#very happy that csp works for me rn

[fagboyfriend]

how did you get so good at crowded perspective pieces?

hey lol. forgive me for the wait, i tried to answer this (twice) on the day u sent this and both times my app crashed after me typing out a whole thing so i just needed to. take a breath before trying again. im on vacation rn so i dont have all of my files/sketches so im gonna try and make do with what i have.

the real answer is that i only really started doing it recently! i really made the resolution to make my work more involved and resolved instead of just doodling a character on a random background.. i’m very inspired by cartoonists and comicmaking and so i want my illustrations to be fully resolved scenes that tell stories and communicate ideas. right now im focusing a lot on trans bodies in close proximity, small spaces and domestic t4t relationships. I started off with a few studies. I did sketches of some artists who drew enviroments i enjoyed and tried my best to grasp an understanding of spatial relationships. taking some life drawing classes also really helped ^_^

im gonna talk about my house party series bc its relevant but i used different methods to sketch each one!

i used the csp perspective tool to create a linear grid to work off of, it’s very helpful, i knew i wanted a more centered composition for this one so i drew my center character first and figured out how to layer others around them from there!

this one was a little more complex. i made a photo collage (i wish i had used my own refs but. we all make mistakes) and then went over it with a lasso tool blocking out chunks of color. then i turned off the collage layer and drew over the chunks until i was happy with my layout! for this composition, i wanted your eye to travel pretty nonstop around the peice so i chose to make it cluttered and vertical to overwhelm the viewer!

this one was actually not sketched digitally!! i drew the characters in my sketchbook since i knew i wanted to go for a more layered and abstracted vibe, then used my lightboard to trace them on top of eachother.

I think creating crowd scenes is a lot about juggling space, figuring out how to make things look cramped but not have things blend into one blob. it’s difficult, but with patience you can learn to balance the elements effectivly.

[nagito-ex-machina]

Couldn’t fall asleep and I think that’s a sign from the universe that it’s Momota loving hours. so anyway this exists now

[uniformbravo]

me trying to make a gif part 2 (thrilling finale, buildup ver.)

ok good news and bad news: good news being withheld for Spoilers (not that it’s that hard to guess anyway lol), bad news explained first bc, chronologically, it is first

so yesterday i mentioned in the tags of that post that i had seen that krita has an animation feature so i was gonna try importing the frames into that and then exporting it as a gif. easier said than done, as it turns out

i started by opening the file i made yesterday with 62 layers as the frames and importing that into krita, which worked fine (i didn’t know you could actually open .psd files in clip stuido ((this typo is so fucking stupid it made me laugh so im leaving it)) and krita, so that’s pretty neat, i wonder if it works the other way around too) but i ran into problems when i tried to convert those layers into frames in an animation. because, like, the layout of the program has the layers displayed in one tab, and the animation timeline in another, like so:

(do u like how im using pictures now, i thought of that yesterday after i published the other post and realized hey, visual reference would probably make my plight a lot easier to understand!! so enjoy these educational diagrams from now on)

so my goal was to get the frames from the layers into the timeline, and i still don’t know if i did it right bc lbr krita is not very intuitive at all,,.,, i mean i watched a video tutorial abt how to animate in krita which was v helpful (it’s the one by jesse j james on yt fuckin SHout out) but it was about animating from scratch, not importing an animation you’ve already done elsewhere

so like, the way krita’s animation thing works, from what i could piece together as i bumbled my way around w/ it, is that each layer in the layers tab is a separate timeline in the,,, timeline tab

i want them all to be in the same timeline, not separate ones, and there’s no way to combine them in the timeline tab bc doing that just overwrites whatever layer you’re pasting it down onto, and also if you define the number of frames for that timeline (62 for this project) it just puts the single image of that layer for all of the frames instead of just one of them, so you’d have to go through and delete all the other frames you don’t want it to be, which would be such a fuckin pain

so i found a workaround, which is so tedious that it can’t be the right way to do it, but basically i started w/ layer 1 and defined 62 frames & then emptied frames 2-62, like this

(that blue box is the frame, btw, even tho it says 0, which actually kind of annoys me like why doesn’t it start the first frame on 1????)

from there i went up to layer two and selected that in the timeline, but for some reason the frame doesn’t show up automatically?

& i couldnt fuckin figure out how to make it into like, an Official Timeline Layer or whatever tf bc like, u see on layer 1 how theres that little lightbulb-looking icon on the right? that’s for turning on onion skin which only applies when you actually have frames with things drawn on them, so basically layer 2 in the layers tab has a drawing but in the timeline it doesn’t?

i didn’t find out what the actual reason for this is or how you’re /supposed/ to make the frame appear in the timeline, but what i did was right click on layer 2′s timeline & select “create blank frame” which magically made the frame i want appear

but it’s on top of the layer 1 frame, and i want it to be the frame after. also it’s still in a different timeline. this is the only easy fix in this whole damn process, u can literally just click & drag the frame from layer 2 to layer 1 and put it wherever u want on the timeline

and then u just delete layer 2 and that’s it, frame transferred!! then i just had to do that for 60 more layers and after [unspecified amount of time but it was a fuckin while ok] my timeline looked like this!

(the gaps near the end are held frames, to save me time so i didn’t have to copy a bunch of frames that were exactly the same)

krita is great because as far as i know ur animation can have an unlimited number of frames, at the risk of your own pc’s processing power, which is a definite upside to SOME expensive art programs i know (clip studio, i’m talking abt csp) and u can pick the frame rate too (cough photoshop elements 5.0 even tho u dont technically have an animation feature & it’s a miracle u can even make gifs at all) so once i finally got all the frames situated all nice and in order like on the same timeline, playing it was great! played at the right speed, looped perfectly, it was a dream come true right

well, time to export it as a gif

ha

haha

hoooo oo  o

so u got 2 options for exporting ur animation, u can either hit “export,” which lets u save it as different file types, one of which being gif, or you can hit “render,” which gives you gif and video options

well

i tried export first, bc that seemed like a good idea, but the “””gif””” it made was distinctly not a gif, despite its claim to be one?? this is what i got:

notice: 1. it is not moving, and 2. the black bars to the sides?? those are supposed to be transparent. they’re transparent in the file i made so why didn’t they register as transparent in the export, when gifs have transparency capabilities??

so That was some real live bullshit but i still had the “render” option, right? export was wrong, so rrender must be the correct option to go to that will produce the results i am wanting to see produced in front of me like a silver dinner platter with a correctly functioning gif under the lid, that’s what i want to see and “Render Animation...” is gonna Give me that silver platter righWRONG ok look at this shit rn ok Look

it says GIF it says it RIGHT THERE right??? right?????? then WHY

?????????????

and it also gave me all This bullshit

like did i ask?? did i fucking ask???? i already have all the individual frames why do i need even M o re i mfjgjgk

((rationally ok yea thats v useful for if ur making the animation in krita and want to export the frames to use elsewhere, but like uhhh 1. again, they’re not transparent & 2. i should have the option of saying i don’t want these??? bc *meme voice* i don’t want these)

so in the end i could find NO correct method of exporting animations as a gif in krita bc every ooption that says gif is fuckign LYING to ur face there are NO gifs in krita, aliens made the progam who looked at gifs and went “hmm i thikng this is how a gif works “ and just made jpegs instead but somehow got on the computers good side and got it to lie for them about it being a gif so thats why it says gif on the file still even tho its not a gif illimati confinr

so what is the conclusion to this? well i said there was good news too, and this is the portion where i divulge that sweet nectar (i type dthis 2 seconds ago and @ me what the fuck)

so after wasting a good 2 hours trying to figure out krita i gave up and watched some good old [youtuber name redacted bc what if it shows up in search & ppl see this dumbass post in there but it rhymes with fjackfsepticfeye] to relax into accepting my fate that i’ll never be able to upload my animations to tungle except in poor quality loopless video form, making me into a laughing stock on my own art blog, but THEN i had a stroke of genius, in my Brain

so if u read yesterday’s post u might remember that flipnote studio, the animation program i use on my ds, to animate, has the option to export files as gifs, both animated and sequential (meaning either as one fully animated gif or each individual frame separately), which is super convenient, but as i mentioned yesterday, any time i tried to open the folder with those files on my laptop, it crashed immediately

WELL today i thought “hey, how about instead of opening the folder in the sd card when it’s plugged in, how about i copy that folder from the sd card to my flash drive, and try to open it there, in case it’s the card’s hardware that’s causing the problem, not corrupted files”

so i tried that and it FUCKING WORKED THANK GOD GLORY HALLELUJAH

so now instead of spedning A THOUSAND YEARS trying and failing to force art programs to bend to my will i can just export the animations straight from my ds and drag them onto my computer Just As God Intended oh GOD im so fucking happy

here’s the gif in the end, i’m gonna post it to my art blog too but this is the Green Version bc i animate in green bc of some default settings in flipnote that i got used to, plus it makes me feel like i’m just sketching so nothing really has to be finalized so i’m comfortable while i work, and also it’s just nice ok it’s a Nice Green

(there’s a few frames at the end that are like the extra scraps from while i was working dw i got rid of those in the final version that i’m posting to my art blog later. also i added my blog url to that one too it’s aaaaaall good)

the only downside to this method is that i can’t change the canvas size to be 540px wide to fit with tumbrl s image dimensions but whatever i can just post them in a text post and fix the html to display it at its original size instead of the resizing bullshit tmurbl pulls constantly ugh. anyway it works great on desktop but it’s inevitably gonna look like shit on mobile no matter what i do *Big Ass Shrug*

anyway thats the end of my success story uhh i can’t make the like comment & subscribe joke again bc i already did that in the last post so like bye i guess thanks 4 watchign & have a great day i’ll see u in my next fvideo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYob4uDjEKI&t=0s

(^that’s my outro music)