#hopefully? this helps??

[silverskye13]

Hey, do you have any art tips that you use or anything? Any advice?

Uhhh that's kind of a broad question! My art advice is mostly situational.

A few very very broad suggestions for you:

Use references. Your brain can only hold so much, and most images we stick in our head are symbols. Aside from a select few very impressive people, no one can photographically remember, say, a tree. You can remember a symbol of a tree [Brown and red and green, in a specific shape], but you're not going to remember off the top of your head how tall an ash tree is relative to its surroundings, how all the leaves look from a distance, etc. So, use references. This includes references for things like poses, or colors, or art styles. I've gotten in the habit of collecting things I think are aesthetically pleasing for exactly that reason.

Draw from observation or life, as practice. Kind of an extension of above, but even if you don't draw realistically, you can learn a lot about stylizing, say, a bottle, by staring at the bottle and drawing it. Same with landscapes and buildings and animals and people. Different lighting and their affects on color and things. Its a great way to learn what looks realistic, in terms of relativity -- figuring out where shadows fall, how cloth lays, that funny shape your arm makes when its pointing straight on. Another interesting twist on this is making copies of artworks you like. Pick up the prettiest watercolor you've ever seen, sit down and try to make it. You won't come close, but you'll learn a lot about what that artist thought was important. Draw This In Your Own Style memes are also good for this.

Use tracing and replication for what they're made for: building skills. They're very good tools for teaching yourself how to take things apart and put them back together again, which is how we as humans tend to learn best. You learn how to do math by learning 2+2, and then you figure out 22+22 is basically the same thing, but when you were 5 learning to count in preschool, they didn't start you out with the 22 bit, did they? Same goes for art. All those "How To Draw X" books start you out with "First a circle then some lines" for a reason. If you can break up the big bit into tiny bits, you can figure out how to build stuff from scratch. Tracing and copying art styles, coloring styles, and poses can go a long way to teaching you how to break up all those things into digestible shapes.

Draw often. There's some saying somewhere that you need to put a thousand hours into something to advance a level. So, 1000hrs to go from "I know nothing" to "Beginner." 1000hrs from Beginner into Novice. Etc. It's not a literal rule. I'm sure I've put a few thousand hours into art, but I wouldn't call myself an expert yet. But art is a muscle as much as it is a skill. You only learn how to draw a straight line by drawing 50 wiggly lines and then miraculously one of them is straight, and you feel how that line felt in your wrist and you try to make it feel that way again. You make a really nice texture by accident once and you try it again 100 times before you can consistently remember its by crosshatching there and erasing over there. A long time ago I used to swear by comics [the largest leap forward I ever made in art was when I sat down for a year and drew a comic when I was, like, 13. It had a couple hundred pages, and rapidly progressed from "I'm basically tracing deviantart wolves every pose because I can't see them in my head" to "I can pose these little guys on my own and they actually kind of look like who they're supposed to look every time!"

Uhm... smaller advice tidbits.

Play with as many mediums and art supplies you can get your hands on! Thats how you figure out what you like, and also you draw wildly differently with a brush than a pen. Its really fun to see those differences and integrate them into other things.

If you're working digitally, experiment with merging layers and drawing over them. If you're insecure about it, copy the whole thing into a new document and draw over top of it. It's really fun, lends to experimentation, and there's a lot of effects you just can't achieve by fiddling with your layers.

If you drop your pencils, you will break the lead on the inside. That's why sometimes you sharpen a pencil and it just keeps breaking until there's no pencil left. This happens especially often with colored pencils, because the lead is super soft. Protect your pencils with your life.

For every "pretty sketchbook" you keep around, keep beside it some shitty copy paper/lined paper book with a ballpoint pen. Its good for warm ups, and for getting over the anxiety of "but I don't wanna ruin my pretty sketchbook" :( anxieties

Keep a bottle of water in your art space. This is good for drinking, for spilling on things, and for reminding you you are human and have needs. I recommend one with a cap if you do watercolors, so its less likely you'll dip your rush in it.

Get in the habit of resting every hour. If you have tendonitis [like me] rest every half hour. Set a timer if you have to. This keeps your wrist from exploding, and it keeps you from randomly picking up objects three days from now and wondering why your hand just decided it didn't want to anymore.

Don't feel pressured to post everything you make online -- in fact, keep from that habit as long as you can. The little seratonin rush is very nice when people comment on your work, but if you rely on it to motivate you, you will stop working on things. I have pieces that live in a vacuum, that no one will probably ever see. Most of them art shit, some of them aren't. The fact that no one can see them and tell me they're pretty is good and healthy, actually.

Don't destroy your work. When you finish a long project, there will be a little demon in the back of your head that whispers "I have never hated anything so much as this. Burn it. Kill it. Punish it for existing. I hate it." Do not listen to that little demon. It has been starved of all your existential angst while you were Stuck In Creation, and it is hangry. Put your art away somewhere, wait a few days, a week, a few months even, if you have to. Eventually the little demon will get involved with something else, and you will look at your art and go "Oh, hey, that's not so bad actually" :)

If you wait a year and you still think its shit, objectively, it might be, but I still maintain its demon is probably just being stubborn.

[macdenlover]

it came to my realization that 99% of my fandom related headaches would be cured if everyone understood this

[oatmealspet]

Over 800 TAG members marched on Netflix & delivered a petition demanding the AMPTP keep #animation jobs #union, agree to AI protections & more. Show the AMPTP that you #standwithanimation. Sign your name next to the people that make the shows you love.

[black-quadrant]

on my knees begging you to please look up “squick” if you don’t know it and help bring it back to fandom space by using it. it’s a valuable word we’re missing that through normalizing could solve some of the more prevalent communication issues.

[aur0raaura]

Yknow what- you're so right...

[bixels]

The Piedra sisters.

Born and raised in a small mining town in New Mexico. Calida and María Molina have stayed behind to support their parents while Rosita and Madelina have gone off to pursue their dreams. Madelina recently obtained her Ph.D. in geology from Las Cruces College. Rosita works as a baking apprentice and entertainer in Ponyville, Nebraska. Madelina is the eldest, Calida the middle child, and Rosita and María Molina (non-identical) twins.

[racingliners]

In a very important home life update: we got a high vis vest for one of our chickens

They apparently have a great unintended use of stopping hens from getting bullied, so we got one to try it out since the above hen gets excessively picked on by the others (we don't really know why).

Shout put to the wonderful @gingervivilou who told me about it!!

[otaku553]

Fire (Part 2)

<- (PREV) (NEXT) ->

(Spade Pirate Sabo AU Masterpost)

And that is!! 18 of 18 pages!! It's this long because I didn't want to break up their fight. I hope you enjoy :)

I had to rewrite their fight like,,, 3 times lmao. I'm not very good at writing fights because I'm Incredibly Passive Aggressive and Very Non Confrontational. Thankfully my partner helped me out a bit with making the escalation feel natural, so hopefully their grievances and motivations read well. In the end, both of them are starving probably-emotionally-stunted teenage boys in a high-stress situation, and Tage is being faced constantly with one of the biggest sources of his trauma that he doesn't even remember-- of course he's going to lash out.

Fun thing I learned this time around, if I struggle with planning a chapter, it can kind of help to write it out in prose like I would a fanfic, and then translate it to comic form. This is how I eventually ended up with 18 pages of comic,,, because I can't really estimate how much I'll need to draw when I'm writing in prose. In turn, this did help a lot with adding more natural behaviors between dialogue, like Tage tapping his finger to fidget while crossing his arm, or all of their pointing and gesturing while they're arguing.

[twipsai]

doom morph

(not ship 👍)

[turretangel]

It's for a future homework, please help me with my statistics class! I just need data! Reblog if you can! 😴

Ms. Fransisca, eat your heart out, I'm gonna have SUCH a data set! 💕

[lucidmagic]

Repeat after me:

The first draft just needs to exist

The second draft needs to be functional

The third draft needs to be effective

The first draft just needs to exist

The second draft needs to be functional

The third draft needs to be effective

The first draft just needs to exist

The second draft needs to be functional

The third draft needs to be effective

Remember, the second and third can't happen if you don't have something to work with. Your first draft will always be shit compared to your third, but at least it exists. The worst first draft is an unfinished one. The best first draft is a just completed one.

You read books/stories not in their first draft form-- only in their finished form (third, fourth, sometimes fifteenth draft). So stop comparing your first draft with a final one.

So, just write--you can make it better later. Perfectionism is the greatest weight a creator can carry.

[electrozeistyking]

"She's Gone"

This bad boy was started on the third of November, and finished on the seventh. In total, there are thirty panels (all of which were drawn separately).

A good chunk of N's dialogue near the end came to me after I did some improv to figure out what he should say. I have since dubbed it "N's Failure Monologue."

[pokeberry5]

girl experiences gender euphoria and is immediately slammed by grief

for @litttlittt <3. this was supposed to be a portrait of caroline hill, but litta mentioned tim looking like janet when dressed as caroline and identity issues and angst and things spiraled

something about tim not knowing if he's his mother's child or bruce's or neither's.

figuring out the looks:

i wanted janet to have that poofy 70s hair

[starry-bi-sky]

Out of Context Stuff for a Danyal Al Ghul au i haven't posted - Pit Beast Danyal

Damian, 13: Look, Danyal, -- I am so sorry for everything that happened between us in the League, I hope you can forgive me.

Danny, 10 (allegedly): (has been secretly plotting to murder Damian this whole time, is still gonna do it obvs, but is going to make it significantly less painful now)

Danny: I-- of course, older brother. :]

--------

Bruce: what do you have there, Damian?

Damian:

Danny: (a hulking 10ft pit beast standing beside him, growling idly with ram horns gouging out his eyes and a second set of horns jutting into the air, spines down his back, and a long, spiked tail with an animalistic, skull-like face)

Damian, who smuggled him in (they've made amends): a smoothie, father

----------

Damian: this is my little brother Danyal, i murdered him when he was five. He festered in rage for the last half-a decade, took over a League mountain base in Switzerland, murdered everyone inside and then tried to murder me when I went to investigate with Drake.

Danny: hello!

Damian: we're cool now

----------

Damian: thoughts on resurrection

Danny, (a full ghost): i will succeed in murdering you if you try it

Damian: we'll put a pin in it then

----------

Danny (still instilled with League values): why don't we just murder him??

Damian, on patrol (Danny followed him): we don't murder people, Danyal

Danyal:,,,,are you sick, Dami?? Have you been possessed? Why not!?

(There is raucous laughing through the comms)

----------

Danny, five, pre-death: Dami! :D

Danny, dead, vengeful: Older brother (:

Danny, post-forgiveness: Dami! :]

-------

For some actual context: Danny is fully dead in this au, its a result of the classic DPxDC Demon Twins "death duel" trope but instead of Danny getting revived, he stays fully dead. Danny was five, Damian was seven. His ghost lingered though, and due to the proximity of the pits his ghost steadily absorbed the ambient energy it was letting off. The pits are not corrupted ectoplasm in this au, it's just liquid ecto.

Which means Danny's corruption from an angry and hurt little ghost boy to an unrecognizable monster is from his own doing. It's a result of him stewing in his hurt and anger for years, it physically warped him. He's very powerful. Danny can travel between League Bases but chose a small, out-of-the-way base in the Swiss mountains to fester in and then just. Never Left.

His influence steeped into the very foundations of the building, allowing him to transform and warp the rooms and hallways for his own bidding, Meaning he could turn it into a seemingly unending labyrinth if he so wished to, and block the entrance.

Eventually, blinded (both metaphorically and physically) by his own rage, Danny grew powerful enough to appear physically in the living realm and attacked everyone in the base, slaughtering them all and leaving the base abandoned. He attacks anyone who dares enter -- whether that be other league members, or the unfortunate hiker who stumbled across the base. His conscious is steeped into every nook and cranny of the building, there is nowhere you can hide where he can't find. Nobody leaves without his explicit say so. Nobody ever does.

Him appearing as ten years old before Damian in the skits above is his own physical doing. First it was to prevent Damian from being suspicious of him. Damian initially thought Danny was revived with the pits, he was too busy with his own training afterwards to notice that Danny never showed up again, and when he did notice, he assumed it was because Danny was too ashamed of his loss to face him. He'd always forget to ask about him.

Then it becomes a personal choice to appear as ten. It's how old he would've been had he been alive.

danny forgiving Damian is kinda for an offshoot branch of the main au. Whereas the main au takes the form of a ps4 first person horror game where Damian and Tim are investigating the Base for Plot Reasons. There's no sign of the rumored "monster" living inside until the end, where Danny, who was found inside the Base and has been happily "helping" them look around, manages to persuade Damian into splitting off from Tim in order to "show him something."

This something turns out to be Danny revealing that he never really forgave Damian for that fight, and he reveals through a horrifying transformation, that he was the monster the whole time. Which the game subtly hints at throughout as Danny's strange behavior becomes harder to ignore.

First from his insistence to only refer to Damian as "older brother" (when before the duel he always called him Damian or Dami), to him right off the bat denying the existence of a monster when questioned. ("There's no monster here, older brother. It's just me.") To other various things, like his knowledge of the outside world not matching up to modern times or things going on with the league outside of the base, or what happened to the other league members.

This whole idea was inspired by the song "Scylla" from Epic the Musical, with Danyal being the voice of Scylla as well as Odysseus, while Damian stands as Eurylochus. The instrumentals after Scylla says "hello" is him turning into the pit beast, and Scylla's "drown in your sorrow and fears" part is danny, as the pit beast, snarling at Damian while he attacks him.

There's a Good Ending, a Bad Ending, and a True Ending. The Bad Ending results in Damian being killed by Danny, it happens when Damian decides not to question or suspect Danny and treats him kindly. The Bad Ending is a cutscene, where Danny kills Damian quick and painlessly.

Meanwhile the Good Ending is Damian killing Danny. This is a boss fight, and it happens when Damian treats Danny coldly and suspiciously the whole time. Danny as a result, decides to make Damian's death painful as he had planned to, which is why it's a boss fight because it only causes him to double down on his anger.

The True Ending is Damian escapes with Tim. It happens when you treat Danny warmly up until the last minute, where when Danny proposes to Damian that he wants to show him something, Damian goes to talk to Tim and finally, reluctantly agrees that something is off with Danny, and that he'll be careful going in. It starts off with the boss fight until a third through, where it then changes to a cutscene where Tim manages to get the door open and Damian escapes out. It's then a chase scene down a never-ending hallway as the building actively works to keep you trapped inside. But you eventually make it to the exit so long as you avoid all the projectiles and doors.

Remember when I mentioned that Danny only lets people leave when he wants them to? That's where the treating Danny kindly throughout the game comes into play. It causes him to second guess himself and, eventually, reawaken and strengthen the love and admiration he had for Damian prior to his murder. It's why in the Bad Ending he kills Damian quickly -- because by then, he loves him enough that he doesn't want him to suffer, but is still so consumed by his rage and need for vengeance that he kills him anyways. That quiet part is what allows Damian (and Tim) to find the exit, because some part of Danny still loves Damian enough that he wants him to live.

The True Ending ends with a cutscene of Damian and Tim tumbling out into the snow/grass outside of the base. Damian looks up back to the entrance to see Danny standing there. But rather than a ten year old boy, there's a little five year old Danyal Al Ghul instead. He stares at Damian emotionlessly, blood seeping from his chest, staining his clothes, and little, bloody sword in his hands and tearstains on his cheeks, before he turns away and disappears back into the building.

[selfship-shinigami]

Your F/O would never abandon you Your F/O will always be there for you when you need them Your F/O loves and adores you No matter what happens, your F/O is never going to leave.

[remindertoclick]

Your reminder to Click for Palestine today!

Once you've done that, here's a fun poll: