#this is so disproportionate.. and i wanted to use colored pencil

[meringuehearts]

the green fairy ✨

[layla4567]

Scars // Brad Wolfe x Fem reader

Summary: Hunter X-5 has always had peculiar scars on his arms, they seem deep and have an "X" shape. You've always wondered how he did it. Warnings: Maybe a lil of angst but mostly fluff WC: 3k A/N: I feel like this would be a continuation of the Too Close fic but you don't need to read that one to understand this one, you can imagine it as separate stories.

————— ୨୧ —————

Sitting in a chair in front of your desk you looked at the photos of variants in your report, with a highlighter you marked the most relevant information and with a pencil you made notes to the side. Mobius at the next desk moved his fingers rapidly on the typewriter keys, seeming concentrated. Proud and sighing, you picked up the report and tapped it on the table to organize the papers. Out of the corner of your eye you saw your friend and called him whispering

"Psst! Mobius!"

Mobius didn't seem to notice (or decided to ignore you) so you grabbed an orange post-it note and crumpled it into a ball and threw it at him. The ball landed right on his head and bounced until it landed on the floor, he shrugged his shoulders upon receiving the impact and looked at you confused.

"What the shit?"

Mobius opened his arms and put his palms up in a clear gesture of intrigue, you laughed at his reaction.

"I'm sorry, you weren't listening to me."

He sighed long and stopped writing to take the paper out of the typewriter and put in a new one.

"Well I'm listening to you now, what do you want?"

"I wanted to know if you finished the paperwork, and besides, I'm bored."-you said innocently smiling as you placed a hand under your chin and rested your elbow on the table.

"Well, I'm sorry I can't please you with the answer, because I still have several papers to write."

You groaned and placed your head between your arms resting on the table, hiding your face as if you were sleeping. Mobius took pity on your situation and approached with his chair to rub your shoulder patiently.

"If it makes you feel better, I only need to finish one page, why don't you give me your report and I'll deliver it to Casey myself?"

You raised your head with a shy smile and affectionate dimples adorning your cheeks, you handed your work to Mobius and to kill time you began to doodle on your post-its and paper cranes with them. Minutes and almost hours passed and your desk was full of colored paper cranes and post-its with stars, hearts and a caricature of Mobius's head with his funny mustache, it was disproportionate and exaggeratedly larger than normal. Out of boredom, you had fallen asleep on the desk and were about to start drooling over the pencils and markers that you had near your face if it weren't for your friend who came over and gently hit you several times with his finger on your head.

“Hey Y/N, are you awake?”

You started and raised your head abruptly, narrowing your eyes, your heavy eyelids still wanting to close. Your friend had his hands on his hips like he always used to do. You closed your eyes and ran a hand over your face, rubbing it lightly, trying to shake off the sleep.

"What did I miss?"

"Oh, not much, don't worry, I already gave the reports to Casey and he said they were good, especially yours. The notes you made on the side of the paper were useful, and I think I'm jealous about that."

Mobius started to laugh and you followed him, but then his smile faded to a frown when he saw your happy, mocking caricature of him on a post-it note resting next to you. You followed his gaze to the small paper that was on your table and you blushed embarrassed, lowering your head to avoid eye contact.

"What is that? Is it me?"-He said pointing his finger

"Well, what did you want me to do? I was bored and decided to draw you"-You said, shrugging your shoulders and brushing it off.

"Let me see it"

"Hey no!"

Mobius grabbed the post-it before you could stop him. He stayed for a while looking at it as if he wanted to analyze its molecular particles. Then he handed it to you with a frown but a small corner of his mouth wanting to rise and transform into a smile.

"I don't have a big head, and neither does my mustache."

"Are you sure 'bout that?"-you said smiling funny

"Hey! What are you implying?"

"I was kidding, chill out"-you laughed

You stood up to stretch your legs, patting your friend's shoulder, who stood with his head slightly down.

"Or not..."

You said mischievously and walked away without saying anything else while he turned around and watched you leave before he could form a single sentence, leaving him more confused than before. B-15 approached him and Mobius asked her

"Do you think my head and mustache are too big?"

"Uhh..."

You walked with sure steps to have a coffee and then go visit O.B, the poor guy almost never received visitors and you thought that your presence would cheer him up a little. You headed to the machine at the end of the hallway to drink your coffee, when you got it you brought it up to your nose to inhale the sweet and bitter aroma of the drink. You were drinking it while walking towards the TVA basement when you found X-5 walking in the opposite direction, that is, he was coming towards you. He had his pruning stick activated and he seemed upset.

"Hi, everything okay?"

When he heard you and saw you, he stopped, sighing and raising his eyebrows.

"Well, since you mention it, not really. A variant escaped me and I couldn't prune it"

You were surprised because he never missed anyone. He was the best hunter in the entire TVA, intelligent, cunning and tough enough to be a hunter. In addition to knowing all the interrogation tactics. You simply smiled at him sadly, understanding his frustration. Suddenly your gaze fell on his strong bare arms. They had some unique scars, before you had not paid so much attention to them but now you remembered having seen them before and wondering what happened to him. He noticed your eyes on his arms and crossed his arms, raising an eyebrow.

"How much do you look at, huh?"

You quickly looked up and looked him in the eyes, feeling caught red-handed, you tried to hide it by clearing your throat.

"Sorry, I just never knew how you got those scars-"

"And you don't have to know"

He interrupted you abruptly without leaving his frown or stopping crossing his arms over his chest, making his biceps stand out. You were surprised by his reaction, he wasn't the nicest person in the TVA but he almost always seemed more patient with you. You thought his rude attitude was due to his anger at the variation but you knew there was something more. You stayed silent trying to say something but he broke the silence for you.

"I would love to continue talking but I have things to do, excuse me."

He said with a sarcasm that hurt you and stepped aside to continue on his way. You watched him leave with your heart sinking a little. What happened to him? He had never been like that with you before, usually he was funny in his own way and would go around provoking you and teasing you just to see how angry you would get, sometimes he was sarcastic but in a more pleasant way. A little sad, you went to the basement to see O.B without the good mood you had before, it seemed that now the one who needed to cheer up was you and not him.

I knew you Hand under my sweatshirt Baby, kiss it better, I And when I felt like I was an old cardigan Under someone's bed You put me on and said I was your favorite

When you went down the spiral stairs and finished walking the circular hallway you found the round entrance like a tunnel but O.B was nowhere to be seen. Instead of him being behind that structure that said "Repairs & Advancement" it was all empty. You slowly approached calling his name, a little voice answered you didn't know where.

"O.B? where are you?"

"Y/N!! I'm down here"

You still didn't know where exactly "here" was but when you peeked your head over his round desk you saw him sitting with his back leaning against the structure, he was fixing something you didn't know what it was.

"O.B?"

He raised his head to look at you and gave you a warm smile.

"Oh hello there! How is everything going Y/N?”

He stood up, leaving his work aside and looked at you attentively, you didn't know where to start.

"Well… my initial plan was to visit you and brighten your day a little, I know you're always working here alone, but… I think now I'm the one who needs to brighten up…"

"Oh why is that?"

You explained your encounter with Hunter X-5 and his curt reaction to your question about his scars. O.B seemed to reflect before answering.

"Well it seems that this is a delicate topic for him, maybe you should give him time before asking him again"

"What if he doesn't want to talk about it again? Or worse, what if he doesn't talk to me again?!"

"Calm down Y/N, don't panic! I know Hunter X-5 can be difficult to deal with but you are the kindest person I know, you'll see how you find a way to make him talk"

"Thanks O.B"

You smiled at him not very convinced and turned to leave when his high-pitched voice spoke to you again.

"And remember, if he refuses to talk after all your efforts, leave him alone, don't force him or it will be worse."

You nodded at his wise words and said goodbye, leaving the basement. You were nervous and confused, you needed a pie. You headed to the key lime pie room without thinking twice and realized that you were not alone, Mobius was there apparently to receive a little comfort too. You silently grabbed a pie and sat in front of him sighing.

"It seems like someone also needed the comfort of a pie"

You nodded without looking at him as you moved your spoon playing with the dessert "Would you like to tell me why you are here?"

"Only if you tell me first"

"It's a fair deal"

You told him about your whole affair with X-5 and how you were worried about his attitude at the mention of his scars. Mobius listened to you attentively without interrupting you. When you finished speaking he sighed.

"Can I give you an advice?"

"It's what I need most now"

"Be close to him, I have realized that he is less of an idiot with you than with others, maybe your kindness will help him open up and heal"

"Thank you Mobius, you always know what to say"

"Oh and another thing, if he doesn't want to talk, let him. We all deal with our own burden."

You laughed softly "How curious, that's what O.B said."

"Wait, you talked to O.B first instead of me?" He looked at you offended and you laughed again this time harder.

"I'm sorry, it wasn't intentional. But don't change the subject and now tell me what's bothering you."

Mobius remained silent for a few seconds that seemed like hours until he finally opened his mouth "It's Ravonna."

"Ravonna? What's wrong with her?"

"It's… Her attitude confuses me, I thought we were friends and look what she did, she lied about C-20, she didn't care about the whole thing about variants and time keepers and to make matters worse she abandoned us all"

It made you sad to see Mobius so downcast and even more so for a person he thought he knew. But you had never liked Ravonna so you didn't wait to take off your friend's blindfold.

"Well maybe… she was never a good friend to you."

He looked at you intrigued, waiting for you to continue talking, you swallowed.

"I mean… look I know you liked her and I don't want to be mean but Ravonna only cares about herself, all those times she helped you were only because they benefited her and saved her position"

He looked at you with wide eyes and you immediately regretted what you had said "I'm sorry."

"No, no, it's okay. Maybe I didn't even appreciate her but so many years together working side by side, you get used to it, you know?"

You nodded looking at your plate. "Can I give you some advice? Like you gave me one?"

He nodded "Keep going. I know it seems like shitty advice but it's the best, if she did it you can do it too. "Don't cling to the past and stay with the people who do care about you."

He smiled, nodding at your words. "And I thought I was the wise one here."

Laughing and feeling the atmosphere loosening, they finished eating and got up from their seats. When they were about to leave, B-15 called them and told them that Judge Dox needed them in the war room. You and Mobius looked at each other intrigued and followed the hunter. When you arrived at the living room you saw Dox sitting in one of the three corners of the triangular table with his stern gaze and stoic attitude. Standing next to you was X-5 looking at the two of you. To say that the judge scared you was an understatement, Mobius took the seat for you, letting all the pressure fall on him.

"I think you already know why I summoned you here, since Ravonna Renslayer left, the TVA has been a mess. We need to do something with those variants and the best thing would be to prune them"

You jumped and Mobius shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

"With all due respect, I'm afraid that won't be possible Judge Dox."

The woman tensed her jaw when she heard Mobius's voice. "I hope you understand that if we can't control the variants, the branches will continue to grow."

"Believe I'm aware of that but we can't take away people's free will"

"But that's what we've been doing and that's what we do best, Agent Mobius."

"Besides, I think I know that you do not have enough rank to make these decisions" Dox counterattacked.

You clenched your fists in anger at Dox's sharp voice, you were not going to allow them to talk like that about your friend.

"Excuse me, Judge Dox, but every worker here has the right to their opinion, whether they have a high rank or not."

X-5 and Dox looked at you surprised at your outburst of bravery, you usually used to keep quiet during these debates. Dox narrowed his eyes analyzing you.

"Very well Agent Y/N, since you seem to want to say something so badly, we listen to you" She stated venomously.

You knew you screwed up, nervously you looked from Mobius to X-5 who was looking at you attentively and a little tense about what you could say.

"W-well, we-we can't prune the variants because technically we are too, and who are we to decide about the lives of others? Literally no one. That would be hypocritical.."

X-5 looked at you surprised by your response while you looked down in shame and wishing that the earth would swallow you. Dox raised an annoyed eyebrow so Mobius quickly spoke for you.

"Sorry but Y/N is right, give us a couple of days at least to try to find another solution, could you?"

Judge Dox seemed to weigh the situation as she looked at the two of you. After a while she sighed

"Fine, you only have three days otherwise we will continue with the usual itinerary"

Mobius smiled in relief and the two of you were about to leave when Dox spoke again.

"And next time tell your friend that she should speak when they allow her to."

Dox stood up abruptly and left while Mobius also left the room. You and X-5 still stayed in the war room. An awkward silence settled between you and him until he was going to leave, passing by you, but you grabbed him by the wrist.

"No! wait…please"

He turned around confused to meet your pleading gaze, “I need to talk to you.”

He softened his face and sighed, tilting his head. "Okay, but make it quick, I have to get back to work."

You guided him to a chair and you sat in front of him near the table. You sighed a little nervously, not knowing how to bring up the topic. He saw that you were playing with your fingers nervously and ran a hand up your thigh, sending a sensation of electricity through your belly.

"C'mon what's happening? you can tell me anything"

You exalted, trying not to look at him. "Well, first of all, I wanted to apologize. That's not how I had thought this, but I think it's only fair to apologize for asking you about your scars."

When you mentioned his injuries he reflexively covered one arm while rubbing his hand up and down.

"I made you feel uncomfortable and it wasn't my intention" You felt your voice break "But you had never told me how you had gotten those injuries and I thought we had enough trust to tell each other everything"

You felt your eyes wet and you didn't want to cry in front of him so you stood up and threatened to leave but he took your hand "Wait, don't go."

You looked at him in amazement as he forced you to sit back down, he looked at his arm and sighed "I never talk about them because they remind me of a past failure…"

You looked at him attentively and let him speak, you felt that he was finally opening up to you. "When I was just a novice hunter, a variant attacked me from behind, causing several wounds and bruises, but the worst were in my arms." He closed his eyes. as if the memory caused him deep pain. "After that, Dox, I was demoted and had to start from scratch. I climbed until I got to where I am again and I promised myself that I would be the best at what I do and I would have no mercy on anyone."

You looked at him in shock at his story as he looked at his arms. You suddenly gently rested your hand on his scars. At first he was tempted to withdraw his arms but resisted.

To kiss in cars and downtown bars Was all we needed You drew stars around my scars But now I'm bleedin'

With all the delicacy and love in the world you began to touch his scars with the tips of your fingers, tracing them like a drawing. He shivered at your warm touch but let you continue. Your fingers went up and down and your gaze inspected the cuts. You took all the time in the world to caress his arms, making him understand that for you his scars were beautiful and it was what made him unique and special. They had never bothered you because you thought they framed his arms well, you were just curious. X-5 moaned softly, closing his eyes and feeling his body relax when he felt the heat of your fingers.

When you finished, he opened his eyes and met your sweet and soft gaze and it made him wrinkle his eyebrows upward, softening his gaze.

"…Thank you…"

You nodded, smiling and stood up while he did the same and followed you.

“Umh Y/N…”

You turned around to look at him. "Yes?"

"I think I owe you an apology too, you had no idea what I had been through"

It seemed like he was having a hard time pronouncing these words as if he were making an effort to swallow his pride. You smiled and walked over to stand on your tiptoes and grab the lapels of his uniform and plant a tender kiss on his lips. At first he wasn't expecting this but he made no effort to pull away and circled your waist to pull you closer and deepen the kiss.

And you'd be standin' in my front porch light And I knew you'd come back to me You'd come back to me And you'd come back to me And you'd come back

You quickly walked away somewhat embarrassed and with your pink cheeks burning "Apologies accepted" And you trotted back the way you had come while leaving a confused but smiling X-5 who was licking his lips, feeling the taste of yours again.

[ailingwriter]

So a while back, I decided to draw a reference sheet for one of my OCs, for Reasons. And, for related Reasons, I decided to post those sketches here! There are quite a lot so I'll put them under the readmore.

A bit of an explanation, I drew this by drawing each part separately, then drawing them all together in a less precise way to get an idea for proportions. Then I drew them all together again even rougher because I decided I didn't like the color scheme.

Also, the character is robotic. Not a robot, for plot reasons, but she has a robotic/puppet design.

Her head.

The eyes should probably be bigger. I changed that in the full body sketch.

Her hair is made from a bunch of stiff plates. I have no idea how they might work in 3d space at the moment.

Normally, she does not have a mouth. When she does it's because she ripped open her face and is showing her fleshy inside. As i said, she is not a robot.

Her neck is stiff, like a doll's. It connects to a ball joint on her head.

A closer shot on her eyes. It's probably harder to see than is ideal because of the medium and the specific shades I had access to.

I couldn't really show it here, but her eyes are essentially LED displays.

Her body. Lots of detail here, not sure I'll want to keep all of it.

On the left side of her chest is a hole where her heart should be. This is for plot reasons. Also for plot reasons, there are wires that show that something was torn out of this space. It's a bit smaller than I'd like in this drawing.

On the right side of her chest is a pattern that looks like piano keys and ribs. I took this out of the later designs since I felt it made the design look too cluttered.

There is a speaker in her stomach area. This is how she makes sound. Around it is a ring of purple.

Her 'dress' is made up of a series of sharp metal slats that are essentially attached to her body by hinges and move individually. She can control what specific elevation they are at or let them hang loose.

The angularity isn't just me being inexperienced at drawing human torsos, she really is kind of angular.

Her back. Normally it would be colored the same as the rest of her torso, but I didn't bother since by the time I drew this I had changed the color scheme.

I have not decided whether the pattern are holes like on a violin or just markings.

I may want them a bit closer to the spine to get rid of negative space.

Left Arm.

Both of her forearms are disproportionately long.

Hands are hard okay.

On her left arm are a set of violin strings. I may redesign her later to have the bridge be at the elbow instead of near her hand, and to add something to act as the fingers for changing notes. At the moment, the design has the strings jutting out slightly, as opposed to...

Right arm.

The bow to the left arm's violin/viola/cello/what have you. This one sinks into her arm a bit as shown above.

Legs

Yes, her lower legs are swords. Yes the legs are supposed to be symmetrical even though I'm just now realizing they aren't.

Normally the hips are hidden under the skirt.

Proportion full body sketch.

I messed up the coloring on the skirt, but that's okay! I changed the color scheme later on. The joys of working with pencil and paper...

You can only see it here, but the neck connects to a largeish ball joint in the torso. This is a minor design element that I may change though.

I changed the size of her eyes and the hole in her chest here. The eyes are good but now I think the hole is too big.

As I said, the hips and lower legs are not visible through the skirt, I just drew them to give an idea of where they are. Even so I think I might move it up a bit?

I ended up removing the piano key ribs and am leaving that area blank for now. I forgot to color that area in though.

Hands are HARD.

Color scheme. I think this is a better color scheme. So not use the proportions though. These aren't the actual colors btw, just what I could draw with what I had on hand. The actual colors are more along the lines of the following hexcodes:

Black: 191919

White/light Gray: D5D4D4

Purple: 76209D

Brown: 422B23

[synergy-poprocks]

#0002: Ivysaur

Meet Seedly!! She’s got an adamant nature and likes to take siestas according to her blurb. I like to think she has a “work hard, play hard” attitude and takes her siestas as serious as her battles. two versions again, one with the official art as a ref and the other without a ref in a more battle-like pose bc she be brawlin.

this is pencil because I’m going camping and left the tablet at home. PENCILS ARE HARD WOW. Impressed with anyone who can use them successfully because that was a TRIP.

thoughts under cut. mostly for me but feel free to look if you want:

Things I am Happy With:

I GOT. THE. LEAVES. It took me the better part of an hour to figure it out. I started out trying to build OFF of a base leaf, but then I realized what I actually needed to do was cut INTO the base instead. I’m so proud I figured it out. The leaf in the corner is when I finally figured it out

flower bud was HARD but the one on the official art version looks pretty good!! I stuck with it.

I tried a new pose—front-facing. I’ve never drawn something like Seedly from the front before!! And with all the weird plant stuff too. It’s disproportionate, but I think I got the body right? like enough of her body is showing. I’m happy she looks as good as she does despite the imperfections. I also like her vines—I made them thorny so she looks like she packs more of a punch. and her markings.

things I need to work on:

clearly I can’t work on my digital goals (no shading or color or crisp lines) right now but I have some pencil-specific goals that can carry over;

first, I want to work on head shapes. Venusaur is a little flat in the head, but starting with Charmander I wanna make sure that my heads are more round when needed. the other two starters in particular have such bald, slappable heads and it is essential they are more spherical. all my faces seem a lil flat and I want to experiment to improve.

second, I want to work on making my proportions and more consistent. clearly they are far from perfect, especially that front pose (first attempt though so bound to have issues let’s be honest) It’s a little hard to do with pencil too (especially since I’m with a limited eraser), but I’m gonna work on it as much as I can.

i think i had a third goal but tbh my original post draft got deleted and I’ve now forgotten. oh well. Next one!!

[cloudsoffire]

Old Art Part 2

i have some more art from high school that i never posted, so i will do so now because the only thing i've been able to draw recently is a messy colored sketch of L from death note.

quick note before hand: a lot of these are of my sona because i'm trans and wish i looked a certain way so i drew my sona to cope. even now i don't look like my icon. plus it was a character i didn't need a reference for so it was easy to experiment with. the only other character i could do reliably from memory was... a skeleton. so yeah that's why these characters look alike.

1.

small one but i like the angle

2.

this one has some detail you can tell it was drawn in class. that's some terrible foreshortening on the second scythe though. also wildly impractical.

3.

the proportions on this one aren't incredible but again you can tell time was spent on it. a note above it says "form: dragon" so like that explains the scales. stomach and torso could stand to be wider but i don't remember the drawing process. i probably wanted to keep the shoulders close together for dysphoria reasons, and then i wanted the left arm to be visible. idk something like that. i also only recently started drawing wings the correct way so if there are any other "m" shaped wings you now know why.

4.

phantom of the opera but make him a handsome anime twink

5.

thumbs up

6.

get a load of this society.

7.

i think the image explains itself. must've been using a different pencil than normal. maybe with thicker lead. obviously didn't like it. i don't think my other character drawings were this disproportionate, so i might've been trying to include some of my irl weight while also not including a gut because i'm hugely insecure. either that or i just didn't plan to draw legs the majority of the time so i didn't sketch them out. either one really

8.

is this what you would call vent art?

9.

idk if anyone has been here long enough to remember my friendship with thatmegalomaniac/sushiibetrayal/mental-1llness but i'm pretty sure this is him in a suit. if you've been around that long i am so sorry you had to endure my cringier-than-normal years

anyway that's all for this post, reached the image limit. i'll continue in a sec.

[secretly-of-course]

when did u start drawing and do u have any tips for beginners?

Hi anon! I’m so excited you want to try drawing! This may be more than you bargained for but I hope you find it helpful. I’m working under the assumption that you are a very beginner, so I apologize if any of this seems obvious to you already.

I started drawing digitally roughly a year ago, but before that I’ve been drawing in some form for as long as I can remember. 9 year old me used to sit at the kitchen table for HOURS drawing Pokémon lol but I digress.

Anyway this brings me to my first and arguably most important tip: Practice. It sounds cliche but practicing really is the best way to see improvement in yourself. Take me for exampl (your question inspired me to look through my old journal). On the left is something I drew circa 2011, I would have been 15 years old (idk why I drew these magic creatures, or why I felt the need to label them all). It’s a pretty good example of how I drew throughout high school. In college I took 2 drawing classes (one a general drawing class and one specifically for fashion illustration) and that helped me improve a lot, as you can see in the right hand image.

A year after graduating, when I first began drawing digitally, my style and skill level was very similar to the above right image. But, after a year of drawing nearly every day, you can see significant improvement from how I drew when I started (left) vs. how I draw now (right).

So anyway, practice is a big deal.

I would also recommend experimenting with different mediums. Whether it be pencil, markers, digital, etc, trying different mediums is a fun way to figure out what you like and develop your own style. It can also be really helpful. In my own experience, sometimes if I’m having trouble drawing something on my tablet I find it easier to sketch it out on paper first and either copy it or take a photo and trace it.

That brings me to my next tip: Trace. This is is gonna be controversial with some artists but in my opinion tracing really is a great way to practice and learn. Tracing photos or existing drawings (quick reminder to never post tracings of other people’s art, posting tracings of photos is totally fine) is a great way to get a hang of the movements and shapes you need to draw. Eventually you’ll develop muscle memory and you won’t need to depend on tracing so much.

Speaking of muscle memory, always draw with your whole arm, not just your wrist. Your shoulder should move your pencil more than your wrist does. If you draw a lot this will save you physical pain and help prevent carpal tunnel.

If you’re drawing free hand, a good thing to remember is that any subject can be broken into simple shapes. For example, noses are a weird shape but they become easier if you think of them as 3 circles with 2 lines attached. You can do this with anything, you just have to get used to trying to find the smaller shapes within the things you see, which also gets easier with practice.

And remember reference images are your friends! The internet is full of images and tutorials to help you, use them! My current search history is 80% drawing related and they are a huge help. Heck, even if you can’t find the right reference image you can ask a friend or sibling to quickly pose for you while you snap a photo.

When drawing freehand sketching guidelines is a huge help. On paper you should do this lightly with pencil, or digitally you can use a separate layer. Seriously, if you’re drawing digitally the more layers the better. These guidelines can help you keep your proportions while you make your more detailed drawing on top. I like to sketch in a bright color and delete the layer afterwards.

While I’m on the subject, proportions make a huge difference in your drawing. Backing up and looking at your drawing from a distance is a great way to judge your proportions and composition, and then decide if you need to make changes or not. It’s also helpful to turn your drawing upside down. Something about this tricks your brain so any disproportionate parts become much more obvious and you can fix them.

Lastly, start with what you like. Drawing should above all be fun! For example, if you like drawing faces then start with faces. If drawing hands annoys you, there is nothing wrong with leaving them as blobs. After focusing on the things you like drawing, you’ll eventually gain more confidence and skills to attempt the harder things that aren’t as enjoyable.

I hope you found this helpful! Happy drawing ;)

[dispactke]

Infrarealism Manifesto

Manifesto of Infrarealism

——-

GIVE IT ALL UP AGAIN

first infrarealist manifesto

“It’s four light hours to the confines of the solar system; to the closest star, four light years. A disproportionate ocean of emptiness. But are we really sure there is only a void? We only know that there are no stars shining in that space. If they existed, would they be visible? And if there existed bodies that are neither luminous nor dark? Could it not be that on the celestial maps, the same as on those of Earth, the star-cities are indicated and the star-villages are omitted?”

— Soviet science fiction writers scratching their faces at midnight.

— The infrasuns (Drummond would say the happy proletarian fellows).

— Peguero and Boris alone in a lumpen room having premonitions of the wonder behind the door.

— Free money.

*

Who has crossed the city and had, as the only music, the whistles of his fellow man, his own words of wonder and rage?

The handsome guy who didn’t know

that chicks’ orgasms are clitoral

(Look around, shit isn’t just in museums.) (A process of individual museumification.) (Certainty that everything is named, revealed.) (Fear of discovering.) (Fear of unforeseen imbalances.)

*

Our closest relatives:

snipers, country boys who smash up cheap cafés in Latin America, people who fall apart in supermarkets in their tremendous individuo-collective dilemmas; the impotence of action and the search (on individual levels or good and muddy with aesthetic contradictions) for poetic action.

*

Little bright stars eternally winking an eye at us from a place in the universe called Labyrinths.

— Nightclub of misery.

— Pepito Tequila sobbing his love for Lisa Underground.

— I suck it, you suck it, we suck it.

— And the Horror.

*

Curtains of water, cement or tin separate a cultural machinery that serves as the conscience or the ass of the dominant class from a living, annoying cultural happening, in constant death and birth, ignorant of the greater part of history and the fine arts (everyday creator of its insane history and its hallucinatory fine artz), body that suddenly feels new sensations in itself, product of an epoch in which we approach the shithouse or the revolution at 200 kph.

“New forms, strange forms,” as old Bertolt said, half curious, half cheerful.

*

Sensations don’t arise from nothingness (the obvious of obviousnesses) but from conditioned reality, in a thousand ways, as a constant flow.

— Multiple reality, you make us sick!

So it is possible that on the one hand one is born and on the other hand we’re in the front row for the death throes. Forms of life and forms of death pass daily through the retina. The constant crash gives life to infrarealist forms: THE EYE OF TRANSITION

*

They put the whole city in the nuthouse. Sweet sister, tank howls, hermaphrodite songs, diamond deserts, we’ll live only once and the visions, more complicated and slippery every day. Sweet sister, hitchhiking to Monte Albán[i]. Unbuckling their belts to water the corpses. It’s something at least.

*

And the good bourgeois culture? And academia and the arsonists? And the vanguard and its rearguard? And certain conceptions of love, nice scenery, the precise multinational Colt sidearm?

Like Saint-Just[ii] said to me in a dream I had a while ago: Even the heads of aristocrats can be our weapons.

*

— A good part of the world is being born and the other part is dying and we all know that we all have to live and we all die: in this there is no middle road.

Chirico[iii] says: thought needs to move away from everything called logic and common sense, to move away from all human obstacles in such a way that things take on a new look, as though illuminated by a constellation appearing for the first time. The infrarealists say: We’re going to stick our noses into all human obstacles, in such a way that things begin to move inside of us, a hallucinatory vision of mankind.

— The Constellation of the Beautiful Bird.

— The infrarealists propose Indianism to the world: a crazy, timid Indian.

— A new lyricism that’s beginning to grow in Latin America sustains itself in ways that never cease to amaze us. The entrance to the work is the entrance to adventure: the poem as a journey and the poet as a hero who reveals heroes. Tenderness as an exercise in speed. Respiration and heat. Experience shot, structures that devour themselves, insane contradictions.

The poet is interfering, the reader will have to interfere for himself.

“erotic books full of misspellings”

*

The THOUSAND DRAWN-AND-QUARTERED VANGUARDS OF THE SEVENTIES are our ancestors

99 flowers open like an open head

Slaughters, new concentration camps

White subterranean rivers, violet winds

These are hard times for poetry, some say, sipping tea, listening to music in their apartments, talking (listening) to the old masters. These are hard times for mankind, we say, coming back to the barricades after a workday full of shit and tear gas, discovering/creating music even in apartments, spending all day watching the cemeteries-that-expand, where they hopelessly drink a cup of tea or get drunk on pure rage or the inertia of the old masters.

HORA ZERO[iv] are our ancestors

((Raise arsonist kids, get burned))

We’re still in the Quaternary Period. We’re still in the Quaternary Period?

Pepito Tequila kisses the phosphorescent nipples of Lisa Underground and heads off for a beach where black pyramids sprout up.

*

I repeat:

The poet as a hero who reveals heroes, like the fallen red tree that announces the start of a forest.

— Attempts at an ethic-aesthetic are paved with betrayals or pathetic survivals.

— And it is the individual who could walk a thousand kilometers but inevitably the road will eat him.

— Our ethic is the Revolution, our aesthetic is Life: one-and-the-same.

*

For the bourgeoisie and the petite-bourgeoisie, life is a party. They have one every weekend. The proletariat doesn’t have parties. Just funerals with rhythm. That’s going to change. The exploited are going to throw a big party. Memory and guillotines. Sensing it, acting it out on certain nights, inventing edges and humid corners for it, like caressing the acid eyes of the new spirit.

*

Movement of the poem through the seasons of rebellion: poetry producing poets producing poems producing poetry. No electric alley/the poet with his arms separated from his body/the poem moving slowly from his Vision to his Revolution. The alley is a complex point. “We’re going to invent it so as to discover its contradiction, its invisible forms of negation, even to clarify it.” A journey of the act of writing through zones not at all favorable to the act of writing.

Rimbaud, come home!

Subvert the everyday reality of modern poetry. The chains that lead to the poem’s circular reality. A good reference: Kurt Schwitters. Lanke trr gll, or, upa kupa arggg, happens in the official line, phonetic investigators encoding the howl. The bridges of Nova Express are anti-codifying: let him scream, let him scream (please don’t go pulling out pencils or little notebooks, don’t record it, if you want to participate scream along), so let him scream, to see the look on his face when it’s over, what incredible thing happen to us.

Our bridges to unknown seasons. The poem interrelating reality and unreality.

*

Convulsively.

*

What can I ask of present-day Latin American painting? What can I ask of the theater?

It is more revealing and more evocative to stand in a park devastated by smog and watch people cross the avenues in groups (that contract and expand), the avenues, where drivers as much as pedestrians feel the urge to return to their hovels, when the murderers come out and the victims stalk them.

What stories are painters really telling me?

The interesting void, fixed form and color, at best a parody of movement. Canvases that will serve only as bright advertisements in the rooms of engineers and doctors who collect them.

The painter adapts to a society that is every day more of a “painter” than he is, and there he finds himself disarmed and registers as clown.

If painting X is found in some street by Mara, that painting acquires the status of an amusing, communicative thing; in a salon it’s as decorative as bourgeois wrought iron garden chairs/a question of the retina?/yes and no/but it’d be better to find (and systematize according to chance for awhile) the unleashing factor, class-conscious, a one hundred percent deliberate deed, in juxtaposition to the values of “work” which both precede and condition it.

The painter gives up his studio and ANY status quo and fills his head with wonder/or takes up chess like Duchamp/a self-taught painting/And a painting of poverty, free or rather cheap, unfinished, collaborative, of questioning participation, physically extended and spiritually unlimited.

The best Latin American painting is that which is still being made at unconscious levels, the game, the party, the experiment that gives us a real vision of what we are and opens us to what we can be; the best Latin American painting is what we paint in the greens, reds, and blues on our faces, to recognize ourselves in the incessant creation of the group.

*

Try daily to leave everything behind.

May architects give up the building of inward-looking scenes and open their hands (or make fists, depending on the place) toward that outer space. A wall and a roof acquire utility not when they’re used just for sleeping or avoiding rain, but rather when they establish, for example, from the everyday act of dreaming, conscious bridges between man and his creations or the momentary impossibility of these.

In architecture and sculpture the infrarealists start from two points: the barricade and the bed.

*

The true imagination is that which destroys, elucidates, injects emerald microbes into other imaginations. In poetry and in whatever else, the entrance into the work has to already be the way into adventure. Create the tools for everyday subversion. The human being’s subjective seasons, with their gigantic, beautiful, obscene trees like experimental laboratories. Watch, glimpse parallel and heart-rending situations as a giant scratch on your chest, on your face. Endless analogy of gestures. There are so many that when new ones appear we don’t even notice, even though we’re making/watching them in front of a mirror. Stormy nights. Perception opens by means of an ethic-aesthetic carried to the limit.

*

— Galaxies of love are appearing in the palms of our hands.

— Poets, let down your hair (if you have any)

— Burn your nonsense and start loving until you come up with priceless poems

— We don’t want kinetic paintings but enormous kinetic sunsets

— Horses running 500 kilometers an hour

— Squirrels of fire hopping through trees of fire

— A bet to see who blinks first, between the nerve and the sleeping pill.

*

Risk is always somewhere else. The true poet is the one who’s always letting go of himself. Never too much time in the same place, like guerrillas, like UFOs, like the white eyes of prisoners serving life sentences.

*

Fusion and explosion from two shores: creation like a decisive and open graffiti by a crazy kid.

Not at all mechanical. Scales of amazement. Somebody, maybe Bosch, smashes the aquarium of love. Free money. Sweet sister. Visions frivolous like corpses. Little boys jerking off from kisses until December.

*

At two in the morning, after having been at Mara’s house, we (Mario Santiago and some of us) heard laughter coming from the penthouse of a 9 story building. They didn’t stop, they kept laughing and laughing while below we slept propped up in various phone booths. There came a moment when only Mario was still paying attention to the laughter (the penthouse is a gay bar or something and Darío Galicia had told us that it’s always watched by the cops). We made phone calls but our coins turned into water. The laughter continued. After we left that neighborhood Mario told me that actually no one had been laughing, that it was recorded laughter, and up there in that penthouse, some stragglers or maybe a single homosexual had silently listened to that record and made us listen to it.

— The death of the swan, the swan song, the last song of the black swan, IS NOT in the Bolshoi but in the intolerable pain and beauty of the streets.

— A rainbow that starts in a grindhouse theater and ends in a factory on strike.

— May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth. May it never kiss us.

— We dreamed of utopia and woke up screaming.

— A poor lonely cowboy that comes back home, what a wonder.

*

Make new sensations appear—Subvert daily life.

O.K.

GIVE IT ALL UP AGAIN

HIT THE ROAD

—Roberto Bolaño, Mexico, 1976

(translation by Tim Pilcher – TimothyPilcher@gmail.com)

[dazombi3fari3]

Hey doll hey!! How is everything going for you today? Great I hope. I made 5 makeup brush purchases this past 2 months that I have been testing out behind the scenes to see what was good and what didn’t work out for me. I had wanted to do this post last week but I just didn’t have the energy and pain level that would allow for me to deep clean my brushes to get good pictures for this post. Last night I was able to wash 2 months worth of dirty brushes…. I love brush cleaning day!!! I just cant’s sit upright for as long as it takes for me to wash my whole brush collection … generally it takes me around an hour to an hour and 1/2…. …. last night I was washing brushes for around 3 1/2 hours to wash all my brushes… I still have clean brushes in my collection but I wanted to make sure all my brushes were clean going into March …. I typically try to deep clean brushes every month… I wasn’t able to do it these past 2 months so there was a ton of brushes to clean.  I don’t use any fancy brush cleaning liquids or soaps… I use plain old Dove Pink Beauty Bar With Deep Moisture. I buy them in a 10 pack at Walmart for $11 and I use this only to wash my beauty tools. I love the way it smells, it doesn’t leave any residue on my beauty tools, and it leaves all my brushes soft and supple. I even use this soap to wash my beauty sponges daily. Well let’s talk new brushes….. ** SIDE NOTE ** There were 3 brushes that I purchased that are part of this haul that I used today so I had to take pictures of those brushes separately because I didn’t want to mix them in with the clean brushes … that is the reason they have a different back ground and that they are not lumped in with the rest of the brushes.

  I made 3 purchases of BH Cosmetics brushes. The picture with the white handle brushes was a set of brushes I purchased from Ulta that came with this super cute holographic makeup bag… the pictures are of all the single brushes I purchased off the BH Cosmetics website.

This is a set of brushes I purchased from the Profusion Cosmetics website, plus 3 additional single brushes.

This is 3 sets of brushes plus 1 single brush that I purchased from the line Real Techniques, I purchased them from Ulta. There is 1 brush missing, I had to throw it out… I got to use it 1 time and the next day all the hairs kept falling out in clumps…. sad really because I really enjoyed using it …. more on that to come later in this post.

This is a brush set that I purchased from the Tarte Cosmetics website called the Limited Edition Back to School Brush Set…. this set can no longer be purchased, but Tarte does have similar single brushes on their website now.

Now let’s jump into the individual brush purchases and what I think about them ….

This is the Crystal Quartz – 12 Piece Brush Set with Cosmetic Bag that I purchased off the Ulta website for $29. From left to right the brushes are numbered from 1 to 12. From left to right the brushes in the first picture are the: Deluxe Powder Brush, Large Rounded Bronzing Brush, Rounded Buffing Brush, Flat Contour Brush. From left to right the brushes in the second picture are the: Large Blending Brush, Tapered Blending Brush, Domed Blending Brush, Buffing Blending Brush, Eye Shader Brush, Pencil Brush, Flat Concealer Brush, and the Angled Brow Brush.

To be honest I only purchased this brush collection because I wanted that darn makeup bag!! It was super cute. I thought I could use the brushes as decoration on my makeup vanity, however… I was missing my nose contour brush somehow … I think I might have accidentally thrown it away when I decluttered my vast makeup brush collection … so I decided to try the Flat Concealer Brush as a nose contour brush. It worked so darn well that I ended up using the whole set for my makeup application the next day.

These brushes are so soft and so well put together that had I not know that this was a drug store brand I would have mistaken them for high end brushes!!! I loved them so much in fact that I put 3 more sets from Ulta in my online shopping cart to purchase later this month (March). These brushes are nicely weighted with a sturdy ferrule (the metal piece at the top of the brush right before the bristles).  I use the face brushes just was they are meant to be used except for the Flat Contour Brush…. that brush I use to cut my jaw line when I bake the high points of my face. I never like to use a blunt brush to contour… basically I never truly contour my face… I don’t know how to contour my face correctly and almost always end up with my features looking disproportionate. I do bronze the perimeter of my face and I do use bronzer to contour my nose (I find that contour powders tend to look muddy on me so I don’t use them to contour my nose), but for the most part I steer clear of contour powders for my face.

The eye shadow brushes are just lovely!!! Simply put they our perform most of my high end brushes. This is definitely a great brush set for the price point. This would be a great gift to give someone just starting out with makeup, or for someone new to the world of makeup brushes in general… they brushes do most of the work when it comes to buffing in products and blending out eye shadows. They also hold up very well to vigorous cleansing. There was no shedding and no splitting of the hairs upon inspection after they dried …. that’s the other thing…. these brushes dried super fast…. I washed my brushes around 5:30 pm and finished washing my brushes around 9:15 pm and I woke up around 7 am this morning and all of the brushes from this set were bone dry! In fact most of all the brushes in this post were bone dry by the time I woke this morning. The only caveat was the Tarte brushes … I think this is because they are so densely packed.

This is 8 of the 15 brushes that BH Cosmetics sells. I purchased them off their website individually. First the face brushes (the 1st 3 brushes of the picture on the left side and the single brush in the picture on the right side)….. The first brush is the BH Studio Pro Brush #2 Tapered Powder $6 but on sale for $4.20 right now, the second brush is the Studio Pro Brush # 3 Small Contour Brush $5 but on sale for $3.50 right now (at the time of this post this brush is sold out, but if you are interested in it you can choose to be notified by email when it’s back in stock), the third brush is the Studio Pro Brush # 15 Blush $7 but on sale for $4.90 right now (at the time of this post this brush is sold out, but if you are interested in it you can choose to be notified by email when it’s back in stock), and the brush in the right picture is the Studio Pro Brush # 18 Tapered Highlight $7 but on sale for $4.90 right now. Now for the 4 eye shadow brushes in the left picture …. The first one is the Studio Pro #7 Flat Shader Brush $4 but on sale for $2.80 (at the time of this post this brush is sold out, but if you are interested in it you can choose to be notified by email when it’s back in stock), the third one is the Studio Pro Brush # 6 Blending Crease Brush $4 but on sale for $2.80, the fourth one is the Studio Pro #9 Small Flat Shader Brush $4 but on sale for $2.80 right now, and the final brush in this purchase is the Studio Pro Brush #17 Small Tapered Blending Brush $7 but on sale for $4.90 right now.

This is another bunch of seriously great brushes for a drug store price point.  They are super soft and fluffy. They have a nice weight to them and the  ferrules are very sturdy. Out of all my large powder brushes that I own the BH Studio Pro Brush #2 Tapered Powder is by far my favorite one. It’s the perfect size to buff loose setting powders into the face. In the same vein the Studio Pro Brush # 18 Tapered Highlight is by far my most favorite highlighter brush of all time. It’s got the perfect amount of bristles that are just the right length and just the right flexibility to buff highlighter into the skin beautifully. In fact, I love this highlighter brush so much I ordered 3 more today so that I can always have a clean one ready to use… I plan to declutter or repurchase my other highlighter brushes… this Studio Pro Brush # 18 Tapered Highlight brush is all I’ll ever need.

The eye shadow brushes have just enough density to blend and buff shadows perfectly. I don’t use the flat shader brushes for eye shadow, I use the larger one to apply concealer and primer to my eyelids and I use the smaller one to blend my brow highlighter out and to go around the upper side of my brows with foundation to sculpt my brows out.

I can’t get over just how inexpensive these brushes are for just how good quality they are. These brushes also held up impeccably with deep cleaning. The handles are weighted well and the ferrules are sturdy. The bristles are duo colored with white and brown hairs all throughout the ferrule.

This is 12 of the 18 Vegan brushes that BH Cosmetics sells. I purchased them off their website individually. First the face brushes (the 1st 2 brushes of the picture on the left side and the single brush in the picture on the right side)…..The first one is the BH Cosmetics V1 Vegan Large Powder Brush $6 but on sale for $4.50 right now, the second one is the BH Cosmetics V11 Vegan Deluxe Round Powder Brush $11 but on sale for $8.25 right now, the third one is the BH Cosmetics V12 Vegan Flat Top Buffer Brush $11 but on sale for $8.25 right now.

a closer look at the 9 eye shadow brushes from the above purchase.

Now for the 9 eye shadow brushes, from left to right …. the first one is the BH Cosmetics V15 Vegan Round Crease Brush $10 but on sale for $7.50 right now, the second one is the BH Cosmetics V9 Vegan Eye Precision Brush (basically a small pencil brush) $3.50 but on sale for $2.63 right now, the third one is the BH Cosmetics V19 Vegan Large Blending Brush $10 but on sale for $7.50 right now, the fourth one is the BH Cosmetics V13 Vegan Brow Definer & Blender Brush $5 but on sale for $3.75 right now, the fifth one is the BH Cosmetics V20 Vegan Precision Brush $10 but on sale for $7.50 right now …. note this brush came with a damaged ferrule but it still works, it’s just dented…. the sixth one is the BH Cosmetics V6 Vegan Large Eyeshadow Brush $3.50 but on sale for $2.63 right now (at the time of this post this brush is sold out, but if you are interested in it you can choose to be notified by email when it’s back in stock), the seventh one is the BH Cosmetics V5 Vegan Blending Brush $4 but on sale for $3 right now, the eighth one is the BH Studio V16 Vegan Smudger Brush $10 but on sale for $7.50 right now, the final brush is the BH Cosmetics V18 Vegan Flat Shader Brush $10 but on sale for $7.50 right now.

I had purchased a high end brand of vegan brushes a while ago and never liked how scratchy they felt… You don’t get that with these brushes. These vegan brushes are soft and fluffy and a joy to work with. The bristles are duo colored with white tips andd brown roots. They don’t feel as weighted as the Pro line does but they still have a good weight to them and the ferrule on all the brushes but 1 are sturdy and of good quality. These brushes also stood up to vigorous cleaning.

These brushes I purchased from the Profusion Cosmetics  website. 5 of the brushes are part of the Eye Essentials kit for $17.99… this kit includes from left to right …. ES3 Pointed Crease Eyeshadow, ES2 Firm Blending Eyeshadow, ES5 Flat Shader Eyeshadow, ES6 Small Pointed Eyeshadow, and the ES7 Flat Precise Eyeshadow. I also purchased 3 single brushes …. another ES6 Small Pointed Eyeshadow $4, another ES2 Firm Blending Eyeshadow $4, and an ES1 Large Blending Brush $4. These brushes are so amazing that I promptly purchased the full 19 piece bundle set regularly priced at $92 but I got it on sale for $69.99. The brush handles have a Pro makeup brush weight to them. They are sleek with a matte rubber coated handle and a very sturdy ferrule. The bristles are duo colored with white tips and black roots.

Ever since I received these brushes in the mail I haven’t been able to stop using them! They feel like PRO brushes …. like really feel like PRO brushes. I can’t wait to try the face brushes in the 19 piece set. I may have to order another of the Eye Essentials kit just to have plenty of options for eye brushes….If you can’t tell I’m a bit of a makeup brush hoarder (ha ha). These brushes held up nicely to cleaning and dried quickly. The bristles are firm but soft and fluffy. The blending brushes buffed out my eye shadows so well and in such a short amount of time. These brushes truly made creating glamorous makeup looks a breeze.

I purchased these next brushes off the Ulta website. It’s noteworthy that I own over 20 Real Techniques brushes, not including these ones.  These 9 brushes 3 sets and 1 single brushes from Real Techniques . The first brush is the Setting Brush $7.99, the next 2 brushes (the orange handle brushes) are part of the Flawless Base Set  $19.99, however 2 of the brushes I gifted to a friend since I have purchased this brush set many times and have so many multiples of those 2 brushes…. The first and the last brush in the left  picture bellow are the 2 brushes I gifted to a friend. The 2 brushes I kept were the Contour Brush and the Square Foundation Brush. I use the Contour brush as a blush brush and the Square Foundation brush as another brush to cut my jaw line while baking the high points of my face. The next 2 brushes and the single brush in the right picture are part of the Enhanced Eye Set $19.99, however I used the Fine Liner Brush and the Lash Separator today and they both were way too dirty to comfortably take a picture of…. this set is the set in the right picture bellow. The 3 brushes from the above pictures that I was able to photograph without grossing you out are the Essential Crease Brush, the Shading Brush, and the Medium Shadow Brush. The last brush in the picture above it part of the Eye Shade + Blend Duo Pack $8.99. This set comes with the brush that you see in this picture above (in the light reddish purple handle) which is the Base Shadow Brush and the Deluxe Crease Brush (pictured in the single image bellow, it’s the first brush on top)…. the Deluxe Crease Brush is the brush I had to throw out because clumps of the bristles were falling out… the first day I used it, I used it as a transition brush and it worked so perfectly to blend out the transition in no time…. but the next day when I went to clean it off on my makeup towel clumps of the bristles fell out, I tried to use it any way and still clumps of bristles were falling out, I got bristles in my eyes … it was just a mess. I plan to repurchase this set so I can have that Deluxe Crease Brush again, but I couldn’t return the set because I didn’t keep my receipt.

The Eye Shade + Blend Duo Pack

Out of all the brushes I purchased from the Real Techniques line, the stand out brush for me was the Setting Brush. It’s the perfect size and shape to use as an under eye setting brush and is, by far, my favorite under eye setting brush.

These brushes are very light weight. It feels like you’re holding nothing and the ferrules are very cheap aluminum, easy to dent when tapping your extra shadow off the brushes. The handles are a matte rubber coated material and all the brushes have bristles that are duo colored, white on the tips and black at the roots.

These brushes hold up well to deep cleaning and dry fast, however you have to spent sometime after they are dry to reshape them.

I love Real Techniques brushes, but out of all the brushes I purchased this past 2 months, they are not my favorite… save for the Setting Brush.

And Finally … My last brush purchase of the past 2 months …. the Tarte Limited Edition Back to School Brush Set $39 when it was still being sold, however I have seen this brush set on Amazon for $69.99. Also I received a free dual ended brow brush and spoolie with my order…..  Some of these brushes are still being sold as singles …. I will include links to the ones that I can find and links to ones that are similar to the ones I received in this set….

From left to right the brushes are: powder player bamboo pressed powder brush $34 but is on sale for $24 on the Tarte website, a dense foundation buffer brush…. the closet thing that Tarte sells is the the buffer™ airbrush finish foundation brush for $25, a Double-Ended Contour & Highlight Brush (I could not find a similar brush to this one on their site), The next brush came with Tarte Treasures Collector’s Set, which included a 13-shade eye & cheek palette plus a full-size mascara & this Double Ended Blush and Crease brush …. the closet thing I could find on the Tarte website that is comparable is the Bronze & Glow Contour Brush  $34, the next brush is the Deluxe Shader & Blending Eyeshadow Brush $24, the next brush is the Double-Ended Concealer Brush (there was nothing comparable to this brush, however Tarte does sell a Quickie Double-Ended Concealer Brush that is fluffier and less precise for $22 and the Airbrusher Double-Ended Concealer Brush which is denser for $24 , the next brush is the double-ended eyebrow brush that I got for free with my purchase and there is nothing on the Tarte website that is comparable, and finally the last brush in the set a Doube-Ended Liner Brush, there is nothing on the Tarte website that is comparable to this brush either.

I love these brushes!! I mean all of them!! I use the Powder Player brush as a foundation brush and the foundation brush as a bronzing brush. These 2 brushes are densely packed but extremely soft . These 2 brushes do not dry fast but held up beautifully when deep cleaned. The Double-Ended Contour & Highlight Brush I use as a blush brush and concealer blending brush and the rest of the brushes I use as they were intended for use. The remaining brushes are all soft and fluffy and blend and buff makeup so well. Out of all my higher end brushes this set of brushes is my favorite. All the handles are made of sustainable bamboo, the bristles are all vegan, and the ferrules are extremely sturdy and made of a good quality metal.

Well…. Thanks for sticking it out to the very end …. I truly appreciate your willingness to read through all 3,000 words of this post…. I hope that you are having a great day/night and that life finds you in great spirits.

Stay tuned Saturday when I do another Makeup Haul post, see ya in tomorrow’s post and remember….. Save a spoon for a bit of lipstick,

XOXO

  2 Months of New Makeup Brushes Haul Hey doll hey!! How is everything going for you today? Great I hope. I made 5 makeup brush purchases this past 2 months that I have been testing out behind the scenes to see what was good and what didn't work out for me.

[elodieunderglass]

This is all 💯 . Now what to do if you’re a parent or guardian or planning to be one someday, and you just don’t have these resources? What if you’re freaking out because you don’t know how to do this as a parent.

With specific respect to things like developing pen grip, probably the most important thing is to give children access to mark-making tools and encouragement to use them. “He can’t use a pencil” is more of an indicator that the child can’t use pencils than anything else. And the cure for that is to hand your toddler a pencil.

I mean, outdoor play is important on so many levels, but it’s pretty awful and unnecessary that it got to that point ANYWAY. In the UK (even in 2018 when the screencapped article was written) the parents would have received a 2.5 year health review that would have assessed fine motor skills, including having the toddler copy marks made by a parent and assessing their ability to clutch a ball, stack blocks and grip items. And if the kid was in nursery at any point, their carers would have had mark-making on the curriculum, and would have been measuring the kid against their milestones for fine motor control and mark-making. So that one case is possibly less about “woe, I gave my toddler a tablet” and more: how did this family, their healthcare providers and their childcare staff completely miss out on the fact that a 6-year-old hadn’t progressed in his mark-making since he was about 2. I see the tablet use as a red flag, but also as a stand-in: the reason you give screens to small children is to get them to look at something and be quiet and leave you alone to do other things, and in small doses that’s perfectly legitimate. If you’re doing it THIS much, then it’s indicating other issues happening here. It isn’t about the technology so much as the fact that the parent wants to quell their child for so many hours of the day. Why didn’t they engage at the two year review? If the kid was with a stay at home carer, instead of going to nursery, why didn’t the carers think about this at any point? What was going on in that home? It isn’t critical and judging; it’s worth the parent in the article getting some support.

Outdoor play is necessary and important and it’ll been on our list of things to radically improve in the healed world. But in our current world, access to the outdoors is definitely delineated by class markers in different demographics; forest schools for toddlers in the UK are synonymous with the middle class; in countries such as the USA, people of color disproportionately live with less access to outdoor space. (In the USA, a 2020 report on the nature gap led by the Hispanic Access Foundation found that communities of color are almost 3x more likely than white communities to be “nature deprived” and lacking access to parks and green spaces - letting alone that such public spaces are rarely set out as invitations to toddlers to engage in open play.) this is the foundation of environmental racism, so obviously it will have to be fixed in the revolution - but what about if you’re parenting now? “Oh my god will my child be unable to hold a pencil?”

For struggling parents stuck in urban areas, who are still finding their way through parenting, activities like drawing/sticking/cutting can be done very cheaply, make little mess, and hit developmental milestones so that kids can grow up to hold pencils. Providing materials and your attention, and researching/learning about children so you can be better at doing that, goes a long way towards making up a great childhood.

As a final piece of anecdata, our five year old leans into the crunchy childhood we try to provide, since toddlerhood enjoying forest schools and the garden and allotment, and takes great pleasure in such wholesome activities as hitting mud with sticks. We recently all went with our neighbors to stand in a cold shallow clean creek during a heatwave, and the five year old encouraged all the older children to scrape the creek bottom to get the best mud to plaster on themselves. They dug dirt from the roots of a fallen tree with a stick so as to add an immovable crust to the mud.

The two year old indicated nothing but horror at this idea. They requested all their clothes be taken off and hung on a tree before they stood in the river (keeping their sandals on) and then were quite pleased to get changed back into their clean dry clothes. They don’t like being muddy or dirty or heavensforbid wet in any way. They don’t want to throw stones (someone could get hit) or hit things with sticks (that’s hurtful!) they love being outside but would rather sit and watch; they like to feed ducks and pick wild fruit, or perhaps a little light seed-planting, but see no pleasure in romping through mud like a spaniel. And they don’t like dogs. Or farm animals apart from chickens. Or anything noisy, messy or sticky. Or sand in their sandwich at the beach.

The astonishingly good pen grip they exhibit at the age of two is largely due to their fondness for sitting quietly and making complex marks with adult size pens in notebooks, an interest they have held firmly for a year.

If you have a kid that’s a little resistant to messy play, and you’re worried about them developing into a Redditor because of it, take heart from this. Kids have their own interests: identifying and supporting them is just as important for their development as giving them luxurious resources like private woodlands and swimming pools. Give the kid a pen.

And watch the Bluey episode “The Creek,” which shows how a child who is mildly anxious about things like risks and leeches can still appreciate how “the creek is beautiful.” Nature phobia is a documented thing that can put off both children and parents! And give the kid a pen.

not to be like "millennials vs Gen z" ageism but I don't think it's possible for a human child to develop normally without having even played leaf stick and rocks? Never made a mud pie or carved sticks into walking staves? Never played with a June bug in a mystery stream all afternoon, or pulled out the hose to make the mud clay softer to build with?

Something has to be weird about the first generation of kids to have almost 100% tactile outdoors play replaced by almost exclusively 15 second meme videos. And that's not even to say anything about the total disappearance of the middle grade chapter book genre.

[reactingtosomething]

If They Liked This, They May Also Like...

Holiday Shopping with Reacting to Something

stock photo shamelessly lifted from

We know we haven’t generated original content in a very long time, but we wanted to get into the holidays in a way that was more or less on brand. So in the spirit of a Netflix recommendation algorithm, here are some suggestions for what to buy friends and family who liked some of the movies we saw in 2018 (including a couple that premiered in late 2017).

It’s probably obvious, but just to be super clear, the format below is --

If they liked this: They may also like this

Miri’s Gift Guide

The Shape of Water: I shouldn’t say a day pass to an aquarium because it’s a terrible, easy joke BUT I AM WHO I AM.

If you’re not a garbage person, maybe consider the rest of Del Toro’s creature filmography, anything related to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or a collection of fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen. Dark and gritty originals, not the tidied up versions.

Call Me By Your Name: NO, I WILL NOT SAY ANYTHING TO DO WITH PEACHES BECAUSE EVEN I HAVE LIMITS. APPARENTLY. The book is a lovely, lyrical, tragic read (or listen, if you go with the Armie Hammer audiobook as I did), and I would also recommend giving a gift of solitary artistic pleasure in whatever way speaks to your intended recipient—a CD, a ticket to an art exhibit, a coffee table book of a painter you think they will love. Something beautiful that requires a little bit of space to enjoy privately.

Black Panther: The new Shuri comic! (I am a hypocrite because I haven’t read it yet but it looks so awesome!) Also, there are some choice funko pops for Black Panther, which are a nice, reasonable price and make a great desk or bookshelf addition.

Annihilation: A DVD of Arrival and a book on fascinating genetic mutations. (The photo above is from the first linked book.) Also, tell them about the Twitter account Tessa as Goats, which is a true gift to us all.

Game Night: A murder mystery game! Or whatever game you think most appeals to them, but I personally think the immersive nature of a murder mystery is a true delight. Also, something Olivia the Dog themed because she’s awesome.

A Wrinkle in Time: For the actual child: one of the books published under the Rick Riordan Presents banner.

For the child in all of us: a soothing and/or empowering adult coloring book and some nice colored pencils.

Thoroughbreds: Really cool sunglasses.

Love, Simon: Tickets to the upcoming Clea DuVall helmed queer rom com starring Kristen Stewart and YES this is a request for myself, obviously.

Blockers: Make them a dance music playlist on Spotify!! (Or burn an actual CD for peak nostalgia/those who enjoy physical media.) And if you have some time together, have your own dance party with as many or as few people as you want.

photo illustration by 

Ocean’s 8: LEVERAGE! BUY THEM A SEASON OF LEVERAGE!!! Give them the gift of even more cons and fun!

Incredibles 2: If they are parents: a night out without the children (this could mean a gift certificate or an offer to babysit). If not, try something heroic like these ornaments, or something that helps them learn to be their own hero, like a self defense or kickboxing class.

Tag: LASER TAG! It’s so fun, even if you’re bad at it! Give a gift card or book a session together and enjoy chasing each other around like giant, fun-loving idiots.

photo illustration from

Set It Up: A massage. Anyone who related to this movie too much is likely very much in need of stress relief. Also, a large quantity of popcorn to be eaten in whatever manner they wish with no shame at all.

Hotel Artemis: A Swiss army knife and a couple of airplane bottles of booze.

Sorry to Bother You: An Oaktown t-shirt (I have been told by someone from the area that this is A Thing but I don’t actually know and I’m sorry for that) and a copy of Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

Crazy Rich Asians: Ideally, a whirlwind food tour of Singapore. If that’s not feasible, a Hulu subscription so they can enjoy Constance Wu’s full comic potential in Fresh Off the Boat. And a really nice candle, because it’s a small decadence that can really go a long way.

To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before: The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory (if they like a steamy read), tall socks (if they like to be cozy and cute), and custom stationary (if they like to live dangerously).

A Simple Favor: A cocktail shaker, fancy bitters, a really good mystery novel.

Widows: Tickets to go see Widows again because it’s amazing and is probably even more amazing a second time.

Kris’s Recommended Reading 

Wildlife or Widows: The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness

As I say in my Amazon review, this is the best applied ethics text I was never assigned. In fairness to my professors, attorney-turned-journalist Jill Filipovic hadn’t written it yet when I was a philosophy student. Filipovic is also not a philosopher. But she is a brilliant writer and a rigorous thinker, and The H-Spot is fundamentally and explicitly an Aristotelian ethical project. That is to say, it takes the starting position that political organization should be aimed at the goal of human flourishing (as opposed to, say, economic growth). From there Filipovic builds a case, or maybe it's better to say several cases, for specific ways in which American policy fails women and disproportionately women of color in this aim, and concrete ways in which it could address this failure. She does so largely through first-hand accounts of several women across America, in a wide range of socioeconomic circumstances. Although the institutions and less formal systems in play are complicated, the questions at the heart of all this are simple: What do women want? What do women need?

Filipovic asks these questions without pre-judgment, and without assuming that any answers are too unrealistic to consider. Not that anyone she talks to asks for anything "unrealistic." Partly this is because they often speak from too much experience for the unrealistic to occur to them as something they deserve to ask for, but also, the idea that woman-friendly policy is unrealistic is a Bad Take to begin with. Filipovic doesn't need to be pie-in-the-sky utopian to show how things could be much better for women (and by extension, it should but still doesn't go without saying, for everyone).

I left academic philosophy over five years ago, but I really think each chapter (built around topics like friendship, sex, parenting, and food) is brimming with potential paper topics for grad and undergrad students of ethics and/or political philosophy. Whether you’re philosophically inclined or not, if you think “women should be happy” and “the point of civilization is to make happiness easier for everyone” are uncontroversial claims, The H-Spot is the book for you -- and for your friends who loved the several underestimated women of Widows, or Carey Mulligan’s captivating portrayal in Wildlife of a woman doing the best she could within the restrictions of her era.

Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet

Though it helps to have some familiarity with the Avengers storylines that led up to Ta-Nehisi motherfucking Coates’s first year on the Black Panther comic -- as well as with the excellent opening arc of Matt Fraction’s Invincible Iron Man -- here’s all that even a new comics reader really needs to know before jumping into Nation: King T’Challa, the Black Panther, was recently unable to prevent several consecutive disasters in Wakanda. Both as a cause and as a result of these disasters, T’Challa worked with the so-called “Illuminati” (Tony Stark, Reed Richards, Stephen Strange, and other intellectual and strategic heavyweights) to prevent the end of the multiverse itself. That crisis averted, T’Challa has returned to Wakanda to resume his royal duties.

Coates takes as a starting premise that Wakanda, the most advanced nation on earth, would only still have a hereditary monarchy if the monarch was uniquely suited as a protector of the people. In the wake of the Panther’s failures in this regard, Nation opens with a rebellion against T’Challa’s rule on two fronts: domestic terrorists with an unknown agenda on one hand, and on the other, former officers of the Dora Milaje (the all-female royal bodyguard corps beloved by fans of the movie) rallying Wakandan women who have suffered great injustices unaddressed by the crown. The leaders of the latter, lovers Ayo and Aneka, are nominally antagonists to T’Challa, but to the reader they’re parallel protagonists. You root for both T’Challa and the Dora Milaje, even though their agendas are in tension, not unlike the way one might have rooted for both Tyrion Lannister and Robb Stark in early Game of Thrones. (Shuri’s around too, though she’s quite unlike her movie counterpart.)

When he’s not fighting or investigating, T’Challa does a lot of soul-searching and debating about his responsibilities as king, the ways it conflicts with his career as a globetrotting superhero, and whether and how the government of Wakanda must evolve. Though Wakanda is too small to be considered a superpower, the domestic terror angle, an interrogation of historical injustice, and the struggle between moral idealism and political reality make Wakanda a proxy in some important ways for modern America. (You may have noticed that Ryan Coogler did this too.) Coates’s meditation on leadership and political power made A Nation Under Our Feet not only a great superhero comic but -- this is not an exaggeration or a joke -- my favorite political writing of 2016.

Nation is illustrated mostly by Brian Stelfreeze and Chris Sprouse, with colors by Laura Martin; some of Stelfreeze’s designs clearly influenced the movie.

Thoroughbreds: Sweetpea

When a clever, mean-spirited would-be journalist with airhead friends learns that her boyfriend is cheating on her, old traumas bubble to the surface and she becomes a serial killer who targets sex offenders. Darkly, often cruelly hilarious, Sweetpea is what you’d get if American Psycho was set in southwestern England and for some reason starred Amy from Gone Girl. Protagonist Rhiannon is a self-described inhabitant of an Island of Unfinished Sentences, de facto Chief Listener of her “friend” circle, and a maker of lists. Lists of the things her friends talk about (babies, boyfriends, IKEA), signs she’d like to put up at work (please close doors quietly, please do not wear Crocs to work), and oh, the people she wants to kill. Like her boyfriend, at the moment. Or ISIS, when news coverage of a terror attack pre-empts her beloved MasterChef.

Author C.J. Skuse smartly chooses not to have Rhiannon wallow in her traumatic past as many superheroes do. We get glimpses for context, but Rhiannon is committed to moving forward, to escaping her demons rather than being defined by them. It matters that she wants to get better, even if she also hates that she’s bought into society’s definition of “better.” (#relatable)

It’s worth noting that Sweetpea leans seemingly uncritically into a lot of dated gender tropes, in Rhiannon’s assessments of the women around her. (Body positive she is not.) Then again, she’s an unreliable narrator -- one of the best demonstrations of this is a scene in which she’s convinced of her ability to fool the world into believing she’s normal, then overhears her dipshit co-workers talk about how unsettling she is -- so arguably we’re supposed to laugh at how terrible she is without necessarily agreeing with her. This is, I think, a perfectly legitimate approach to a protagonist, even if some find it unfashionable.

The book is not quite as thematically rich as it first appears, at least on the topic of sexual violence; it indulges a “stranger danger” picture of rape that doesn’t feel entirely contemporary. (For a more nuanced treatment of rape culture, see the sadly short-lived but wildly entertaining vigilante dramedy Sweet/Vicious.) But as a portrait of a vibrant, layered, genuinely Nasty-and-you-kinda-love-her-for-it woman -- given Oscar-caliber-portrayal-worthy life by Skuse’s wickedly sharp voice -- Sweetpea is too fun to pass up.

Upgrade or Infinity War: The Wild Storm

Castlevania showrunner Warren Ellis helped redefine superhero comics with 1999’s The Authority, which at DC’s request he's given a Gritty Reboot (along with the WildCATS, whom some of us remember from this extremely 90s cartoon) in The Wild Storm. Ellis has always been interested in The Future, both its potential wondrousness and its probable horror. Fans of Upgrade’s refreshingly unsanitized (and unsanitary) take on human enhancement through body modification will find much to like in Ellis’s spin on the trope of second-skin powered armor. (He semi-famously wrote Extremis, one of the comic arcs that inspired Iron Man 3.)

art by Jon Davis Hunt, from The Wild Storm #1

Angela Spica, a reimagining of Ellis’s old Authority character The Engineer, is a cybernetics expert who stumbles onto a sort of shadow government conspiracy related to her employer, and goes on the run with the armor she’s designed for them. (When not deployed, the armor is stored inside her body.) Angela is quickly targeted by multiple covert organizations, one of which rescues (?) her and brings her in on a secret history of technological arms races and contact with extraterrestrials. The Wild Storm is full of big action and bigger ideas, and for smart, generally curious superhero movie fans who find the decades-long continuities of the DC and Marvel universes intimidating, it’s a great entry -- with a blessedly planned ending -- into sci-fi-comics.

Happy holidays, and have fun gift shopping!

[alazic02]

Hey! I was wondering if you had any advice on drawing. I had gotten out of drawing for quite awhile thinking it wasn't for me anymore but then recently came back to it but I am struggling... I feel like I don't know the basics anymore, and I can draw people from reference, but when it comes to drawing fanart, it just looks terrible. Advice?

This has been stewing in my inbox for many a week and I’m so very sorry that it’s taken so long for me to answer ;o; I hope that this is able to help! I am very honored that you find me qualified jasdjhfjkasdf I’m almost completely self-taught and still have a long way to go myself ;v; BUT ANYWAY!!

Drawing is all about manipulating shapes into the compositions that you want. If you don’t have a basic idea of the way that 3D shapes operate and the way that light falls on them and how shadows are made, your art is going to feel very flat and disproportionate.

Most things are made of circles (including ovals, egg shapes, etc.), squares/boxes, and triangles/prisms (with round bases, square bases, whatever)! A good exercise is to look at common objects like vases, fruits, containers, animals, etc. and to break them down into their basic shapes. 

Adding shadows comes from determining where the light falls on the shapes. From there, it depends on the way the shape is formed to determine where the shadows and highlights will be.

Lighting is best learned through observation! Set up a still life or sketch things from your desk and don’t feel pressured to make it look good, just get the basic shapes and values down.

One of the best ways to warm up and get the feeling of shape and motion is gesture drawing! That’s when you break down a pose to its basic movement(s) and quickly sketch it in a few seconds. Detail is not the point of these, it’s to learn how to make active poses and form a solid line of movement so that your characters don’t look stiff.

After a quick Google search, here are some sites that have preset timers and models that you can use to practice!! I recommend doing gesture drawings on fairly large work spaces (newsprint is cheap and commonly used) so you can channel as much of your own body’s energy into it as you can, as well as using thick, soft lead or charcoal. Site 1, Site 2, portrait references

Other good eye practice-type things you can do are:

line drawing challenges

have a friend or someone draw a random line or 2 and then you turn it into something new

a fun game to play with your friends! you all switch off drawing the line and everyone else turns it into a drawing

blind/contour drawings

contour drawing is when you look at what you’re drawing and try to replicate it by following its outline, or contour

you can do this by looking back and forth from your paper to your reference, or you can try it blind where you do not look down at your paper and only look at your object

one line drawings

try to draw something without picking your pen/pencil off the page

For all of these, it is better to NOT ERASE! It is very common to want to erase and fix and fuss with a drawing until you think it’s perfect, but doing that wastes energy. Trying to be perfect on one sketch will not teach you as much as doing 100 not-so-perfect sketches. To make it easier to break the habit of wanting to erase, I’d recommend drawing in colored pencil or ball point pen. Both have good pressure diversity like graphite, but can’t be erased.

I put together a little guide for how I tend to think about the shapes that make up people. This is a really simple breakdown lol BUT it is not the be all end all and needs supplementation from actual anatomy studies so please do look into muscles and bone structure and physiology.

(In making this I’ve realized that we are made up of eggs and frosting bags lol)

If you’re having trouble with drawing fanart, that’s okay!! Do not be afraid to use references when drawing fanart. It is A-OK to not know how things work!! I use references all the time for poses and objects and such.

Usually a Google Image search works well enough, but there are also a lot of pose reference blogs and providers online! Here’s one with a lot of poses.

There are also many, MANY reference and tutorial blogs here on Tumblr, and feel free to go down my Tutorials Tag here to see what I’ve reblogged.

If you’re having trouble coming up with ideas, just draw some squiggles or lines or crosshatching, anything to warm up your brain and get your hand going.

Another thing that could help is changing up your medium and the size of the paper that you’re working on!! Forcing yourself into a new work space can help break you out of your old comfort zone and help you grow. Pick up a bigger sketchbook, try drawing without erasing (i.e. with a pen), try painting if you normally just draw, and so on.

There are so many other things to dive into BUT I hope this was helpful, at least a little bit! If there are more specific things that you’d like me to try and talk about, please let me know. Pretty much the best, most basic advice I can give you is observe observe observe, and do not strive for perfection (all the time). I think that loose sketches that capture form and movement are the most valuable things you can practice. Go out to a park or the library or somewhere and draw the people and the places you see. And of course, good practice makes good perfect.

Find your style and how you like to work, and you can only go up from there :>

[bashfultern]

Research

My research can be divided into 4 chunks- The australasian Bittern, legal eagle, schatten parker, and autism. The australasian bittern

my research into the Australiasian Bittern was very interesting. It is an endangered bird that thrives in the wetlands of eastern australia, namely in freshwater environments where there are many reeds. Its most stunning feature is its long neck, which it can extend up to 45 cm in length. The neck is pale on its underside, with long dark brown stripes running down it, which would later inform my design of both the neck and the clothing seams. It is a heavy set bird, which also informed my design. The Bittern often when threatened or alarmed will extend its neck to its highest length. This inspired me when i would later research stimming behaviours, as a common stim is to jut ones chin out and to stretch the neck. Due to this, i made this one of Andy’s self soothing stims. This animal is very shy and reclusive, with current numbers not even being accurately known due to it’s reclusive nature. Due to this, I think Andy could draw from this personality trait, and be also very shy, almost bashful. 

Here are some visual research drawings

a “Legal Eagle,”

This phrase connotes a lawyer who is particularly skilled in their profession. Due to this, I decided that Andy is a law student, who is currently completing his masters in International Commercial Law with Dissertation. I decided he is probably most fond of contract law, as this is the type of law that fits in best with the phrase Legal Eagle- meaning someone with a fine eye for the detail of the law, and a very devoted lawyer. I decided that contracts and the language they use is a special interest for Andy, hence his extreme aptitude at the subject. Andy is not well liked among his peers due to his odd behaviour, however even they acknowledge his prowess in the court of law. Andy would love to be hired in a sucessful law firm by the time he graduates, (he is in his final year of law now,) however his social skills need some more fine tuning before he can confidently apply for a job.

Oddly enough there is a partner phrase to “Legal Eagle,” being “legal beagle”. Legal Beagle however, has more negative connotations, such as being more aggressive in court. It also has a tendency to refer to lawyers you are opposing, rather than ones on your side. Due to this, i wanted to make Andy a sympathetic character, hencemy choice for him to do contract law.

Schattenparker

In german, this word refers to someone who parks in the shade- its used in an insulting manner to imply this person is delicate, or “not a man.” In context, and example of someone being a Schattenparker would be if they parked their car under the shade after a long hot day. The argument is that only old people and weak/sick people would park in the shade.

Whilst this word only implied these meanings, as i delved deeper into my research i found it very odd this turn of phrase. There are many reasons why people would want to park in the shade. People could be sick, they might have an animal in the car, they might have a migraine, or a sensitivity to light.

As i investigated this, sensory processing issues for autistic people came up. Many of Andy’s characterisations already leant to towards behaviours shown by autistic people, so i decided to do more research in autism for Andy’s character.

Autism

Autism is defined as “ a developmental disorder characterized by difficulties with social interaction and communication, and by restricted and repetitive behavior.” A lot of my research into it was information from autistic people; their experiences, their explanation of things like stimming and sensory issues/overload, and on their special interests. I was able to talk with a friend of mine about her autism, and she helped me with the respectful characterisation of Andy. One thing which appeared in my research was about how to avoid alienating the audience from an autistic character. The example was called  behaviorizing vs humanizing. An example of behaviourising from their site was “’Brianna would scream whenever she had a wrinkle in her sock.’(Non-autistic kids typically do not do this, so the unusualness is located in the action of screaming. Because Brianna’s experience is left out, the only thing the reader sees is “mildly uncomfortable situation” and “completely disproportionate behavior”.)” 

and an example of humanizing was “Wrinkles in Brianna’s socks grated on her nerves like sandpaper on raw skin. Brianna often had difficulty conveying how unpleasant this was to other people, and when it happened, it reminded her of all the times she’d tried to communicate her frustration and been ignored. The combination of pain and stress and knowing she would likely be ignored again stripped her words from her and left her with no other way to communicate but screaming.”

Things like stimming and sensory overload are not things that autistic people do out of the blue. They are direct responses to stimuli, in the same way that I might smile when i see my favourite movie, an autistic person might flap their hands or rock from side to side. Sensory processing issues can lead to what in neurotypical people to be a tolerable sensation, for example a wrinkle in a sock, but for non-neurotypical people to be a vary painful and unpleasant experience. As with the other experiences associated with autism, such as repeated behaviours, special interests, and occasionally non verbal phases, it’s important to portray these respectfully in Andy’s character. He should not be a source of comedy due to his actions. So, all being said, here is a little character summary of Andy. Andy is 6 foot 2, heavy set, and a genius when it comes to contract law. He is home by 3:15 every day, applies sunscreen every 4 hours, (sometimes a bit more often if it’s been a rough day,) and finishes his studying at 9′oclock every evening. He likes to wear a matching pale green jumpsuit everyday, (turned inside out so that the hems dont grind on his skin,) loosely tied sneakers, and he keeps his hair short so it doesnt tickle his nose like how it did when he was younger. However, whilst Andy might be a legal eagle when it comes exams, he can’t seem to apply this keen eye to his social life. no matter how many online forums he reads, he can’t seem to make this friendship thing work with anyone in his year group. He is often seen with his brother Jonathan, who is helping him find some buddies of his own. 

Andy is 22, and is a Capricorn. His favourite season is winter (as it is much less hot, and sweating is an unbearable aspect of the human condition. In summer he showers 7 times a day just to avoid it.) His favourite color is beige, and if he won the lottery, the first thing he would buy would be 2 new rubber pencil grips. When he sees a cute puppy, he flaps his hands in delight, and can often be found gently rocking himself in his favourite part of a movie, or when the day is a bit stressful. At exam time you can see him jutting his chin out and stretching his neck from the stress of it all, and occasionally, when class is a bit too loud and the lights are a bit too bright and it’s getting overwhelming, you can find him under the stairs in block 4. It’s nice and cool there, very quiet, and there are no harsh glaring flurocents to stab into his eyes.

Andy’s dream is to work in a law firm that has very gentle lights and gentle speaking people. He is looking for graduate oportunities now, and can’t wait to start his dream job one day.

[rainsonata]

Stationary

Fandom/Shipping: Elsword; MMLP Rating: K+ Word Count: 1,686

Summary: Lunatic Psyker has to coax Mastermind out of his room to make the opportunity to give him a gift.  Writing request for @nagiiisasan.

If someone was to catch Psyker impatiently tapping his foot standing in the hallway of the house he shared with his counterparts, he would have told them that it was none of their damn business.  Really, it wasn’t.

In his hand was a paper bag, the kind used for packing lunch.  He didn’t want Mastermind to see the transparent plastic bag he purchased with it from one of the small shops downtown.  That would have given away the surprise too quickly!  There wasn’t much of it inside, so it was lightweight when he held it up to eye level.  He made sure to throw in tissue paper to further obscure the content inside.  

Leaning his head against the door to Mastermind’s lab, Psyker would hear the quiet sound of classical music playing in the background.  The scientist probably wouldn’t notice if he was to barge into his room since he wasn’t complaining about him pacing back and forth in the hallway for the past few minutes or so.  Only the sound of quiet typing on the keyboard indicated that Mastermind was still awake and not passed out at his desk.  

“Add?” Psyker knocked the door with the back of his knuckles.  He checked his dynamo for the time to see that it was getting late.  Could Mastermind hear him?  Well, that was also why he was here.  The brawler bared his fist on the door louder this time and shouted, “Hey, dinner’s ready.  If you don’t come out, I’m going to eat all your chocolate.”

The chair squeaked from the other side with a long-haired man slamming the door open with a scowling expression.    

“Touch my chocolate and I’ll set Apocalypse on your room.”  

“You’re awake!” Psyker laughed at the threat and bared his canines, “Disproportionate retribution, much?”

Mastermind dragged his hands across his face and groaned, shaking his head at Psyker’s laughter.  He peered between his hands and ran his hand through the end of his ponytail with a yawn.  Seeing the paper bag in Psyker’s hands, his eyes narrowed.    

“Is that my chocolate?” Mastermind asked – more like demanded to know.

“That was just a way to make you leave your damn room,” Psyker rolled his eyes.  “Come on, no one locks up their snacks more than you do.”

“You always find a way to break into them anyway.”

“That was once.”

Of all things, Mastermind was most concerned about chocolate?  How petty. He had no doubts Mastermind would go to extensive lengths to protect his chocolate, but that didn’t stop him from laughing again until he saw felt the presence of something coming up to mewl from behind him.  The sound that came out of the brawler’s mouth was a high pitch squeak, which sent Mastermind cackling at the knee jerk reaction.    

Psyker turned to see Apocalypse meow again, nudging its head against his shoulder for attention.  A smile formed across his features and scratched behind the cat cube’s ears, pulling away when it vibrated with a soft purr.  Mastermind could threaten sending his pet all he wanted, but he had the perfect counter to that.  Apocalypse went to him for toys and scratches behind the ears.

“It’ll be hard to nuke my room if you forgot to recharge it,” Psyker said with a smirk when he noticed that the light from the cat cube was dimmer than usual.

“Apocalypse isn’t the only thing I can use to ‘nuke’ your room as you say it,” Mastermind sneered, but there was guilt in his eyes when he glanced at the cat cube, who chirped in happiness at the sound of his voice.

“So what’s in the bag?” Mastermind asked when Psyker was still staring at Apocalypse, “I heard you cackling like a madman.”

Oh, right.  He held up the paper bag and handed it to the scientist with a grin, “You always complained about running out of supplies.  You’re welcome.”

Psyker thought he heard the Mastermind murmur something about being obnoxious.  He couldn’t help but snort when his counterpart looked at him with suspicion.  He wished the other would open the package already so he could see the reaction.

Mastermind blinked when he saw the layers of tissue paper inside the bag, his face was conflicted between surprise and annoyance for the effort placed into hiding the contents.  He took out the tissue paper with care, as if afraid to crumble it and tossed it on his desk on top of his keyboard. His eyes flurried in confusion when Mastermind reached into the bottom of the bag to pull out a transparent plastic case with white polka dots.  Inside the case were several different colored pens and pencils with flowers stenciled across and –

“Why cats?” Mastermind inspected a pen in his hand to see a cat sitting on the cap with a peaceful expression carved into its round face.

The rest of the stationary were similar with each cat painted with an assorted color scheme and different facial expressions, all of them happy and content.  Balancing one pen with one hand, he lifted it to eye level and stared at the white cat curled up on the tip.  Psyker almost jumped when Mastermind pressed on the cat clicker to test the pen.  Apocalypse beamed when Mastermind used its head as a table to write a few words on a notepad to test out the ink.    

“Hm?” Expecting Mastermind to throw it back to his face and reject it, Psyker leaned over when he didn’t get an immediate response from the scientist with a sly grin, “I think it suits you.”

“Cute,” Mastermind twirled the pen in his hand with a twinkle in his eyes.  “Didn’t know you were into this kind of stuff.”

Wait, what?  Psyker shook his head at the accusation with panic in his eyes. No, not like that!  His cheeks heated up as his bit the corner of his lips and glared at Mastermind, fighting a failing battle when he felt the blood travel up his face.  He could have sworn that bastard was smirking at him as he struggled to find something clever to say back.      

Some nerve this guy has, Psyker huffed when he caught Mastermind gazing at the cat clicker with a fond look.  Not even a thank you from him?  Well, okay, it was a joke gift, really!  He wanted to see the other throw a hissy fit and get annoyed over him buying something strange.  Instead, the scientist pressed a finger on his lips, lips curled up with his eyes looking at Psyker’s with amusement.  What was the other thinking?    

“It’s for you, not me.” Psyker said, but his words sounded hollow with his face turning red.    

“Spending money for me?” Mastermind teased, “I didn’t think you were listening to me back then.  How nice of you.”

“Are you keeping them or not?” He snatched the pen away from Mastermind to get the other’s attention, “because if not, I can take it back.”

“Oh no, I’m keeping them.” Mastermind scoffed and took the pen back, pointing the cat to Psyker’s chest, “I’m not rejecting something that’s free.”

“You’re such a brat…” Psyker twitched.  Did he really have to word it like that?  “It’s called a gift, asshole.”

“And I’ll be sure to think of you every time I use it,” the scientist chuckled

How could he be ungrateful one minute and then say weird stuff with a smile the next?  Psyker sighed at the sudden change in tone and wondered how Mastermind always managed to tease him like that.  He checked the other’s face for a hint, but all he received was a toothy grin.  Yeah, this guy was definitely fucking around with him.  Ass.    

“Don’t forget to charge your stupid cube,” Psyker scowled when he noticed Apocalypse turning dull again.

“Don’t be like that.”  Mastermind bit his lip and frowned, worried?  He led the cat cube over to the charging station connected to his desk before letting it go into sleep mode for a full recharge.  Pulling his side bangs back, Mastermind placed the pen behind his ear, the cat sticking out making him look ridiculous, or at least Psyker thought it looked absurd.  The scientist pulled Psyker in close enough that it made him nervous when he looked at the brawler.  Huh?

Slender arms wrapped around his waist, closing the space between them as Mastermind slowly moved his hands and pressed them on his cheeks to feel the warmth.  Psyker’s breath grew short when he caught himself staring back into the other’s eyes, bright magenta with white outlines around his pupils.  Mastermind brought his face in close with a quiet sigh, as if he was struggling as Psyker was in holding steady breathes.    

“You’re gonna drop it,” Psyker eyed the pen sitting behind Mastermind’s ear.

“Just for a few seconds,” Mastermind laughed quietly, placing his head on his shoulder.  “Can’t take a gift without a thank you, right?”  He moved his fingers across Psyker’s chest and leaned over to press his lips against the other’s cheek.    

“Dinner,” was Psyker’s intelligent response when the scientist pulled away.  “It’s getting cold.”  He turned his face away, but he couldn’t stop himself from looking back to see Mastermind smiling.  Shit, he was turning red again.  Psyker was almost disappointed when Mastermind pulled away and closed his eyes.

“Give me a minute to wrap up something,” Mastermind said, but his face was as pink as Psyker’s.

“Sure, sure.” Psyker scratched the back of his head with averted eyes.

When he went back to the kitchen to check on their food, it was cold.  He sighed at the inconvenience, but sat on a stool while reheating their meal.  Perhaps it was his imagination, but the rare smile Mastermind gave to him when they ate together made him lightheaded, but it was so brief, he could have been wrong.  His heart fluttered in what he thought was pride, maybe even happiness when he caught the scientist putting a sticky note on the fridge with the cat pen in hand.  At least his gift was getting put to good use.  

[easythingstodrawtutorials]

How to Draw an Ogre - Easy Things to Draw for Beginners

New Post has been published on https://easythingstodraw.net/how-to-draw-an-ogre/

How to Draw an Ogre - Easy Things to Draw for Beginners

How to Draw an Ogre – Easy Things to Draw for Beginners

I go over how to draw different cool things, and I take this and re-dub it. Its a simplistic version of an ogre. There are pretty much an infinite amount of ways an ogre can look like. This is my version, and I show you want I’m doing.

Ok, let’s get started with some guidelines. Well, shapes. Draw a big, round, triangle, egg-shaped thing for the main body. Then draw two smaller shapes for the forearms. Draw a center line down the body and add some finger guides, if you wish. Lighten your guidelines and we’ll begin the simple drawing. For my style of Ogre, we want a small head on top of a large body. Also, check out : How to Draw a Monster Ear – Easy Things to Draw Step by Step

Not what we want “shrek”

Draw the eyes closer to the top of the head than you would normally. This makes him look a bit… slow, shall we say? Draw around, bulbous nose that hangs over the lips, and draw a large chin. You can have teeth sticking past the lips to make him look more animal-like.  Next, we’ll draw the upper arms and chest muscles. Begin with the shoulders. Keep everything soft and round, since this guy is quite chubby.

  You can simplify the lines of the arms quite a bit, using just a few curves to get the right look. Try to wrap the chest muscles around the body. Imagine it as a big marshmallow shape that you’re tying a string around. Next, draw the large belly of the Ogre. We’ll have the belly button very low, so the lower belly with just split into two lumps. For this cartoony drawing, we’ll use large, square shapes for the fingers.

  Try to make an L-shape for each finger, to give them a claw-like feel.  With the fingers drawn in, use the guidelines to draw in the forearms. Then you can draw the web between the fingers, draw the knuckles, and add fingernails. Ok, I decided we need to draw a belly button after all. Draw a belt, partially obscured, beneath the hanging belly. Beneath that we’ll draw a furry loincloth using simply curved V shapes…

  One important detail is the arc of the back, drawing near the elbow area. This isn’t absolutely necessary but helps give an idea of his overall body type. The top line is the back of the ribcage, and the lower line is the side of his belly. Now we’ll just add some very cartoony legs and feet. Start with the thighs and knees, drawn together in a single line. Then draw a chicken drumstick shape for the lower leg, and then keep everything bubbly for the feet and toes.

Now for some basic details. Even though these lines are quick and simple, they’re based on actual human anatomy… so if you’re not sure what you’re doing, don’t hesitate to look at some reference online for muscles, or check out my How to Draw Muscles tutorial here on Dragon Art. Draw in the knuckles, add some little hairs on the belly and arms, stubble on the chin, and give him some hair flowing across his neck area.

Erase your guidelines, and you should be left with something like this. Not too bad. The proportions are very cartoony, and the hands/forearms are nuts… but you can get away with some crazy anatomy when drawing something like an Ogre. They’ve basically deformed humans, so that’s what we’ve got here.

  This is the creepy part. You can lighten the lines from Step 9 and use them as a guide for drawing a more detailed and realistic final illustration. The best advice I can give here is to look at photos of real people for reference. Bodybuilders for muscles. Anyone with hair. Use your own hands and knuckles for reference. Adding little imperfections to the character make him seem a bit more real…

  Keep it organic. Break up your lines. Yeehaw.  Ok, next image! These guidelines are a little more complex than the first image. This guy’s more hunched over, and his hands are out in front of him, for the most part. The body and arms are just pillow shapes and blobs. The main thing to pay attention to is the placement of the fingers and thumbs. Again, use your own hands for reference. You have a little room to mess around since these are cartoony fingers, but you want to make it look as realistic as possible, so be careful with the angles of the fingers.

  Continue drawing in the fingers and remaining thumb. Overlapping the fingers makes them seem somewhat rounded in space if that makes sense. Try to draw the knuckles on a curve that runs through all the fingers on each hand.  Draw the palm of his left hand. Most of the left arm is covered by the hand, but the main outline is still visible. On his right arm (our left), start your lines from the hand, and draw toward the elbow. The muscles closer to the wrist should overlap the shapes toward the elbow.

Draw the upper arms the same way you did for the first image. Keep it around and simple. The lines of the pectoral muscles begin in the armpit.  Looking around online, I’ve seen a lot of extreme Ogre designs. I doubt the original folk tales described Ogres as having lots of spikes and whatnot, but let’s have fun and draw some on this guy. Draw at least one spike breaking the outline of the back. This will tell the viewer’s brain that the spikes aren’t just in a row across the shoulders, but cover a larger area on the back. At least, that’s the idea…

  I drew these spikes more jagged, almost like… wooden teeth, if that makes sense. When somebody’s stomach is this large, sometimes there’s that split down the center. I like to draw it because it makes the guy look tougher than just having a big balloon for a stomach. This makes it look like maybe there are some ab muscles hiding under there somewhere. The loincloth will be made of leather straps this time. First, draw a few straps spaced out below the belt line. Now draw the remaining straps in between the first set. How to draw easy pictures.

  This makes it look like they’re overlapped. Be sure to use different curves on the straps, so they’re almost flapping in the wind, or just with his movement. Keep the upper legs simple, combining the thighs and knees into a single shape. He’s squatting a bit, so from this angle, the lower legs are mostly obscured.

  Start the feet with the big toes. Then draw the little toes getting smaller until the pinky toes. I like to add that extra arc to the small toes, rather than just drawing little sausages. This guy’s barefoot all the time, so his toes are actually gripping the ground. Check your own toes for reference. Seriously.

  Finally, the head… part one! Again we’re going to keep the forehead pretty small, the eyes high up… Draw a big nose hanging over the lip line. This guy’s mouth is open, so we’ll show him with a few teeth missing. Feel your own teeth with your tongue to make sure you’re drawing the right type of tooth in the right place.  Now the lower jaw. This guy’s really roaring, so we’re essentially looking straight down on his jaw. Start by drawing the teeth in a U-shape. Then draw in the tongue, and add the lower lip. Check Out : One Great Drawing Tip – Easy Things to Draw for Beginners

Here we can fill in the black spaces and really show off the missing teeth. To finish up the simple drawing, we’ll add some of the basic details again. Muscle fibers across the chest, some cuts, scratches, and wrinkles… Draw some basic lines of the leg muscles. His thighs don’t have to be super defined, but a little will look cool. Finish it up with some bushy hair on the tops of his feet. Why? Why not?

  Erase your guides, and you should end up with something like this. Pretty ferocious. As before, you can stop here and call it a day, or you can use this as the underdrawing for a new image. An hour or two later, this is what we’ve got. Well, you can outline and detail your drawing in whatever style you wish. I like this, blobby lines. What an ugly guy. Still, he’s pretty fun. You should play around with the design. Change the facial details, give him a beard, some armor, or whatever you want. I hope there were some helpful tips in here, and that you’ll be inspired to draw your own Ogre or Ogres. This was fun. Check out more stuff to draw and  on this website.

  Also, don’t forget to check another tutorial How to Draw Batman – Tech Version

BUY an: Artist Pencil Case

I do this because as I mentioned a while ago I am combining my two channels together, this tutorial I did some time ago for me another channel Sketch Monster, but that channel I want to merge with my other channel Easy Things to Draw since I consider that it’s the easiest way for me to maintain the channels. The channel Sketch Monster, it was going around about what I liked drawing the most, You know, like monsters and that sort of thing, but I noticed that people on this channel were also interested in that kind of thing, so I thought, why I didn’t just combine them?.

  So before we start with the drawing I’ll explain a little bit about what the ogres are about, just in case you don’t know them, an ogre is a humanoid creature from the mythology of many countries. This is also mentioned in some fairy tales, it is said that their main food is humans, especially children. The way mythology depicts them is with an inhumanly large and very high size, in some cases, they can reach up to more than 3 meters, they have a disproportionately large head, Abundant hair, the skin has an unusual color and this can be green or gray, they have a voracious appetite and a very strong body.

  The term “ogre” is sometimes used to refer to people with a bad temper with the term “you’re an ogre” or “how green you are”, it can also be used to refer to someone with a very deep voice. An example of an ogre of modern time could be Shrek.

According to mythology and legends, an ogre is a member of a race of large, fierce, cruel humanoids who eat human flesh. In some stories, they can also become shy and cowardly, in most of the cases they are very stupid what makes them easy to defeat. They are greedy beings, so they are always hunting and capturing humans, elves or dwarfs, mainly to hold them as a prisoner, eat them or steal their belongings. Prisoners of ogres are used as slaves or as their food. To capture the prisoners, they use ambushes and raids, since as I said before, their intelligence is not too high, so you can’t expect them to use many combat techniques, even the smartest ogre in the tribe is considered to be the leader. Today we can classify ogres into three types, the common ones, the oriental ones, and the aquatic ones. They are very similar to each other, but they have some characteristics that make them unique, an example of this is that the oriental ogre usually uses magic, while the aquatic one is the most aggressive one that exists. Ogres usually live in tribes and can adapt very well to any climate, so one can find it in the mountains, plains and warm climates, now that we know a little more of them let’s continue.

  For this drawing I used a pencil and start ghosting the image, this is something I’ve already talked about before, so you can go see my previous videos if you need to go over this theme. This step I find very funny, well not funny, it’s a process very messy, but very quickly, I just trace some vague figures and I just scribble to have an idea later on where to start putting the details, there are a million versions of ogres that you could choose from, as I said before Sherk is one of them, I will go for a bearded style of World of Warcraft ogre, although those that appear there are actually orcs, I never really understood the difference whit ogres and orcs, if there is anyone there who does it, I would appreciate very much if you would tell me in the comments.

  After making a pretty simple version of what’s gonna be on top of the shoulders, especially for me, for the things that I draw, this sketch is really simple, I’m gonna start making dark shapes, I use the exact same pencil I just go with dark, now I’m thinking about this angry face, this is almost my default face, it’s not like me in real life, because if it were in real life, I wouldn’t have any friends, this is my default face for drawings, you know as angry…

  I also start to add a few shades and I will make the lights come from above, the same happens with the nose, I do the same, I look for the course shadow along the rim of the nose and I also do that for the edge of the brow line and over the eye, right now I’m curling the furrowing of the nose, right above the nostril and these furrings are going to intricate these mildly Matte of the character or maybe just gives him more the appearance that he can be a character who can go mad like super crazy, but also who could be one who has this resting bitch face look and he doesn’t apologize for that, I am also thinking of this character as a kind of soldier, an emperor or even the biggest one, kind of like the “gorond” of Legend of Zelda.

  Now I continue with the other eye and I want to make sure that both eyes matches, because one of the things that I run mostly with the eyes, is when you draw it on one side, it’s hard to duplicate it on the other side, especially the dark when you have this very slight perspective and apart the nose is blocking the view. Then I add some giant freaky teeth underside and I love that look, I think the first time I saw this look, was in the comic book “Spawn”.

  Continued with the beard and I breaking that beard up, the first things I think is that the beard is one large mass and then I’m breaking that mass, you can also use that method for rocks too. Then add a little shade on the lower lip, since this by itself makes a bit of shade, I alsowant to add a full value for the beard, I go with darker values to break the beard into pieces is very similar to dividing shapes, I also add a few small hairs to the beard and then I add more and more details, and this really depends on you…

  how far you want to go with the drawing, one thing that helps you draw is to think in the third dimension, I recommend you to do that. Then I go on with the teeth, I don’t know what to call these lower teeth, I’ll just call them tusks lower teeth, those have more like rounded forms in some way and I’m thinking of them as a kind of a comb. I go up to the head and I draw these horns on it, I do that randomly, there’s no pattern or anything like that, I’m putting them all over the place like a Darth Maul-style, all these horns are quite similar, one thing I regret with this drawing is not giving them a little variety in the sense of length and size to the horns, I wish I had done that, the next thing that I do is connect the back of the skull with the ear.

  Then I give my ogre a huge back of the neck, like this huge trap, which tends to symbolize more the figure of superheroes, not always, usually the villain tends to have a bigger trap, if you take a look at things done by Ed McGuinness, they all have giant traps, I don’t know what it is, but to me it’s a cool look. if you look at people who use steroids, not always is true, but it’s a sign that people use them in real life, would be that the androgen receptors in the neck area, trap, and shoulder, start getting bigger. But that’s doesn’t mean if you have a big neck you’re using steroids, what I’m saying is just as a sign, although there’s a lot more, it’s just a funny little fact about that. If you look at the UFC fighters of the 90s, you will know that everybody there uses steroids, some of them have a humongous back, by the way, it is good to learn Fortran Anatomy.

I wanted to add to my ogre, kind of like a breastplate or something like that, and I’m not going to lie, but now it looks more like an apron, I also think, why I didn’t connect the apron with to the other shoulder?, because I’m looking at him and it’s kind of weird. Now I’m trying to put a little detail on the cheekbones, even if they have those huge teeth in front of them, you have to use your imagination to think what’s behind them, That’s attention to detail that hopefully, you are having a lot in your drawing.

  I go back to the horns that we put earlier and add a little more of shade, you know, just crisping out these edges a little bit, this is mostly a line drawing with just a little bit of shading, I mean, there’s shading mostly in the beard and in the face, but not as much as in other drawings, and that’s it, if you want you can continue drawing and adding details as much as you want, until you feel that the drawing is ready for

you. Thank you so much for being here, remember that I have a YouTube channel ”

  Easy Thing To Draw 101�� and I would really appreciate it if you subscribed, also if you’re interested in improving your artistic skills you can click on the notification bell, that way every time I upload new content, you’re going to get a notification. Another thing that I want to talk is, if you want me to critique some of your drawings you can go to my Patreon page, the thing I will do is put a layer in Photoshop and add the things that I think it should change, not because they are wrong, because they could be better, and I will also give you exercises for the things that you need to work in general.

  And that’s all, thank you so much for being here and I will continue doing tutorials of how to draw easy things, I like to explain how to draw step by step, as detailed as I can, making it much easier for you to learn. What I like to teach in my channel is how to draw, monsters, superheroes, things related to mechanics, and much more, even in some cases I like to try new things with you, that way we learn together. I am also interested in teaching how to make drawings for beginners, and I teach them from the most basic, so they can learn the best way, although as I have said on other occasions it really doesn’t matter at what level of drawing you are, you are always welcome here on my channel “Easy Things to Draw”, remember that if you have any doubts you can ask me, either in the comments or in the way that you want, I will try to answer you and help you as much as possible, but as I said before you can visit my Patreon for a more detailed review of your drawings, goodbye and we will see you later in another tutorial.

Hey guys for more information on upcoming events, contests and freebies, join our email list. SPAM FREE. Click Here to Sign Up!

[jaredbrophy43-blog]

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[trilotechcorp]

New Post has been published on PBA-Live

New Post has been published on http://pba-live.com/west-is-best-but-stars-hold-the-key-to-the-future/

West is best, but stars hold the key to the future

For decades, a stream of talent with big aspirations has been migrating west across the Appalachians and the Mississippi River. History, mystique and the nation’s most hallowed institutions still reside on the Eastern Seaboard and in the old industrial Midwest, but for big upside and a high ceiling, go west.

The phenomenon of highly skilled labor leaving one region for another is what economists call human capital flight or “brain drain.” Over the past 20 years, the NBA has experienced a game drain as the league’s biggest stars have disproportionately landed in the Western Conference.

When the Indiana Pacers shipped Paul George to the Oklahoma City Thunder on June 30, the current outflow of talent from East to West swelled to a tsunami. Thirteen of the top 14 players in ESPN’s November 2016 installment of #NBArank will open the 2017-18 season in the Western Conference. The only holdout is LeBron James, who is reportedly contemplating a move to Los Angeles next summer, when his contract expires in Cleveland.

It naturally follows that an outsized share of the league’s best teams play in the Western Conference. The West has beaten the East head-to-head in 16 of the past 17 seasons. In adjusted net rating, which weights a team’s overall efficiency for strength of opponent, the top five teams in the league last season all reside in the West. Of the top five teams in adjusted net rating over each of the past five seasons, only four of those 25 hail from the Eastern Conference. For all the dominance the West has displayed over the East, it’s most pronounced at the very top.

Powerful forces in the NBA have brought us to this point — among them superior management, higher expectations and plain ol’ luck. But it’s an even mightier force, the motives of star players, as demonstrated this month by Gordon Hayward, that can help the NBA rediscover parity between West and East. Is the West superior by luck or design?

The basic laws of probability dictate that in a league composed of 30 teams in two conferences there will be periods when one dominates the other. And because league rosters are relatively stable from season to season, once a conference gains an edge, it can sustain it over time through inertia. For instance, the East enjoyed an advantage during the entire span of the 1980s, when Boston, Philadelphia, Milwaukee and later Detroit consistently racked up 50-plus-win seasons.

The West’s reign of today has an air of permanence about it, as if its superiority can’t be accounted for by simple chance. But if the disparity is more than that, then what is it?

Regarding conference imbalance, Occam’s razor would suggest that better teams are simply better managed. Good players don’t stumble their way onto rosters by accident. Their talents are identified and their rights are acquired. They develop their skills in a specific environment, one shared by teammates, coaches, management, medical and performance experts and all kinds of support staff.

The better the operation, the more successful the team. Over time, elite organizations tend to retain the best players and/or find new blood, even if the process requires a couple of lean seasons while the place is being renovated. All of that starts at the top.

“There are good owners in both conferences, but collectively there are better owners in the West,” Rockets general manager Daryl Morey says. “Players are getting wise to owners being an important selection criteria.”

In his statement following the announcement of his new four-year, $170 million extension on Saturday, James Harden said, “[Owner Leslie Alexander] has shown he is fully committed to winning, and my teammates and I are going to keep putting in the work to get better and compete for the title.”

The East certainly boasts some standout owners — Micky Arison in Miami, Wyc Grousbeck in Boston, to name a couple. But from the Texas triumvirate to the steady Miller family in Utah, the depth chart of the West’s owners, just like its superstars, is more impressive.

Smart ownership yields smart management, and the most innovative, competent — and stable — front offices have been concentrated in the West for a while now. Continuity is the mother’s milk of the NBA, and the regimes in San Antonio and Dallas (ranked first and second in wins since 2000) have been in place for eons. Two big winners this offseason, Sam Presti in Oklahoma City and Morey in Houston (the Rockets and Thunder rank fifth and sixth in wins since 2000) are both a decade into their tenures. Third and fourth place go to the Lakers (Mitch Kupchak presided from 2000 until 2017), and Miami (Pat Riley has ruled since the first term of the Clinton administration).

The suggestion here is that if an organization wants to reap a long, bountiful era of milk and honey, and all the rest of it, it should install competent managers in the executive suites and provide them with a long runway. But is longevity for a front office the catalyst for winning, or is this the halo effect at work? Do elite teams win big because owners provide management teams decades of job security, or do those front offices get 10, 15, 20 years of trust because their teams are successful? The Warriors and the broken window theory

The Golden State Warriors have set the entire NBA on edge, particularly those franchises that have been deliberately constructing their teams to contend during the latter half of this decade. The Dubs have sent a message: If you want to contend in the West — hell, if you just want a chance to host a playoff game in May — you better load up.

That’s exactly what the Rockets did in acquiring Chris Paul, bolstering their vulnerable defense with PJ Tucker and feverishly managing their spreadsheet to add even more. The Spurs, determined not to squander Kawhi Leonard’s prime, added Rudy Gay and brought back key contributors instead of retreating into a soft rebuild to ready themselves for a time after the dissolution of the Holy Warriors Empire. Oklahoma City saw a chance to add a second top-10 player and pounced.

Meanwhile, back East, 41 wins will likely land you a spot in the playoffs, as it did last season for Chicago (though not Miami).

“When a conference is weak, teams in that conference don’t have to invest as much to succeed,” Mavericks owner Mark Cuban said via email last week. “Nor is there as much pressure to succeed. That impacts the decision-making process.”

Call it the Soft Drudgery of Low Expectations or even the Broken Conference Theory, whereby a conference that falls into disrepair is more likely to continue its slide into oblivion. In an environment in which a sub-.500 record could net a team two home playoff dates, and a 45-win season practically pencils a team into the conference semis, it’s not surprising to see a whole bunch of teams behave like the regular season is a pass-fail course. This effect leads the East to function as a warehouse store for treadmills of mediocrity, where a .500 record buys you a bargain.

Perhaps there’s an evolutionary component to this idea. College coaches routinely point to scheduling challenging out-of-conference games as a means to strengthen their teams for postseason play. For Western Conference squads that can hardly go a week without seeing a Warriors, Spurs, Rockets or another .600 West foe on the docket, their merciless schedule demands constant playoff-quality execution. All the while, Eastern Conference teams get to scheme against the confederation of the middling.

Salt Lake City, New Orleans, Memphis and Oklahoma City rank as the NBA’s only metro areas shy of 1.5 million people, according to the U.S. Office of Management and Budget. But that hasn’t stopped the Jazz, Grizzlies and Thunder from, season after season, turning out a consistent product in a league in which market size has huge implications for local broadcast revenue and free-agent recruitment. Spend 10 minutes with top team business execs such as the Jazz’s Steve Starks and the Grizzlies’ Jason Wexler, and one thing is clear: There’s an organizational imperative to scratch, claw and do whatever it takes to maintain relevance, even if it means bowing out with dignity in the conference semifinals to a juggernaut like Golden State.

It’s also easy to forget that San Antonio qualifies as a bottom-10 NBA market in size (the nation’s No. 31 Nielsen market, just behind Hartford, Connecticut), because the Spurs long ago stopped behaving like a have-not. Portland, the league’s No. 23 television market, might not have enough high-end hotel rooms to host an All-Star Game, but the Trail Blazers have compiled a .564 winning percentage since Paul Allen bought the team in 1988.

For all the hand-wringing over the precarious state of small-market NBA franchises against the big-market bullies, the gap between big and small isn’t a fraction of the chasm between West and East. The question is: Why is the disparity so hard to undo? The Matthew Effect

For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. But the one who does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him.

This verse from the Book of Matthew inspired a well-known aphorism: The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Sociologist Robert K. Merton gave it a name: the Matthew Effect. If the past several years are any indication, the Matthew Effect has found a sturdy vessel in the NBA.

Ostensibly, the NBA doesn’t try to perpetuate inequality between teams or conferences. With the draft, the NBA employs an incentive structure that hands the best incoming talent to terrible teams. If those teams are disproportionately located in the Eastern Conference — or, for that matter, wear blue as their primary color or play in cities whose names start with letters in the first half of the alphabet — the draft system is, in practice, supposed to make the poor richer. For whatever reason, these remedies aren’t having their intended effect.

In 2010, a new variable changed the equation when the Big Three joined forces in Miami — a somewhat ironic turn given that the Heat play in the East, as did the three stars who joined forces, LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh.

Theoretically, the salary-cap structure is one of the NBA’s mechanisms for discouraging a concentration of power, but James exerted his self-determination as the talent who drives the talent of the league. He wanted to play with two hand-picked All-Stars, and aided by the spreadsheet jiu-jitsu of Pat Riley and Andy Elisburg in Miami’s front office, that’s exactly what happened. In the seven years since, James’ contemporaries have adopted the same strategy.

“Today, for players where the money is equal between destinations, ‘Which superstar am I playing with?’ are Nos. 1, 2 and 3 in selection criteria,” Morey says. “Only after that comes owners, management, coach and city.”

If the brightest stars are magnets that attract other superstars, then the more talented conference will effectively compound its advantage. Kevin Durant joins Steph Curry in Oakland, while Chris Paul partners with James Harden in Houston. Paul George might not stay in Oklahoma City, but the presence of Russell Westbrook means that, if things work out this season, both guys can re-up for top deals and assure they’ll be playing with a fellow superstar.

Try as the league might to declare the terms for competition, superstars are now running the show — and they want to play in tandems and trios. Superstars can fix this

As the gap between the West and East widens, calls for eliminating conferences altogether grow louder. Sensible proposals have been made and Adam Silver said in 2015 the league would “take a hard look” at a playoff system that accepts the top 16 teams overall, regardless of conference standings.

Such a system could burden teams with brutal travel. The lower seed in a seven-game series between Portland and Miami would log 16,200 miles in six cross-continental flights over two weeks. For Boston-Los Angeles, it’s 15,600. That volume of travel isn’t conducive to world-class basketball when the games matter most, nor to good health.

Time might be a cure, as Boston, Philadelphia and Milwaukee are poised to be very competitive for a very long time. At the same time, Minnesota, Denver and the Lakers figure to rejoin the living in the West over the next few seasons. If LeBron makes good on reports that he’s eyeing Los Angeles, the entire enterprise might capsize.

Stars like LeBron hold the key, and they might be the best corrective for conference imbalance. According to multiple sources close to the Gordon Hayward sweepstakes, a key pitch point in the recruitment process from Boston — and to a lesser extent Miami — was a shorter line to compete for a conference title and beyond.

Around Hayward, Utah built an exemplary culture with classy ownership, standout management and a dedicated coach. Yet the Jazz were up against an impossible structural challenge — they couldn’t offer him the fast track Boston could. In the East, Hayward is an even-money bet to snag one of the three starting frontcourt spots in the 2018 All-Star Game; in the West, he’s a cautionary tale.

However much Hayward was drawn to Brad Stevens or the Celtics mystique, Boston’s trump card was opportunity. “Where can I win?” is a question inextricably linked with “Which superstar am I playing with?” At what point do other top-20 players entertaining those questions examine the landscape, spot the market inefficiency and make the same call?

When they do, this conversation is over.

Source: http://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/19959615/west-best-stars-hold-keys-future-kevin-arnovitz