#i actually have a video in the works for this comic

[forwards-beckon-rebound]

dick grayson instagram hcs

basics

we are pretending dick is not a cop in this because i said so!

he's a professional model but also does perform at a local circus as a special guest

he's not actually going to the olympics (yet) but the american team has been trying to contact him for the better part of the decade so maybe you can convince him to go

he's kind of like one of your friends who you think is chill and normal but then you go to their ig and you find out they're something of a local celebrity?

everybody in gotham already knew him as bruce wayne's son but also he went semi viral on tiktok and got a bunch of new fans (and some edits) out of it

he used to have a less serious pfp but his management convinced him to use this one instead

followers + following

obviously you're there

as well as his friends and family

he manages to get away with following the superheroes since i mean, basically everybody else does as well

also a lot of industry people that he meets, both for modeling and gymnastics/trapeze

highlights

he is an abuser of the story function

will spend any opportunity to brag about his pretty girlfriend and all of the dates and trips you guys go on

he is weirdly good at taking photos, will give you tips on how to pose to get your best angles

also he has a lot of fans so he likes to post a photo of you every once in a while to remind everyone that he's happily taken

will also repost your work related stuff to be like hey look at how cool my gf is at her job!

dude has a million highlights that he updates for the fashion weeks each year

a lot of photos of his looks, him meeting with certain designers, it's mostly his team who posts this

same thing with his shows in the sense that it's usually other people (including you) taking photos of him while he's performing

but this is a more personal venture of his so he asks everyone to send him the pics and he decides which ones to post

will also repost stories from fans who came to the show!

oooh this man posts the most jaw dropping photos of himself

he will have just woken up and post a photo that makes you think it's so unfair how perfect somebody can be

he just likes to post when he feels good about himself and i support!

haley and (i did not come up with a name for your guys' cat so you guys can have fun with that!) also have their own dedicated highlight

it is exactly as cute and wholesome as you would think it is

there are even more highlights if you keep on scrolling. he has highlights for each year's fashion weeks, as mentioned, as well as trips you guys have been on (the most recent is a trip to greece and italy!)

posts

once again he's one of those infuriating sort of famous people who are like fine as hell but they post just enough cute and relatable content that he actually seems like a real and very nice guy (fun fact, he is!)

you can tell immediately when he's been on a trip because he'll have at least 3 posts up and they're all of the same place

you guys are like the photo taking couple

if you weren't good at taking pics before you started dating, his skills definitely rub off on you

he'll do the thing where he gets you to pose for him so he can take a photo of you and then you take the same style of photo for him

it's disgusting you guys have matching photos on your feeds of each other

if it wasn't already common knowledge that you guys are dating, i can imagine the conspiracy theory videos being like guys they were in the same place? at the same time? and they took the same type of pics? i think they're dating

he loves cooking with you (while i personally think it would be really funny if he can't cook, in some of the comics they do mention that he can cook, but either way he enjoys cooking with you)

you guys are like the parent friends who host dinner at their place and there's usually a theme surrounding seasonal ingredients and everything's plated really well

you probably watch cooking shows together and are now you can't serve a dish without some microgreens or sliced radish on top or something

also yes he did plan the picnic and he's quite proud of it

he watched all of those charcuterie board hacks to make the flowers and fancy cheese arrangements

and there were chocolate dipped strawberries, champagne with glasses, and freshly baked cookies (alfred might have helped with that one)

also yes he does wear glasses!!!! only at home when he's reading or staring at a screen too long. his prescription's not that bad

———

jason ver.

[tblsomedoodles]

The Preferable Alternative - part 14

Start - previous - next

rare 6 pg update! b/c the pacing was better if i stopped the scene there.

Leo: That was weird.......ANYWAYS!

: )

[blackkatdraws2]

There are more things in the Parable than Stanley knows about. [Blank Scripts AU]

[personishfive]

in which his life is like a video game

[ferronickel]

Hail, flatter! This one, who is a layperson of the arts and comixcraft, has a query for you:

So like, what is flatting?

I've seen your flats in Wifwulf, and I've read about the flats in Looking Glasses, and generally get that it results in an image with similarly coloured areas sharing the same false-colour.

But like, how is it then used? The final images seem to contain more colours and shading, so why not just go straight to this? Why do false colours get used instead of the real ones? How do you pick the colours and how many get used?

How come this is a thing that a whole other person can do separately? I guess that's because it's time consuming - so it saves time somehow?

Thank you! I come in the spirit of humility wishing to relieve my ignorance of your noble craft!

OHOHOHO!!! You've activated my trap card and now I get to ramble about comics craft! And in my area of professional expertise, too! Be prepared for a long post

I'm going to start with the last part of your question:

How come this is a thing that a whole other person can do separately? I guess that's because it's time consuming - so it saves time somehow?

So the thing about comics is that it is one of the most intensely time consuming mediums to create. One person can make comics on their own fairly easily, but it takes forever to produce. Consider that I've been working on Looking Glasses for 18-19 months and have drawn about 87 pages. Now, the western comics industry expects issues to be produced monthly, generally 24 pages in length. It's very difficult for a single person to work at this rate, so the labor of producing comics has been divided. Generally these jobs become:

Writer (writes the script)

Editor (edits the script)

Artist (draws the lineart)

Colorist (colors and renders the art)

Letterer (adds balloons, dialog, and sfx)

Flatter (sometimes 'color assistant' they take the art and prepare it for coloring)

This isn't comprehensive though, there are a bunch of other jobs, like designers and layout artists. Occasionally the artist job gets broken into Pencilers (who sketch the art) and Inkers (who ink the sketch). Basically, by splitting the work amongst a number of people you can produce comics much faster. Not all of these jobs are required, and creator-owed books might have artists do their own coloring and lettering, while big work-for-hire books might have twice as many people working so they can pump out a spider-man book every other week.

Okay, so why Flatters?

Flatting at it's most basic level is just coloring inside the lines. You take a black and white page of art, and you have to fill in every part of the page that will eventually be colored. It's a pretty time consuming task depending on how involved your lineart is.

Flatting a page of Looking Glasses doesn't take me all that long, usually less than a half hour, which is pretty quick. Looking Glasses pages tend to be... optimized for flatting though. There are only ever a few characters and there aren't a ton of background details.

You mentioned Wifwulf (created by my longtime friend and collaborator Dailen Ogden), here's one of it's pages:

Basically everything that's a different base color, (every tree, plant, bit of moss, character, etc.) needed to be picked out separately. Each page of Wifwulf took me a few hours to flat. If Dailen had been doing that themself, those hours would have really added up, but instead they could spend that time drawing and coloring. Now, that said, these pages have a lot of texture, so it's hard to see exactly what I did.

Here's an example from a comic I worked on early in my career. (Lineart by Patrick Custodio)

The writer for this comic loved to put in these incredibly complex crowd scenes, which is something the artist excelled at drawing. I was coloring and flatting at this point on the book, and before I could even start coloring properly, I would need to flat for like eight hours. (I have a much more efficient method these days) It was frustrating because I just wanted to work on the actually creative part, but the majority of my time was spent on something monotonous. As soon as I got the writer to hire a flatter for me, coloring a page would take me only one or two hours, not nine or ten.

So that's why flatters exist, mainly to ease the workload on colorists.

But like, how is it then used? The final images seem to contain more colours and shading, so why not just go straight to this?

Flatting serves a couple of purposes. It's main function, like I said above, is just coloring in the lines. After finishing your lineart it has to get colored in, so in a layer below the lines, you add colors.

The secondary function is preservation. I like to work in a way that is non-destructive, basically, at any point in the process I can restore an earlier version of the drawing if I make a mistake or don't like something. Flats are integral to this.

In digital art, there's this thing called anti-aliasing, where the edges of a line or shape have a drop off of pixel color or opacity. It makes the edges look smoother or blurrier. The three dots on the left are Anti-Aliased, while the one on the right is Aliased, there's no drop off, just hard pixels.

Anti-aliasing is fine until you need to change the color using the paint bucket, or select using the magic wand...

See how the anti-aliased art doesn't play well with these tools, but the aliased art does? So with something like Wifwulf, the final art is going to be full of texture that makes it impossible to select anything again once it's painted. By having a dedicated aliased flats layer under the rest of the artwork, you can always re-select any part of the image you want.

I always leave my flats layer alone, and do any detail work in layers above. For example when I was painting this, it really helped to be able to select just the titan so I could work on those paints without worrying about brushstrokes overlapping the rest of the characters.

One of the other things you can do with flats is quickly selecting certain elements. On most pages, I flat my panels, figures, and background elements separately. Later, with a single button press, I can select just the characters in the scene, or entire panels at a time, which makes things like shading a whole lot easier.

Why do false colours get used instead of the real ones?

If you're flatting for other people you often don't know what the final colors are going to be, so you just pick random ones. Garish colors can be helpful because it makes it obvious that they're not the final colors. Why don't I use the correct colors on my own pages when I'm flatting? Habit, mostly. It's also faster to grab random colors than to track down the correct ones. Sometimes two different things will have the same final color but I like to flat them with different colors so I can select them individually if I need to.

You can see the process a bit here. In my flats, Lancer's spade (eye? eyes? thing) is a different color from his tongue, even if they end up being the same white in the final image. This would help if I ever needed to select just his eyes for some reason. You can also see how I select his body fur color and then add details on top, like his colored fingers and the grey on his arm. Those elements have blurry anti-aliased edges, and it would be impossible to re-select them without flats.

How do you pick the colours and how many get used?

I use the default "additional color set" palette in clip studio and just work my way through it. I pick row and work my way down (for a change of pace I vary which row I start with). How many is mostly dependent on the artwork. You just keep going until you run out of individual objects to color. I have worked on pages where I've run out of colors on this palette and had to start making up more. Typically a page of Looking Glasses only needs around 20-30, though.

So! That's flatting! It's a little known job, and it's how I got started with my comics career, so I have a lot of thoughts on it. I was trying to be concise (lol), so I hope this all makes sense, but I'd be happy to clarify or answer any other questions about this process. I know I didn't really go into how I flat my work, so I can make that post if anyone is interested.

[syrupyyyart]

one of the first and only teasers for motley: the cartoon

[unfriendlyamazon]

the thing about azula is she's also a victim of abuse she bought into her father's ideology because she was rewarded for doing so (and she has some funny thoughts about divine right to rule) and explicitly gains power both in the context of her society and mentally by torturing her brother ("you can't treat me like this you can't treat me like zuko")

which is to say the show depicts azula and zuko has fundamentally different from a young age (and zuko's inherent goodness is his main source of conflict for most of the show) and i appreciate that the show doesn't go out of its way to show sympathy or explain its abusers, even when azula is given her moments, it's not to make her more sympathetic, and i think the show is aware that azula has benefited from being a natural prodigy who aligns herself with fire nation ideology, but it's clear by the end that ozai treats her as no less a tool or extension of himself than he does zuko

which is also to say her final battle between katara and zuko is my favorite part of the show hands down i find it beautiful and the music makes me tear up and when she is defeated and sobbing and completely undone, it's my favorite part of the show. azula has spent so much of her time and energy into currying favor with her abusive father, putting herself into a position of power, and to be undone by her brother who she views as inferior to her in every way and some waterbending peasant i think it must just break her worldview. everything she's done up to that moment, it was the wrong move, and zuko is now the one on top

anyway i think the show has a lot of interesting things to say about power and those who wield it, and i think azula's relationship with power, both under it and exerting it herself, is a really interesting one, and as a foil to zuko, she works really well in showing that even aligning oneself with power despite or because of circumstances is ultimately a fruitless task, and those in power will keep moving the goal posts as you try to get ahead

[pixlokita]

Why don't you allow them to do dubbing for you?

While a few people have been polite enough to ask and properly credit there’s a quite a few dubs that didn’t get permission, didn’t credit properly if at all… even credited the wrong person on purpose. And don’t get me started on people using AI voices to “dub” comics (also without crediting the source) . At least put in the effort. That’s just reposting art at this point :’> anyway it gets depressing when people say they’ve seen your art but couldn’t even find you because of that. I love the dubs that people were nice about tho 💖 it means a lot that they’d go out of their way to do that sincerely because they just liked the comics or contributed to the ideas somehow but yeah it got pretty overwhelming and bad after a while.

[flickering-nightfall]

[astranauticus]

not sure if this counts as an AU but.. thinking about the Per Aspera crew as horror game bosses like.. you are wandering through a forested mountain range and you know somethings wrong because the forest shouldn't be this eerily silent, this devoid of life, and then you hear the crash of falling trees and there is a hand that is half your size glowing golden in the night and it is grabbing you and its claws are digging into your flesh and you see the spines running down the golden arm that is far too long as it lifts you over a crater in mountain, over a coiled, serpentine thing with a visage that is not of this world, and if you look closely you can see the shape of a child curled at the centre of the thing, golden hair reflecting the glow of the creature and if you listen closely you can hear her sobbing, 'Don't hurt me, I don't want to do this'. you are sailing through the astral sea when you see an ephemeral, resplendent spelljammer cutting through the starry waters and you rejoice because you have been lost on the seas for so so long, so you board the ship looking for help, supplies, anything, and you are greeted by a blue fire genasi (you wonder, do those even exist? but you can't get off the ship now because where else will you go?) and she tells you she is the captain of this ship but as far as you can tell there is no crew on board, and if she is not appearing right behind you from a trapdoor you've never noticed she is always in the engine room 'fixing the ship' even though the ship seems to be sailing perfectly fine ('Where are we going?' you ask her once and she doesn't even turn to look at you, 'Don't worry about it') and if you are ever so unlucky as to damage the ship in any way, you begin to catch flashes of red and orange out of the corner of your eye, a fire genasi wearing the woman's face who whispers at you with hollow, angry eyes 'Don't you fucking dare hurt my ship'. you are sailing through the astral sea when you see a rotting, decaying spelljammer, so badly damaged it's barely moving although you have to wonder how it's even staying afloat at all, and out of some morbid curiosity you climb on board and the deck of the ship is in no better shape than the hull, the marks of hard-fought battle - scars in the wood from sharp blades and arcane energies, stains of blood and oil splattered about - still fresh but you know time doesn't pass on the astral sea so who knows how long ago this all took place, and as you climb below decks you start to notice the writings on the walls, pieces of parchment nailed to every surface and connected with fraying, rotting threads, or words etched directly into the wood, the deep gouges barely readable, and you start to hear the creaking and clanking of rusted machinery slowly moving about and you turn a corner to see a figure standing in a room facing the wall, slowly scratching yet more of that unintelligible writing into the bones of the ship, and it turns as the rusted dented mechanite stares at you with eyes ablaze and he asks 'Who are you? Where is my crew?' as sparks of arcane lightning begins to arc through the room. you are running through a feywild forest and you know, even without the figure chasing you, that you have made a horrible mistake, you should have known better, should have been more careful, should have kept your impulses in check, and now you are being chased through an unfamiliar forest and the figure, the Hunter pursuing you knows this realm like the back of his hand, knows every tree and shrub and vine that is slithering up to grasp at your ankles, and you glance back desperately to catch any glimpse of your pursuer but there is no pursuer, he has hidden himself with some arcane trick or some innate power or just the knowledge that this realm is his home, and you hear his voice even though you cannot see him as he cries out 'You should not have hurt my family. Prepare to face the Hunter of Hundkiln'

sorry no Vhas yet maybe I'll update with one for him once we get more of his whole deal

[journal420]

what if i shilled gravity falls and pokemon crossover thoughts. what then

[perenlop]

finally watching those videos on bw’s story that drake sent me since i was thinking about it last night and good god it’s cathartic. i love engaging with good faith criticism for once

[carcarrot]

so because im insane i tried to find that sweatshirt harry anderson was wearing in that friday night videos thing and found out it was a reversible disney sweatshirt, with one side being mickey mouse comics, and the other side being a huge image of minnie mouse

[oldrockformations]

I’ve been reading superhero comics lately and I just,, want to force these bitches to drink some water. How are these people not passing out from dehydration every fight

Nobody with abs that defined has a healthy daily fluid intake. Get this man some goddamn gatorade

[sweetberry-roebuck]

My oc Jacob and the two characters I wasn't aware of when I made him but who are suspiciously similar to him in different ways :-)

[mokeonn]

Man I gotta get started on that dnd comic idea I've had for a while because if yall like Poetry yall are REALLY gonna like Mystery