being a self-taught artist with no formal training is having done art seriously since you were a young teenager and only finding out that you’re supposed to do warm up sketches every time you’re about to work on serious art when you’re fuckin twenty-five
when i was in undergrad, it was kind of mentioned in and offhand way that we should do warmups, but we were never shown what that meant. And, y’know, we were young so it didn’t matter so much.
Being older now and having an art job it’s…kind of essential.
So: a quick primer for those of you who are like ‘ok but how do i actually go about doing this warmup thing.’
1) you may be tempted to do ‘a warmup drawing’ which is just a drawing that will take longer than it needed to and probably be frustrating and kind of bad because you didn’t warm up first. It’s tempting but always a trick your brain is playing on you! Do not trust!
2) warmups will vary based on what feels good to you/what task you’re about to do/what motor skills you want to practice. That being said, some good standbys:
a) circles. Just a whole page of circles on whatever drawing surface you’re going to be using, whether that’s your tablet or your sketchbook or a drawing pad on an easel. For these circles you should make sure that you’re drawing from your shoulder and not your wrist. In fact, you want to be drawing from your shoulder rather than your wrist most of the time! forever! your wrist is delicate please preserve it!
In order to ensure that you’re drawing from your shoulder, when you’re holding your pencil or whatever drawing tool you’re using, the only part of your hand that should be touching the drawing surface is part of the last two fingers–some people prefer the finger tips, but I tend to favor the first knuckles. Either way, the fingers should really be ghosting over the surface, providing guidance rather than support.
I usually start with big circles and then go to smaller circles and lines of ellipses, and then try to fit circles and ellipses inside other shapes i’ve already drawn as a precision exercise, but i don’t do that unless i’m feeling loose
b) spirals! i don’t always do spirals, but if i’m stiff and the circles just aren’t cutting it, spirals are a good fall back. I start from the center and work outward, going both clockwise and counterclockwise until i feel comfortable with the whole range of motion. Some people really care about getting perfect spirals but for me it’s all about making sure i’m comfortable with how i’m moving so who really even cares about how the spirals look. Not me!
c) lines! straight lines! in parallel! i do a mix of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal. These are often more from the elbow than the shoulder, especially if I’m working on a smaller surface. For this exercise, I recommend holding the drawing tool perpendicular with the surface
d) connect the dots. This is a precision and accuracy exercise and takes two forms. The first is to draw two dots and then draw a straight line between them. The second is to draw three dots and draw the curve that connects them. This sounds a lot simpler than it is in practice. Take time to ghost over the line you plan to draw before actually committing to your line. (I don’t always remember where I picked up my warm up exercises, but I’m pretty sure I got this one from Scott Robertson. His how to draw and how to render books are very technical but also accessible and worth checking out)
e) cubes, spheres, cones, and cylinders. These help get your brain into a more volumetric space. I draw multiples of each, rotating the forms around, and I’ll often take the time to do some rough shading on at least a few of them
f) spidermans! This one is really good if you’re going to be storyboarding or working on dynamic poses. Just fill a page full of spidermans doing all sorts of acrobatics.
g) beans. I don’t do beans too much anymore, but I know a lot of people like it so I’m mentioning it here. Fill an area with different size bean shapes without lifting your pencil off the paper.
h) short medium and long line repetition. draw a short, medium, and long line on your page, and then draw directly on top of them 8 to 12 times, doing your best to exactly trace what you’ve already drawing. Repeat with a wavy line. I’m bad at this one, which means I probably need to do it more.
And there are lots more options too! Hit up youtube to see what other people recommend, put together your own go-to list, mix it up when you’re getting bored, etc.
This is a long list, I know, but I usually don’t take more than 10 to 15 minutes to warm up, and I can warm up one handed while I’m drinking coffee, so, multitasking hurrah.
Sometimes I’ll advance to a precision warmup and find that I haven’t loosened up enough yet; it’s totally ok to go back to an earlier exercise! Also, all of this has the added benefit of kind of ritualistically getting you into the drawing mode so even if I’m not feeling it before I start, by the time I’ve gotten to the end I’m usually Ready For Drawin’. Brain hacks.
so, yeah! that’s a lot of words, but! Warmups are important! Save your joints, take less advil, do better drawings!
anon in my inbox said fanfic writers who wrote about dark and taboo topics were not “real writers” because of what they wrote about.
reblog if you believe anon is wrong and writers are writers, no matter what they write about. no matter how they portray these taboo topics.
reblog if you believe art can be about topics that are controversial, taboo or outright disturbing, and artists who create controversial, taboo or outright disturbing art are as valid as artists who create art of conservative values.
I made a fully functional font for @opashoo 's conlang Yongasabi. It contains 263 unique glyphs, 201 of those being ligatures!
Link to the font in google drive:
Font testing website for using of the font without installing it:
Drag and drop font files into the browser and test in real time
Glyph document for yongasabi:
Yongasabi Glyph and Number Documentation Document started 2025-06-12 Main Document here: This is the documentation for the writing system
Organizational document for Yongasabi:
Yoŋasabi (Scuglang) by oPashoo (Find me on tumblr) The Slugcat language of the Rain World Undergrowth AU dang'ag lamlan pagsa. She is Rivul
More information upon using the font and how I made it under the cut.
How to write with the font:
I wanted the font to translate the direct phonetic translation of the Latin alphabet that is specified within the glyph document to Yongasabi’s alphabet, but the glyphs in Yongasabi are syllabograms, leading to there being ambiguity when translating into it from the Latin alphabet which, if there is a constant or consonants between two vowels, does not specify which syllable the consonants belong to.
The font Opashoo made for Yongasabi uses apostrophes as a separator to break up multiple syllable words with ambiguous cases, but I opted to use capitalization instead as it allowed for me to pull off a couple of tricks to reduce the amount of ligatures I needed to make. There are a few rules for how use capitalization in order to write the font below:
-The onset (consonants that are behind the vowel in a syllable) is always capitalized, in onsets with multiple letters (ch, ng, sh) both are capitalized.
-The coda (consonants ahead of the vowel) is always lowercase, multiple letter codas have both letters in lowercase.
-Short vowels (a, i, o) are Capitalized if the coda is present, [v] [Cv] [Vc] [CVc]
-u is capitalized if the onset is NOT present, [U] [Cu] [Uc] [Cuc]
-The a in ae is always capitalized, the e is capitalized if the coda is present, [Ae] [CAe] [AEc] [CAEc]
-the e in ei is capitalized if the coda is present, the i is capitalized if the coda is present and the onset is absent, [ei] [Cei] [EIc] [CEic]
Numbers directly work in the font without any hassle, thank you numbers.
Here’s a punctuation list! Refer to the glyph document for what they look like:
full stop - period | pause - apostrophe | text end - (ligature) period x2 gate brackets - parentheses | exclamation - exclamation mark question - question mark | !? - (ligature) exclamation + question mark arrow brackets - greater than / less than | long dash - underscore ellipses - (ligature) period x3 | short dash - hyphen quotes - double quotes / single quote
The font does not have glyphs for f, q, r, v, x, or z as they are not used in Yongasabi, any symbols not mentioned in the above section are not represented either.
Inconsistencies with the glyph document:
-Middle line glyphs (b, d, h, l, n, s, y) in the coda are supposed to connect with the middle line in syllables with o even if the upper glyph is non-connecting (b, g, k, l, p, s, t, w) I did not include this as it would increase the amount of needed ligatures.
-the glyphs in the coda of ae syllables are supposed to be the same size as the onset glyphs. I did not include this as it would increase the amount of needed ligatures.
-h in the onset of syllables with o is supposed to connect to middle line glyphs, I just forgot about this one.
How I made this thing:
I decided on the sizing first, every glyph was designed as lines upon a 16 by 24 unit grid, the lines were then thickened to be two units wide so the full glyph takes up a 18 by 26 unit grid (all grid measurements I say later are based on the non-thickened values). The size of the Fontforge canvas is 1000 pixels tall which turns out to be a hair over 260 mm so each grid space represents 10 mm.
Before I started working on designing the glyphs I knew that I couldn’t make ligatures for every possible syllable combination as that would require 1938 characters to represent every possible combination (17x6x17 [cvc]+ 17x6 [cv]+ 6x17[vc]) but in Yongasabi the coda is almost always in the same place so I could just have it as a separate glyph that is imposed over the previous glyph (I did this by having the spacing of the coda glyphs being a single pixel and moving the glyph behind both spacing bars) meaning I only had to do the [cv] ligatures. For u I made the [vc] ligatures and imposed the onset from behind (I couldn’t do the same for ae because the [ca] ligatures would already combine them together and so I just had to push through with [cae] ligatures.
Because the [CV] ligatures for [cvc] glyphs only took up half of the space they should have, I made a separate set of [Cv] ligatures to use without the coda and used the lowercase vowels to make them distinct. The a in ae ligatures is always capitalized as to make it so [Ca] or [a] syllables wouldn’t combine with [ei]. Because vowels in [CEic], [EIc], [Cuc], and [Uc] didn't need to combine with the onset I used the capitalization of the i and u to determine whether or not to add the null symbol in the upper slot.
After looking at the glyph document for some time I decided that I needed every consonant in 6 x 6, 9 x 16, 12 x 16, 15 x 16, 21 x 16, and 24 x 16 in order to create all the needed combinations. Because two 9 tall glyphs left just enough space for a bar for the [COc] and [CIc] glyphs with non connecting consonants (this means that the coda glyphs have to be 9 x 16), 12 tall glyphs were needed for connecting [COc] and [CIc] glyphs along with non connecting [CAc]
With 15 x 16 being used for connecting [CAc] glyphs. 21 x 16 is for [Ci] and [Co], 24 x 16 is for [Ca], and 6 x 6 is for all of the tiny glyphs used in ae, ei, and u.
I modeled the glyphs in Autodesk Inventor with the 6 x 6 consonants, vowels, numbers, and punctuation were made individually. The 16 wide glyphs were all made together with the intention of being able to modulate all of their heights with the same dimension, with a separate extrusion that I could suppress in order to get the center line glyphs without their top line. These dxfs were converted into svgs, organized, and exported in their final forms (as well as being scaled up by 10 because I didn’t want to put all those zeros in when modeling them) in Inkscape.
Because I had already made and labeled all of the needed glyphs in my files Fontforge was mostly just putting everything in its right place, setting the spacing for the glyphs (I put gaps of 70 pixels between everything and because the 180 x 260 mm glyphs are about 680 pixels wide most things take up 750 pixels), and making all the ligatures work properly.
Miscellaneous things:
Because c and e are used in ligatures but not on their own I just made them the null symbol in their respective roles, putting Ac after a capital consonant creates the standalone consonant glyph shown in the glyph document.
The non connecting onset glyphs are a bit higher than the connecting ones so that they don’t connect in [Cuc] combinations but this means that they’re higher than the others in [Cu] and [CEic] combinations aswell.
Shoutout to Michael Harmon for making this series of Fontforge tutorials which have been nearly the only source of information I have used to make both this font and my personal conlang’s font.
And shoutout to Opashoo for making Yongasabi (as well as making the glyph document so thorough, it would have been impossible to make this font without all of its detail) (and also being really cool and stuff)
everyone should be more ecoterroristic. picket against destruction of nature. plant wildflower bombs all over the place. murder an oil exec. protest pipelines. vote against environmental destruction. murder another oil exec
important reminder that most people you follow online are significantly lamer than you think they are including me. and if you feel insecure comparing yourself to someone online: DON'T. theyre probably also lame and weird. most people on the internet are
the idea that every summer will be as hot if not hotter than this for the rest of my life is unbearable i need to (remembers suicide jokes are bad for my mental health) murder an oil executive
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
areudirty
gracieabrams
vaporwave
dailybridgerton
tangentwithtanner
germansingergirl
romaincrisis
