#binary pen tool

[11-eyed-rook]

I just like how sharp the it

don't look at me like that

[wifiwuxians]

Dont know how to describe but something like hamster roller? Xue yang on running for candy (cant reach up its trap), jgy watching him

what a request. thank you

[kaleidoru]

tell no tales

[samipekoe]

omg my friend had a ton of art saved i drew on their laptop back on like 2017-2018 when we were both crazy about bnha

ochako was truly my muse back then...

[sleights-of-hand]

May I request a Papa Khan because there's no one else on my mind <3

me laying on my stomach on my bed kicking my feet in the air and drawing men for 48 hours straight.

[oid19]

some early may sonas in costumes that were following the same theme! they kinda clash though... in a good way

[skypiea]

binary pen more like. non-binary pen am I right [resounding silence]

[rkzetto]

A Nook exploring a temple !

[alllgator-blood]

ohh my goodness can you pls pls pls do a brush tour?? i love ur art so so much its so cruncy >:]

Yes I can, I appreciate your interest!! I use paint tool sai 2 which is kind of archaic, but I've been drawing on a wacom pen and touch small + using paint tool sai since 2012 and I'm too stubborn to move onto something better. I actually only use three brushes so I've made a little drawing where I only use one brush per character to show the differences:

Gonna put the screenshots of the brush settings below the cut cause it got longer than I expected:

I drew my three big faves cause frankly I am sick of looking at kallamar and narinder's smug faces lmaoooo ANYWAY. GOING FROM LEFT TO RIGHT, WE HAVE THE CHUNKY BRUSH. I use that brush for messily coloring things in, doing big blocky background shapes, or just adding texture to a drawing. It's my favorite brush to paint with but I have not....finished a painting for this blog yet...

Then for the crunchy brush, it's a tool I use half for lineart and half for coloring. I use it for stuff like changes in fur color/markings, drawing all the lines in the backgrounds I do, and finer details the chunky brush can't handle. It's also the lineart tool I use for my drawings where the lines are all on the inside of the chararacters but not the outside!

As for the smooth brush, this one only ever gets used for lines but it was created when I was so bored of my lineart tool I stopped drawing for a while. I wanted a calligraphy pen and had to work around SAI's limitations, so while it doesn't have that thin-thick angular effect that calligraphy pens have....I manually apply the pressure and it looks passable enough. I hope.

The brush settings are visible in the pics but uNFORTUNATELY I DO *NOT* remember where I got my stupid brush pack from. I literally downloaded the files before I was even a teenager but I *do* remember they're from deviantart. If anyone is for some reason kicking and screaming to acquire this ancient, crusty brush pack I'm sure I could throw it in a google drive

I have other useless information about my process if any of this is remotely helpful: for the anaglyph effect on my lines, I literally take a full 120 seconds to copy+paste two copies of my lineart, color it red and cyan, and then slightly move them up+down beneath the black lineart to get that 3dish effect. My flat backgrounds are just another sai preset texture, usually the checkerboard one cause it's swag. The rest of my brushes are just for utility or to fill in the gaps, that scroll bar leads to a bunch of empty space. They're not worth showing off just because they don't ever get used, or it's just like. The bucket tool. The select tool. A binary pen I never use. And lastly, for my usual lines, I actually go back and mess them up myself to get them to look more chaotic...my lines are usually smooth + even but it's so boring to look at and time consuming that I'm trying to unlearn that.

here's a wip of what my lines USUALLY look like with the smooth brush. You can see for the background I mostly used the chunky brush for shapes and then the crunchy brush for the finer lines! But yeah it takes forever to do smooth lines because I have nerve damage in my arm (it's why my stabilizer is maxed out...) and I refuse to use the line tool. In a professional setting I definitely make sure my lines are polished but this is just my goofy fanart blog and I want everything to look like it's been laced with crack.

I HOPE ANY OF THIS HELPS?? OR JUST SATES YOUR CURIOSITY, I try to not gatekeep the way I do my art so I have literally no secrets tbh

[reallyhardydraws]

2023.

i hope any of you reading this will forgive the essay. i started posting to this art blog ten years ago in 2013 when i was just at the very end of high school, uploading short animations i'd made for one of my final projects, preparing myself for art school where i was gearing up to become an illustration/animation student.

i went into my art foundation course in 2014, still thinking i was going to be going into storybook illustration or with faint hopes of becoming like a concept artist for game/animation, although even then i'd started thinking about patterns...

and then in 2015 i did go into my BA, going in for that illustration with animation degree that... usually when i talk about it in real life, i say didn't really feel like the best place for me. if i think back, the best things i got out of it were two of my best friends, one of whom is now my partner. looking back on my BA era, there's some bits of sketchbook stuff...

and while i was at university my main fandoms were thunderbirds are go and x-men for a bit... these are from the end of 2015 into the beginning of 2016...

then for a little while i was doing this still sort of pastel-ish lineless situation:

and i alternated between that and this thin fineliner type work (pretty sure all of the linearted pieces were done on paper and scanned, and all the lineless were graphics-tablet-only) - it was in this style that i started to offer commissions for the first time too.

and i also had fineliner-lined work in sketchbooks that i coloured with marker and posca pens, the colours of which were generally a bit more intense just based on not being able to slide the hue/saturation around on paper:

also 2016 was when i discovered the spongebob musical just after it's trial run in chicago (which ended in july of 2016) and i started making fanart at that point... which would have the biggest effect on the way i drew (and i did end up handing in a piece of spongebob musical fanart as one of my art school homeworks lmao)

from summer 2016 until early 2017 things were still quite soft and pastelly in my digital art, colour-wise:

and then suddenly everything got whacked up to 100% on saturation. also i was using the binary tool to give everything really thin pixel lineart for some reason.

then i went on vacation in summer 2017 and didn't draw for maybe a month? just short of? and when i came back i decided to change everything up again... giving characters blobbier, more ugly-cute faces with large squinting eyes and big nostrils and i was worrying a lot less about making anything look smooth, lineart-wise. i turned off the pen stabiliser in SAI and let it wiggle.

then... the spongebob musical opened on broadway in late 2017, i went to see it live in person for the first time... and my whole brain was ENTIRELY consumed by my love of it. i was putting that david zinn inspired pattern explosion into everything, even if it wasn't sbm fanart.

as we go into 2018, i started colouring my lineart. my biggest interest was still broadway musicals (with spongebob at the top of the list)

i think summer 2017 - early 2018 is probably my favourite art era, i was at my most bright and colourful and exciting... although i know in my actual real life i was struggling a lot with my home situation and i had been for some time. art was definitely my escapism back then, and i think a lot of the time i drew really bright, joyful stuff to try and inject that feeling into myself.

as for my university work, i was putting my focus into 3D paper-mache puppets:

and i was also starting to do more repeat patterns, mostly inspired by things around me. i'd learned how to make patterns actually tile and repeat in 2017, so made a few during my time at uni just to accompany some of my projects, but never as the focus of them. one of my university tutors told me that maybe i should put more focus on doing surface pattern, and maybe applying it to textiles, but i said i wasn't interested.

i graduated from my BA in the summer of 2018, and immediately began volunteering at the whitworth art gallery doing anything i could - stewarding, helping with arts and crafts, dancing with families...

in 2019 i was still very colourful... i was trying out more chunky colouring on characters skintones that i think was def inspired by tumblr artist jadenvargen:

but the blobbyness and ugly-cute style of drawing faces was gone by here, and i think... the way i drew characters probably had better *anatomy*, proportions were maybe a bit more realistic...

in 2020 i started adding the black shading to under the chins and some other places on characters' bodies because i started watching the anime my hero academia with my brother, lmao (and i was starting to pastelise colours a bit again, these are the most pastel-ish examples) my lineart has really smoothed back out too, though i never turned my pen stabiliser back on in SAI. i think my hand just adjusted. probably seems a bit insane to miss that, but i do.

by the end of 2020, the almost-year of lockdown over cobid had... made me a bit insane, i think, and i moved out of my mother's house and into a flat with a friend from university.

in 2021 i think things were much the same... i think from this point on is where things have sort of settled. i don't want to say stagnated, but i do think things have been very... like this for a while.

2022 - got the most exciting examples out...

also i was very into these little frames in 2022.

and then on to 2023! in 2022, i did begin trying to shift gears a bit -- hoping to put more energy into sewing and making products (like my tutor has suggested back in uni, even though i'd really resisted the idea.) i sold at a few in-person markets during winter of 2022, but got disheartened by the amount of money i had to sink in up front to sign up for a spot...

which has made me VERY grateful for the people who have supported me via online sales. it has really helped me stay afloat in 2023 - AND it has felt more wonderful than i can describe that there have been people interested in my work... especially when a lot of it has been my original designs, rather than the fanart that i expect a lot of people initially followed me for.

i've also... in the past 2 years... branched out a bit more when it comes to 'being an artist' - and have had the opportunity to deliver arts & crafts workshops with local refugee & asylum seeker support charity, afrocats. it's taken me to their home base in a church to hotels across the city where asylum seekers were temporarily placed while waiting on their new homes, and of course to my beloved whitworth art gallery, where we welcomed visitors from all backgrounds: from the typical white middle class visitors the gallery usually expects, to all the refugee visitors coming into the space for the first time.

and through my volunteering at the whitworth, i showed up so often they decided they might as well pay me. so i've also become a facilitator of... creative play sessions, my favourites of which have been outdoors. monthly, year-round, we have 'outdoor art club', where i get to paint with mud and make potions from leaves with kids & families - here you can see me tell you a little bit about it in this video below with 'crempog' a puppet character that makes videos about activities for kids and families around manchester (my bit starts at 01:10 although i am in the intro and thumbnail haha)

and then of course the summer 'PLAYTIME' activities we've had the past two years: scrap studio in 2022, and play market in 2023. it's the best freelance gig ever -- just to hang out and encourage families to be creative and have fun.

in working more in these new avenues... outside of being - as i've called myself for a long time - "an internet artist"... i've found myself more interested in this sort of thing. in being a "real world artist" too. in doing surface pattern design, and being a workshop facilitator, i find myself wanting to put more energy into these sorts of projects.

in 2023 i've also dabbled a little bit more in youtube videos! i have had a channel for a while and have made videos in previous years, but 2023 has been the year i've done the most in. admittedly most of them haven't been about my art, and more just like... random things that interest me (the spongebob musical in particular) but i've really been enjoying video editing. that's kind of an art form too, so i'm including it here!

moving forward, want to keep putting even more of my energy into other things. my shop, with a bigger range of products to offer. workshops in real life, where i can make a difference.

as for my art blog... i feel like i've done the least drawing in many years in 2023, and... well, things have been weird and complicated for a bit in my real life. i hope to draw for fun a bit more again very soon, and to return to doing things in more of a wild and crazy way, to be more creative and exciting with the way i draw things. still, here's some of my favourites from 2023:

thank you so much to everyone who has borne witness to my art journey this past decade!!! i hope you will stick with me, who knows, maybe for another 10 years if tumblr holds out. especially a big thank you to everyone who has ever commissioned me, or bought anything from my store, you literally keep me able to make art at all and i cannot, cannot, cannot overstate how much it means to me.

i'm moving homes soon, possibly into very cramped temporary conditions for a little while before HOPEFULLY starting my real life with my partner. if i can take one more moment to plug my work, then [here is a link to my online shop] and [here is my ko-fi page too.]

cheers, cheers, cheers!

- LOREN 🌈🍍🎉

[mspaesthetic]

what brush did hussie use to draw everything

He used the default hard round brush preset in Photoshop with the Pencil tool. Some newcomers to digital art might hear the word "pencil" and get confused, thinking it refers to a literal pencil texture brush, but it's a distinct tool from the typical Brush tool. In other programs, similar brushes might also be called the Binary brush or Pixel brush.

The Pencil tool is basically the same as the Brush tool, but draws the strokes with pixelated hard edges. The Brush tool on the other hand draws strokes with anti-aliasing, smoothing the outline of the strokes. This is done with semi-transparent pixels, something that the Pencil tool specifically does not use (hence why it could be called a Binary brush, because a pixel is either fully opaque or not).

Something to note is the version of Photoshop Hussie used: CS3. In CS3, if you had pen pressure enabled, the minimum brush size the strokes could go down to was 2px only (if the brush diameter was set to at least 3px). Setting it to 1-2px would not net you any benefits out of having a pressure-sensitive drawing tablet. In other words, brushstrokes can't taper off to 1px thin ends.

(Bear with me since I currently don't have a computer with Photoshop installed so I'm using these kinda shitty old demo gifs that weren't supposed to be used)

Photoshop CS3 brush engine

The brush engine changed slightly in versions after Photoshop CS3, however. Starting from Photoshop CS4, setting the brush size to 2px with pen pressure enabled would make the 2px brush size invert and jump up to 3px as the minimum brush size, while only going back down to 2px if you applied pressure or drew at an angle or something. (I unfortunately don't have any images on hand demonstrating this clearly.) Only setting the diameter to 3px makes the ends 2px, as you can see below.

Photoshop CS4 brush engine

You can still see this shitty behavior in Photoshop CC versions to this day:

Photoshop CC 2024 brush engine

Maybe this doesn't really matter too much if you're normally drawing hero mode panels, but it does produce slightly different results when drawing sprites.

Also if anyone tries to sell you on using a square brush, disregard them. They're an idiot, plain and simple.

[wifiwuxians]

AQ being adopted by a random different MDZS ship that you like (is she adopted by wangxian? xuechao? sangyao? You decide! I just think it'd be funny to see, I love songxiao + aq)

she would be a monster and i want it so bad

[conchiferrous]

horny people have no rights

[IMAGE ID: Digitally drawn fanart of One Piece, pre time skip. It's roughly drawn using only the binary pen tool. Most of the straw hat pirates are an infirmary. Usopp, Luffy, and Sanji are in beds on the left side of the image, and Nami, Franky, Robin, and Zoro are laying in beds on the right side. Luffy's bed is between Usopp and Sanji's; both of Luffy's arms and one of his legs are all covered in casts, and half of his face is bandaged. He's saying: "Okay guys, new rule. No more masturbating in the crow's nest when you're supposed to be on night watch duty, or we're not going to live very long." Usopp is covered in a full body cast where only his eyes are visible, only recognizable by his long nose which is bent upwards at a 90 degree angle. Both of Sanji's legs are destroyed, one of them is broken into pieces like pottery that Chopper is working to glue back together. The other leg is cut off from the middle with one cartoon bone sticking out. Sanji is looking down sadly hearing Luffy's announcement. Chopper is sitting on a tall chair while he glues Sanji's leg together like a broken vase. There are buckets labelled "glue" and "Sanji's leg" next to Chopper's chair. Chopper is wearing a doctor's coat and long pants. Nami's head can only be seen from one side and the bottom of her face is bandaged, she looks very annoyed. One of her legs is broken and in a cast and her visible ear is tattered. Franky is missing half of his face skin and is drinking from an IV drip of cola. His hair is drooping, he's resting his left hand on his abdomen and leaves the other arm dangling. He's missing the skin from the pinkie on the left and a chunk from his elbow missing on the right. His right foot looks like a bite was taken out of it. Robin's right hand is broken and she's eating soup with two left hands, one for the spoon, the other to keep the bowl she's leaving on her abdomen still. Her only noticeably injury is an eye patch, and she looks unphased by the whole ordeal. Zoro looks groggy, and the top of his head is bandaged. There's a cartoon bone and a bump sticking out, and a dent in his head. His left arm is broken as well. Robin is feeding him soup using a left arm she spawned on his abdomen. Zoro's blanket has rubber ducks on it and Zoro's hooked up to an IV drip labeled "zoro juice". END ID]

[kalivasquezart]

Off topic but

I am desperate for a good brush all lineart brushes i use sucks, so i'm wondering if you could share tips about brushes i love you're art, ofcourse only if you wish!

Hi there!

The brushes I use for lineart are usually default ones that come with the drawing software itself. Some of my favourites are:

"Pencil" tool of Paint Tool SAI, its smoothness and crispness is unmatched imo; for pixelated/aliased lines I use SAI's "Legacy Pen" tool (binary pencil)

"Syrup" brush in Procreate (iPad needed), which is my current favourite; it looks pixelated but it's not a perfect binary pen, there is still some aliasing in there

"Gesinski ink" brush in Procreate, which I consider a softer, textured version of Pencil that is still nice and sharp

There is a brush pack that I've been experimenting with (and enjoying) lately - Comic Ink Brush Set by Georg Graf von Westphalen. It says "for Procreate" but I think it also includes standard .brush file that can be imported into other art programs.

Oh, and I heard Krita's got some cool default brushes. And it's free! I know a handful of artists who use it. I think it's meant to replace Photoshop, althought I can't say much about that as I never used it myself.

Thank you, and I hope this helps!

[aibouart]

hihi!! im askin here bcz i dont wanna clog the nuzlight inbox n this seems like the best place to go-

i really LOVE the pixely artstyle you do for the blog and ive been wanting to try something like it, so ive been curious- how do you go about doing that? it looks a lot like your typical style but is there anything special you do? what program do u use for it? :Oc

heya!! i don't mind OOC asks on her blog !! do note i don't check this acc as often so u can also try @mspeevee since that one's logged in on mobile if u were looking fer a faster response~

as fer the pixel style, i use the binary tool on Paint Tool SAI!

here's a few other tools that make it a lot faster to do~

the first is my bucket tool/fill tool. normally i always use the shortcut Ctrl F to fill large sections with selection tool tho but this one helps with small areas and functions like how it would on Ms Paint~. Make sure to keep anti aliasing off! fer anyone who may not know, anti-aliasing is what makes a brushes edges softer, the pixels will have varying levels of opacity.

I also edit my magic wand tool for pixel work also. Working Layer means when you use the tool it will only take the layer it's on into account, where-as All Image means it treats the entire drawing as one layer even if separated. Transparency means the tool will select or fill based on the transparency of the drawing around it, but Colour Difference will look at the colours around it instead as its border. (if that's confusing you can always test it out~)

for the most part i also change my stabiliser to the maximum when doing lines with the pixel tool as it makes it very smooth, and the tips will be tapered well if i am using the pixel brush with pen pressure active. (S1 is my default cuz i have shaky hands sometimes)

as a tip for how i do Mia's images when they're actually so tiny, since resizing the image loses quality i actually zoom into the canvas 3x and take a screenshot. here's how it'd look in comparison: (og size, scaled up, screenshot)

if u have any specific questions or anything lmk too tho~ i love to share now!!

(and ofc there's also the binary colour layer mode! but i rarely use that)

[cyberstudious]

Tools of the Trade for Learning Cybersecurity

I created this post for the Studyblr Masterpost Jam, check out the tag for more cool masterposts from folks in the studyblr community!

Cybersecurity professionals use a lot of different tools to get the job done. There are plenty of fancy and expensive tools that enterprise security teams use, but luckily there are also lots of brilliant people writing free and open-source software. In this post, I'm going to list some popular free tools that you can download right now to practice and learn with.

In my opinion, one of the most important tools you can learn how to use is a virtual machine. If you're not already familiar with Linux, this is a great way to learn. VMs are helpful for separating all your security tools from your everyday OS, isolating potentially malicious files, and just generally experimenting. You'll need to use something like VirtualBox or VMWare Workstation (Workstation Pro is now free for personal use, but they make you jump through hoops to download it).

Below is a list of some popular cybersecurity-focused Linux distributions that come with lots of tools pre-installed:

Kali is a popular distro that comes loaded with tools for penetration testing

REMnux is a distro built for malware analysis

honorable mention for FLARE-VM, which is not a VM on its own, but a set of scripts for setting up a malware analysis workstation & installing tools on a Windows VM.

SANS maintains several different distros that are used in their courses. You'll need to create an account to download them, but they're all free:

Slingshot is built for penetration testing

SIFT Workstation is a distro that comes with lots of tools for digital forensics

These distros can be kind of overwhelming if you don't know how to use most of the pre-installed software yet, so just starting with a regular Linux distribution and installing tools as you want to learn them is another good choice for learning.

Free Software

Wireshark: sniff packets and explore network protocols

Ghidra and the free version of IDA Pro are the top picks for reverse engineering

for digital forensics, check out Eric Zimmerman's tools - there are many different ones for exploring & analyzing different forensic artifacts

pwntools is a super useful Python library for solving binary exploitation CTF challenges

CyberChef is a tool that makes it easy to manipulate data - encryption & decryption, encoding & decoding, formatting, conversions… CyberChef gives you a lot to work with (and there's a web version - no installation required!).

Burp Suite is a handy tool for web security testing that has a free community edition

Metasploit is a popular penetration testing framework, check out Metasploitable if you want a target to practice with

SANS also has a list of free tools that's worth checking out.

Programming Languages

Knowing how to write code isn't a hard requirement for learning cybersecurity, but it's incredibly useful. Any programming language will do, especially since learning one will make it easy to pick up others, but these are some common ones that security folks use:

Python is quick to write, easy to learn, and since it's so popular, there are lots of helpful libraries out there.

PowerShell is useful for automating things in the Windows world. It's built on .NET, so you can practically dip into writing C# if you need a bit more power.

Go is a relatively new language, but it's popular and there are some security tools written in it.

Rust is another new-ish language that's designed for memory safety and it has a wonderful community. There's a bit of a steep learning curve, but learning Rust makes you understand how memory bugs work and I think that's neat.

If you want to get into reverse engineering or malware analysis, you'll want to have a good grasp of C and C++.

Other Tools for Cybersecurity

There are lots of things you'll need that aren't specific to cybersecurity, like:

a good system for taking notes, whether that's pen & paper or software-based. I recommend using something that lets you work in plain text or close to it.

general command line familiarity + basic knowledge of CLI text editors (nano is great, but what if you have to work with a system that only has vi?)

familiarity with git and docker will be helpful

There are countless scripts and programs out there, but the most important thing is understanding what your tools do and how they work. There is no magic "hack this system" or "solve this forensics case" button. Tools are great for speeding up the process, but you have to know what the process is. Definitely take some time to learn how to use them, but don't base your entire understanding of security on code that someone else wrote. That's how you end up as a "script kiddie", and your skills and knowledge will be limited.

Feel free to send me an ask if you have questions about any specific tool or something you found that I haven't listed. I have approximate knowledge of many things, and if I don't have an answer I can at least help point you in the right direction.