Blendermarket is having a 10 year anniversary event and they're giving away blender tools for free every day for ten days.
Sadly if you didn't know this was going on, you missed them giving away retopoflow 3 yesterday, but there's 9 more days of free stuff! If you have an itch for blender and have never picked it up, you might want to consider making an account just to claim stuff you can use eventually.
the talk about art as something divine and mystical runs completely counter to reality: anyone can do it if they wanted to. its not a super power, its a skill. like handling a knife or power tools. anyone can do it.
yknow i never noticed the sheer rareness of images having ids or alt text on this website until i started adding alt text to my art (and trying to remember to add it to any images i post in general, especially text screenshots) and that makes me kinda sad
I feel like a lot of people just don't know how to do it or are intimidated by the prospect. I was too, actually, and I couldn't find any good guides on how to do it (beyond basic formatting) and most guides boiled down to "just describe what you see and important details!" I really wanted to add alt text bc accessibility is important to me, but I would always get kinda stumped on how to do it.
But then I saw this image, I think in a discord server, and I immediately started doing it. It kinda broke the ice for me
I have to draw a lot of gold and metal for my work, but wasn't happy with any of the metal tutorials i could find around. I prefer really specific instruction, so after some research i put together what i think works as a generalist's guide/tutorial. Not perfectly accurate, but i hope it's helpful!
yknow i never gave this blog an icon but it's so ancient now i wonder if I'm the only one with this old default icon left. i can't change it now I'm preserving history.
Library of Congress - historical posters and photos
NASA - you guessed it
Creative Commons - all kinds of stuff, homie
Even Adobe has some free images
There are so many ways to make moodboards, bookcovers, and icons without plagiarizing! As artists, authors, and other creatives, we need to be especially careful not to use someone else’s work and pass it off as our own.
Please add on if you know any more resources for free images <3
This is a method I started using when NFTs were on the rise - thieves would have to put actual work into getting rid of the mark - and one that I am now grateful for with the arrival of AI. Why? Because anyone who tries to train an AI on my work will end up with random, disruptive color blobs.
I can't say for sure it'll stop theft entirely, but it WILL make your images annoying for databases to incorporate, and add an extra layer of inconvenience for thieves. So as far as I'm concerned, that's a win/win.
I'll be showing the steps in CSP, but it should all be pretty easy to replicate in Photoshop.
Now: let's use the above image as our new signature file. I set mine to be 2500 x 1000 pixels when I'm just starting out.
Note that your text should not have a lot of anti-aliasing, so using a paint brush to start isn't going to work well with this method. Just use the standard G-Pen if you're doing this by hand, or, just use the text tool and whichever font you prefer.
Once that's done, take your magic wand tool, and select all the black. Here are the magic wand settings I'm using to make the selections:
All selected?
Good.
Now, find a brush with a scattering/tone scraping effect. I use one like this.
You can theoretically use any colors you want for this next part, but I'd recommend pastels as they tend to blend better.
Either way, let's add some color to the text.
Once that's finished,
You're going to want to go to Layer Property, and Border Effect
You'll be given an option of choosing color and thickness. Choose black, and go for at least a 5 in thickness. Adjust per your own preferences.
Now create a layer beneath your sig layer, and merge the sig down onto the blank layer.
This effectively 'locks in' the border effect, which is exactly what we want.
Hooray, you've finished your watermark!
Now let's place that bad boy into your finished piece.
You'll get the best mileage out of a mark if you can place it over a spot that isn't black of white, since you'll get better blending options that way. My preference is for Overlay.
From here, I'll adjust the opacity to around 20-25, depending on the image.
If you don't have a spot to use overlay, however, there's a couple other options. For white, there's Linear Burn, which imho doesn't look as good, but it still works in a pinch.
And for lots of black, you have Linear Light
Either way, you're in business!
As a note, I know it's a bummer for some people to "ruin" their work with watermarks, which is part of the reason I developed this mark in particular. Its disruption is about as minimal as I can make it while still being effective.
There's other methods, too, of course! But this is the one I use, and the one I can speak on. Hope it helps some of you!
This post pissed off an AI weeb who, with their multiple accounts, decided to whine about how copyrights for smalltime artists are tyranny or something.
That gives me a fair indication that I'm doing something right. ;V
Let me also restate that no anti-theft measure is foolproof. There are going to be ways around watermarks, always. A properly determined individual can always figure out methods of removing it.
However: add enough layers of frustration, and most will not see the point in bothering. Removing a speckled watermark from multiple images takes the kind of time and effort AI bros are, rather famously, unwilling to put in. If they have to do it for a whole gallery, most won't go through the trouble.
I made this Extremely Basic mouthchart for my students to help them learn what Basic shapes are associated with what sounds. Made with 2d builds in mind, as thats the most common 2d work in my area.
Every single project has its own show style regarding lipsync, so this NOT the be-all-end-all. You and your projects arent beholden to these suggestions, theyre purely a jumping off point.
do recommend going straight to the larger mouth to hit those accents. Sometimes I see animators easing out of a closed mouth to hit a hard ‘ah’ accent and it just tends to feel goopy !
technically when you open your mouth, it doesnt pop open. but the frames we choose to show dont have to represent EVERY nuance of movement, and thats where style comes into play, and how you can use timing to drive home the *feeling* of something !
