the truly evil part about lolcowing is that the targets are almost always people who have done something/things that are unsavory at best or objectively harmful at worst and that is used as justification to treat them however you want with no recourse whatsoever. like you suddenly have permission to dehumanize someone for what, fucking entertainment. and if anyone tells you to cool it for a minute, suddenly they're supportive of that behavior, making you effectively immune to anyone who disagrees. like apparently nobody's ever heard of disproportionate punishment
notice how men feminine enough to be mistaken for women are a staple in much media but women masculine enough that they get mistaken for dudes are rare precious gems. just another one of life's little cruelties
Re: your comment on challenging yourself with difficult illustrations- what tips do you have for not getting into a frustrated-enough-to-cry state with it?
hmm... this is a complicated question. my answer here is way way too long so i've stuck it under the cut but tl;dr is IMO frustration usually comes from a lack of knowledge, not a lack of skill. you need to develop your analytical capabilities enough so that you can understand what is actually different between what you make and what you like. and you need to understand what tools you're using and why well enough to be able to identify when they're the thing that's holding you back. once you know what the actual roadblock is it's much easier to decide if you want to proceed and how, or throw in the towel for your own peace of mind. the answer is essentially never 'just keep plugging away at it'.
not all frustration is created equal. i feel like there are kind of two main camps of creative frustration; theres the logistical frustration, and the emotional frustration.
logistical frustration is is feelings like 'i don't know why this looks wrong' or 'i'm not sure how to do what i'm trying to do' or 'this feels too slow and difficult'. to nip it in the bud before it gets unmanageable you need to stop and take a step back for a moment to try and figure out what your actual roadblock is. sometimes it's a straightforward case of just needing more practice at the specific thing you're trying to do, but i feel like more often than not this tends to be a knowledge gap rather than a skill gap.
a big part of being able to close this gap involves developing your sense of taste and analytical capabilities. If you don't understand what it is about the work you like that makes it good, you can't aim for it in your own. and if you don't know which direction you're pointed in, you can't know which steps you can take to go forward. Knowledge of technical skills like perspective, anatomy, and lighting is not a cure all and it can only help you if technical proficiency is your goal. Sometimes something incorrect looks better.
sometimes you are also experiencing a problem with your tools. its true you can make good art with just about any kind of supplies, but there is a lot to be gained from using the right tool for the job. it's always worth taking the time to consider if adjusting any part of your setup could reduce friction.
For people who draw digitally, this can be stuff like having your stabilization on too high or too low, using worn down nibs, ignoring features your program has, using a program you're familiar with instead of one that has more relevant functionality, etc. For traditional art it's stuff like using a surface that doesn't pair well with your medium, using cheap supplies that can't actually produce the kind of marks higher quality ones could, or even environmental factors like not having enough light in your workspace. so on and so forth.
like the drawing im working on right now that's beating my ass. ill just sort of go over the problems i ran into and what i decided to do about them so you can see what i mean.
i tried to color it and it didnt look right at all. i think my palette was Fine, it wasnt super inspiring or anything but it should have been functional, and it just wasnt. i plugged away at it until it became obvious that spending more time wasn't resulting in better colors, it was just a cleaner version of something that sucked. When I took a step back and thought about it, I realized the problem was that I'm used to coloring under the assumption that there will be no or minimal internal line detailing. But this drawing has the most detailed lineart I've ever done in my life. So my usual coloring inclinations just resulted in a drawing where the lines and the colors were competing for supremacy and cancelling out each other's impact instead of complementing each other.
so my next approach was to start over coloring from scratch with a very similar palette but a more delicate application of the color; watercolor brushes over a toned background instead of blocked in flats with soft cel shading. I got a ways into this and it looked much better over all, but eventually I hit the wall again. Part of this was a skill issue; i'm not actually very good at making delicate marks because I don't do it a lot. In order to compensate for that lack of skill, I was using a lot of layers; apply it messy and tidy up the bleed after the fact. But I ran into technical limitations with procreate because the maximum layer cap of 34 was not enough for me to finish coloring in this method.
I was really considering just shelving the entire drawing for a bit and revisiting it once i eventually go through with getting a newer ipad, but I decided that since the palette called for so much white anyway I might as well just work it grayscale in screentone instead. This could theoretically be done in procreate but it's also a layer intensive process, and procreate does not have a robust toolkit for doing it. I went to work on it in csp instead. I've never used csp to finish a drawing before but i've been wanting to, and i know it has dedicated screentone features, so this felt like a good inroad to the program. thats what i was doing all this morning and it's going pretty well.
something important to keep in mind though is the golden rule:
sometimes throwing in the towel genuinely is the right move if you don't have some external obligation to finish it. there's no reason to force yourself to produced a 'finished' work. sometimes you have learned all you can and gotten all of the experience you can get out of a drawing before you manage to finish it. drawing to Have A Final Product is a one way ticket to ruining your relationship to art.
emotional frustration, though, is a whole other beast. this is the 'everything i draw is terrible' frustration. the 'i'm humiliated to be alive', the 'this is the only thing i've been doing my whole life and i've spent so much time and energy on it, how can i still possibly be this bad?' the "i wish i could just give up and never do this again" and unlike the mechanical frustration it is not really actionable.
i've always been a pretty miserable and self loathing person so this kind of negative self talk is more or less constant for me but really all i can do about it is say So What. i can't make myself stop thinking this way but what i can do is just not give a shit if the drawings i make are bad. like whats the worst that's gonna happen if i draw a drawing that sucks. literally nothing.
sorry that was too long but i feel like any way i could have think of to truncate it left out something i thought was worth saying.
it’s actually wild how terrified of the general public most usamericans are. like you don’t realize it if you’re someone who mostly walks and takes transit and spends a lot of time in populous public spaces but then you talk to one of the thousands of people that seemingly never set foot in any public space besides a parking garage or a starbucks and you suddenly understand why it’s so easy for fascist rhetoric about the dangerous alien to take root. this country’s median voter pretty much never interacts with strangers who aren’t their coworkers or people they met on dating apps
saw a post on instagram that was literally someone citing statistics saying public transit is one of the safest travel options out there and the comments were literally just “ummmmm op this is so ableist and misogynistic of you :) don’t you know the average public transit user is a dangerous violent criminal who wants to set you on fire :)))”
it must be so terrifying and sad to go through life convinced if you set foot outside your car in public or interact with people outside your nuclear family you’ll instantly be raped and robbed by the Evil Poors no wonder so many of these people are reactionary tar pits
it's very frustrating seeing otherwise well-structured posts about media literacy and critical thinking bookended with statements about "nowadays", "nobody has literacy anymore", "this generation is so anti-intellectual", and the like, unquestioningly falling into better past fallacies.
Do we really think the 80s and its Satanic Panic were better at critical thinking? what about the 40s? the Victorian era? societies have always had problems with critical thinking and literacy, because most societies have dealt with propaganda, corrupt leadership, difficulty providing education (due to poverty or discrimination or other issues), and/or people who resist critical thinking (due to privilege or circumstance or what have you). we can criticize media trends without pulling a "well back in the GOOD OLD DAYS" about it.
“The LEGO Movie was my favorite movie of 2014, but it strikes me that the main character was male, because I feel like in our current culture, he HAD to be. The whole point of Emmett is that he’s the most boring average person in the world. It’s impossible to imagine a female character playing that role, because according to our pop culture, if she’s female she’s already SOMEthing, because she’s not male. The baseline is male. The average person is male. You can see this all over but it’s weirdly prevalent in children’s entertainment. Why are almost all of the muppets dudes, except for Miss Piggy, who’s a parody of femininity? Why do all of the Despicable Me minions, genderless blobs, have boy names? I love the story (which I read on Wikipedia) that when the director of The Brave Little Toaster cast a woman to play the toaster, one of the guys on the crew was so mad he stormed out of the room. Because he thought the toaster was a man. A TOASTER. The character is a toaster. I try to think about that when writing new characters— is there anything inherently gendered about what this character is doing? Or is it a toaster?”
— Bojack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg commenting on how weird gendered defaults in entertainment are, and why we should think twice about them. Excerpted from this longer original post.
(via 360degreesasthecrowflies)
I always think of the description I saw years ago: Self-imposed deadlines don't help me, because I know the person who set them, and they're full of shit.
I always think of the description I saw years ago: Self-imposed deadlines don't help me, because I know the person who set them, and they're full of shit.
this was getting traction on the rage bait site but basically it is 2026 and I long for a cartoon/comic/game/whatever out there that does an actual gender dimorphism reversal cause I have yet to see it
I will be honest if someone posted "I'm a tutor and everyday I watch zoomers try to double tap on books to open them" thousands of you would reblog it and tag "😱 it's so scary that this is what all kids today are really like they're so helpless and stupid omg!!! those damn kids need to get off their phones!!!!"
things a concerning amount of people aged 25-40 on this site believe about today's children:
they don't know how to read and this makes them mean and dumb. also even though their meanness and dumbness are the result of poor education, they are still personal character flaws that deserve to be mocked.
they are responsible for wide scale censorship in schools and on social media. because, as we all know, children are famously politically powerful, never want to see horny or edgy content, and love it when books are banned in their school libraries.
they love to spread misinformation around so they can all armchair diagnose each other and act like they have learning disabilities in order to excuse their laziness about doing school work. obviously they are all liars and just need to just get their acts together and grow up instead of shirking responsibility for their actions like this.
they are uniquely cruel in comparison to past generations, and this is because of Phone. and also TikTok. no one has ever been cruel like this before.
they would all be much better off with their parents monitoring their internet usage. if they're closeted and their parents are homophobic then, well, sucks for them. kids being abused out of sight is better than them being annoying where I can see them.
Every part of Vegas feels like it's pulled out of fiction and is Incredibly off-putting. It's a major city in the middle of one of the world's most inhospitable deserts
Its famous for recreating other world landmarks on a small scale. It uses this as a trap to bait people into making life ruining decisions. It's motto is essentially "never speak of what happened here". Fucked up
okay. how do I put this. if you approach interactions with strangers as if the vast majority of them are unbearable losers who aren't worth your time, you will find yourself not liking most of the people you meet because you'll be looking for any excuse to write them off as unbearable losers. I know this is hard to hear but sometimes the problem is you.
gracieabrams
amandla
