#but my advice is solid

[constantly023]

hey you! listen! so what you're going to do is get yourself some good sliced bread. not wonderbread, but brennan's or from a bakery or whole wheat if that's what you're into. get a slice or two and put them in the toaster. medium setting, for a minute or two. while it's cooking, set up your battle station. get a plate, a knife, and some butter, and any other toppings. marmalade, jam, whatever you like. as soon as the toast pops, you strike. grab it as quickly as your reflexes allow. place it on your plate, and knife in hand, quickly apply your toppings. especially if you're in the mood for some good buttered toast. if the butter is solid and cold from the fridge, scrape off a thin slice with the HIGHEST surface area to volume ratio you can get. leave it for thirty seconds, it should soften and become easier to spread.

then? you get yourself a delightful hot beverage. something chill and laid back. tea, hot cocoa, some decaf coffee. drink it with the toast. enjoy your meal.

[alkalinefrog]

Hey Alka, I had a quick question for you (whenever you have the time to answer or even if you have the time), I've been taking some storyboard classes and with my illustration background, it's been hard to really find a good shorthand for characters to really get that anatomy/gesture looking right without it being too sketchy and unreadable.

How long did it take you to find your storyboard shorthand, and what exercises would you recommend to try to find it? I'm sure it just takes time and practice, I've been doing a lot more studies and gesture drawings (currently following along all the free Glenn Vilppu videos I can find on youtube) but I wanted to ask you as well because I am in love with how fluid your anatomy is, and how clear your storyboards read. And those hands my god you're a wizard!!!

Thanks a bunch, have a wonderful day!

Heya Secret, great to hear from ya! Well, what you don’t see online is how gross the rough stage of my boards can get LMFAO. Most of the boards I post are actually overly cleaned up because I'm just doing them for fun and can afford the time! I'm not really sure how long it took to develop my shorthand, I've never really enjoyed drawing detail to begin with, so when I decided to go into boarding I kinda just leaned into it!

I’ve covered a bunch of gesture drawing exercises already if you scroll through my advice tag, but ***once you have a good foundation*** here's some stuff you can try!

First you'll want to build up an arsenal of anatomy hacks you can always fallback on, particularly for complex parts of the body. The less time you spend on details, the more time you have to focus on the overall pose and storytelling. Aim to find ways to draw with as FEW lines as possible. If I had to make a list to streamline what to practice:

Head shapes - find the most efficient way to draw the front + 3/4 + side view in as few lines as possible (the challenge is still making them look structured with dimension)

Eyes - are SO important for expressions! Unless your project has characters with dot eyes, you're going to need to find a quick way to do the circle and iris in as few lines as possible. Make sure you can convey where they're looking

Hands - fists (you'll be drawing a lot of people holding poles), open palms at various angles, foreshortened fingers pointing at viewer, fingers making grabby motions----protips: 1) half the time all you need is a vague triangle/rectangle plus thumb sticking up and that's a hand 2) if the hand is relaxed, you probably don't need to draw the knuckles. Save some time!

Feet - just learn how to make sure they look like they're standing on the ground, and do some studies of what they look like when you're running. Otherwise you can usually get away with a vague shoe or boot shape (just add toe lines if they're not wearing any)

----everything else you'll practice as you go!

Jump from SUPER rough straight into clean boards to really force yourself to be economic. I've done each of these methods for work before:

Before you start boarding with a character, sketch them a few times with the intention of simplifying their design while keeping them recognizable:

You'd be surprised how little you need to recognize a character:

Depending on the scene, you can adjust how much detail you want to include:

Stay loose/more generalized with action, especially for the "inbetweens" between key poses. Clean up enough to communicate movement and make the character recognizable.

If the character's small on screen in a wide shot, edit out most details and focus on the silhouette

Save the detail work for character acting, when you really want to be specific with their expressions and gestures.

But outside of all that, be bold and fearless!! Everyone has that stage where their boards look like spaghetti! Boarding is like handwriting; you could have really shitty chicken scratch, but if you're writing beautiful poetry, who cares!

god I love drawing hands you don’t even know thank you so much!! Good luck dude!! You’ve more than got this!!

[guraiuna]

So there's a meme trend on twt

[lux-scriptum]

Things I’ve found will fix most plot problems:

1. Make it gayer.

2. Fuck with the gender more.

3. If all else fails add (another) cat. Yes, even then.

[charger-lens]

[waroferas]

making a comic with your friends is like having a baby together

[note-boom]

The best thing about BSD Lucy Montgomery is that she is trying so hard to live her fairy tale dream, like asking Atsushi to save her from the Guild and all that nonsense.

Instead, she just gets beaten by him once when they're enemies, gets out of the Guild on her own, and has to save that sorry boy's life over and over again.

Like, sorry, Lucy girl...you're not the damsel in distress in this fairy tale. You're the prince charming who had a bit of a villain arc and now is doing good out of sheer spite and stubborness. Better luck next arc?

[manga-and-stuff]

Thoughts on: Ikoku Nikki

I am currently reading Ikoku Nikki by Tomoko Yamashita and I noticed that like a solid quarter of the scenes in this manga do absolutely nothing to drive the plot forward.

It's not even funny banter or world building or whatever, it's literally just mundane little scenes like this:

You could honestly skip all of these scenes, and the plot would still make just as much sense.

But the thing is, I think doing so would make this manga considerably worse.

The manga is about a 15-year-old girl being taken in by her very introverted aunt, after losing her parents in an accident. And these mundane little scenes do an incredible job of grounding the whole story.

For one thing, it fleshes out the characters, it makes them feel real. You can really believe they all have their own lives with their own thoughts and feelings, their own problems and worries which are largely unrelated to the main plot.

It also makes the story feel very realistic. Like, yeah, sorry your parents just died, but you still need to go to school and worry about stuff like fucking lunchboxes. Yes, you just took in your orphaned teenage niece, but you still need to work... and maybe tidy up your room?

Just like in real life, the rest of the world in this manga doesn't care that the main character's world just got turned upside down. The earth just mercilessly keeps on spinning, and the protagonist has to go on living somehow, with all the mundanity and irrelevancy that comes with everyday life.

[cinamun]

This is just good morning | Next

[vintageandroid]

I cannot stress how important it is to learn to cook, because someday in your 30s you might discover that you're a diabetic with 973 food allergies, including things commonly found in convenience food such as wheat and corn.

I'm grateful I can cook so I can still eat, but I cried in the soup aisle of Walmart because I can't buy canned fucking soup anymore.

[goldensunset]

do not EVER think its annoying to liveblog stuff this is like parasocial equivalent of getting a friend into something and waiting for The Thing to happen (and in my experience pokesp fans are just rabidly desperate to get new ppl into it in general lol) im sure its not at the top of ur radar by any means but if u ever get round to the hoenn manga arcs one day PLEASE liveblog that. its not as philosophical or anything but it gets so much crazier. u have no idea how much crazier. i love pokesp. sinnoh arcs are also extremely good

[dumpster-fire-deluxe]

My friend is having such a smooth time with her current psychiatrist and she's trying to encourage me to give that one a shot too, but how do I explain to her that therapy always follows one of two scenarios for me

SCENARIO A:

Me: lies and downplays my issues, leading to me only working on surface-level problems

-> super unhelpful

SCENARIO B:

Me: is honest

Therapist: this is too much for me, you need a high-caliber psychiatrist, this sounds like a personality disorder

High-caliber psychiatrist: I only diagnose and treat patients who are in truly deep shit. So unless you get charged with felonies or abuse, I can't help you. You may be controlling and ethically interesting now and then, but you're not breaking any laws, so it's not severe enough. It's probably all just autism anyway.

-> gets kicked out of the mental health system, with another "suspected personality disorder, requires further testing" note floating fruitlessly in my file, and zero progress in feeling better

[idlingsomewhere]

i like avoiding listening to things because im scared of how strong an association ive formed between that thing and periods of my life i dont like but then coming back to them months later and not experiencing any strong emotions like fuck yeah! it got reset!

[kdrama-movies-more]

[majorbaby]

probably the best life hack ive ever discovered is if youre absolutely sick over someone youre forced to see constantly and they dont love you back, find their celebrity look alike and project any illegal feelings you may have onto that guy instead.

for this to work you need to commit with the tenacity and grit of a teenage girl or a kpop stan. if after a few weeks people haven't started associating you with your proxy crush, you're not doing enough. time and space is better but if The Person is your coworker, try this.

[owleics-fr]

I wanna put this out there but you can share an ip address with someone who also plays fr, hell you can even send items to and from that person (as long as you're both actively playing/benefitting) and you wont be locked for multiaccounting. Devs have said many times before that sharing an ip address is perfectly fine, its when funnelling occurs (sending loads and loads of items from one account into another) that its an issue bc thats one of the flags for multiaccounting! Im sure they also have other ways to tell as well! Just the likelihood of someone who is playing genuinely getting falsely locked due to mistaken multiaccounting is very very low