#the rendering looks so different from the flats but I like both a lot

[lullabyashes]

Birthday gift for my super cool sister @concreteclouds of her equally cool water demon Eileen! <3

[morlock-holmes]

Okay, guys, after reading a post by @centrally-unplanned I just took that ACX "AI Turing Test" that Scott Alexander did, and I am screaming, as the kids used to say.

You guys are way, way overthinking this.

I thought I would do better than average, and I guess I did; excluding three pictures I had seen before, I got 31/46 correct.

Not great if you're taking the SAT, but I feel like if I could call a roulette spin correctly 2 times out of 3 I could clean up in Vegas.

So, what is the secret of my amazing, D+ performance?

You have to look at the use of color and composition as tools to draw the eye to points of interest.

AI is really bad at this, when left to its own devices.

For example, here:

Part of the reason to suspect that this is AI is the "AI house style" and the bad hands that I literally only noticed right this exact second as I was typing this sentence. Even if the hands were rendered correctly, I would still clock this as AI.

The focal point of this piece ought to be the face of the woman and the little dragon she is looking at (Just noticed the dragon's wings don't match up either), but take off your glasses or squint at this for a second:

Your eye is being drawn by the bright gold sparkles on the lower right side of the piece. That particular bright gold is only in that spot on the image, but there's no reason to look there, it's just an upper arm and an elbow. The bright light source highlighting the woman's horn separates it out as a point of interest.

Meanwhile, the weird aurora streaming out of the woman's face on the left side means that it is blending in with the background.

In other words, the way the image is composed, and the subject matter suggest that your eye should be drawn here:

But the use of color suggests that you should look here:

That's a senseless place to draw the eye towards! It would be a really weird mistake for a human to make! In fact, I think there's a strong argument that the really close cropped picture of the face of the character is a strong improvement. It's still not a particularly good composition, but at least the color contrast now draws the eye to the proper points.

In fact, I would say that a good reason for my performance not being even better was this alarming statement at the start of the test:

I've tried to crop some pictures of both types into unusual shapes, so it won't be as easy as "everything that's in DALL-E's default aspect ratio is AI".

Uh...

So how about this one:

This is a lot better anatomically and in terms of the use of color and light to draw the eye towards sensible parts of the painting. The lighting makes pretty good sense in terms of coming from a particular direction and it also draws the eye to effectively to the face and the outstretched hand of the figure.

It's also a really flat and meaningless composition and subject matter that no renaissance artist would have chosen. What is this angel doing, exactly? Our eye is drawn to the face and hand, and the figure is looking off towards the left side, at, uh, what exactly?

But then I thought, "Well, maybe Scott chopped out a giant chunk of the picture, and this is just a detail from, like, the lower right eighth of some giant painting with three other figures that makes total sense"

This makes sense as a piece of a larger human made artwork, but if you tell me, "Nope, that's the whole thing and this is the original, un-cropped picture" I'd go, "Oh, AI, obviously.

All of the ones I had trouble with were AI art with good composition and use of color, and human ones with bad composition and use of color. For example, this one:

This has three solid points of interest arranged in an interesting relationship with different colors to block them out. I'd say the biggest tells are that the astronauts' feet are out of frame, which is a weird choice, and looking closely now, the landscape and smoke immediately to the right of the ship don't really make sense.

But again; I had to think, "Maybe Scott just cropped it weird and they had feet in the original picture."

Here's another problem:

StableDiffusion being bad at composition is such a known problem that there are a variety of tools which a person can use to manually block out the composition. In fact, let me try something.

I popped open Krita (Which now has a StableDiffusion plugin) and after literally dozens of generations and a couple of different models I landed on ZavyChromaXL with the following prompt:

concept art of two astronauts walking towards a spaceship on an alien planet, with a giant moon in th background, artstation, classic scifi, book cover

And this was the best I could do:

Not great, but Krita has a tool that lets you break an image into regions which each have different prompts, so I quickly blocked something out:

Each of those color blobs has a different part of the prompt, so the green region has "futuristic astronauts" the blue is the spaceship, the orange is the moon, grey is the ground and pink is the sky, which gives us:

Still way too much, so we can use Krita's adaptive patch tool and AI object removal to get:

I'm not saying it's high art, or even any good, but it's better than the stuff I was getting from a pure prompt, because a human did the composition.

But it's still so dominated by AI processes that it's fair to call it "AI Art".

Which makes me wonder how many of the AI pictures I called out as human made because one of the traits I was looking for, good composition, was in fact, actually made by a human.

[kozachenko]

[Click image for better quality]

I FIGURED OUT A WAY TO FUCKING MAKE THE IMAGE SMALLER FOR POSTING ON TUMBLR WITHOUT SACRIFICING THE ACTUAL QUALITY OF THE IMAGE OH MY GOD

Ok so, what I did is go into the clip studio paint file, make a new file, copy and paste the group in the original file, merge everything, get rid of the extra stuff outside of the canvas, and then make the flattened image smaller and crop the canvas. Once you have that, export it and you're done. This helps maintain the actual quality of the image and also helps shrink the file size down to something actually postable (if anyone has a better way of doing this please tell me)

[Edit]: Ok I guess posting something to Tumblr just naturally compresses the image a bit more somehow because I'm looking at it now and zooming in too much makes it a bit blurry so I'm still gonna have to futz around with image quality for future pieces oof

Artist's Note:

I'm so glad I figured out a way to do this because I like working on a big canvas so I can get as much detail in as I possibly can. Only problems are how laggy it gets while drawing lol.

I had an idea for a drawing with Reimu and Zanmu because I really like thinking about their potential dynamic a lot. I also wanted an excuse to draw Zanmu again but in my normal rendering style because last time I drew her she was in my more sketchy style with generally flat colours so I wanted to draw her again. Speaking of, looking at the sketch for this is a jumpscare that I never enjoy seeing, like, man am I glad I didn't use those for my final piece.

Also about her spear. I was originally gonna make it like the ones she had in game, but it kinda threw off the whole piece. It was too big, too blue, and too flat, so I just went "fuck it" and gave her a different one instead. My headcanon justifying this is that the ones she uses in game are for danmaku battles whereas in any other fight she just uses a proper yari, or she still uses the yari and just makes it all glowy to power it up, maybe both lol. I pulled as much inspiration as I could from Sengoku era spears, and even put in some blue into the decorative part of the spear and also added a little skull to pay tribute to the original spear. Also, in my research I saw some art of izanami and izanagi making japan and saw that the yari izanagi has had a little decorative tassley thingy on it so I took some inspo from that and just made it one of Zanmu's tassles (Idk when that art was from or if the spear was still accurate to Sengoku period Japan but hey, probably the same reasons Eirin puts little bow ties on her arrows, it's just for personalization purposes).

I love rendering hair and clothes so much omg, while I like the super curly hair Zanmu, the longer, wavier hair suits her better for this drawing (I imagine it only does that like how Ghibli characters hair moves when they feel angry lol). I love making Zanmu's hair all messy and crazy, as well as giving her grey hairs, this woman has aged like a fine wine. Also, if the hem on the ends of her sleeves, top of her shirt, and her pants look like gold to you, that's because it is! It's fairly light so she's not collapsing under the weight, but it's gold! (I don't care how impractical it is, it's just cool). Not the undershirt though, it's made of a gold fabric. I had a cute idea with Reimu's hair to make it have a red shine to it. I also changed up Reimu's outfit so it isn't just a blob of red. I like it a lot when Reimu's skirt and outfit is segmented into different layers, so I wanted to incorporate that.

I tried to draw their hands differently as well, but IDK how noticeable that is. Also, I am super happy with how the side profiles for the two of them turned out, I used to struggle a lot with how to make the side profile of a character actually look like the character, so I'm really happy that they actually look like themselves.

Also added in the tree and rocks in the background as an homage to Zanmu's character art in Touhou 19, just because I was getting kinda stumped on what to do with the background lol.

In terms of a story idea with Reimu and Zanmu, idk why but the potential plotline of Zanmu wanting to ascend to godhood is so fascinating to me. Like, it is very possible that if she just convinced everyone she was a god (which would be very easy for her to do), she would become one in a heartbeat. Also, if she were to become a god, with her ability to return stuff to nothing, could she hypothetically get similar abilities to (Jojo Part 5 spoiler btw) GER? Like, idk about the death timeloop stuff, but the concept has been haunting me every night as I have been trying to find loopholes in GER's ability for a while now ( for no reason in particular). Back to the main topic, I imagine that she would probably tell Reimu that if she were to become a god she would take over the Hakurei shrine since the god there might as well be dead, and Reimu just says to her, "Over my dead body bitch." Like, I have no idea how to summarize their dynamic but like, it's the type of hero-villain dynamic where the phrase "We're not so different, you and I" would definitely be a phrase said during a fight. I think that if another IN style game were to release, Reimu and Zanmu would be in a team together. They could also have an interesting mentor and pupil kind of dynamic. Can you tell that Zanmu has been charging my mind rent these part few months? Like, instead of living in my head rent free, she kinda just uno reversed the whole situation and now she's the one charging me rent. What happens if I get evicted from my own brain? Actually, scratch that, I don't think I wanna know.

[pleucas]

i got a few asks about my process :0 so yea i took some screenshots mid-process of my recent cliff-skk thing just for that

m gonna preface everything by saying that i did have a ref for the environment!! i avoid color dropping from the image and tracing cuz i do want to hone some digital skills. also saying i'm doing an "environment study" when i'm really just drawing skk makes me feel better abt myself

when i don't have a reference, i tend to do some thumbnail sketches in my sketchbook. here's some random stuff of past work, where i rawdogged everything:

but whatever, back to the cliff-skk. i'll also post a timelapse of it for easy ref, but detailed stuff is under the cut :)

first i did some rough sketches on an orangeish background (underpainting etiquette, i find it helps things feel brighter and keep a stable tone when choosing colors to lay on top), and I quickly lined skk :)

then I laid down some flats for the background, again really eyeballing the reference for hues. afterwards i thought it was a bit bright, and i wanted a more sepia/nostalgia feel to it, so i hue adjusted everything to something more uniform

then i lay down flats for skk + the ocean, which i both had to color adjust a lot (you might see that in the timelapse), and then i jump straight into rendering the background. when i render, i always prefer to do it over something lineless, so i turn the sketch layer off. i rarely do lineart for backgrounds.

i also used to render the characters first, but i've found that it's just not a great approach—especially for art where characters and background are interacting, knowing the hues and shades of the environment is crucial to effective rendering on the character that doesn't make them look out of place.

when i'm rendering, i really try to keep in mind tenants of contrast, perspective, form, and light/shadow. ex, stuff "closer" to us has more detail; the hill in the back is minimalist (in comparison); the shadows lean cool-green while the light leans gray-yellow. rake brushes really carried me here idk... my fav brushstyle forever

eventually i reach a point where i'm satisfied (or bored) with the background. for the last stages i usually have the subjects hidden so i can really perfect the details—but then for super duper final details, like the little leaf specks and grass strands, i unhid skk so the poppy details could work around skk. then i get to rendering the characters :)

i forgot to take ss of all the stages when i rendered skk, but here's something from... about the middle of the process? i tend to render characters with the lineart hidden as well, sometimes bringing it back just to clarify things, but ultimately i prefer to define things by form than by line. that's just me tho idk, idt it makes or breaks anything, just a preference

again rlly just thinking about cool/warm, reflective tones (the greenish shadow on chuuya's left inner leg, sky-gray blue on dazai's vest), really just slotting the subject into the environment. after i finish rendering the characters, i usually return to the background and add some stuff—in this one i defined the waves a bit and put some grass around skk

and yeah then we're done idk LOL. sometimes i run the file through camera raw (photoshop) to do some color adjustments—i find that my iPad displays colors super differently, usually making things a lot lighter than they are (u can see how dark the timelapse is...), so i find myself lightening my work a lot. i also sharpen and add noise as needed :)

i think my process has changed a lotttt even in this past year. it's kinda crazy!! it's always fun to do these and just reflect a bit on how i work. mostly just mindless insanity until it kinda works.

thanks for sending in an ask. and if u read all that, thanks to u too lolol

[breakfastatmiles]

Your art is wonderful!!!

A constant inspiration to my own creativity and art work. Could you explain some of your art style to me? I’m interested in looking at a bunch of different ones to try and finally find one for me.

Goodnight!!🌙

Thank you so much! That means the world to me! I’d be happy to share some of my process with you 😄

Keep in mind I’m completely self-taught, so this is just the process of how I make my drawings and not any sort of professional advice 😅 apologies for the long post ahead 😪

Starting with the basics, my biggest influences are Jin Kim and Ami Thompson. Both are amazing character designers and I really admire their stylization and expressions. Whenever I feel stuck on something, I always go back to their drawings for inspiration.

I typically start in Procreate with a canvas size of 3300px x 4200px or 11” x 14” with a DPI of 300.

I put my reference in the corner of the canvas (in this case it’s a screenshot from the movie She’s the Man) and I start my rough sketch (emphasis on rough). Sketching is probably the longest part in my drawing process because I’m focusing on expression, composition, proportions, etc. This usually has about two to three passes before I move on.

Then I lower the opacity of the sketch and clean it up with some lineart on a new layer. Lineart doesn’t play a huge part in my style, but I still like to play around with line weight. Since I knew this was going to be a fully rendered piece, I didn’t spend much time on lines that I knew were going to be removed later in the process.

Underneath all of that, I use the skin tone and color the base of the character. I make sure that I color ever so slightly past the lineart, for reasons that will be important later. This part can be tedious, especially because I use a textured brush, so there are a lot of gaps that I fill in later.

Then using new layers with clipping masks, I start the flat colors. Nothing too crazy here.

I’ve made color palettes for characters and backgrounds that I typically draw, so this way it speeds up the process and maintains style consistency. If I need a color that I don’t normally use, I’ll just play around with the colors until I find something that fits well with everything else.

Next, on a multiply layer, I add some basic shading (with the skin tone color) and blush (with an orange-pink color). I also move onto the background. Some are more complex than others. If I’m going for a more cinematic look, I’ll fill the background in with some basic shapes and blur it slightly. Thankfully the background was pretty simple in this reference.

I start checking proportions now that everything has basic colors. Then I duplicate my lineart layer and change it to a pinkish-red and put it on multiply mode and turn down the opacity. This is why the base color layer needs to line up with the lineart, otherwise there’d just be gaps underneath. Instead of erasing my black lineart layer, I put a mask on it and just keep the eyes and eyebrows.

Then I start working on the shading and hair, which is an entire process in itself. Maybe I’ll make a tutorial on that one day 😅

I also use some vivid light and soft light layers and put in some subtle colors for extra pizzazz.



Then I add a hard light layer to the eyes for that glossy look and on a normal layer add some white details just to make some things pop more (like the nose, lips, eyes, sometimes hair, etc.)

I did make an eye tutorial a while back, but my process is still the same!

Lastly, I spend a lot of time playing with different blending modes (multiply, add, soft light, vivid light layers) and really focus on the lighting. I used to focus on adding a lot more details and make the coloring more realistic, but I found that the more simplistic coloring was easier for me to do and fit my style better. Sometimes I still tend to go too far with the details and realize that it looks better when I tone it down a bit.

That’s pretty much it! Let me know if you have any questions! Hope this helps. Have fun making art!

[tsukimefuku]

in my shoes ❖ nanami kento

summary: you get severely injured while on one of your first missions with nanami.

wc: 1.1K

tags: jujutsu kaisen, light Nanami x oc/reader, angst, some fluff if you squint, mentions of injure.

notes, etc: just a little drabble i thought about to help me write "toxic endeavors". wound up bigger than expected (and in the collection).

❖ collection of stories: "jujutsu partners au" → masterlist for fics listed in chronological order of events

Why would she ever do this, was all that Nanami could think when he brought you in for Shoko. Your entire body was in disarray, broken bones sprinkled across from head to toe, and his usually neat blue shirt was completely covered in blood — your blood.

Shoko's eyes widened as she saw Nanami carrying you inside, and she pointed at a gurney while asking for an explanation with her glance.

"We were jumped by two different curses we weren't expecting, and she took the hit in my place" was the answer he mustered to say as he laid your unconscious body for Shoko to work her magic.

She hovered her hands on top of you, and Nanami sat back, removing his glasses and pinching the bridge of his nose painfully.

"What's her prognosis?"

"I don't know, Nanami" Shoko replied, already applying RCT on your most critical wounds, both internal and external. "But she can RCT herself, so I figure I just have to do enough for her to wake up, then she can RCT herself too."

Nanami wasn't sure as to what felt worse in this whole situation.

You revealed yourself as a fine colleague, on top of being a good company when you weren't hellbent on your antics at him. The few missions he had gone on by your side were pleasant and allowed the both of you to finish work earlier. Losing a colleague — even one he had barely been working with for two months or so — usually wouldn't hit him that hard. However, not only were you under his guidance, rendering him directly responsible for your wellbeing in the field, he also carried a lot of guilt regarding you, specifically, due to past failures.

It felt like it would be the last nail in the coffin for you to die because of his inability to help you once again.

***

You had been unconscious for about four hours, and Nanami still sat inside that room, staring at you, waiting for any kind of movement or sign you were about to wake up. Frustrating all of his expectations, your body laid flat and unmoving on the gurney, even after Shoko healed you to the extent her RCT could.

"You know, staring won't make her heal any faster" Shoko said, while she leaned against the wall. "She's stable. You can leave, I'll let you know when she wakes up."

He sighed, and remained still, right where he had been sitting ever since he brought you in.

"Soooo, what happened?" Gojo said, coming inside the room unceremoniously. It took one look at you for him to go, "oh. Shit."

Oh shit, indeed, Nanami thought to himself.

"She's stable, we're just waiting for her to wake up" Shoko replied.

"I don't understand why she ever thought that doing this was a good idea" Nanami sighed, pulsing headache around his temples. Nearly every muscle in his body was clearly tense, and Shoko took note of that.

"You really are concerned about her" she said, and it wasn't a question.

Nanami diverted his gaze to face her for a moment, before looking back at you.

"I was given the rare chance to right an old wrong, and it seems I've failed once again. That's all there is to it" he answered.

"She'll be fine. She always finds a way" Gojo replied, hands in his pocket, more relaxed than everyone else in the room. That slightly rubbed Nanami the wrong way, and he became annoyed.

"There is no 'finding a way' in breaking nearly every bone in your body, along with massive internal injuries."

"That is not what I meant," Gojo retorted, pulling his phone from his pocket to casually check on his texts.

"Then, what did you mean?" Nanami asked, irritated.

"What I meant was that if she chose to do this, then she probably had a good reasoning to do so. She's not irresponsible or reckless, much to the contrary," he answered, putting the phone away.

Nanami sighed. Even a broken clock can be right twice a day, and so was Gojo when he said this. You were many things, but reckless was not one of them.

"Hm... What is..."

Nanami got up immediately at the sound of your voice and walked towards your gurney, resting a hand on its side.

Your eyes opened slowly, and you awoke to the sight of a giant blond man looking at you, his impassive chiseled face slightly torn with worry.

You braced yourself for the chastising to come, as you slowly remembered what happened and began to RCT yourself. Every nook and cranny of your body pulsed with pain, and even breathing was a labor-intensive task, diminishing by the second with your own healing.

"Why would you take the hit in my place? That was incredibly irresponsible and put us both in a dire position" Nanami chided, not noticing how hard he was pressing his fingers around the gurney's side support. 

Mindlessly, you put your hand over Nanami's, sending pins and needles all over your arm. Bad idea.

You thought you saw him glancing rapidly at both your hands before you began to answer, as his hand softly relaxed under your touch.

"Because healing someone else is only about 40% as effective as healing oneself" you began, "and I knew I couldn't tank both curses in your place if you got injured or knocked out."

You took a moment to breathe before continuing, but just as his hand did, his gaze had softened too. 

"I figured that, by taking the hit, you'd be unscathed and able to exorcise both curses, then bring me to Shoko. I began RCT as soon as I got hit, just in case I passed out, and knew that after Shoko woke me up, I'd be able to heal myself properly."

Gojo let out a small chuckle.

"We need to be strategic, right?" You asked, looking directly at Gojo.

"See? I told you," he said, looking at Nanami.

Nanami, on the other hand, was at a loss for words. Your reasoning did make perfect sense, and he wondered.

"If you were in my shoes, what would you have done?" You inquired, hissing slightly at a sudden shooting ache throughout your body.

He sighed and closed his eyes, nodding. "I would've done the same."

You mustered some strength to smile.

"I'm glad you acknowledged it."

"That doesn't mean, however, that you shouldn't be more careful or consider other better options when a similar situation arises again," Nanami replied.

You scoffed. "I will make no such promise, but I will try to be more careful. Does that sound good enough?"

"Not so..." Nanami began speaking, and you twisted your face at him. He sighed. "Fine. Good enough for now."

You smiled at him, winking.

"Thank you. I promise to try to do better next time this happens."

You didn't.

[redslug]

Denoiser wisdom

Since a lot of people showed interest in my workflow of using SD like a renderer for existing sketches, I'll be sharing the little tricks I find while exploring the capabilities of SD with Neuroslug. Read the inpainting post to understand this one. When inpainting, the model takes into consideration what is already in the area it regenerates and in the areas around it. How exactly it'll follow these guidelines is determined by denoising strength. At low values it'll stick closely to the areas of color it sees and won't create anything radically different from the base. At high denoising strength it'll gladly insert colors, shapes and silhouettes that weren't there originally. Basically the more you trust your sketch the smaller your denoising strength should be. It doesn't mean you won't need the high denoising at some point. Let me explain it using yesterday's artwork. It all starts with a rough sketch.

Since I have a particular composition in mind and want it to be maintained, I'll be using a low denoising strength to fully regenerate this image.

It means that the algorithm won't have enough freedom to fix my large-scale mistakes, it's simply not allowed to change the areas of color too dramatically. So if you want to do this yourself make sure to set the image to black and white first and check that your values are working and contrast is good.

To make sure the result isn't too cartoony and flat I used brushes with strong color jitter and threw a rather aggressive noise texture over the whole thing. This'll give the denoiser a little wiggle room to sprout details out of thin air.

It kept the composition, the suggested lighting and the majority of flowers kept their intended colors too. This was denoising strength 0f 0.4. To contrast that, same base image with denoising at 0.7:

It's pretty, but it's neither the style nor composition I wanted. Let's refine the newly redrawn base to include the details that were lost in transition. These were intended to be roses.

It's here where I learned a little trick. You can mix and match different models to achieve the look you desire. Neuroslug is good at detailed moths and painterly environments. It's not good at spitting out really detailed flowers, they end up looking very impressionist which is not what I want in foreground. So, I switched to an anime focused model and let it run wild on this bush with high (0.7) denoising strength.

Nice definition, but it looks too smooth and isn't in line with what I want. Switching back to Neuroslug with denoising at 0.5 and letting it work over these roses.

This way, I get both the silhouette and contrast of the anime model (counterfeitV30) and the matching style of Neuroslug. It's also useful in cases where the model doesn't know a particular flower. You can generate an abstract flower cluster with the anime model and use the base model to remind the AI that what you want is in fact a phlox specifically. So I did this to basically every flower cluster on the image to arrive at this:

It's still a bit of a mess but it has taken me about 80% of the way there, the rest I'll be fixing up myself.

My "Lazy Foliage" brush set was really helpful for this. I'll release that one once it accumulates enough brushes to be really versatile. Now we block in the character.

Yes, I left the hands wonky since I intend to be drawing them manually later, same about the foot. There's so much opportunity for the AI to mess them up that I'd rather have all the control on these details.

When it renders the face it can really mess up everything, so I do it with low (0.45) denoising strength to discourage new eyes popping up in inappropriate places. Take note that I kept the antennae out of the mask. AI is easily confused when one subject overlaps the other.

Good, good. Wait. Why are your eyes hairy? Now, mask out the eyes, remove all mention of fur from the prompt and

That's about right. Since the eyes are all one color block I can afford to raise the denoising strength for more wild results. Same for areas of just fluff on the entire body, it's all one texture and having the denoiser at 0.6-0.75 is beneficial because it's going to add locks, stray hairs and other fluffy goodness. Just make sure to not make the mask too tight to the silhouette, it needs some space to add hairs sticking out.

With the skirt it was back to really low denoising. The folds I blocked in make sense with the position oh her legs under it, so I didn't want it to be lost.

Lastly, I drew in a flower that she's planting and ran over it with moderately high denoising to make it match the surrounding style. Ignore the biblically accurate roots there, I'll fix them by hand.

One last pass over the whole thing in Procreate. I draw the hands and add details such as the round pseudopupils, face ridges and wing markings to keep the character consistent with the previous image of her. And a bit of focal blur for a feeling of depth. Phew, even with generous use of AI this whole thing took an entire day of work. In the end what determines quality isn't the tool you use but the attention you choose to pay to finding inconsistencies and fixing them.

[bl4z33467]

(Cracks knuckles) Alright folks I remember how to draw

Fat fuck Vulpes by yours truly, Blaze Lander. Inspired by the lovely drawing by @yourmateyoya ,egged on by @legions-top-dog , and because i force you to deal with all my shitty drawings, @noomycatz

Yes, once again, i have put too much effort into a shitpost. Roughly 2 hours as I reused a canvas on ibis paint for a 5th drawing lmao

Yall can burn me at the stake later lol

Process below hehe i like to ramble

And just because i like to talk about my drawing process for characters with complex outfits, this is how my lobotomy brain does it:

First i do silly fun colored sketch. I use different colors to differentiate the "skeleton" from the, euh, fleshy bits, and the clothing. You can see lots of lines that would not be shown in the final product so it makes it confusing to look at.

Next i do a clean sketch.

This is where i clean up everything before doing the final lines. I use one color and a thin brush to make it easier to line over. Here i add any extra bits (like the top football armour) and "render the physics" as i call it, so properly drape cloth and the uhhh squish of stupid fat fuck vulpes' boobs and stomach. I also will balance the drawing here by flipping it and redrawing or using the drag tool.

Next is lining.

For this drawing, i used a 9.0 digital pen with a taper. Its my standard :þ. I kept my pen at the same size for this piece. Sometimes i line the outside darker to make the drawing stand out more. I decided not to as i wanted to give the drawing a more "serious" tone. (How serious can this be though lol-)You may notice on the arms little bits of the lines are missing, thats because i gave him some arm hair. I like make little details like that show over the lines. But since the one shading technique i used works with clipping masks, i had to but the arm hairs on a layer lower than the line art. Next is colour:

I colour in the drawing with midtones. Simple as. I tried to stick with warm colours besides his eyes, which are grey blue. Idc if they arent, im too lazy to google it. I mostly use flat colors but i did make his shirt a gradient. Next is do simple cell shading:

Depending on how i feel i shade with or without the colours in the back. I went with a sorta "non decrepit" light source here. Didnt want too much intensity. I used a deep marronish orange on a multiply layer on 45% opacity. Soft shading/lighting next:

I get intense with the soft shading. I use the airbrush with a deep maroon to add dark gradient and airbrush with a light pink to add a bit more depth. I usually use less light and more dark because im evil i like the intensity. I keep the layer the same amount of opacity and multiply it with the darks and soft light for the lights. Next are the shine highlights:

I use the dip pen hard with a taper to add light highlights of white on shiny bits like metal and eyes. I uses pure white, set the layer to 25% opacity, and use normal blending.

I also shade the lines because it makes the lines softer. I use a clipping layer on the line art, set the whole thing to a dark grey, and airbrush in darker and lighter parts. (I felt like a picture wasnt needed cuz its hard to notice.

For the background, i used a dark red i stole from the cell shaded layer, drew a vine pattern with the kaleidoscope ruler, and added a vignette. Vignettes are my cheat code for background hehe~ it makes the subject stand out while keeping suave, seriousness and formality. To make a subject pop out more, put the vignette behind the character but in front of the background. For more intensity but it on top of both.

Also- I usually draw with a level 10 stabilizer (i got shaky hands) but i drew with a 2 stabilizer so im surprised it came out so smoothly-

Also i gave him goggle tan lines because if i have to have them from playing tennis with sunnies, so does he.

[genericpuff]

Absolutely love the rendition to the panel of Hades holding Persephone. Lovely to see it rendered as a more mutual act with Perse holding onto Hades instead of just letting Hades hold her, and ofc seeing Persephone actually look like an adult woman. (Not to even mention the colors and rendering because whoaa those were lovely)

And I have a question about this new rendition if I’m allowed to make it! The original had very dramatic and sharp composition with the angles and being off centered which conveyed much of the emotions and style that made early LO very striking. In adapting it, was it a conscious choice to change the composition or what were the deciding factors that made you and banshriek decide centering Perse and Hades worked better in this situation? :0

Ahhh thank you ;w; It took a few rounds of sketching to get the pose just right, the flats thankfully weren't as difficult as I was worried they'd be, but the challenge was definitely in trying to get the pose right while maintaining the height difference that's there.

As for your question, a lot of the posing and sketch composition is something I do, and then Banshriek typically goes wild with the backgrounds while making adjustments to those compositions if necessary, often times I leave the backgrounds up to their discretion as they're 10x more skilled at that sort of thing than I am and they often bring new perspectives to the table. This means that it often ends up being a game of give and take between what we contribute, sometimes I'll have sketches that they feel need to be adjusted, other times I'll have to add little tweaks to their backgrounds if it's missing something. We're both working off a base rough sketch, but we both get to contribute to the final scene in our own ways; splitting it between background and character flats has been a happy middle that's worked well for us :)

Depending on the scene, sketches can range from minimal to more detailed. Here's the original base sketch for that scene:

So originally there was a larger tree working over the side but I didn't really know how detailed we wanted to be in the actual full background, much of it depended on how complex Banshriek wanted to get. You can also tell that Persephone's face was originally buried into Hades' chest in the original panel, which I originally flatted in, but then wound up changing because I wanted her eyes to be visible to reflect both of their expressions of relief at the same time.

That said, with the pose changing from what it was in the original (from Persephone almost laying on Hades vs. him holding her and lifting her up) the composition had to change with it so I decided to just make them a bit more centered, that way the focus would be fully on them and the balance of the scene wouldn't feel "off" due to the pose change. I tend to follow the Rule of 3 here !

So yeah! That's pretty much why centering it felt a little better in this case. Though part me of does wish I was able to keep the original pose, when breaking that scene down into its bones I found it had to take a lot of liberties with its anatomy and proportions, as many LO scenes do. You can't really tell just on a surface level but Persephone's head is huge and the rest of her body is tiny (her hips literally come up to Hades' sternum and her feet meet at his knees). With the character design changes made in Rekindled to make Persephone a little less tiny and more consistent in her body type (while still maintaining the size difference between them) and to reflect their character arcs at this point (as I'm not rushing them into intimacy quite like the original comic did) certain things have to change to balance it out and accommodate. If you're a math person, think of it like solving algebra equations - what you do to one side of the equation needs to be reflected and adjusted on the other side.

And of course Banshriek did a lot more to really exemplify the mood shift in the almost labrynth-like forest Persephone grew within Tower 4. There are still trees and plant life everywhere, but instead of feeling like an endless maze with its tones of deep red that we saw Hades navigate, it now feels like a soft and gentle meeting point for the two. Like the original scene, the color change is used to change the mood of the scene and reflect the calmness of Hades and Persephone as they've found one another.

At the end of the day we did what we ultimately thought would work best for the way Rekindled is drawn, giving both Banshriek and I the freedom to fully utilize our respective skillsets. That way we were able to pay tribute to that original scene while also creating something new out of it <3

That said, I'm sure @banshriek can also chime in with their own design notes on this episode, if they have a minute to spare! I'm sure they'll have lots to say about the fun they had working with those new brushesヽ(・∀・)ﾉ

[foolsocracy]

i wanna know how you learned how to render, it's so yum 😞💔

thank you!!! I'm glad u like it. I can try my best to explain my process but its very much a 'feel it with my heart' experience. This is gonna be long and incomprehensible but I'm gonna try:

If we're talking about the (above) garth & baby arthur jr pic or the bloody pete pic, I'd say i started to actually render like that in maybe high school art class (they were much worse then ofc because i have years more practice now)? Obviously my process now is different than it was back then, but before I actually started physically painting canvases with acrylics I usually just did line art and color without the blending-painting pizzazz.

Thats actually where I get my weird random interspersed colors in my coloring as well. Acrylics dry super fast and a high school art class is like 45 minutes so I'd have to totally mix a new pallet the next day. Not that I couldn't color match, but its annoying and having variations with colors or just mixing something up to fill in gaps looks neat if you get it right. If it looks bad just paint over it, but its worth it to try.

My process with these is almost exactly like my non painterly rendered ones, just with steps after. Also, you can get away with a lot when not fully rendering, but when i do render PHOTO REFERENCE is to die for. Specifically for the lighting. I can't emphasize this enough. By the time i'm done with a drawing my search history should be like "knees. Knees sitting. Knee anatomy. Harsh light photography. Curly hair. baby. J. C. Leyendecker new year baby" + 8 pictures of u doing whatever pose you're trying to do.

Anyway, the process for me is usually: vague sketch > carve out the lines/neater sketch > flat colors > basic shading/rendering > color adjusting sketch lines (usually from black to dark red) > collapse everything into one layer & get to WORK

I know the 1 layer thing is scary, but thats life. Its easiest to adjust things that way (for me). No need to worry about layers and blending modes cause its all right there. I usually duplicate the layer the drawing is in before I start on something crazy just to reassure myself that if I fuck it up I can go back. So a lot of the time my layers in procreate are progressively more rendered stages of the piece lol.

Now that Im here trying to explain this im blanking on how to actually express it. Lets see. I can run through some general stuff:

For both of those artworks (baby & pete) they're 100% made with HB pencil on procreate (a default brush! I've never downloaded any new brushes cause im lazy). I actually made a brush explanation for someone a few months ago I can put that right here:

hopefully those are readable. sometimes tumblr flops lmk if my writing is illegible

the eraser tool is your BEST FRIEND!!!! The way I get my lines and shapes and whatnot is by making big ass strokes and then erasing until whatever I'm looking for reveals itself. Here's a video of that process from the aquababy pic. Ignore the jerky pauses lol. also there's the reference photo!:

rendering itself is really hard to describe. Basically just throw color at it until it works out. (just tried to add a video but tumblr says only 1 video allowed

I hope this is helpful somehow! Just threw a ton of stuff at you. If you want anything more or the actual video or smth just let me know!

[megamagimugi]

Hey there, my friend! I saw you reblogging an artist ask game, so please allow me to make you a few questions 🥰

How about 2, 12 (I'm interested if you're willing to share!), 15 and 25? 💖

Sure thing, my friend!

Based on this:

2. How long have you been drawing?

Short answer: for as long as I can remember.

Long answer: I drew a lot as a kid (fun fact: I used to make quick uncolored pencil drawings to tell stories, kinda like storyboards; I would do it for hours and use so much paper that my parents eventually told me to draw on both sides😅). The fact that my older sister was very good at drawing - and I was very competitive - also motivated me to work hard and try to get as good as her. Then I drew less often in high school and in my first college since I had less time and was focused on schoolwork, and then started doing it more often again as I now study graphic design and would like to maybe become an animator if possible - the dream job of my childhood that I gave up on too early. When it comes to digital art specifically... I got my tablet, the very same one I use to this day (Wacom Intuos 4), for Christmas when I was about 15 or 16. Because it was so hard for me to learn how to draw digitally, and like I said I soon started spending less time drawing in general, sometimes I didn't use my tablet for long periods of time. That, of course, eventually changed into using it nearly every day.

12. Is it okay for people to ask you about your process?

Yes, it's okie dokie to ask!

...Or did you mean you wanted to know right now?

In which case, well, it depends on the medium and the specific piece since I don't always do my art the same way. Generally in digital art, for the characters I like to do a rough sketch first, then either a cleaner sketch or lineart (I rarely bother to do both, even in animation - unless my initial rough animation is like... really rough and basic, just to get the feel of the motion). Then I do flat colors, often on separate layers, and then shade/render each part. Or I do the whole character minus the sketch on one layer, it really depends. For example, I did Mario and Luigi both on one layer in my Brothership repaint/wallpaper, other that the yellow glow on their hands. For backgrounds... it really depends, but I usually build them up layer after layer, from general shapes to details, like a normal painting. Of course, I use some sort of sketch for most of them too, unless I don't need it because the BG is very simple or abstract. If I don't want my sketch to be visible, I basically just remove it and refine the parts that look bad without it, sometimes adding some brush strokes imitating lineart in some places. Happens to both characters and backgrounds. I use different brushes to create different effects, but in the majority of my works I've been sharing on here, I only really use a hard round pressure opacity brush for both the final sketch and rendering.

15. How long does an average piece take you to complete?

This one is always tricky to answer (yes, I've been asked this before by some classmates). Uh, several hours? It's really hard to tell exactly simply because I rarely just sit down and complete a whole piece in one go. Unless it's just a simple sketch/doodle. So in reality my average pieces often take me a few days.

25. Do you like to draw in silence, or with music?

There's one piece of advice in Richard Williams' fantastic book The Animator's Survival Kit that I don't think I'll ever be able to heed. It's this one:

Sorry but no, I do almost everything with music. It makes things more enjoyable and ironically makes it easier to focus in the long run. So, definitely drawing with music💯😁

Thank you so much for the ask, @silenzahra!😊

[budderdomo]

My Paint Tool Sai Brushes/Painting Process Tutorial!

Explanations and Examples down below

Disclaimer: long post

Hello! I wanted to first thank everyone for liking/reblogging my most recent art piece (the Darkiplier one) It has become my first post with over 1000 notes which is just insane for me. I just wanted to do something to thank you guys for that.

Anyway, this post will be divided like this, so scroll to the title if you want specific things

Introduction

Brush textures/shapes for download

Overall process -> Terms and Definitions

How I use each brush (+ examples) -> Sketch -> Lineart (only do this sometimes) -> Rendering -> Textures + Post Processing

Conclusion

Introduction

This post is mainly for me in the future to look back on how my painting process was. My process changes ALL the time, sometimes I use lineart, sometimes I paint, sometimes I don't use textures, sometimes I have 100 layers, sometimes I have 1. It just changes depending on the piece. There is no "correct" way to do art. Do what you want!

Second of all, I feel I should point out you don't need fancy brushes or many brushes to make good art. I painted this piece with 1 brush.

That's right, 1 brush (it was the P A I N T brush shown in main). I didn't have a sketch, I didn't have any lines, I started with big shapes and went from there.

Third of all, I use Paint Tool SAI (the first one). So this will be specific to that program. I'm sorry, it's just what I know how to use.

Brush Textures/Shapes

You may see in my brushes that there are textures/shapes that don't come with the standard SAI program. I tried to find the links for you to download them yourself.

Arrow: https://www.deviantart.com/digikat04/art/Custom-SAI-Brush-I-265506547

All texture brushes: https://painttoolsaibrushes.splstc.com/painttool-sai-textures/

For some reason I can't find where I got marble pt. 2 or chalk so here's the png files. (You can convert them to .bmp files) (Hopefully that works!)

Chalk : Marble pt. 2

Overall Process

Before I go over my process I'm going to define some terms I'll be using and what I mean by them:

Flats - base colors

Rendering - Includes shading, lighting, small details, and texturing to define a form

Blending - mixing two separate colors together

Reduction - Once you've made a line/shape, reduction is the act of erasing part of it -> At the bottom of my brushes (in the images up above) you can see a checkered box which makes your brush transparent. I use the erasing brush to Reduce the red circle.

Persistence - How well the brush can create a new shape/color on top of pre-existing colors (If the brush blends a lot on top of other colors it has low persistence)

"Hard" vs "Soft" brushes - How well defined an edge is on a brush

Stabilizer - Turns trembly lines into smooth lines

So, I draw a different way each time. My canvas size is normally between 2500 pixels and 4000. I usually do around 3000 though. In general for my paintings I usually do

A sketch

Flats

Hue Shifts

Lighting/Shadows

Brighter Light/Deeper Shadows (Highlights/Ambient Occlusion)

Smaller Details

Texturing

Post Processing

For my bigger compositions, I make thumbnails. And for my "comic book" style I use lineart and layer modes (like multiply, luminosity)

How I Use Each Brush (+ Examples!)

Sketch

I have 2 sketch brushes. "pencil" and "sketch" For most of my life I have been using the default pencil brush on size 1. But recently I have been using this softer "sketch" brush on size ~20 or so. Either way works, but I find that the "pencil" brush is easier for linework and the "sketch" brush is easier to blend into paintings

"Pencil" : "Sketch" examples

Lineart (opt.)

Nowadays I don't use lineart that often, but if I do it's with my "Softlines" brush. It's great for both very thick and very thin lines. I lower the opacity of my sketch and put lineart on a new layer on top of it

"Softlines" brush examples

Flats

With lineart I seperate each new color with a new layer. For painting I'm now using one color as an underpainting color and working on top of that layer. So I render one thing at a time while working on the same layer.

I lower the opacity of the sketch and create a new layer under my sketch. I use my "pencil" brush to lay out the underpainting color and "blur" for hue shifts. And then I reduce it to the silhouette using my "sketch" brush (This gives a softer outline)

Rendering

This would take way too long to explain every step of how I do it. So I'll explain how I use my brushes in this step.

"Arrow!!!" - I use this brush for laying out intial shapes, big areas of color, shading, lighting. The arrow shape has a point on the end that's really great for triangular shapes. It's not very good at small details because of the texture applied to it.

"Sketch" - I use this brush during the rendering as well. It's great for small details that you want a softer look of. It has a high persistence so it's great for working on the same layer.

"P A I N T" - This is a brush that's good at very many things. It has higher blending than "sketch" or "Arrow!!!" and it's shape is square. Great for blending, general painting, small details, reduction, etc.

"blur" - great for gradients or to smooth something out a lot

"Gaussian" - is a gaussian blur. Great for making things out of focus or fuzzy

"square TEX" - texture brush that has high persistence with some blending

"metal TEX" - texture brush with high blending and a spread shape.

"speckle TEX" - texture brush for kind of a sparkly look. High persistence

"water TEX" - texture brush that works kind of like a glaze. You can use for flair/fun

example

Post-Processing

Typically I use more filters for this. Paint Tool Sai has sliders to change hue, saturation, brightness, contrast, luminosity, and color deepen. So I tend to mess with those. I also add effects like chromatic aberration

The tutorial I follow for chromatic aberration in Paint Tool Sai: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thmaephD9Ec&t=169s

I also add particles like dust and other objects.

Finally I use my Gaussian blur to make things out of focus/motion blur

Conclusion

I hope this helps! I feel like I'm at a point in my art journey where I'm good enough to give advice. So hopefully this helps someone out there with their art journey! Obviously I have a long way to go, but I'm pretty proud of where I've come. I remember watching speedpaints and tutorials trying to become better at art. So I kind of want to add to that cycle for artists. :D Have a great day!

[sewerpalette]

(this ask is from @master-kohga-dating-sim btw, i had to send it on anon since sideblogs cant send asks :( ) losing my shit recently trying to learn how to color my stuff recently since i'm trying to develop my style more,,, anyways completely unrelated i swear but haiiiiiiii im curious about how you do your coloring :3 detailed step by step instructional format please /silly

Ohhhh this is kinda hard to explain but most of my coloring comes from the render! Ofcourse a huge thing you’re going to have to look at is the values of the piece, wich especially if you’re looking to start out drawing in greyscale is going to be important.

But the way i personally do it is that i gravitate towards very muted and desaturated colors and start working from there, it helps me take more control over where the focus of the piece is by making the contrast between the vibrant / light colors and my usual dark desaturated flat colors bigger, wich adds more visual interest in my opinion! But there are dozens of ways to do coloring, and I can see how this technique wouldn’t fit every person.

When it comes to deciding colors I’m actually not the best in that wich is why even for my OCs you’re going to see alot of repeating palettes and more desaturated color choices, but one thing to look at is complimentary colors, I do tend to use those! So using the color opposite of the color wheel for balance, there are better videos for this in specific on YouTube though and I don’t really have alot of thought process behind this part I usually just take colors I like and can imagine the character wearing haha.

I keep both of those in mind and then usually just lay down the flat colors first, not really restricting myself to the lines, and I’m going to be completely honest I do not do lineart, cleanup or anything like that I just render over my sketch directly for efficiency, so that’s where most color comes from, I pick a light source and an ambient light and start from there, I pay attention to making the shadows as dark as possible and highlights as light as possible without making it look weird or muddy. That’s all I can really say haha, there are a lot of good videos for this on YouTube though, wich I usually play in the background. I say just do whatever feels right and eventually you’re going to find out what you like and what you don’t!

Also ALOOOT OF GRADIENT MAPS AND COLORING MODES, those are life savers, take a color you like and flip through the different layering modes, eventually after enough trying around you’re gonna find smth that looks good lmao.

Another piece of advice is putting the background of your canvas as a midtone, you’re gonna see this a lot in concept art because it helps with not making colors too dark or too light.

Here’s an image of two of my Minecraft OCs to show an example of what I mean by my favoring of dark desaturated color palettes, since my subnautica art on here usually gets a little more vibrant to match the style of the game!

[thenerdysewist]

Making My Morgana Cosplay

I watched Merlin for the first time in 2015/2016, and was immediately obsessed with Morgana's Season 4 Coat.

At the time, I hadn't really gotten into sewing yet. I knew how to sew, but I'd only made one project bigger than a pair of pajama pants. But then the pandemic hit, and I was stuck inside with too much time on my hands. I rewatched Merlin (and have multiple times since 2020), and realized that I likely had the skills to make that coat so it became my pandemic project.

Materials:

My first concern was the materials. The coat is full length, with full sleeves and a train. That would require a lot of specialty (expensive) material, and I was pretty broke considering I had been laid off. Plus, new fabric is also pretty bad for the environment. So my goal was to thrift any and all material I could. I got lucky.

I found a king size comforter set at the thrift store for $10, and that meant I got both the specialty material and the lining in one

I found a lace skirt at a different thrift store for the sleeves of the under-dress, and a green prom dress to modify.

After much digging and swearing I found left over fabric from another cosplay to use as the green fabric in the hood and sleeves

A friend was moving and cleaning out her closet, meaning I was able to thrift the belt buckle from a belt she was going to donate

The only material I purchased new was the trim I used for the belt.

Process:

The first step was picking apart the comforter set. I probably could have just cut it open in order to render it into two flat pieces of usable material, but I knew the yardage would be a tight fit, so I used a seam ripper to separate the three layers of fabric from the layer of batting. (I think while I introduced a friend to Merlin).

I used a combination of patterns from my stash to get the pieces I needed. I used the hood from Simplicity 1771A, and the sleeves and skirt from Simplicity 8013. Looking back I likely could have used the bodice as well, but I felt the angle of the neckline was wrong, so I drafted my own bodice pattern using a t-shirt and the angle from the neckline of McCalls M7502.

I decided to make a mock up first. I only had the fabric from the comforter to set to work with, and there wasn't a lot. I didn't want to risk cutting into it, and then realizing it didn't fit. So I used an old white sheet to make the first draft.

Initially I thought the coat was a coat-dress, but noticed the detail that when Morgana walked, you could see the lining flash at the front. So I cut the bodice on the fold, and turned the skirt backwards. The front was meant to go on the fold and the back was two pieces to accommodate for a zipper. However, knowing I needed a train, I added a train to the front panel and made that the back, and then made the two back panels the front panels. I sewed them part of the way down to give it a skirt look, but left the bottom open so that the lining would flash when I walked. It ended up looking like this.

As you can tell from my face, I didn't like how it was laying. It didn't have the same shape as her coat, at which point I realized the front should be separate to make it close like a coat would, rather than a dress would. So I seam ripped the front skirt panels apart and cut the bodice front up the middle. I tried it back on and it looked like this:

(You can also tell by image quality that my old phone gave up the ghost and I had to get a new one, which had a much better camera)

I liked this a lot better, but there were still more adjustments I needed to make. I didn't like the angle of the neckline, and I felt like the train was too long. So I made those adjustments to the pattern, and made a second mock up out of a sheet set that my mom had cannibalized for her own sewing project.

With all the adjustments, the second mock up ended up looking like this.

I was now happy with the angle of the neckline and the length of the train, and felt ready to move onto working with the actual materials I bought.

I cut out all the pieces twice; once from the specialty material and once from the black backing material from the comforter set I used for the lining. I also cut additional lining for the hood and sleeves out of the green fabric since Morgana's coat has that contrast lining. I started by stitching the specialty fabric together.

Once that was done, I stitched all the lining pieces together. Then I pinned the specialty fabric to the lining with the hood in between the two layers so that it when I turned everything inside out, the hood would be on the outside.

I ended up not liking how the hood looked.

It came from too far back on the neckline. and that meant I had to pick apart the shoulder and neck seams and redo it. I redid this step probably four times because the fabric was thick, heavy, and slippery. It refused to stay in place, and I was constantly catching parts of the fabric I shouldn't.

Next was the sleeves. Which literally made me cry from frustration. Sleeves are my kryptonite at the best of times, but I was also working with fabric that was heavy, slippery, and thick, in a narrow arm hole. After several screaming matches with my sewing machine, and a stress and frustration induced break down, my mom ended up inserting the sleeves for me. (Thank you, Mom!)

Then I finally got to see the fully assembled garment and I was thrilled! It really looked like it was shaping up to look like Morgana's coat.

I completed the hem on both the lining and specialty material and the bulk of the garment was complete! But I still needed her belt, and I wanted to make have an under-dress since you can see a flash of the skirt under the coat while Morgana walks. For that, I just adjusted a prom dress that I found at the thriftstore. I shortened it, moved the skirt to be right under the bust, and added straps. I didn't think to get photos of that process since it was mostly pinning and cutting.

I did however, have to make my own lace sleeves for the dress since you can see lace sleeves under Morgana's coat. For this I traced the sleeve of a shirt I already owned.

Then I made a mock up which was way too tight. I added a little extra width, and made another mock up which fit. So then I was able to cut the sleeves out of the lace I removed from the skirt, and I stitched it into the armhole created by adding straps to the modified dress.

As you can see it wasn't the neatest job, but I didn't care since it was going to be covered by the coat anyway. If I wanted to submit this for a contest or anything, I'd probably go through the trouble of making her under-dress too, but this works.

All that was left was her belt. For that, I had ordered a precut YaYa Hahn pleather trim and that gave me the width of my belt. It also gave me the length since there was just enough there to wrap around my waist with some overlap. I cut a strip from the green fabric I used for the sleeves and hood, and black fabric for the belt lining since I was out of the green fabric.

Stitched those together, and flipped it right side out. I left one end open so I could insert two loops to attach the belt buckle to the belt. Then I pinned the trim to the belt and ironed it on. It was iron on trim so I didn't have to sew it.

I inserted the loops through the belt buckle, then tucked the ends into the belt and stitched it closed.

Reveal:

Final Thoughts:

Overall, I am jazzed by how this turned out. I think it looks so much like Morgana. I might need to fix the hem since the first time I wore it, twigs started getting caught in the hem, but that is an issue for future me. My issues are actually more with my makeup. I tried to learn contouring for this. I literally haven't worn makeup since 2019 and I only did basics then. So if anyone wants to let me know tips and tricks, my ask box is open. I also still don't know how for photos.

This project took well over a year to complete. Part of it was the amount of mock ups I did, but part of it was the process of tracking down materials. It took weeks for me to find the right green fabric and I actually bought multiple other fabrics that I returned because they weren't right for it. That it was in my own stash was such a relief while simultaneously the most annoying thing ever. The second snag was finding the belt buckle. I had to get one in the right dimensions to fit the trim for the belt, and apparently belt buckles are impossible to find in a size bigger than an inch. It was complete luck that my friend found something in her closet while she was moving. (If you have buckle resources, please hit me up. I need buckles for another project I'm working on now, and can't find buckles small enough.)

This is the biggest project I've done so far, and I am so proud of myself for it.

[discet]

Have you ever played a game called Sea of Stars?

I have! I have some complicated feelings on it

So First off, this game is absolutely gorgeous. The sprite art style that they used throughout the world is a love letter to the 16-bit era while taking advantage of modern tech to make it even better. It's that thing that some independent games manage to do, where it looks like the old games felt even though if you set them aside by side, it is much better.

Mechanically I also had a BLAST with this game. It's core battle system is fun and has a deceptive amount of depth to it. It also utilizes the Paper Mario style of 'every attack and ability is also a mini game' that I have always loved. Traditional JRPG's tend to make me zone out during combat but Sea of Stars had been turned into almost every encounter. The progression always made me feel like I was getting more powerful without ever making the encounters ahead feel trivial.

In addition to all that, this game is clearly a love letter to Chrono Trigger, in it's perspective, world design, humor and more. The world is beautifully rendered and feels like a lived in space. It is by and large a light hearted and hopeful throw back to the games of old.

All that said. The Actual Story-Telling frustrates me to no end. A lot of things work, but a lot of things really, really don't for me. While I can rant about this forever, I will focus on my frustration with the main trio. Spoilers Ahead

So this game is ostensibly about Zale, Valare, and Garl. Zale and Valere are both chosen ones imbued with the magic of the Sun and Moon and destined for greatness. Garl is their childhood friend who they are separated from traumatically after one of their misadventures ends with Garl losing an eye and his two friends being dragged away for training in isolation for their futures as chosen ones.

They don't see each other for years. Now, trope-savvy girl like me was expecting for Garl to reappear as a rival to the heroes, bitter after losing an eye and being told he couldn't cling to his friends.

BUT NO. Like, within hours of the pair being released from their training to Do The Plot, Garl shows up, scarred eye and all and insists on joining them to support them in their adventure. And its just cute and wholesome and he's an endless well of positivity and lightheartedness in the story. I know some people found him annoying, but I loved Garl. He is just so genuinely enthusiastic about the world and its mysteries that it was contagious.

Unfortunately, Zale and Valere, by comparison, are pretty flat characters. They are both fairly stoic, serious minded adventurers who have basically the same dynamic with Garl. In most conversations they will respond exactly the same. Mechanically their kits cover very different bases in the combat system, but as characters, they have the same personality.

That said, my love of Garl, and the gameplay carried me past all that.

Then when Garl sacrifices himself it really actually got to me. Like, genuinely choked up. The music, the visuals, the writing really make his sacrifice feel both tragic and necessary for the story to finish.

With the desire to not let his sacrifice in vain carrying me through the last few plot beats.

Now the initial ending, is very clearly a set up for the secret ending. The big bad you've been opposing all game basically sicks his top Lieutenant on you and that's basically the final boss.

So of course you do all the end game stuff and unlock the secret ending where... Garl... doesn't die. The heroes use time stop shenanigans to basically swap Garl at the moment of his sacrifice with a shape changer you meet after his sacrifices. Which meant all that heart wrenching drama that had really genuinely gotten a reaction out of me... was all pretend. Was all acting from your shapechinging friend who just let themself be buried in a grave for a few months to keep the timeline in check. Garl was fine! He was just chilling and you get to finish the game properly now!

And that. Fucking sucked. I finished off the true final boss cause I mean I had worked hard enough for it but all of my investment had kind of drained away at that point.

The fact that several plot beats were actually in reference to the studios first release (the messenger) a game of a totally different genre and vibe to Sea of Stars, basically made the story weaker overall.

It's like. They were close. They were so close and it just lost me at the 5 yard line.

[worrysomegus]

Do you have any tips or good tutorial links for getting started using the hair tools in Blender? They seem intimidating, but your models look fantastic

sorry I uuuh don't watch tutorials (evil) I just fucked around for years until it suddenly clicked. So here's a few things, not sure if they'll be useful or not

also blenders particle system fur isn't being worked on anymore and is getting glitchier by the update so maybe look into geometry node fur (I haven't) (evil) also everything under the cut is assuming you know absolutely nothing about hair

this is based on blender 3.5 btw

create a particle system, put it to your desired length (short fur is usually longer than you expect) then set the number to 0, then you can use the add tool to get a symmetrical groom

the strands you add are just to guide all the fur, in areas that curve a lot add more to prevent clipping

puff brush is best girl

once you've finished your groom you can create a weight map to control the furs density (you can also make some for clumping and randomness and shit) (I usually don't) (mostly because I'm lazy) then go to children > interpolated and select your weight map in the density zoneland, if your computers beefy and/or you want a better idea of what it will look like you can change the viewport amount of particles to 100 (or whatever)

go render properties > curves and change it to strip (you don't need to do this using cycles) then back into particle properties under hair shape to change the diameter root length from 1 to whatever looks best (uber dependent on what size your model is, I usually go with 0.08)

oh fuck I forgot to mention you gotta do different systems for the head, neck, body, whatever. It makes it easier and is better for lag

roughness is pretty important for making animal-ish fur too, here's my settings I used for making this face fur, my settings for all my particle systems are pretty consistent but it's also pretty dependent on your models size

here;s some other things I forgot and can't be bothered to go back and add

selecting this thing will let you select groups

uuuuuh I think that's it on the groom itself onto shaders

so they're pretty important to making some nice looking fur, you can make it look fine in eevee but cycles will probably always look more realistic (not to imply eevee isn't best girl it's really good at most things)

(eevee)

(cycles)

in cycles you pretty much just need a principled hair bsdf shader with a few settings tweaked (here's mine for the model above) (also make sure the fur material is different to the skin material)

so for both cycles and eevee your best friend ever is the curves info node (hair info in older versions)

all of these can be pretty useful but the most usefulest ones for me are intercept into a colour ramp makes an ombre from the roots to the tip

and random which adds variation to the strand colour

here's a little breakdown of my cycles shader for her

and eevee, they're pretty similar tbh

BUT also for eevee you need to change a few more things to give your hair weight n shit

in render properties enable ambient occlusion and bloom, then in the settings of your lights enable contact shadows

and one more important thing for nice looking hair is lighting, I find it easier in cycles because it reacts more realistically and rim lighting my beloved, but in eevee it's suuper important to making it not look flat, if doing those settings edits didn't do much it's because of your lighting

1 make your background completely black so you can see what you're doing better

2 add ONE area light and position it, pay attention to how the size, distance, and power affect things and make sure you don't make your model look flat

then you can add a rim light (duplicate the area light and reposition) if you want to give your character some extra highlighting, although good fucking luck if you're using eevee it's probably not worth doing

then you can add an hdri (super good webbed site for them) to be the fill light

having it at full strength tends to flatten the model (especially in eevee)

(cringe mode)

(yaaay)

and uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh I think that's it, I don't feel like reading all this back tbh

and please don't follow this like a loser follows the law this is just a guide and you should do whatever you find the most fun/gets the best result

ALSO ALSO don't feel upset if your first few attempts look like dogshit fur is super hard and only insane people make beautiful grooms first try