#i'm using too many dpis

[dazaislanderer]

some more sketches

femzai propaganda part 2 ( ^ω^ )

[renai-fr]

Perler Bead Flight Flags

Made these flight flag coasters a bit back, figured it was a good time to post 'em! I do enjoy Perlers, they're like pixel art but at the end I can hold them and stuff.

Crafting details after the break, if y'all want to make your own.

These are using the original 2013 flag designs/colors on a 14x14 board, with standard 5mm beads. If you wanted to do the current flag designs, they'd need a little bit of tweaking as many are more symmetric in the current art (and also, I'd recommend a 16x16 size, since then you have room to put the current art's border). You could also try out an odd-sized flag, 15x15 maybe, but the angles at the bottom will look a little off. Doesn't hurt to try stuff though!

I got most of the beads for these out of variety packs and various kits, which don't necessarily label the colors in them, but these are my best guesses to what I used:

Earth: Tan design on Brown base

Fire: Butterscotch/Orange on Light Brown base

Wind: Dark Green on Kiwi Lime

Water: Light Blue on Dark Blue/Cobalt

Lightning: Toothpaste on Parrot Green

Ice: Turquoise on Robin's Egg

Light: Cheddar on Creme

Shadow: Pastel Lavender on Purple

Nature: Kiwi Lime on Dark green

Plague: Red on Cranapple

Arcane: Pink on Raspberry

(Most of these came from the Multi Mix packs or the Neutral Colors/Fun Colors trays, but Cranapple in particular was catankerous to get ahold of. Fitting for Plague, I suppose! Anyways, there's some wiggle room on hue for a lot of these, too, I was just using what I had onhand as much as possible)

As for what I would do differently if I made another set of these? Well... I've gotten a bit better at getting the melt level consistent, so there's that. Learned the hard way that trying to melt two designs on the same pegboard, even if said board is big, isn't a good idea (and it's near-impossible to fix). Also, I was using one of the freebie folded pieces of parchment paper, so some of the coasters have creases... On non-ironing notes, I think it would be fun to take a stab at a micro-bead variant, since they support a higher dpi and all!

Anyways, if you decide to make your own set, please uh... I'd say ping me, but I'm not actually sure how that works here? I think it'd be cool to see 'em, that's all. Happy crafting!

[pterribledinosaurdrawings]

could you tell me more about spoonflower? i'm interested in uploading my own designs, but i'm not entirely sure how it works or how much it pays. thank you!

Sure! When you first upload your design, it'll look like this.

The standard DPI for printing on all the fabric sites I've seen is 150, and since I made this pattern at 200 DPI that means Spoonflower will print it bigger than I want it unless I change it here. So I click on the "change DPI" thing, type in "200" and click "change". Sometimes I find it doesn't save, so I always go back later to check and make sure it did save the right DPI.

(You can avoid this by just changing your image to the right DPI before uploading, but sometimes I want the option to make it a bit bigger, just in case.)

If you want to make multiple sizes of the same pattern available you'll have to upload a different version for each one and change the size individually. For example, I drew my Bathroom Dinosaurs pattern pretty large and at 150 DPI, and left that as is for the big version.

But I wanted a small version too, so for that one I changed it to 670 pixels per inch so it'd print much smaller.

You write in the title, tags, and description, and you can put any links to other pages or references in the "Additional Details" section.

(Leaving links isn't usually necessary, but sometimes it is, like how I wanted to leave a link to the original 1760's teapot for my crinoid fossil pattern.)

At this point, you can order things printed with your design, but nobody else can yet. You have the option to show the design publicly, but I like to keep it private until I've ordered my proofs and can sell it.

Now, to order proofs! DO NOT GET THE CUT SWATCHES!!! They are SO much more expensive than getting a fill-a-yard, because cutting and packaging all the little pieces is a lot of extra labour. Wether you have a few designs, or a lot, just get a fill-a-yard.

To make a fill-a-yard you first need to make a collection. Collections can be either public or private, so I keep a private collection called "new designs to proof", and I put all my new designs in there until I've ordered them. You can also add other people's patterns to a collection, so if you have extra space to fill up or you want little bits of a bunch of other people's patterns for a quilt or something, add whatever you want to your collection.

On the collections page when you hover your mouse over one you'll see a little patchwork symbol show up in the middle along the bottom edge, and you click on that.

That'll take you here, and you choose a layout and a fabric.

For some reason the fabric options here are a bit limited and vary depending on the layout. I like to get either the 1 yard/42 designs in cotton poplin, or the 2 yards/48 designs in cotton sateen, but there are plenty more you could try.

I'll click the latter for this example. (The squares in this one are the perfect size for pleated face masks, and I have a few made from mine and my friend's fabrics.)

Then you just click on a design and click on however many squares/rectangles you want it to fill. It usually takes a few seconds for them to show up.

You can have just one little sample of each, or you could make half the fabric be one design and fill up the rest with little samples. (That's what I did for my brown monster waistcoat - I printed juuuust enough of a fill-a-yard to cut out a waistcoat from, and the rest was other samples.)

You can change it around if you want. Once you're happy with it, put it in the cart and buy it!

I'm not going to order this one since it's an example with designs I've already proofed, but here's what my monster patterns looked like when they arrived.

Also, I want to point out that you could VERY easily make some really fun pride flags using the fill-a-yard! You might have to have it be only part of the fabric, depending on the number of stripes, but you could make it be any texture or pattern you want. Here's a quick example I did with other people's patterns by searching "(colour) marble texture".

With only 4 stripes I'd have to fill the rest of the space in with something else and cut it off, but it would still be pretty big! (The edge of that purple stripe looks jagged in the preview, but they print perfectly straight.)

I have not done this, but someone should! Just wash it, trim the blank edges off, hem it, and you've got a flag!

(Don't do this with the 2 yards/4 designs option though, it looks like nice stripes in the thumbnail but it's made for infinity scarves and there's a gap and dotted line down the middle for cutting. Bleh.)

Anyways, once your samples arrive you can make the designs available for sale! If you have any changes you'd like to make, to the size it prints at or the pattern itself, you can make them now.

I found the small version of the Bathroom Dinosaurs print was too small when I first got my proofs, so I just reduced the DPI a bit.

And you can replace the image with a new, edited version by clicking "upload revision".

So when my brown coffin pattern printed really washed out and grey, I replaced it with a more saturated version and was good to go, no need to order another proof.

Down at the bottom of the design editing page you can now click on the options to list it publicly, and to sell it on fabric and/or wallpaper. I make all of them available on fabric, and some on wallpaper if I deem them to be appropriately large.

They'll pay you 10% of the sales price of the fabric, or slightly more if you sell over a certain amount in a month. There's a whole page of questions and answers about it.

You also get a 10% discount if you order fabrics with your own designs. (Although, personally, if I'm ordering my own designs on fabrics for me then I'd prefer to get them from somewhere like ArtFabrics, since they use reactive dyes instead of inks, so their blacks actually print black and don't make the fabric stiffer like Spoonflower's do. And also because they're here in Canada so there's less shipping cost. Sadly they don't have an option to sell your designs though.)

Spoonflower also has weekly design contests which are announced a few weeks in advance and have pretty big store credit prizes (the first place one is 200 USD), and I've entered a few times, but I don't vote often because Spoonflower is such a huge site that there are frequently over a thousand entries and it's really time consuming to scroll through them all.

Ok, that's everything I can think of! I also put all my patterns on sone things on Redbubble, since they have options for repeating patterns on some things.

[mellosdrawings]

What do you use to draw with? Like what device and drawing app? I finally graduated high school and want to get back to drawing and maybe start posting it but I wanted some advice

Hi~

I'm just gonna go and give you my full setup (plus health advices coz trust me they're important).

These days I use an IPad Pro 11" and Procreate. My friend has the bigger version but I hurt my elbow using it because it made my moves too big, so I settled for the littler version. I suggest you chose based on your feelings for that. If you want a bigger screen to see more of your work, it's perfectly valid.

If you do take those two, I suggest you also take the ICloud save. (I have the 200Go save and that's only 3€ a month, but the 50Go save in free!) Should your IPad eventually break, you'll be able to retrieve ALL your art files from the Cloud, which is a huge lifesaver!

(I used to use a simple computer plus graphic tablet plus Adobe Photoshop, but it kept crashing so much that I had one too many rage quits. Plus it's super expensive since it's subscription based, and nowadays they take your art from the Adobe Cloud to feed their AI, so I can't really recommend that. Photoshop is an excellent tool but the direction Adobe is taking does NOT suit me.)

For brushes I just use the default Procreate Pencil. For the eraser I use Syrup, which is found in the default Inking Brush set.

My base canvases are 4000x4000px with a DPI of 300 (I suggest you improve the DPI if you do illustrations or really precise work. I only do little fanarts and comics with that DPI). For posting online please be careful to chose an RGB color profile (I use the default Display D3). If you ever want to print though, you should chose a CMYK color profile (I use the Generic CMYK Profile then).

Now back to the real world! I'm going to strongly suggest you make sure your paper/computer/screen is at least at an angle, at best right in front of your face. The least pressure you have to put on your neck (bending), the better it will be. If you do traditional art, I'll suggest actual art tables that you can adjust in size and angle. Here's mine.

To prevent any pain in my thumb I use one of those hold-helpers thingies kids use to hold their pens properly! It increases the size of the grip which prevents from holding the pen too tight (trust me, it's important). You can also find special tape to roll around your pen if you need an even bigger grip.

I wish I had a proper desk and chair because that will also be very important for your posture and health, but rn I'm not in my own flat so eh. What I'll encourage you to do instead are stretches and exercises BEFORE and AFTER an art session. Fingers, wrist, elbow, shoulder, back, neck. If you want to avoid medical costs (masseur, kine, osteopath) you need to take great care of your body. You can also find little self-massaging gadgets in sports shops to help with your muscles.

(Talking from experience there. I'm only 25 and I already had to undergo surgery on my writing wrist because I f*ed up. Your health is important!)

I'm aware most of those are extremely expensive to get (it took me half a year of intense working and savings just to get the IPad) but I've found that they were 100% worth it in the end. It's alright to get things little by little if you feel they are going to be important for you. I strongly suggest you invest in your health first though!

Once you have decided on your preferred setup, I guess the only thing left to do is train, experiment and have fun!

I think that's all? If you need more advices on setups or art or whatever, I'd be happy to help, my DMs are always open!

Also congrats on graduating highschool!

[hotwaterandmilk]

Hi! I love your content and was wondering if you have any tips for those who might want to post their own scanned manga stuff on here?

I have some furoku, postcards, magazine clippings, etc and I enjoy scanning and cataloguing stuff, but I'm a bit shy about posting it online. I'm worried there might be some kind of etiquette regarding all of this that I'm unaware of. Like are publication dates important to disclose? should I try and find it for every scan I upload or can I just give some basic details about it? Oh and if someone else has already scanned something I own should I refrain from posting my own scans of that item? Hope these questions aren't too dumb, I just don't want to accidentally step on anyone's toes.

Hi, thank you for your kind words. I can only really share with you my opinion on sharing scans, as there are no real "rules" about doing this hobby that I'm aware of. I feel that things boil down to courtesy, like so many elements of fandom, and asking those involved when unsure.

I personally won't share something I'm aware someone else has shared before, unless I feel I can provide a better quality scan or additional context to make the effort worthwhile. For example, people have shared plenty of old Hana to Yume calendar scans in the past on sites like Minitokyo, but as they're not in 1200 dpi I feel like my effort in rescanning and sharing these images is "worth it".

If someone else is committed to scanning monthly furoku for a particular series, I won't double up by sharing scans of the same furoku - I'm wasting my own time by scanning/editing these items when someone else is doing them already, but I'm also potentially making the existing contributer uncomfortable.

However, we can't all be expected to keep track of every scanner on every website or through every fandom - sometimes there is overlap or there are multiple people passionate about a work. In that case, or in any case where unsure, I don't think it hurts to reach out to someone and ask "Hey, do you mind if I also share ____" ?

People can say no, but ultimately none of us involved in sharing scans/scanlating/fan works/etc. owns the original property and these are widely published titles. We can say "Hey I'd prefer it if you don't share ____ when I'm already sharing ____" but it is down to the other party if they wish to cease doing so.

In terms of things like publication information, that's very much a personal choice. My opinion on this is that it is respectful to include artist information wherever possible and publication details when you can so that others can find the original item for themselves. It's extra work, but it means I don't get messages asking "Where is ____ from?" as that information is already available.

The caveat to this, for me, is that sometimes we simply don't know all the details. Goodness knows I've got hundreds of postcards from 80s shoujo magazines that I've been gifted or received in bulk aucions without any information on the issue they were included with and at best I can narrow down the year they were released... right now I'm not sharing that content because I really do want to attribute that information if possible. But not everyone cares about things like that and that's OK, sometimes people just include an artist and the series and that's all.

I want to be clear that I'm not here to prescribe what you should and should not do when sharing your treasure trove. I'm just one person with a singular experience. So much of sharing scans as a hobby will boil down to what is important to you and how much time you have on your hands. And plenty comes from trial and error, along with feedback that others provide.

I feel it's important to convey that not everyone will like what you share or how you share it, while some will lift what you share wholesale to try and profit from it on other sites. I've had to develop a pretty thick skin regarding what people say about me online, despite being a nobody. I'd be lying if I said this didn't get to me sometimes, but for the moment my love of sharing has won out.

What I think is key, overall, is just that you want to share things with others and are willing to put the work into doing so. Missteps around doubling up on sharing may happen, but are more often than not resolved through communication.

I hope you can find a way of sharing the things that are important to you that best fits with your needs and schedule. ^^

[purity-town]

Ask responses are typed up & under the cut!

I'm happy I was able to work in some more of the NPCs even if it was just into the background, so I'm glad you're liking seeing them. And yes! I don't have specific measurements on anyone's heights beyond a vague “X is taller than Y,” but she's the tallest member of the cast, all divinity and ancient magics and humanoid-but-not-human. And thanks for reading; I'm glad you're excited for the next chapter!

Andrew much prefers to deflect over lying outright, but if pressed claims to be 26 with a summer birthday (putting him as “29” in the comic now as he's lived in town for 3 years). Mid-twenties roughly aligns with his physical age, as he slowed and eventually stopped aging around that point, so people don't have any obvious reason not to believe it.

In the past, Andrew usually just moved around every long while, assuming things were otherwise peaceful. The jump from “this guy is weird and aging gracefully” to “this is an immortal being inextricably tied to this world and its fate” is quite large, especially since Andrew mostly kept to himself.

Living in Purity Town is a first in many ways for him, particularly in that he's serving an actual purpose to the town and has to both interact with people and stick around for the foreseeable future. Under normal circumstances he would absolutely gracefully arrange his leave, but then once you throw the hero being present into the mix things just get messy.

Honestly, with enough time he probably would come clean to the townsfolk. If he explained it to Chris delicately enough initially, Chris (and Alalia!) would eventually back him up and that'd likely do a lot to sway folks. Between their input and him having just…been around town long enough to show that he’s not a bad person and actually form some relationships, I think it would go okay.

Thank you!!! I'm glad you're liking the comic so much!

Honestly, I have no idea! It's probably a combination of factors in my art style (like my tendency to use solid/clean lines and keep painted portions to the background) playing nice with however Tumblr crunches images. I know that Webtoons struggles a good bit more with my pages due to color/resolution limitations, but Tumblr’s always been pretty good with it. That's all just a rough guess though; I couldn't find your art on your blog to examine so I'm just throwing out ideas!

Possibly relevant, each page is 2320x3587 pixels (350 dpi) after I trim the edges and export it as a .png. Downloading pages from Tumblr saves them as a 1987x3072 (72 dpi) jpeg, but preserves the fine details pretty well. So that’s what we’re working with here!

(Interestingly, after some testing I found that Reddit preserves the higher resolution of pages, but crunches their colors around areas of shading, while Tumblr smoothly fuzzes them when it downscales.)

I'm happy to see more folks caught what I was going for there! I didn't draw much of her shimmered design since she's mostly covered and under some heavy effects, but it was cool to work with. Here's a snippet of her shimmered design in that panel without the effects, since I had it on hand already from a comment a while back.

Thank you!! It feels crazy to me that it's been going on so long, but I'm really happy to have continued with the comic for so long. I'm also happy to be done with college, haha -- I’m liking my new job a lot more than the school grind!

Thank you so much for this!! It’s super touching that you’ve stuck around so long -- I definitely recognize the folks I’ve seen popping up in my notifications over the years, and I’m really glad that people are liking being along for the ride. I’ve learned so much through working on this comic and I’m really really happy that other people are enjoying it too, because I love these characters and this world and this game so so much.

I’m not articulating this well but- thank you for this! I hope that whoever you are, you’re doing well, too :)

Go right ahead! Though this serves as a reminder to myself to make sure that all of the pages on the various sites are all updated, since I usually go back through after a chapter is done to correct little errors, haha.

I totally understand if you want to remain anonymous, but if you need files or anything give a shout here or on Discord (@ariibees)! Purity Town is somewhat formatted for print by virtue of having pages instead of vertical-scrolling but I know that the chapters are kinda short and pages would probably need to be re-formatted around the edges to fit book binding.

All that said -- if you end up going through with it it'd be insanely cool to see how it turns out, if you're comfortable with sharing!

Chapter titles are done in Albertus Medium (with the exception of the "Purity Town" text and character intro bubbles, which is in the Terraria font Andy Bold). Speech bubbles use Segoe Print. There's not really any concrete reasoning behind the fonts I picked (beyond the obvious choice to use the Terraria font), I just chose ones that looked good enough, haha.

[ryouhiko-ankuu]

I saw that post about what Tumblr is supposedly planning to do... I found out about your art a few years ago and I love your style, and I know it's frustrating to have the threat of your work being put on AI and such, I understand the feeling as an artist too (although I haven't uploaded my art yet to Tumblr)

You don't have to answer this message, but I wanted to send this because I found out about an interesting tool that can be helpful against the AI problem that you may like: https://www.tumblr.com/does-this-look-inanimate-to-you/740926391530487808?source=share

Sorry for the bad English though, it is not my first language. I really love your art and hope I could get as good as you someday!

Thanks for your kind words anon.

I know about Nightshade and Glaze, even used the latter a couple of times, and I admire the team's efforts... BUT realistically I can't use it:

they still haven't addressed the issue with 1660/1650/1550 GPUs (and I don't have any spare money to buy a new GPU just to make Glaze and Nightshade work)

iirc the only Glaze version that worked for me was 0.0.3 and that's simply because it didn't use GPU at all; their latest "non-GPU" version on download page still switches to GPU for an unknown reason and produces the same black image error again;

I contacted them three times trying to troubleshoot this and they never replied;

I have access to webglaze, but it barely solves any problems. It has a limitation of 10 glazes per day and 40 glazes per week. This might seem like a non-issue since I post stuff once in a blue moon, but let me illustrate what the problem here is with an example - here, look at the glazed version of the screenshot with Jam that I posted on twitter:

As you can see, glaze artifacts here fuck the whole image up like some really bad jpeg compression, there's even some weird pink blob on her face. These artifacts are a common problem for artists who use clean lines and colours instead of painterly style. To be fair, you can still make it look much prettier, like some kind of a fancy texture, but for that you literally have to run it many, MANY times, like some gacha. Ten glazes are NOT enough. If I had a working app, I could run it twenty, fifty, heck I could run it hundred times to figure out better settings and image properties. I have no such opportunity, so instead I just tried sending it to webglaze one more time, got another result with a pink blob across Jam's face and opted for posting a non-glazed version.

I guess I sound like some ungrateful bitch but honestly I'm mostly disheartened that the only tools to protect my work at least somehow are just posting smaller images with 72 dpi resolution and blocking AI bros to avoid targeted attention. I'm tired. So fucking tired. And I can't even "draw for myself" and keep my work on the hard drive away from people's eyes because it's quite literally a form of communication for me. Duh.

[stepswowdsen]

【Magi】 Judar 🖤❤️🐈‍⬛

Full Size

Intro Rambles

Doodled a quick Judar yesterday (last one) but I think I like the 1st and 3rd ones the best. The eyes are really striking on this one...

I also like the others, but the 1st and 3rd ones are my faves

I think the 4th and 5th one have nice expressions too, I just think that for the last one, I should tilt the shoulders to match the head tilt

I just need to decide whether I want to make it a simple ref like how many OC ref sheets have it as a simple standing pose to use for art ref purposes, or whether I want to give it an actual pose hmmm...

I guess it's up to me to decide what I want 🤔

Art Process Rambles

Also, if y'all are curious about my canvas size, I usually draw on A4 paper size (8.5 x 11 inches), though a lot of times, I draw small on the canvas (especially if it's a quick doodle)

I always draw on 300 dpi, which is the recommended minimum requirement if you want to print your works. 300 - 600 dpi is recommended for printing purposes.

Iirc, you get sharper lines at 600 dpi when it comes to printing

I then scale up the drawing later if needed (when the drawing gets more refined)

I like to draw on vector layers so I can edit, adjust, move, resize (scale up and down) and adjust the line thickness of my sketch lines without losing quality.

On CSP, you can also change the brush type of vector lines too! I'm not sure about other art programs?

So this means that I can also scale up my arts if needed!

Vector layers take up more file space since it uses math to calculate lines, but it's worth it for me since I adjust my lines a LOT

I'm trying to get better about finishing art. I really want to finish something soon.

I'm satisfied with my current art growth and really like my art style, and I tend to remind myself a lot that kid/younger me would be very proud of my art journey.

Kid me's biggest art goal in life was to be able to draw hot people (hot/cute/pretty people) and I think I've succeeded at that 😎 But I want to become even better!

I should get back into gesture drawing again... It's hard for me to stick to consistent schedules as someone ND-spec.

I'm so picky with my arts as someone ND-spec because I want to be able to capture my faves' beauty, so I constantly redraw my own arts to outdo my sketches and make them better each time.

I think I've been sketching a lot lately for the past few years cuz quick sketches usually only take 45 minutes - 1 hour for me (on the first sketch pass)

And also cuz I know that my full art process (from sketch to full render) will be very time consuming and will take me at least several hours for one piece. I think rendering and actually finishing art will be very worth it and satisfying though...

[poxei]

I love ur art so much!!!! are the recent brushes you use still the same as the ones listed in ur FAQ or do you mess with the settings at all? And what size canvas do you work on? 😍✨

hey!!! thank you!! my recent art is pretty much just from this set, especially "Casual", so yeah still the same ones listed in my FAQ! if you see any art I draw with flat coloring and monolines (most of my stickers), that's probably with Narinder Pencil which is a default brush in Procreate, except that i made it more dense/darker. I don't mess with brush settings too much except to make the size of the brush larger or to make it darker.

the size of the canvas depends on what I'm drawing for (illustration? sticker?), but for an illustration it's usually at least 6x9" at 300 DPI (1800x2700 px). I think the largest canvas I've drawn on is 16x9". it sucks that the bigger the canvas, the fewer layers you get to work on in Procreate, so sometimes I'm forced to draw smaller. if I want to print it bigger, I export it into Clip Studio Paint and scale it up in there, because Procreate's Transform tool sucks sooo much.

the brush I use the most comes in a pack that costs money, but I would feel terrible if I recommended it to you and then you end up hating it and wasting your money.. maybe you can download it from here first and if you like it a lot then you can pay for it. I know I've downloaded many brushes before after seeing other artists recommend them, only to use them once and never again 🥴 so you might not even like this brush, who knows

DISCLAIMER I do own the Sketchers brush set legally though!!

[arthurhwalker]

Lenovo Yoga Book 9i Review

The hype for this device is warranted. That said, some of the features are incomplete, or "coming soon." There's a lot of really great reviews of the device that talk specifications. In short, the specs are great. This review is going to about how the device fits into my own use case, and the features that mattered to me most.

Yep. I'm going to make it all about me.

Text Entry

Being able to use two screens in landscape, one above the other, or side by side in portrait mode is a show stopper. It's really difficult to have that set up, and have it fit comfortably in your daily carry bag. Being able to set a document window to cascade between both screens in stacked landscape mode is done by tapping five fingers on the screen. It's so good.

Also, it comes with a Mystery Triangle. No idea what it's for, but it is magnetic and has instructions on it for assembly. I found at least one thing it can do, but probably isn't intended for.

Pen holder?

Pictured below: 65w Charger, Lenovo 2-channel quiet Bluetooth mouse, keyboard accessory, stylus, and Mystery Triangle.

The Bluetooth keyboard accessory is excellent. Best of all, the keyboard is included. Literally, the best travel sized/weight Bluetooth Keyboard accessory I've seen is just quietly bundled with the Lenovo 9i.

Key travel, latency (I type very fast if I want to), and feedback are great. I know the device is designed to take pen input, but I love making text with it. They way the keyboard rolls up into the stand to protect the keys from havoc while traveling in my bag is really nice. A lot of thought went into the accessories for the Yoga Book 9i.

The effort paid off.

Pen Entry

You make some sacrifices here, but I'm not convinced it is Lenovo's fault. Being able to draw on the deck display while using the lid display to view your reference material is awesome. Pen input is pretty good, but I'm still wrestling with getting tilt and other functionality to work as I'd prefer. It doesn't seem to matter which application I use, there is a little jitter.

The device will take pen input on both screens simultaneously but that experience is heavily dependent on the applications, and what pen protocol they are using. Overall I'll be doing my finishing work at 300 dpi at home on my Thinkpad with a Wacom Cintiq. Will I do front end digital art, pixel art, and sketching on my Yoga Book 9i?

For sure.

It's an 8.5 stars drawing experience that feels like a 10 because the displays are both OLED, and vary closely matched in both color and brightness. I haven't applied any film to the deck, but the included stylus has pretty good resistance without it. My other favorite stylus works great, too.

User Experience

Microsoft's software products have been in steady decline for over a decade. I didn't think Microsoft had anything left to ruin after Windows 10, but they broke new ground with Windows 11. User experience isn't anywhere on Microsoft's list of priorities these days, and anything Windows 11 does well feels accidental.

Fortunately, Lenovo goes all out to smooth things over wherever they can. They have software running that helps curate the experience for the user. In some cases it does better than put lipstick on the pig that is Windows 11. With screen gestures and touch input particularly, I forget the pig exists.

There are many "coming soon" features that promise to make the experience great, utilizing both displays for function and neat visual aesthetics. If Lenovo does all they've promised with regard to features, the user experience would go from good, to great.

The bad news is that the display scaling is kinda stuck at 200%. You can change it, but you have to change it for each display, every time you log in. When you turn your computer on in the morning to get started working, you'll be changing the scaling, if you don't like it at 200%

For me, the 200% scaling is perfect, and I imagine it will be a for a lot of people. If that is not ideal, it becomes an arduous daily chore to open the display settings, and change the scaling to the desired amount. It is likely that Lenovo will fix this with an update.

If you're having this issue, head to Lenovo's Forums and hit this post. It has some work arounds, but also reply in line. Bump it up. Thanks.

I'll update this review if I find a silver bullet or if Lenovo issues and update that fixes the issue.

Darkness

During the Pandemic my spouse was ill (not with COVID, something else). Being able to sit next to her in the dark, and continue my work without disturbing her was pretty important. At the time I had an Thinkpad X1 Carbon that I had Lenovo's power management settings on it. With the screen brightness bottomed out, and the machine set to run quiet as I could get it, I was able to continue working.

After my spouse's recent surgery, I found myself in a similar situation. She basically needed to sleep for a month to heal, and I needed to be able to watch over her, and continue my work.

Using the Yoga Book 9i in a dark room to make text is great. With the backlighting turned down to nothing, the software keyboard (Lenovo's, not you Microsoft) is perfect. It can be set to give feedback, and a little noise, or nothing at all. The OLED displays turned all the way down are perfect for viewing text, without adding enough illumination to a room to disturb a sleeper.

It's also really cool looking in the dark. Perfect for writing science fiction.

My ears ring constantly after having COVID, and now I'm pretty sensitive to coil whine from devices. The Yoga Book 9i is almost as quiet as a fanless ARM SOC. Almost.

Sound

The Lenovo Yoga Book 9i can be really quiet, but it can also be really loud. If you were using it to run Dungeons & Dragons at a venue, and needed something to play music and sound effects, this device has the best sound on a portable device I've heard. I have one other Lenovo Yoga with a sound bar hinge from a couple years back. The sound on it is really good, but nothing like the Yoga Book 9i.

You can take the Bluetooth speaker out your bag if you're carrying one.

That said, make sure you fully update all the sound drivers. My Yoga Book 9i came with a lot of crackle pop out of the box. Once I updated all the drivers, the sound was perfect. I didn't need to touch a thing.

You will absolutely annoy other people at the coffee shop while watching cat videos on YouTube.

Mobile Workspace

I've been carrying a Thinkpad X12 Detachable Tablet, a Thinkvision M14 portable display, Lenovo Pen Stylus, and Lenovo Bluetooth Mouse as my standard portable workspace. It sets up nicely on a coffee shop table, and let me do my things while I'm traveling.

It's a really nice set up, fits well in my bag.

The Lenovo Yoga Book 9i does the same thing without all the hunting for accessories. Everything you need comes with it. Also, you aren't stuck with two landscape displays stuck side by side, or with extra stands to make your preferred viewing experience work.

It also takes up less space on the table, and I don't have to bring another keyboard as a sidecar to render digital artwork with the pen.

I haven't run into battery life issues with the Yoga Book 9i. I really expected to find myself searching for an outlet more often, but it hasn't been a thing. I assumed the magnetic stand and keyboard accessories would mess with it my bag, and I'd find the device running fans and being crazy in standby mode. Nope, it's been fine.

If it sounds like my expectations were low in terms of the hardware, it is because they were. I was pretty sure I'd buy one, review it, and return it. I'm keeping mine, and riding out the bumps as Lenovo updates and completes software features. I think it'll be worth the wait.

Accessories

All that's missing is the perfect bag or sleeve for the Yoga Book 9i. I'm using a Waterfield Designs Sutter Tech Sling right now, and it is pretty ideal. I have a number of Lenovo's other two-compartment cases that worth pretty well, but nothing that is "the one."

Other than that, carry an extra big microfiber cloth. With three Thunderbolt 4 ports I haven't found the need for dongles or docks unless I'm at home.

Bundled Software

Lenovo ships this device with a Smart Note and Journal application. You can take a Smart Note on the Lock Screen, save Bookmarks, and there is a Smart Reader app in the works. I usually dismiss bundled software, but Lenovo gave these apps some great features.

I might not use Journal, but I will be using Smart Note.

Branding

I've owned or laid hands on every version of Lenovo's Yoga Book devices over the years. My Yoga Book Gen 1.5 (Ruby Red) and Yoga Book C930 still get used, because they are that good. I've had the Android version of the Gen 1, Windows Version of the Gen 1, and used the LTE (Eurozone) Yoga Book C930.

Is the Yoga Book 9i a "Yoga Book" as Lenovo has defined them? Yes, and no.

The Yoga Book 9i is not a 10" ultraportable that defies the traditional categories of clamshell vs. tablet / detachable device. It is a 13" clamshell laptop that comes with the best wireless keyboard and mouse offerings, and the second best stylus Lenovo offers. The stand accessory that bundles everything up is awesome.

It does not fit in my vertical computer bag designed for 10" - 12" form factor devices. It would be unwieldy to hold like a book, in hand, and read text from the displays.

It does provide a computing experience you can't get anywhere else. Lisa Gade didn't even try to explain this in her review. You'll either look at this device and wonder who it's for, or know instantly that you need one for your use case. Like other Yoga Books of the past, there is nothing to compare the 9i to.

There are other dual-screen devices, but they don't compete with the Yoga Book in my opinion. They are not necessarily better or worse, they just don't provide the same experience.

Have a question?

Find me on most social media platforms, @ArthurHWalker

Pictured Below: One use of the Mystery Triangle?

[saint-amand]

Hi!! I love your artwork, your comics look really polished and professional! I was wondering if you had any inspirations/favorite mangaka or comic artists, or if you had any tips for starting on making comics ^^

Thank you so much!

To be honest... I have not actively kept up with manga for a long time (I really should for someone drawing one), although I'm exposed to a bit of the doujinshi community in general just by way of social media. I would say the look I've arrived at stems from having drawn comics for years and so having those opportunities to experiment with different ways of doing things.

The #漫画が読めるハッシュタグ tag on Twitter is a fun trove of seeing what's out there and some professionals also use it to plug upcoming publications by posting the first chapter (it's heavily used though so you might need to wade through a lot). Also recommend finding manga anthologies or magazines because it's a good way to compare a lot of artists in a small space!

As for tips on starting... I feel I can say a lot of things but it depends what kind of detail and what topics!! (I wanted to start a blog on this before but the idea dropped off because I didn't have a lot of time to write) Anyway I'll rattle off about some key points:

Deciding technical details Figure out what your intended specs are -- are you publishing digitally or do you want to print it? Both? Or digitally for now with possibility of printing in the far future? So then what size? Is it in pages or long webtoon format? What DPI will you draw in? Colour or B&W?

Storytelling and panelling Assuming you already have a story in mind and have written some kind of script, you then need to figure out how you're going to tell and pace it, and how you're going to lay it out on a page. I start with going over the script and splitting them into pages, cutting them at points that seem to make sense to be a good stop. And then I split the lines into panels. Now you know how many panels there are going to be per page*, you can begin storyboading (infamously the hardest part of comics). *But at the same time, you might only get a better sense of this once you've had more experience laying out pages. It's a huge spectrum. Depending on the tone of your story, if it's slow, loose, emotional and fluffy, there tends to be less panels on a page. More active and actiony, or if you just need to get through a lot and want to keep the scene going without lingering too long you would have more panels. Some manga average at like 3-6 panels per page whereas some people with higher density go for 5-8... And some people can fit up to 10 depending on the type of scene. It's all up to you! It's not a hard rule though obviously and it can create a lot of impact to mix it around. For example it's really impactful if you typically have 7 panels and suddenly something major happens and there's only 2 panels on the next page. Likewise you can create a sense of franticness or comedy if it's a slow moving story with 3 panels and suddenly there's 8 on the next page. Not to mention there are then a gazillion ways you can shape the panels on the page, and then compose the speech balloons and shots in them. Maybe you already have an image of mind of 1 shot and need to figure out everything around it. I recommend analysing at what other comic artists do for reference! Take your time because this is the most thinking-intensive part of the entire process. It's kind of a problem or puzzle-solving exercise though and it's satisfying once you arrive at your solution for that page.

Drawing style Since you're going to be drawing multiple pages, you need to decide how you want it to look so that it's consistent. There are an unlimited number of combinations, but just keep in mind the more detailed the style and the more drawing steps there are is the longer it takes to complete a page -- it's a balance of quantity vs quality. In the end you want to tell a story but you don't want to take 2 years drawing 30 pages. Some questions to ask yourself: - How detailed is the lineart? How detailed is everyone's clothes keeping in mind that you then need to draw it every panel and every page? - How do you shade it? Not at all? Flats or with some gradients? Screentones or nah? (PS: I only really do screentones because I'm genuinely prepping for print and I like the texture, but beware it doesn't show up great digitally) - Overall black and white balance of a page and how much you do your black fills/shadows - (If it's manga) How do you deal with black hair? (I'm so serious there are so many ways to do this if you have black hair characters) - Do you draw the backgrounds? Or process photos? Or use 3D?

Typesetting Nothing ruins good art faster than shitty typesetting. I have a strong opinion about this but please hand draw/hand lasso your balloons rather than using ellipse tools. And make sure there is enough space between the letters and the edge of the balloons. Nate Piekos' Better Letterer tips is a GREAT resource for this and explains everything far better than I can -- I highly recommend this for everyone wanting to get into comics.

Anyway, in a nutshell, drawing comics is a series of decisions you have to make. Break it up in various stages because thinking about everything at once can be overwhelming!

Start small and don't burn yourself out. It can very much be an exercise in stamina and if you can maintain passion towards a project. In terms of the reality of it, the process can be hard and time-consuming with varying levels of reward and satisfaction at the end. Just remember you're also doing it for yourself though -- because you've been gripped by a great compulsion to tell a story :)

[rockmiyabideusexmachina]

Hey there Miyabi! How do you get such high-res, beautiful, and professional scan quality? What's your process?

Thank you! I certainly don't think I do anything that professional, so glad you have been decieved into thinking that about them! LOL I started doing this scan of the day stuff just to bring better quality to a lot of the older contributions of mine floating around the web. Looking at them on here, the Megaman wikia and other places, they just felt small and dirty. Especially as basic technology had gotten better over the decade or so since I first scanned them. I have 2 different scanners, one of which is a fancier Epson that I bought specifically to scan film slides a year or so ago. Still use it for basic scans from time to time. But honestly, for the settei, I'm still just using my general home HP Envy printer/scanner combo. I always scan at 600 DPI. After that part is done and the bitmap image is scanned to my computer, it's really just doing some heavy touchup. As I have alluded to in some recent posts, some of these sheets will take me an hour to an hour and a half just to clean up, because they have so many artifacts and dotty garbage on them. Settei at auction are mostly just scanned copies themselves after all, so there's a bit of residue to clean up. Ever wonder why sometimes I don't post these at a regular time of day? That's why, I'm still working on touchup before I post (and probably off from work, so I'm not prepping the night before, like when I post at a scheduled time).

Let's use this recent Gauss sheet as an example.

The original scan was pretty messy. Probably can't see it as well in tumblr resize scale, so here's the original scan. But it is dotted all over the place, there's like a smudge line which goes through the whole bottom of the sheet, where the "Final Draft" stamp, character/episode number marking is, and through some of Gauss' headshots as well. You can also probably see some black on the edges, where the sheet comes to an end within my scanner.

The first bit of touchup I usually do is within my image viewer. I use FastStone Image Viewer to help organize and view everything. In there, I will adjust the brightness, contrast, and sometimes the gamma, to get the sheet background a bit lighter and the lines darker.

I just like the number 14. Is it always 14? No. But that's usually my baseline starting point. After that's saved, into the photo editing program of choice we go. I match my brush color to the background white and just paint over all those ugly dots and wipe those black edges away.

Zoom in at 100% to try not to miss those artifacts you don't notice zoomed out. Look at Gauss' speckled fingers. Ugh, cleaning that stuff up is hell. But I do it, so you all can see clean-ish looking art. Do I get everything? No. But I try to at least get the major issues out of the way.

Some things I take liberties on. The shading on his jacket goes outside the lineart. Should I leave it as is for authenticity? Probably. But if I'm cleaning it, I'm gonna clean it all. So you'll see in the finished version I posted, those shading lines are all inside the lineart only.

Some people are jerks and could easily resell these settei just by printing scans and claiming them as original. Another way I try to have a way to differentiate my edits without slapping a watermark on is my editing of the text boxes. See the top left and bottom right of it above Netto? There's almost always some overhang on the originals. I have usually taken the liberty of editing that overlap line off, so that the text box is a clean rectangle where the line stops at each corner, as close as I can take it. It's a dumb, but simple way for me to tell if it's my edit.

Otherwise, that's really it. Just a lot of added effort in touchup, honestly.

Cel scans are a little different, because most of them are too big for either scanner. Especially cels with backgrounds. So many of those involve 2-4 scans and then stitching them all together. Much less touchup that I do to them, but otherwise it's mostly the same. 600 DPI, and some brightness/contrast or slight color saturation adjustments to them, if needed.

And now you know!

[curiosity-killed]

📏, 📚 and 🐻

📏What’s your go-to canvas size? I pretty much always start with a 3000x4000 canvas at 350 dpi but often adjust to make it narrower (closer to 3:5 or sometimes, more rarely, 3:7). This does mean that my canvases get ginormous and too large to upload to tumblr or discord but then I just scale down to whatever makes the shortest side 3000 pixels again

📚How many layers do you typically use?

Haha ha oh no

For pieces like these it’s usually like 2-4 (bg is always separate, and then I sometimes do separate layers for each base color but also not always)

whereas pieces like this are usually between 30-70

in general, I try to consolidate and keep to as few layers as I can while reducing the risk of me getting 3 hours in and being like FUCK why did i merge those D:

HOWEVER this is (I'm pretty sure) my record for # of layers at 218 because the tiling effect in the background was made by duplicating a folder group 36 times 🤡

🐻Your go-to things to draw when you need comfort? ....y'know I didn't have an immediate response to this but I think it might just be Callebero suffering which is not a great sign since I often draw Callebero suffering :| in a more serious vein, I just don't draw as much when I'm upset. I'm more likely to write or run it out

🌼Artist Ask meme!🌼

[veebs-hates-video-games]

The actual next big post I need to write is about how great Fire Emblem Engage is and how Not Ok the Gamers have been about it, but for now it's time to complain about how disappointing Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze is.

I literally waited years to find a copy cheap enough I could justify picking it up, all the while seeing people go on and on about how good it is and how it's a shame it's been so many years since there was a new DK game. I finally managed to find it semi-affordable and grabbed it, ready to see what everyone had been talking about.

The short version is that it's extremely polished but also just not at all fun for me, at least up through the first main boss at the end of world 1, and I kinda suspect if I haven't gotten into yet it I'm not going to.

I guess I probably should've expected it. My history with the DKC games goes back to the original SNES one, and I've always thought they were only ok. I especially never understood why people thought the SNES games looked so amazing because they kinda looked like ass to me. The hardware just didn't have the power to display the pre-rendered sprites in a way that did them justice. I liked the art style enough in the promotional material and other places it showed up higher DPI and a decent color depth, but crushing everything down to fit in the SNES limitations just killed it for me. Thankfully newer games on modern hardware can actually handle it, so it looks perfectly fine even if it's not my first choice of aesthetics I'm into.

But more importantly I've never loved the way the DKC games feel to play. Something about the speed or momentum of the characters or something always feels slightly off to me, and that hasn't changed in this one. I'm not the biggest fan of the style of level design they use either, but it's fine I guess. I didn't get into any of the ones I played in this game enough to have any interest in going back and finding the collectibles I missed or other secret stuff though, which is not a good sign.

Also I just kind of find the general vibe of it kind of annoying? I think I like the Donkey Kong characters less after having played like an hour of this. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with them, but it just really doesn't click with me. Ironically one of the biggest complaints I've seen about Fire Emblem Engage is that too many/most/all of the characters are annoying, but I just happen to personally like the way those weirdos are annoying and not the way these weirdos are annoying, I guess.

Anyway, DK64 continues to be my favorite DK game, Beaver Bother and all, despite being the only 3D one and the least like the others (or maybe because of that), but also it's been over 20 years since I played it so who knows what I'd think now?

[glendover]

Ooo I totally get the lineart thing!!

The most important part I've noticed is line weight.

The easy version of this is when you line your work be mindful of where you want to place shadows later and thicken those lines either with pressure sensitivity but that's quite hard at first (I still struggle after so many years) so I typically just go over them again to thicken them up just a bit. Then parts you want to stand out should also be slightly thicker, along with possibly the outside of the person/ object you're drawing. Where lines meet, so for example where the neck meets the jawline I thicken the corner up slightly too towards the inside of the person.

It's hard to explain in words ah

Also be mindful of how many details you add, meaning, if you have to zoom in suuuuuper far an add a bunch of little things with a tiny brush things can end up a bit cluttered and in return make parts where there isn't that level of detail look flat and unfinished, so be sure to zoom out a lot or keep a little reference window (under canvas in settings for procreate i think)

Something that I do for personal art a lot too is just skip the lineart and simply clean up my sketch and essentially turn it into lineart!

Another tip is to make use of the liquify tool! It's my savior and one of my fav features tbh, especially with lineart.

The blurriness could just come down to how big your canvas is. I have a past in graphic design so I'm quite familiar with it but I totally understand how the technicalities could get confusing. I usually just stick to either a 3000 x 3000 px canvas or 3000×4000 px for personal sketches and somewhere around A4 or A3 for work related things and then export in either jpg or png. It's good that you're using 300 dpi though!

Sometimes different apps mess with it too, so depending on where you post/ transfer stuff that could be the reason for the blurriness.

With layers just stick to the basics at first, my layer sandwich normally looks like this:

Lineart

Shading on a clipping mask layer (with multiply on)

Flat colors

Sketch (normally hidden)

But the biggest tip I can give is to just have fun. In the end the art is for you and it should be a fun progress, everything else comes along eventually :>

- art anon

hey art anon,

sorry for the late reply I was studying 😭

Thank you for all the tips I will definitely try them out and see how they work. I haven’t drawn much recently (bc of the studying) but I think for now I will stick to just cleaning up my sketches and go from there. It’s all a lot to process honestly and I’m just giving myself some time to try things out and see how they work.

Eventually I will get better but I’m not pressure myself rn (and I can always go back to traditional drawing which I haven’t perfect either but at least I know how that works for me personally)

[svgoceandesigns1]

Zelda Korok I'm Too Tired 4 This SVG - Breath Of The Wild SVG PNG, Cricut File

Zelda Korok I'm Too Tired 4 This SVG, Breath Of The Wild SVG PNG EPS DXF PDF, Cricut File, Instant Download File, Cricut File Silhouette Art, Logo Design, Designs For Shirts. ♥ Welcome to SVG OCEAN DESIGNS Store! ♥ ► PLEASE NOTE: – Since this item is digital, no physical product will be sent to you. – Your files will be ready to download immediately after your purchase. Once payment has been completed, SVG Ocean Designs will send you an email letting you know your File is ready for Download. You may also check your Order/Purchase History on SVG Ocean Designs website and it should be available for download there as well. – Please make sure you have the right software required and knowledge to use this graphic before making your purchase. – Due to monitor differences and your printer settings, the actual colors of your printed product may vary slightly. – Due to the digital nature of this listing, there are “no refunds or exchanges”. – If you have a specific Design you would like made, just message me! I will be more than glad to create a Custom Oder for you. ► YOU RECEIVE: This listing includes a zip file with the following formats: – SVG File (check your software to confirm it is compatible with your machine): Includes wording in both white and black (SVG only). Other files are black wording. – PNG File: PNG High Resolution 300 dpi Clipart (transparent background – resize smaller and slightly larger without loss of quality). – DXF: high resolution, perfect for print and many more. – EPS: high resolution, perfect for print, Design and many more. ► USAGE: – Can be used with Cricut Design Space, Silhouette Cameo, Silhouette Studio, Adobe Illustrator, ...and any other software or machines that work with SVG/PNG files. Please make sure your machine and software are compatible before purchasing. – You can edit, resize and change colors in any vector or cutting software like Inkscape, Adobe illustrator, Cricut design space, etc. SVG cut files are perfect for all your DIY projects or handmade business Product. You can use them for T-shirts, scrapbooks, wall vinyls, stickers, invitations cards, web and more!!! Perfect for T-shirts, iron-ons, mugs, printables, card making, scrapbooking, etc. ►TERMS OF USE: – NO refunds on digital products. Please contact me if you experience any problems with the purchase. – Watermark and wood background won’t be shown in the downloaded files. – Please DO NOT resell, distribute, share, copy, or reproduce my designs. – Customer service and satisfaction is our top priority. If you have any questions before placing orders, please contact with us via email "support@svgoceandesigns.com". – New products and latest trends =>> Click Here . Thank you so much for visiting our store! SVG OCEAN DESIGNS Read the full article