I don’t get so much dust

Figured out how to remove faceups using isopropyl alcohol and acetone, and where to find such stuff in Singapore

Learnt how to take photos, decided to learn more using a DSLR

Figured out how to use photoshop to edit photos and the effects in it way before I did started doing Architecture

Started making videos on youtube because I wanted more doll videos

Figured out how to cut wigs, furwigs and fibre wigs alike, to make the hairstyles I wanted my OCs to have

Figured out how to make costume jewelry for dolls, with simple tools bought off the shelf

Because I like Kpop (Infinite, Monsta X, Block B, Exo...), I:

Figured out how to make gifs in one day using online tutorials (already had photoshop skills then, which helped)

Started writing fanfic and now I have 4 years of fanfic written (a total 82 works, 453491 words published online, and there’s more in my drafts)

Through fanfic, learnt how to make stories that are appealing, did alot of research on tropes, different genres of story, different ways of story telling (kishotenketsu aka plot without conflict, which is different from the usual western way of plot with a distinct conflict etc). I figured out that I like slice of life alot for it’s mundane-ness, but also vampire fics alot. And that any sort of relationship with imbalances in power dynamics is not my jam. What I like and what I like to read have similarities but don’t overlap exactly. I also learn what polyamorous relationships are and generally a lot of lgbtq+ relationship dynamics and things that I don’t really get in traditional media

Made a ficfest with two online (Singaporean) fans for Infinite to encourage people to write more fics. Sure, we weren’t very successful but we tried really hard and we did this for almost a year, got a few authors to write a few stories, and we ourselves made over 50 moodboards for inspiration

Started looking at exercise as something positive, like, if the people I like enjoy exercising so much, and talk about its benefits, maybe there’s something in it for me. The biggest inspiration was Wonho who went from scrawny kid to buff dude but like, still remained really kind-hearted and soft and just, this whole combination wasn’t something I really learned to value from the way I was brought up, but it was an attitude I really admire regardless. And I learnt that I have the capacity to be moved by things like this, and to also adjust the biases or inherent assumptions I have

Did alot of research on BDSM and kinks and a lot of non-traditional things that I think I was always interested to know about and felt okay about actually reading up and knowing and writing and reading and discussing such things in a community of writers who did similar stuff. And realised there’s so much more in the dynamics behind these kinks, why people have them, how people can engage in them safely, what are safe practices and good practices, and just, having that knowledge also brings with it a better awareness of how similar power dynamics affect normal (unkinky) relationships

In a similar train of thought, to reserve judgement when I see people write or know or whatever certain things, because you can know something, write it, but not necessarily be agreeble to it (that’s why warning tags agree. It conveys self-awareness without telling the writer, no, you can’t write about this touchy taboo topic)

Learnt how to think horizontally when writing fics

Learnt how to get a beta to read my fics, or even why test readers (and cheerleaders) are important in a project like writing a fic. It’s my name on that fic but it’s with the help of alot of people sometimes, and that’s also why community matters

Thought about fandom, private spaces in online spheres and also constructive critique and non-constructive criticism and feedback on creative work

Read up on copyright laws, both for image use for moodboards, fanart and fanfic rights and ownership and whether one can make money off of it

Because I liked piercings, I:

Did research on how to get them safely, so so much research. From videos, from articles. Trying to figure out what’s credible, what’s not

Got piercings, also realised how biased I can be when someone has piercings. It’s a positive bias and completely groundless, like I see someone with piercings, it’s like +2 impression points or something, like I don’t know why. But it’s definitely something I should be aware of because of how seemingly groundless it is

Because I like unnaturally coloured hair, I:

Learnt how to bleach my hair with youtube tutorials and articles and learnt the dangers of doing so before I did it

Learnt how to dye my hair myself, how to transition between shades of cool and warm colours

Experimented and figured out the rest by actually dyeing my hair, enlisting the help of dorm mates

Learnt that purple is a colour that never shows up on my hair, maybe unless I bleach my hair to almost white

Learnt that I am/behave like a slightly different person with a different hair colour, and that such things affect not just my mood but how I perceive myself. And unnatural hair colours make me feel fun, but more importantly, that I can have them means I have time for myself (to dye my hair and to maintain it), and that kind of mindset is something I miss right now with my natural hair colour

Learnt that I am more open to change and okay with people talking about my hair than I thought, and that it’s fun to keep changing, but also maybe necessary for my psyche, to avoid feeling stagnant and boring

Because I like Peppertones, I:

Set up a tumblr and a blog for them in a day (helped that I’ve had a blogspot and tumblr account for ages before for other things)

Figured out a way to translate Korean songs to English even though my Korean is really really really basic. Like I can read Hangul, I can understand some words, but I can’t really write properly sentences by myself. But despite this, I wanted to know what their song lyrics are so much that I figured that I can use my ability to check a dictionary, my ability to read Chinese (so many things have Chinese translations compared to English), my cross referencing skills, and my Sec 2 literature inference skills to translate their songs despite my language incompetency. And so far I’ve modified 2.5 songs (i.e. added onto existing English translations to make it more accurate) and properly translated 1.5 songs with Chinese lyrics for reference. And there’s more songs in my drafts.

Figured out how to navigate Naver with mostly ctrl-c and ctrl-v of keywords

Compiled playlists of their live performances by individual songs, and created masterlists of their appearances and performances

Looked into Search Engine Optimisation to see how my peppertones blog can be more searchable for people like me who wanted translations of their songs, realising that blogspot is way more indexable than tumblr and finally understanding after so many years why my blogspot doll blog would show up on google image searches while my tumblr never really did

What I’m saying is, like things. Love things. Let your heart do what it wants. And then let these serve as your spark, your driver, and your direction (if for a little while). Let them inspire you, let them bring you to action, and let them remind you a little of why life is worth living. So much of this is not necessarily apparent at first glance because a lot of times, what we like may seem so trivial and trite and pointless, but the energy it offers can be so much more. I’ve learnt and picked up so many things along the way because I liked something so much that I HAD to learn something to do what I wanted to, and I cobbled my way to learning it with whatever available skills I have, and to research the heck out of whatever I didn’t know. And that is such a valuable lesson. 

I got a bit caught up in the details while listing some of the things above, but I just wanted to write down what I could before I forget. Obviously if we want to assess, some of these skills are probably more valuable than others. But the point is, all these are things and skills and abilities and learning experiences that can be picked up, and built upon, and they don’t exist in isolation. And maybe the tiny pieces don’t make particularly good sense at this moment, nor do they seem particularly useful, but like leaves falling, over time they’ll make a pile, and if you like something enough, that’s going to be a big pile of leaves, and it’s up to you what you want to do with that.

Me? I’m going to make a bed to lie on with that pile of leaves with my mediocre sewing skills and listen to all the songs I like.

[ualscout]

Captain’s Log: Cask of Amontillado 10x

I totally misunderstood the prompt initially and did a week of preproduction for a project I would end up abandoning…

I was assigned Flowers for Algernon, which hit really close to home for me. Losing my intelligence or memories is by far my worst fear and I saw a lot of good imagery to the story I could use in a simple but meaningful animation. I wanted to represent intelligence by flower height in a garden. The main character, Charlie, is a small sunflower (flowers known for their height) and other flowers bend down to interact with him. Some help him and some mock him. The different characters would have different flower types to represent their personalities. Charlie’s flower starts low to the ground, where Algernon can be seen scurrying around the ground, and the two scientists start to help it grow taller. As the flower grows taller and taller, it shows how Charlie is not only isolated by idiocy, but the intelligence he thought would help him relate to his peers better isolates him as well. The petals on him become more and more elaborate and big, and Charlie’s flower comes to represent the sun in the sky. Then he starts to wilt. He struggles as he goes back to what he used to be, trying to fight back, then giving up. Once the withered husk of the sunflower is left, someone picks the flower and puts it on top of a grave labeled Algernon. Do you know how much easier this project would be if I just stuck to that?

I wrote the script, did a ton of character exploration, and started designing characters. After all that, I decided to scrap everything and do “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allen Poe. Even though the story is dark in tone, I always saw it as comical. I mean, this guy just walks right into a very obvious trap. It’s so PAINFULLY obvious. The story is kind of a meme in the American educational system, and even online. I think I could tell the same story 10+ over in an even shorter amount of time...

I started with writing a series of situations similar to how the murder happens. It’s always some sort of betrayal with very little blood on the murderer’s hands. I wrote a series of short scenarios, ranging from tense with actual dialogue to basic internet jokes the modern high schooler would understand (we read it in like 9th grade, the kids need an abridged version). One included the character getting tricked into getting possessed, one is the character foolishly saying yes to a “free candy” van, one was getting hooked on addictive stuff from drugs, tabletop gaming, and bad social media sites like reddit, one is him just being yote off a cliff, one is a callback to the Cincinnati Zoo incident that I couldn’t finish storyboarding not out of lack of time but because of moral obligation and guilt. Anyways, they get increasingly absurd and stupid. I was challenged to fit as many as I could into one minute.

The script underwent a ton of revisions, this was the most time I’ve spent on a script. It was hard because I had to shave off as much as I could, but I think it made the stories better. They’re not supposed to be long set up jokes, it’s a series of punchlines. The joke is set up in the intro, when the characters meet in the original setting and say abridged versions of the lines. Everything else is what happens after. 

One thing that was challenging, but fun, was the character design. Since the characters change outfits, have their faces covered, are often not fully in the shot, and otherwise obscured, I had to design characters that were identifiable by every single angle. That means I had to really stretch the shape of the characters and lean into the cartoonish nature of design. One is a warm and innocent character, so I made him more likable and approachable with a bigger body but shorter stature. The other character is more cunning and harsh, so I gave him harsh angles and lines with a tall pointy stature. I tried to keep both of them in as similar a style as possible, and I think I did alright. Still used a lot more lines than I should of- whenever the characters had to have lined clothes, it was hell to draw. In retrospect, the physical dynamic is similar to two characters I used to draw a lot of in high school... 

The character designs had a base, but the outfits changed. I designed the costumes based on what I needed in the moment, so they weren’t filled with thought, unlike the first ones in the masquerade. I was just playing with shots and angles mainly, keeping information from the viewer and getting the drama across without heavy pauses or shots, just by angles. I also liked drawing the characters with the style, I kept it very simple and it made the process much easier. 

I also considered sound design heavily while the script was being written. I made a list of sound effects I would need for each scene, a list of songs to download for background music, and audio cues. I also designed one if the characters around a voice actor I already had in mind. The other character, I was entertaining using text to speech. 

I got much more comfortable with animating in Photoshop, which was nice. It’s still annoying keeping track of the frames and not drawing on the wrong frame, though. I need one of those set ups for animating on paper, just don’t know where to get one… I have a Lightbox, just need the paper and hole puncher. I found a lot of cool tricks in animating Photoshop, like taking advantage of stretching a frame and using layers. The style I was aiming for was very quick, yet stiff, and I had a lot of issues getting that style completely. It’s something I have to work on, but it all just felt too fluid. 

… I wasn’t able to finish this project. 

It was a lot, even when I cut it all down. I had big dreams and not a lot of time. I also had a bad case of depression which I’ve been dealing with since winter break. It all just felt like an uphill battle. I had so many ideas and stuff I wanted to do, but I couldn’t be happy with what I did or always ran into roadblocks which I would ignore for working on something else. Like, I was working on the project in some way, just not in a way that would help me progress in the way I needed. 

I liked connecting, writing, and concepting it all, but when it came down to animating it, it was just too much to do. I did learn a lot about Photoshop animation and feel a bit better using it, but I do need to learn aftereffects so I can use flat images and animations together more effectively. 

I enjoyed being able to flex my comedic writing skills and push them to the limit. My last comedic venture was more about telling a story with the assistance of a joke that already existed, but this one was coming up with new ways to tell the same punchline in increasingly comedic and unpredictable ways. The audience should know how the joke starts and ends, but how the joke gets to the end is the fun and mysterious part. Writing was where I felt my energy was most effectively spent even if it wasn’t the thing I spent the most actual time on (that would go to struggling with ProCreate and Photoshop). I did get to figure out my drawing and animation style a lot more effectively, though. How I draw characters feels a bit more established and defined, which does feel good. However, I think I need to start even smaller and just work on making small second animations or something. 

Anyways…

Your move, Poe. 

[uglypastels]

👶

Writer ask

👶 - advice for new writers 

I have no idea what to give advice for, so here’s everything I know and think maybe could be helpful: 

just… write. This might sound very straightforward, but the first step is to just sit down and start writing. Anything. It doesn’t even have to be a proper story. 

I try to write every day. I’m not saying you should too because everyone should work on their own pace, but I learned that writing often (and regularly) can really help with progressing on your skills. 

Just because you don’t think its good, don’t assume everyone else will think so. 

Don’t get discouraged if something doesn’t work out. It can only get better from there. (keep on writing)

Don’t let any bad critique bring you down. You just created a whole new story out of nothing by yourself. That is something to be proud of! Anyone who says otherwise can fuck off!

If you’re stuck, try to write a future part of your story. then go back to the place you were stuck in and try to work out how to get from point A to point B. I like to call this, the connect the dots technique.

the connect the dots technique can also work well as a starting point in a story. Just plot out a few parts of your story (with the text you know you want to include/ parts that you came up with for the future) and then write everything in between later. 

just like in an actual, connect the dots drawing, the more points, the better. It makes the story more intricate and interesting.

Don’t get frustrated when a story doesn’t come to you immediately. take your time. maybe stop writing for a moment and distract yourself. Just don’t force it. 

Don’t worry if you feel like you don’t know enough to write. I have no literally zero (0) experience except for fanfics. Most of the time, I have no idea what I’m doing anyway. 

Ask for help! Ask for feedback! Don’t feel embarrassed for wanting to know how to improve. 

Get comfortable. Not only literally, but it is important that you feel good with what you’re writing. If you’re not feeling it, drop it (nobody will blame you)

Make research. Not only will this give more depth to your story, but sometimes it can also give some great inspiration for later.  

ctrl + f  can really help out. When you’re looking through your own text for something, but also when making research. 

Most importantly: have fun! If you’re not enjoying what you’re writing, then what’s the point.

Things that I use to write: 

Google Drive (it’s simple to use, you can keep your stuff organized and it makes it easy to share with others if needed + google drive can be used on almost any device which makes it possible to write anywhere.) 

Grammarly 

Notes App. - just the basic notes on your phone. Got hit with inspiration, but don’t have internet? I just write it down on my phone. 

I find all my gifs either from Tumblr or google. 

for editing pictures, I use PicMonkey. It got a bit weird since I started using it (as in, you have to buy a pro-subscription to safe etc.) but it’s good for the basic photoshop and I just take screenshots instead of saving 🙈

my basics for research: 

wikipedia

fandom.wikia 

IMDb

and of course, the OG, google itself

Here are some playlists that I listen to when I write:

My Own Favs playlist  (not made with writing in mind)

Instrumental Pop Covers

Harry Potter (1-7 film score)

Acoustic Instrumental Covers

[theibgirls]

CAS is an essential part of the IB programme, but coming up with ideas for it can be very challenging, especially if money is tight. Therefore, I present to you 99 Free (or at the very least, inexpensive) CAS ideas!

Please like/reblog if this helped you, and so that it can help others! ❤︎

Creativity

1. Learn a new language: Free apps or websites like Duolingo or Mondly can help you learn a variety of languages. Here is a post about the language availability on various apps. You can even practice by manually translating song lyrics, which really is just an excuse to listen to Bollywood hits, K-pop, or even Shakira- there’s no reason to not have a little fun with it! If you do just 10 minutes a day you’ll get over an hour of CAS done every week. If you do 20 minutes a day, you’ll get over 2 hours a week, and by spending a little more than 20 minutes on one or two days you can easily get 2 and a half hours of CAS a week. 10 weeks of this and you’ll have 50% of your creativity hours done, and all while having fun listening to songs, and not having to spend a penny!

2. Making gifs or edits: You’re already on tumblr, why not use it as an opportunity for CAS? Making original content takes time, and will quickly fill up those 50 hours! If you don’t want your CAS supervisor see which fandoms you’re a part of, make school related content, for example making subject moodboards (self spon), edits of your required reading (maybe typography for your favourite quotes?), or giffing your favourite historical figures. If you’re experienced you can mass produce content, and if you’re a beginner you can check that “new skills” box! GIMP is free, and Photoshop has a free trial. After that you can either pay for it, or perhaps scour the internet for alternative ways to keep it (though you didn’t hear it from me). If you fulfill requests then it counts as service as well.

3. Art: You can either create digital art using the programs listed in the previous suggestion, or you can do it the old fashioned. While art supplies tend to cost a lot, there is no shame in making sketches or comics using good ol’ ink and lead pencils that you already have in your pencil case, and doing it in a notebook. If you’re willing to splurge, there are tons of ways to go with your art!

4. Photography: While a good camera is expensive, you probably already have a camera in your phone. The quality won’t be ideal, but you can easily practice photographing different motifs in different styles. You can also retouch and enhance the photos with GIMP and Photoshop, as mentioned above.

5. Join or create a low maintenance club: Baking and music may be fun, but ingredients cost money, and so do instruments. A debate club or film club won’t cost anything, except maybe if you buy popcorn! Regular meetings will ensure regular CAS hours.

6. Write poetry: Writing a good poem can take many, many hours, which in the context of CAS is a good thing! Take a stroll in the forest or by the seaside and feel those creative juices flowing!

7. Write a book: You know that idea for a novel you’ve had for ages? Write it down. It may feel awkward to show to your writing to your supervisor, but think of it as a free editor or focus group. This is a great excuse to fulfill your dream of becoming an author. Who knows? Maybe the final product is good enough to send to a publisher, or to self-publish on amazon so you can make some money!

8. Make Redbubble designs: A spin-off of the digital art suggestion. Whether it’s simple text or intricate fanart, Redbubble is a great place to display your creativity, and can even make you some money if you’re lucky!

9. Join a choir: Privately owned choirs may cost to join, but your local church will probably let you in for free.

10. Play an instrument: If you don’t already own an instrument, this isn’t a great option on a budget. However, some of you will already own a keyboard or a guitar, and may even already be taking lessons. If you are, then there is no reason not to use it for CAS. And if you own an instrument but don’t go to classes, simply practice on our own or watch tutorials on YouTube.

11. Dungeons and Dragons: Shocking, I know, but it is actually quite easy to justify D&D as creativity. A friend of mine succeeded in doing this, stating that it involved team work, initiative, commitment and problem solving. It goes to show that most things can be justified as CAS if you word everything well enough.

12. Makeup, nail art, or body paint: I highly doubt that applying mascara in the morning counts, but there are certainly many ways to express yourself with makeup. SFX, intricate patterns and new techniques certainly require creativity.

13. Dance: Dance will be expanded on in the Action section, but dance is not only exercise, but a form of expression which requires passion and creativity.

14. Learn coding: Coding has become a valuable skill in the recent years. There’s an endless amount of sources online, many of them free. Not only is it an interesting skill, but it’s an impressive skill to see on a résumé.

15. Make a game or an app: Game development is certainly not easy, but that just means that there will be plenty of hours for you to log! It also has the potential to make you money, which of course is a plus!

16. Start a YouTube channel: Buying a microphone and camera is expensive, but unless you’re aiming to become a YouTube star there’s no reason to spend money on equipment. CAS doesn’t discriminate between a $500 camera and a built in webcam, or between Adobe Premiere and Windows Movie Maker, so utilize what you have.

17. Join the school newspaper: The school newspaper is a great way to ensure regular hours, and can even count as service. There are many different types of articles, so you can get some variety in it too.

18. Send in articles to a newspaper: If you think the school newspaper is aiming too low, you can always submit articles to local newspapers or online magazines such as Buzzfeed. Your submissions may not always be published, but it’s worth a try, and the hours will count anyway!

19. Make a PSA video: There are tonnes of important causes you can promote, and a PSA video is a great way to do it. Furthermore, the service aspect will count for service hours, and if you do it with a friend it can count as a CAS project.

20. Acting: There are plenty of auditions around, whether it be to a school play or primetime TV. You don’t even need to get a role, simply auditioning is enough as you’ve been a risk taker (your coordinator will appreciate you using the IB learner profile in your reflections), and been creative.

21. Making a short film: Combining he last two points, making a video and acting, take this chance to make a short film (or a full length one depending on your ambition) and Kenneth Branagh’ it as producer, director, writer and lead.

22. Learn animation: Self-explanatory, and a very impressive skill to have.

23. Free online courses: Whether it be public speaking or anthropology, there are many free courses online which can be justified as creativity. Some courses may even look good on your résumé.

24. Make a board game: Board games are a lot of fun, but harder to make than they seem. Your creation might not be the next Monopoly, but it may provide some entertainment when you’re meeting your friends, and wouldn’t playing games with your friend be a great way to get CAS hours?

25. Gardening: A beautiful garden is a challenge to create, but challenges are a part of CAS! From a terrarium to a full scale English garden, there are many options for gardening. Here are some cheap ideas.

26. Make a podcast: Podcasts have become quite popular in the last few years, so try it out for yourself! There are many different topics you could cover, some which could count as service. Discussing one of those topics with a friend could be a great idea for a CAS project.

27. Make a website: This one is quite self-explanatory. Like the podcast, you could easily add a service aspect into it, and working with a friend could make it a CAS project.

28. Translating transcripts of spoken word poem: this one comes from @kahvia, who says “I found the transcripts of the poems on the Internet (some are hard to get, so once I just messaged the author on Facebook) and translated into my native language. It's hard and time consuming, but can be done on the go, so you can do CAS when commuting.”

29. Calligraphy: I must confess that I don’t know a lot about calligraphy, but I assume that amazing tools can cost quite a bit. But remember, CAS isn’t about quality, it’s about quantity, so screw expensive tools and just go for it!

30. Create your own font: Like with most things in life, wikihow has got your back.

31. Make an interactive story: Cool and largely uncharted territory, and definitely a unique experience. This will help you out.

32. Learn origami: Origami is beautiful, and the possibilities are endless. Although origami paper is preferred, it is possible to use regular paper too, which will save you some bucks. Google and YouTube have a million tutorials, so they got you covered.

33.  Make a Studyblr: Do you have any idea how many hours I’m getting just by making this list?

Action

1. Go jogging: Perhaps the most obvious free exercise is jogging. All you need is a pair of sneakers and you’re good to go (jogging)!

2. Play Pokémon Go: If you are still one of the few people playing Pokémon Go, walk until your eggs hatch. You could simply walk, but games make it a bit more interesting. On your CAS worksheet you can simply say you plan on walking 2km a day, but in your head and your heart it’s an epic quest for Pikachu.

3. Yoga: Yoga has numerous health benefits and is a great choice for those who don’t like exercise. Power yoga is an option for those who prefer a challenge, but beginner’s yoga isn’t too strenuous and can easily be done at home. Although a yoga mat is preferable, a lot of the moves can be done on the bed or just the floor. YouTube and the app store have thousands of free options, so there’s plenty to choose from, from 10 minutes to an hour. Half an hour before bed each day will have you finishing up your activity hours in no time!

4. Swimming in a public pool, lake or ocean: There are some public pools, but many pools require an entrance fee. The ocean does not. It’s not as easy to swim laps as in a pool, but it will do in a pinch.

5. A 30 day exercise challenge: The internet is full of 30 day exercise plans. Although they’re usually not an ideal fitness plan it will challenge your commitment, and you can get a month worth of CAS.

6.  Biking: Assuming you already have a bike, biking is a very cheap method of exercise, but very efficient. Biking to and from school will count, and if takes about 20 minutes back and forth a day, you’ll get 100 minutes in a school week. It’s regular exercise, and therefore it’s regular CAS.

7. Free apps: There’s an almost unlimited amount of exercise apps in the app store, and many of them are free. Try them out! Even a 7 minute exercise app can be useful. 49 minutes every week can be rounded up to 50 minutes, which is a great place to start if you’re new to CAS.

8. Dog walking: If you have your own dog, good for you! Take the adorable little pupper out for a walk. And if not, ask a neighbour if you can steal their dog take their dog for walks. Another case of regular exercise resulting in regular CAS hours.

9. Dance: Not all dancing has to be taught in class. Online you will find numerous tutorials for various dance styles, from belly dancing to hip hop. And if you choose to learn a dance style from another culture, like India’s kathak or the Latin samba you get to learn about other cultures and therefore be a global citizen (as the IBO likes to tell us to be).

10. Dance apps or games: This activity isn’t as focused on independent learning as the previous dance suggestion, but it works nonetheless. Games like DDR or Just Dance are found in many households, so you might already have access to them at home. Just Dance includes an exercise mode, so give it a go! And if you don’t have them, there’s always the free Just Dance app, which should do the trick, memes aside.

11. PlayStation or Wii games: Certainly not a cheap option if you don’t already have the consoles or games, but if you have Wii Sports or PlayStation 3 Sports Champions you have a great way to exercise without leaving your living room.

12. Self-defense: When you can’t afford to go to a self-defense class, we have the internet. Learning proper self-defense is sadly very important, but since it’s important to learn, why not learn it for CAS? Practice with a friend until you’re a ninja, or until you have 15 hours of activity completed.

13. Celebrity workout tape: You know the ones. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a Jane Fonda tape from the 80s which you recreate in a leotard, but then again, why not? You could use a random person’s workout tape, but I think Jane Fonda can be trusted (I mean she’s 80 and have you seen how good she looks?). Cheesy as celebrity workout tapes are, especially the ones from the 80s, there’s something special about them. Many of them can be found online, so give them a go, leotard or no!

14. Jump rope: Chances are you still have a jump rope lying around the house from when you were a kid. Rope jumping is actually very good exercise, so try to find your old toy again- it will come in handy!

15. Chair workouts: Fulfill your dream of becoming Britney Spears with some chair exercises. There’s no need to buy fancy equipment when you can just go to your kitchen instead.

16. Basketball: No need to join a team as long as you have a hoop at home. Many people still have a hoop over the garage door from when they were children, why not utilize them?

17. Join a school club: Of course, any club works, but most clubs will require an entry fee. School owned ones are unlikely to ask for one.

18. Hiking: Fresh air, breath-taking views, and all that crap.

19. Running competitions: 5k runs are frequently put on, why not join one?

20. Walk home: Is it cheating? Probably. But walking is activity, so why shouldn’t you take advantage of it? You don’t need to specify that you’re walking home, you can simply say a daily walk of x minutes.

21. Basic gymnastics or acrobatics: When I say basic, I mean basic. Somersaults, cartwheels, the works. It’s technically exercise, and you can say you’re doing acrobatics without going into further details.

22. Tree climbing: An alternative to rock climbing, only it’s free.

23. Use stockings as resistance bands: I honestly don’t know how well this works, but google said it works so it must be true.

24. Water gymnastics: Once again, doing things properly is overrated. Go to a pool and try to figure it out yourself, or with a friend. It may look ridiculous, but you’ll be trying. Another option is to do it some meters away from an ongoing class, because stealing exercise kinda works according to an episode of Will and Grace.

25. Badminton: When I say badminton, I don’t mean fancy professional badminton, I mean “get a gas station badminton racket and play in the park or your lawn”.

26. Foraging: Go look for mushrooms in a forest and keep track of how long you’ve been out and how long you’ve walked.

27. Orienteering: Although I personally despise orienteering with a violent passion, I have many friends who enjoy it, one who even does it for fun. Orienteering can be planned with friends, and can take place in a forest or a city.

28. Treasure hunt: Almost an extension of orienteering, you can plan a treasure hunt in a city or a forest. With the added element of the treasure hunt, there’s a case for creativity, and doing it in a group can work as a CAS project.

29. Frisbee: Frisbees are cheap and can be bought at a gas station, and work as a fun group activity.

30. Help the elderly: As you will see in the Service section, elderly neighbours might need some help cutting grass or shoveling snow. And as anyone who has ever shoveled snow knows, it’s a surprisingly efficient exercise.

31. Gym trial: Many gyms offer a free trial for a day or a week, or even a month, which is easy to take advantage of. Use the free days to their full extent, and if that isn’t enough, go to another gym chain and use their trial. Obviously this won’t be a long term thing, but if you work long, and not necessarily hard, 15 hours should be manageable.

32. Pilates: An alternative to yoga that works as well at home as at a gym.

33. PARKOUR: … don’t die.

 Service

1. Join Amnesty: Amnesty is an organization that raises awareness for a number of important issues, and often collect signatures for their causes. Be the one who hunts for signatures and watch the service hours roll in.

2. Join the Red Cross, or any other charitable organization: The Red Cross needs no introduction. It is perhaps the most famous charity in the world, and does a lot of good. However, there have been controversies surrounding it in the past, so if you want to support another charity instead, go for it! Find a charity that is important to you and the service hours will feel even sweeter.

3. Blood donation, or spreading awareness for it: Donating blood will often get you a small payment, and you can’t do it often, so it isn’t ideal for service. However, going to your local donation center and asking for pamphlets and sign up forms to bring to school or a stand at the mall is a great way to raise awareness and encourage other people to go donate blood. It’s one of those things people talk about doing but always put off, so be the person that changes their mind-set!

4. Helping out at school events: School discos, bake sales, or bazaars always need volunteers, and it’s a great way to get many hours done at once. Contact the PTA at your school or other schools in the area and see when upcoming events are taking place and you’ll easily get at least 15 hours of service done. If you really phrase things well you might even be able to get some creativity hours.

5. Dog walking: Expanding on the point in Action, you can walk other people’s dogs as service. Ask a neighbour if they need help, or post an ad at the grocery store. Service hours and spending time with dogs, what more could you want?

6. Volunteer at an animal shelter: Like the previous point, this really is just a great excuse to hang out with animals. Check the local shelter to see if they need any helpers!

7. Volunteering at a senior center: Senior centers are always in need of more hands. Whether it’s cleaning the resident’s rooms, walking with them or just making sure they have some company, there will always be something the center will need help with.

8. Volunteering at a hospital: Not all hospitals allow untrained volunteers, but some hospitals do. If you volunteer at a hospital you will not perform the duties of a nurse, but instead simply provide some company for the people staying there.

9. Homeless shelter: Homeless shelters always need more volunteers. There’s a variety of roles you can fill, from handing out food to collecting donations. No matter what it is you do, it will have a great impact on the people who rely on the shelters.

10. Make a PSA video: As mentioned in the Creativity section, making a PSA video is a great idea for a CAS project as it combines creativity and service, and results in lots of hours.

11. Bake sales: Baking yourself will obviously cost a bit, but most ingredients can probably already be found in your home. Set up a stand in the school corridor, and find a charity to donate the profits to.

12. Volunteer at a library: Most libraries have a variety of volunteer opportunities, from tutoring children to teaching seniors how to use technology. Go to your local library and see what volunteer programs they have!

13. Shoveling snow: Winter doesn’t treat people who live in cold places well. In case of snow you might have several neighbours struggling to clear the snow from their lot. Offer them a hand and feel the CAS hours piling up!

14. Cutting grass: Like shoveling snow, cutting grass is something people need to get done, but it’s backbreaking and time consuming. Go around the neighbourhood and see if anyone needs any help with it!

15. Assisting elderly neighbours: If you have any elderly neighbours, offer to do chores for them, like cleaning and cooking. They’ll be sure to appreciate it, and it can get you semi regular CAS hours.

16. Car washing: No, this does not have to include a red bikini, but it does give you two options: either offer to wash cars for free as service, or to set a price so you can give the profits to charity. All you need is a sponge and some water, so get scrubbing!

17. Scouts: Most scout groups require a member fee, so it’s not ideal to become a scout if you aren’t one. However, if you’re already a member, being a scout leader will get you many, many hours, so take advantage of it!

18. Student union: Student unions work hard, and can therefore get you many hours. There will be a wide range of activities to organize and participate in, so you’ll have some much needed variety.

19. Prom committee: If you’re not interested in joining the student union, there may be some committees that are separate from the union. Prom committees, graduation committees, etc., are all great options that can get you plenty of hours.

20. Babysitting: Give your neighbours a night off by offering to babysit for free. Remember, it doesn’t count as service if you get paid, so make sure the only money you get is to pay for dinner.

21. Tutoring: Some schools have study halls, or a homework club, aka after school homework help for the younger kids. And if your school doesn’t offer it already, ask if you can start it. It’ll be a chance for you to tutor younger kids, and if nobody shows up and wants your help, so what? You offered the service, and even if no one came, the hours count.

22. Start a club: Being a member of a club will get you creativity hours, starting one will get you both. Do it with a friend and you’ve got a CAS project.

23. Join a big brother/big sister organization: There are several of these organizations going around, and a popular one in the US is bbbs.org, which states that their mission is to “Provide children facing adversity with strong and enduring, professionally supported one-to-one relationships that change their lives for the better, forever.” A noble cause for sure, and one which your CAS coordinator will adore. It will tick most outcome boxes, and you will gain something from it too.

24. Volunteer in a political campaign: If there are any elections happening in your country soon, get involved for the good of your community, and your CAS hours!

25. Volunteer at a hotline: Many countries have crisis hotlines that often need more volunteers, why not help out?

26. Start Kiva team: kiva.org is a great website that revolves around microloans. It has the option to make or join teams of lenders. Make a team and try to gain members, spread awareness and get donations to lend money to people in need around the world. As they are loans, you get money back in kiva credit which you can then donate to someone new, thus creating a circle of good. Team meetings to decide which individuals, countries or field partners to donate to next will get you many CAS hours.

27. Plan an athletic event for charity: Whether it be a 5k, orienteering, a treasure hunt (all as mentioned in the activity section), or anything else you can think of, it’s a great way to involve a community, and any entrance fee can be donated to charity. By participating yourself, you can tick all three CAS boxes, and doing it with one or more people makes it a great CAS project.

28. Writing letters to soldiers: This may not be an option everywhere, but some countries have organizations where you can write letters to the soldiers overseas who don’t have anyone writing to them, which is sure to be a morale booster.

29. Host a free workshop: Workshops are a great way to learn new skills, or to teach your skills. Maybe you can teach something you learned from/for your creativity hours!

30. Neighbourhood watch: Neighbourhood watches are a great way to help ensure safety in your local area, so either join one or start one.

31. Volunteer to help immigrants and/or refugees: There are many organizations that work to help immigrants and refugees become integrated in society, whether it be activities for children or events to help newly arrived people learn the local language. Look up any local organizations and see if they’re looking for volunteers!

32. Park maintenance: Many parks need help with a lot of maintenance, from cleaning to repainting benches. Contact whoever is in charge and see if they need any volunteers.

33. Studyblr: Coming up with 99 free CAS ideas is surprisingly time consuming, and so is everything else about a studyblr, so give it a go and get those hours!

[georgesmithunit1]

Final Evaluation

25/06/18

In this evaluation I will be sharing my thoughts and opinions on my final animation as well as the process I went through to create my concepts and illustrations.

Concepts & Illustration Process

The assignment brief required me to create an animation that simulates a point and click game. I had complete creative control over the concept. I needed to create a minimum of one animated character, a digitally hand drawn background, elements of the background that are animated, and the whole sequence was to be a minimum of 10 seconds in length. 

I adhered to all of those points except for one, which I completely forgot about - which was to have an element of the background moving, to be fair, I had planned on it only being minor in the first place (the rotating ventilation thing in the first scene). I came up with the idea of making a fighting-orientated scene for my animation, because I really just wanted to test out some animation techniques that I’d learned before, and also because I thought that it would be fun to animate, as well as entertain the audience. I wasn’t particularly inspired by anything to create a fighting scene, I’d wanted to do an animation like that for a while, so I thought it a perfect time to demonstrate what I could do. I had a lot of planning to do before I even created my background scenes. First of all, I needed to conduct some thorough research on point and click games, as well as anything else that seemed appropriate. I researched a number of intriguing titles which caught my eye when I first saw them, as well ones that I’d already heard of, and even played in one case. Researching those titles was really insightful and helped me with coming up with a solid visual style for my animation. After the research, I was required to come up with an entire 300 word plot for my animation - of course, this didn’t impact the animation itself, but it did help throughout the project as a whole, as it gave me a better understanding of my own story. 

After finishing the plot, I needed to establish a clear visual style for my animation. I had already established one before getting to this point to be honest - and that was thanks to a game by the name of ‘Night in the Woods’. Luckily, I stumbled upon this game while I was researching point and click titles, and was immediately captivated, and even more so after I researched it further. I will share my thoughts on this game a little later on in this evaluation. Anyway, After I’d finished establishing my visual style, which would take inspiration from Night in the Woods, I needed to write about my main character complete with his very own backstory. This was similar to the plot in which it didn’t impact the animation at all, but did help me to get a better understanding of him and add some character depth. After all of this written stuff followed a series of pages in my sketchbook devoted to sketching out ideas of a character design, which adhered to my character description, as well as some sketches of the main enemy of the fight scene. Among these sketches was a character turnaround sheet, which would essentially showcase my main character’s appearance, whose name is Ace by the way, so I’ll refer to him as that from now on. The character turnaround sheet was pretty useful I think, as it helped serve as a reference for whenever I needed to draw Ace. Finally, I sketched out some initial ideas for a background scene for my animation, which mainly included cyberpunk cities etc. There was a lot of planning, which I believe was very necessary. 

Now back to my main character, Ace. He is a very important character to the overall plot of the story, and so I wanted him to look intimidating, powerful, I wanted him to have a strong presence, so that’s why his colour palette ranges simply from white to black - I thought it best to have him wear a trench coat type of thing, because I wanted him to look professional and serious, so I thought this attire conveyed that perfectly. In that sense, I think Ace successfully communicates my intentions of having a strong-willed, physically strong and intimidating character. As for the style, I went with the anime/manga style while I was drawing him, since that’s pretty much all I can do somewhat decently, though I’m completely fine with that. It kind of translated over to the animation, though his design had to be dramatically compromised, since it would’ve taken so long if I’d have animated him exactly according to his illustrations, and maybe I wouldn’t even be done with the animation by now if I had been doing that, since I only finished it on 23/06/18, so a few days ago, at the time of writing. 

Back to the backgrounds again. First of all, I mentioned earlier that my main inspiration for my background came from ‘Night in the Woods’. I really liked the visual aesthetics of that game, the graphics were really pleasing to look at in my opinion. They look as though they were all created in either Illustrator or Photoshop and given effects and textures according to the scene. I think that aspects of Night in the Woods are visible in my first scene, but definitely not in the final scene of my animation, since there’s a lot of details and effects that I used. For my scenes/backgrounds, I chose to use Photoshop alone, no Illustrator or scanning in drawings, since I believed that Photoshop was the best option for creating these scenes, and I still stand by that, as it offers many effects and is much more versatile in my opinion, I do end up using Illustrator later on however, since I needed to create two assets for my scene, which was the green arrow which appears at the end of the animation to tell the player that the character can move on, and the mouse cursor which was very important and a good detail in my opinion, as it makes it look like an actual point and click game. Of course, Illustrator is far superior to Photoshop when you need to create complex shapes which can’t be made in Photoshop in a short amount of time however. I also used Adobe After Effects to animate my ‘Start Game’ scene, as the background was created entirely in Photoshop and could only be animated in After Effects, given what I had planned to do. Back to my scenes, I chose to create them in a somewhat simple visual style as I knew that my animated characters would be excessively simple, and turns out I was right. I do think that all three scenes that I created all adhere to the same general theme of being futuristic and cyberpunk, and certainly communicate my intentions and the atmosphere of my animation. 

Personal Analysis of my Final Animation

So my initial intention for my animation was to do a fighting scene, which I actually ended up with. While I was animating, I was essentially improvising what would come next, as for some reason, I never actually planned out the whole thing using a storyboard. I intended for my animation to be entertaining, whilst still trying to adhere to the project name, a point and click game. Actually,  now that I think about it, I had a second idea kept in my head during the very early stages of this project, which would take more of an adventurous route, which I thought somewhere down the line afterwards wouldn’t be as fun to animate. I don’t think that counts as my final animation changing in the end, since I didn’t choose it to begin with, so if anything, it changed during the early phase, before planning. I think that my idea of creating a fight scene was kind of ambitious, but I didn’t want to go over the top in terms of concepts, so I had to limit my imagination a little there, but as I go on, and learn more and more, I’ll hopefully become more versatile in my skill set, and be able to create very ambitious animations, with camera movement etc. In terms of software knowledge, I had a lot of experience in using Photoshop, since I’d been using it a while ago, and I’d had the opportunity to learn it even more this past year, so I wasn’t limited in my background creation. In Adobe Animate, I was less knowledgeable, however, I’ve actually been animating for the past 7 or so years, on and off of course, on a software called Flipnote Hatena, which was on my Nintendo DSi, so I had learned some basic animation techniques which I developed from experimenting over on that, like smearing, it’s a technique that can be seen in my animation quite a lot - maybe I used it a bit too much, but anyway, it’s when you draw a kind of lazy-looking frame between other frames, to simulate the character or object moving quickly. I may find a way to share some of those animations at some point, I have some good ones on there. Anyway, my point is that moving from that software to Adobe Animate wasn’t too difficult a transition, especially since I’d used it in secondary school before, so I was able to adapt to it with relative ease.

Throughout this project, I haven’t particularly learned any groundbreaking new techniques or anything, though I have absolutely had the chance to develop my already existing techniques and skills. It also helped give me experience with combining different scenes together, and then animating them when they were all together, for example, it was tricky at first when I wanted to combine all of these different scenes, but, after a bit of trial and error, I manged to get them together and start animating the mouse cursor, since it was much easier to do this in After Effects. Along with this, I also used the trial and error method when it came to exporting my final finished animation from After Effects, since that was the last software that I used, which held all of my scenes together, as well as the mouse cursor movement and the green arrow at the end. I remember vividly that I ended up having to export it at least 15 times, since I had to keep messing with the quality to try and get the best that I could. I ended up getting a sub par quality when I rendered and exported at home, and then somehow, when I tried it at school, I ended up with a better quality version, which I have uploaded to YouTube. The quality isn’t the greatest and there are black bars on the left and right sides, but it will have to do at this point. I did look up a few tutorials online, but none yielded any success. 

When it comes to my animation, while I’m pleased with the result, I actually believe that it doesn’t look a whole lot like a game, which is a shame, considering the amount of time that I poured into it. I think that the main problem or reason for this is that it looks too fluid perhaps, and also it just looks more like an actual animation, since the movement is so fast - I think that the mouse cursor which I implemented during the After Effects phase as well the start game screen sort of saved the whole thing from looking completely like just a cell animation. I do have an idea of what could be improved to make my animation look more like a game actually, and I’m a little annoyed that I didn’t think of this throughout the entirety of the animation process. What I’m thinking is that when the characters stop, they could kind of bounce up an down, I think that’s called an idle animation or something - it wouldn’t have been such a difficult task to do as well, so it’s a shame I didn’t think to do it. It could’ve also drawn out the animation a little longer maybe. I think that the smear frames that I mentioned earlier definitely don’t help the animation in terms of it looking like a game, though I saw no better alternative for fast movement, since it would look choppy and weird when a character moves from one side to the other if those were the only frames. If I had all the time in the world, I would’ve increased the FPS to something high, but I didn’t so I stuck with the option that I believed was best.

I think that I did a somewhat decent job at getting it to look like a game in the end. Though when it comes to time management, I started off terribly. When I started animating in Adobe Animate, the FPS count was set at 24. So me doing a completely frame by frame animation, I was drawing out these entire characters every single frame and it was taking me so long - I was getting incredibly frustrated at times, and considered completely scrapping the idea of doing a frame by frame animation. This lasted almost two weeks, with me barely getting anything done, and I was beginning to panic, since the deadline was fast approaching, and I had only done just under two seconds total. I had the idea to create a ‘Start Game’ scene, which could be considered a cop out, though I needed it if I wanted to get even close to the 10 second minimum, or so I thought. I made sure to make this screen look good visually, and so I began animating it after I’d finished creating it in Photoshop. I even added a mouse cursor that would click on a button to start the game - I managed to draw this one out to three whole seconds. I was pleased with it but I realised that I needed to go back to the dreaded 24 FPS animation.

One afternoon when I was working on it at home however, I randomly decided to look at the right hand side of the Adobe Animate document, and saw the FPS button, I decided to mess around with it and move it up and down, and when I played it at 18 FPS, I noticed that the number of keyframes in each second decreased, and the length of my animation so far was now at 4 seconds. So I played the animation that I had so far, and it actually looked better than when it was at 24 FPS, since that was way too fast for what I was doing. I decided to move the FPS down even further, and stopped at 15 FPS after playing it a few times, and realising that this speed looked so much better, the animation was longer, at about five and a half seconds. I was very happy with this turn of events, and became motivated to finish it again. I understand this was kind of unrelated from the start of this paragraph, but I just wanted to explain that as I felt it was rather important to the whole project. 

Personal Opinions on my Performance & Final Work

Overall, I am very satisfied with my animation. I believe that the time and effort that I put into it payed off, though it still has its strengths and glaring weaknesses throughout.

First of all, I think that unfortunately, the negative aspects outweigh the strengths, though I think the animation kind of carries the positive aspects. Anyway, speaking of the animation, I tried to get the entirety of it as fluid and smooth as I possibly could, which may actually be considered a weakness, since that is probably one of the main reasons for it not looking like a game. But set that aside, and I think that it is one of the main good things about the animation, alongside the added effects that I added post Adobe Animate (the green arrow and the mouse cursor), since these two aspects help drastically make the animation look more game-like in my opinion. Back to the animation, I’m very pleased with how I animated the electricity emanating from the enemy, and especially when he is charging an electricity beam, and I think that it is instantly recognisable as electricity, which is definitely a good thing (then again, what else would it possibly be). The backgrounds are also a major plus of the whole thing, I think that they’re all well-made, except maybe the scene where they’re in the sky, it looks a bit strange. Though the first two scenes definitely correspond with each other, and actually look like they’re from the same thing. 

As for the negative aspects of the final animation, the weaknesses, are quite prominent in their numbers, though I think as I mentioned before, the animation definitely cancels them out a bit. Anyway, one of the first negatives to take away would be the the characters in comparison to the background. They don’t really correspond to each other and look out of place, although then again, there are a lot of types of animation out there that utilise real backgrounds and then have 2-dimensional characters moving around on them. An example of this that I remember watching at one point would be Aug(De)Mented Reality, which uses real life scenarios with 2-dimensional traditional animation cels. Another example would be anime (or sometimes western animations) - they draw these often very detailed backgrounds because nothing will be interacting with them, so they can just keep them static, but go all out with the detail. A specific example would be the animated movie Your Name, which does has some animated aspects, though my point is that the background is incredibly detailed compared to the main characters (and all characters for that matter). Back to things looking out of place, the green arrow at the end definitely looks strange, no matter how you look at it, since this time it doesn’t just look weird with the background, it looks weird with the animated characters too, I don’t really see a way around it to be honest, except maybe change the colour or even hand draw the arrow in adobe animate. Something I want to point out is Ace and his attire, namely, his trench coat, which I seemed to have subconsciously changed into a cape somewhere along the lines. Finally, the last thing I want to mention is the movement and speed of actions. Essentially, while animating the mouse cursor over in After Effects, I realised I didn’t have a whole lot of time for the mouse to stop at some parts, namely, near the end of the first scene. I just think that there needed to be more pause between actions to allow for more mouse movement to be a little slower, and those idle animations I mentioned would help with this greatly.

There are a handful of things that I would do differently if I were to redo the entire project, including a couple that would have been really beneficial to me. For starters, I’ll go back to the character movement again, I really think that it’s too fast paced, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you can do a fight scene well, which I did, but I think it lacked different camera angles and movement etc. So I believe that when a character is finished performing an action, they should just pause for a bit, so that 1: I can have slower mouse movement, and 2: it won’t look solely like an animation, as opposed to a game, which is what the objective was. The other very important thing that I didn’t do for some reason, would be to create a story board, because I was improvising throughout the entire thing, and if I just drew out a few pages worth of boxes, it could’ve been a lot more structured, and I may have finished the animation a lot sooner, because I knew what I was doing. Also, this probably goes without saying, but I would have started at a much lower FPS than 24 when I started out the animation, since 24 is just way too many for a simple point and click game. 

But overall though, I am pleased with my final animation and I do think that I was successful in creating an animation which adhered to the project name, and I think I managed my time fairly well, more so in the second half of the project, where I was on a roll with creating the final scene and animating once I’d figured out that I didn’t need to animate at 24 FPS. There were things that I did to speed up the process though, like with Ace’s character - he’s literally transparent, which is a decision that I decided on during the early stages of animating the first scene. He was too detailed a character, since he has different segments (clothes) unlike the enemy, which I just coloured one solid colour, along with the eye. Also, I just didn’t want to deal with the fill tool, which I had to deal with enough when I was colouring in the enemy - I kept trying to fill him in, only to find out that there were still like two or three gaps in the lines, so it wouldn’t fill. Another thing I did was near the end of the animation, I started copy and pasting frames and moving them a little bit instead of hand drawing all of the frames, which is something I should’ve done since the start, but still hand drawn the necessary frames. It saved a lot of time. 

I really didn’t plan on writing 3703 words for this, I think it’s the most I’ve ever written. I guess I just had a lot to talk about.