Untamed - Edwina Lucas , 2020.
American , b. 1991 -
Oil on panel , 48 x 54 in.
Three Goblin Art

roma★

Origami Around
Stranger Things
Sade Olutola

titsay
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
taylor price
Cosimo Galluzzi

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
AnasAbdin
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸

No title available

@theartofmadeline

Kaledo Art
todays bird
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH

JVL
d e v o n
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@auroraromanova
Untamed - Edwina Lucas , 2020.
American , b. 1991 -
Oil on panel , 48 x 54 in.
do you have any advice on character design?
watch The Sopranos
i actually wanted to elaborate on this and say that i think it’s a really bad habit of a lot of artists, influenced by current media casting practices, to unconsciously or consciously make every single character they create super pretty, like everyone is just hot in that very boring, homogenous way, and this also comes as a result of people using actors and celebrities as character references or faceclaims and AI facial generation programs like Artbreeder being trained on people who are generally very pretty-looking. it results in alienating, uncanny worlds and drawings completely devoid of people who just look like regular people. it results worlds populated by mannequins fresh off the CW. I feel like whether a character is attractive or not should actually matter, be part of their character, because that kind of thing absolutely affects the way you move through the world and the way the world treats you.
so i wanted to throw in some suggestions that, whenever I’m trying to find a character reference or otherwise draw very interesting-looking yet regular-looking people, which i usually have to do for bit characters in @ikroah or something, I tend to look for references in the following places. these are far from the only reliable way to get inspiration, this is just a non-exhaustive list of places i’ve looked before for visual inspiration when needing to create a character, whether starring characters or background ones:
pre-2000s television (The Sopranos and Twin Peaks especially having incredible character design)
extras in comedy sketch shows
esports players
real photos (not staged stock photos) of line cooks
70s baseball players
athletes from more obscure olympic sports like the javelin toss or greco-roman wrestling, especially if you’re looking for a specific body type
ska, jazz, and blues musicians
firefighters
improv troupes
for teenagers, searching “high school english class project” on youtube and sorting by Upload Date
state senators, small-town mayors, and generally obscure local government positions like comptroller or treasurer (yes i know politicians can be bad sometimes but smaller elections especially don’t really depend on looks)
people who walk by your window (if you live in a city like I do)
and again these are just, in my opinion, deep and easy wells to dive in if you want to get a good idea of what regular people look like. these suggestions aren’t the limits on where you can possibly find inspiration for character design
Fellini’s movies have remarkably interesting and unique looking actors
Yes!!! There’s an entire book called Fellini’s Faces that’s nothing but portraits of his actors that’s phenomenal for this kind of thing, though it’s fairly rare to get a hold of today.
(Since I know a lot of writers/artists follow me for costume/character design ideas!)
Big, big fan of when things are covered in moss or ivy. I just think it's neat.
why is the hill silent. it's supposed to be alive with the sound of music
this is meant to be read in the tone of an exasperated gay theater director
RETURN OF THE JEDI (1983) Dir. Richard Marquand
puttering around the house is an underrated form a self-care. make some tea or coffee. put on a podcast. sort the mail. tidy some pillows and fold some blankets. start the laundry. thaw some soup. just casually wander around aimlessly doing little things to make your space and life a little nicer. who cares if you get distracted or only do a little. you aren't being productive. you're puttering.
Rewatching Treasure Planet (great movie, watch it) made realize something about the way that stories convey information to their audiences. There's been a lot of discussion on the overuse of plot twists and how many stories prioritise surprising their audience over telling decent stories. However, if you instead reveal the "twist" to the audience before it becomes known to the characters, you can build tension and stakes. Treasure Planet comes right out and tells you that Long John Silver is the main villain almost immediately after his introduction (And even before he's introduced we're warned about a cyborg, so you'd have to be pretty dense to not put 2 and 2 together and realize he's a bad guy). So when the audience watches him and Jim bond and grow closer, it builds tension for when Jim finds out and it highlights the tragedy of their friendship, because we all know it's not going to end well. Then, after the truth is revealed, stakes are created because we want the friendship between Jim and Silver to be repaired, because we know it was real, but we don't know if can be after what Silver's done. And all of this would have been lost if Silver's true nature had been a cheap plot twist. The tragedy would be completely overshadowed by the surprise and betrayal, and any investment in their relationship would have been built on the false impression that Silver was a good guy.
Another good example of this is Titanic. Even if you were somehow ignorant of the ship's sinking, the film makes sure you know that it sank with its framing device of Old Rose telling her story to people salvaging the Titanic's wreak. And Titanic's plot structure could only possibly work if you know the ship is going to sink. I'm not just talking about building tension, tragedy, and stakes for the characters like with the above example, I mean that if you didn't know that the Titanic was going down walking into the film, the abrupt shift from romance to suspense-disaster would be an increadibly tough pill to swallow. But it works because we expect it. You don't walk into a film called Titanic without expecting the damn boat to sink.
However, the sad thing about both of these examples, is that despite all the benefits that came from telling the audience these things ahead of time, I think the main reason the creators didn't make them plot twists was because they couldn't have. Treasure Island is the single most influential piece of pirate media out there, and you'd have to have been living under a rock for over a century to not know the Titanic sank. So, the writers had to work around the fact that these important turning points in the narratives were common knowledge, and they wound creating incredible stories as a consequence.
I want to see more of this style of writing in stories where the writers aren't forced to do it. We've clearly seen that you can tell some really damn good stories by giving information to the audience before the characters learn it, and I just wish more works would do that instead of trying to surprise people with shocking twists.
@the-golden-ghost !!!
This is also why most adaptations of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde don't follow the mystery plot structure of the original book, since everyone already knows they're the same person, no one will be surprised by that twist nowadays.
As a consequence, most adaptations of the story are told mainly from Jekyll's point of view, and the conflict between Jekyll and Hyde becomes the main story, which makes for really compelling drama!
We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let’s suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, “Boom!” There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: “You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!” In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.
--Alfred Hitchcock, on the difference between surprise and suspense.
Moss and clover, Skottvång Sweden.
it only took a rewatch of tiger & bunny to completely change the trajectory of my life
After the Rain
download killing upload pain. instant thousand deaths to brain. motherboard on murder spree. blood computer victory.
online chilling upload nice. posts give life a little spice. cpu is pure and true. internet for me and you :)
Kitties in the Garden. A little gift I made for a friend of her little visitors.
Step one: use hall bathroom instead of master bathroom, notice that Builder Beige switchplate is horrid with lovely new purple walls. Take it down and wash it thoroughly.
Step two: dig out stash of old seed catalogues saved for this purpose. Get super crabby because you can't find the Mod Podge anywhere. Give up, then have daughter find it immediately, in the "glue box" you forgot you created.
Step three: decide on a color scheme, and start cutting. I asked @phantomtheraccoon if we should coordinate or contrast and she cleverly said both.
Step four: collect your flowers and fiddle with layout.
Step five: paint item with Mod Podge, place your images, and paint them again. Leave to dry, which honestly doesn't take long.
Step six: trim edges add cut out holes. I didn't actually cut out the screw holes; I just cut little X's there for the screws to go through. Worked fine to put it up, we'll see someday how it survives taking it apart again.
Step seven: coat everything with Mod Podge at least one more time, paying special attention to edges. Dry elevated on something (say, the top of the Mod Podge bottle) so it doesn't stick down.
Step eight: okay, wow, that's awesomer than expected!
*jazz hands*
Ooh, yes, I should decorate my light switch plates here, even if I can't bring myself to do all the painting. I used to have a Lumos/Nox one I made very hastily when I was first renting and it made me happy every time I used it. Light switch plates are such an easy, cheap way to decorate when your space is temporary (they're like a dollar at home improvement stores and very simple to replace with the original when you move out), highly recommend this kind of craft.
Yes to this addition. They're so cheap! Just do something, and then you will enjoy it every time you use it! Do something crappy! You can redo it later. This is such a low-risk/high reward project.
Reblogging because I still enjoy this switchplate every time.
plates: painted green, decoupaged with paper jungle/diluted white glue, waiting for blossoms and sealing.
🎶whiiiiiiiite gluuuuuuuuue aaaaaand waaaaaaateeerrrrr and aaaaaaaaaastrobrights!🎵
inspired to just do the thing by @rederiswrites , in context with wall art by @yuumei-art
Oh it's wonderful!
They had us do this in Girl Scouts! It's such a wonderful activity for kids too, and a great way to have them contribute to the house. My mother still has my sister and mine up and in use.
why did you people come up with russian names for what is supposed to be a movie set in italy. what was the thought process here. why does she sound like she walked out of a tolstoy novel
an insane response, but i can't fight this. carry on
im being hunted for sport in the notes
the colour of lilacs and bluebells
there's a lot of talk about reading comprehension and one thing i think is the biggest barrier to people on this site getting better at it is simply... rushing. rushing to share something you haven't understood, rushing to have an opinion without taking the time to think about it, rushing to declare that you don't understand something
take these tags, on somebody else's post (condolences pip)
the thing is. this is what i would call an inside thought. nobody would have known you didn't get it if you didn't tell them that. if you recognised that it was important but didn't have the headspace to process it, you can reblog without commentary for others, or to come back to later. or you can save it somewhere and wait until you DO have the capacity to read it over a few more times, ponder it, consider what it might mean, figure out how to understand it, and THEN reblog it
but no. rushing to reblog while it is still opaque. rushing to admit to ignorance rather than spend the time to achieve understanding. perhaps hoping that somebody will break it down for you more simply, though to my mind it was quite simply phrased in the first place. never stopping to take the time first
comprehension is not always instant! sometimes it takes a bit of time for something to percolate after you read it; sometimes you need to read it a few times; sometimes you realise you don't have the context for it and either go and get the context or accept that it's not for you right now
please just simply slow down. you don't always have to respond to everything within a second or two. it is okay if it is not an instantaneous understanding. we all need to get more comfortable with thinking more slowly and more deeply and more carefully, and not letting our instant split second responses drive us all the time, because they are a barrier to genuine reflection
favourite things about first drafts:
square brackets with notes to self mid-line like [does this make sense with worldbuilding?]
ah yes, Main Character and their closest friends, Unnamed Character A and Unnamed Character B.
bullshitting your way through something that you probably definitely need to research later
also square brackets to link up scenes. [scene transition idk] my beloved
the total freedom of word vomits
"I'll fix that later"
the moment when the world and characters start to gain a life of their own
pieces falling into place as you write that you were uncertain about before you started
the accomplishment of Made A Thing
Not only is this allowed but it's something i encourage all writers of any kind to play with! :D
The idea that all writers know what to say all the time and just splash fully-formed drafts out one word after the other is false. There are some who can do it, but i think most of us... can't. Which is why we need tricks like square bracket notes! They're not cheats or lazy writing or some other flavour of Not Allowed, but instead really really important tools that we should use as much as we need to.
Some of the most helpful tricks I've collected over the years are:
make some notes in square brackets – e.g., I had to write a scene on a sailboat, but I know nothing about sailing so i literally just had notes like [boat part] and [how to do X thing?]. If you use square brackets as punctuation anyway, use something else like [[double square brackets]] or a unique letter combination like XY at the start of the note; the point is to pick something you can search for easily later on.
(You can also style inline comments in a different font/colour. Scrivener has an inline annotation feature; if you use Word, you can make a specific Style to make notes stand out at a glance, etc.)
bullet-point your way through any tricky parts – this can be pure stream-of-consciousness vague ideas. it only needs to make sense to me later. much more helpful than just leaving big blank gaps that Future Me has to work out how to fill, but also better than dwelling on a piece of writing forever.
use comment tools – mostly do this if I have ideas for alternate events and/or phrasing, or if I want to check something for continuity purposes.
write out of order – Best advice i ever got for academic writing is to know or even write your conclusion first and your introduction last, which your main argument in between. Similar principles apply in fiction, or any kind of creative writing. If there's a part of the essay that I can visualise clearly or a part of the story that is particularly exciting or important, I might write that first, then figure out how it fits/how everything fits around it.
keep a loose scenes and/or "outtakes" folder – anything that i write out of order goes here, along with any notes for how I think I want to incorporate it into the full text. In the same vein, if I delete something but don't know for sure it will never be relevent ever again, it gets cut and pasted into an outtakes folder.
Basic rule though is that you do not have to get your writing perfect on the first try. This is where drafts come in. The way I see it is to treat each draft as a fresh start – I create/open a new document (well, new Scrivener file) and start over as if from scratch. Each draft gets a narrower focus than the last. This is my process, as an example:
first draft is the word vomit. You do whatever you need to do to get it onto the page, and it can be terrible. In fact, it probably should be terrible. You can fix everything later. it's fine.
The second draft is a half-hearted cleanup attempt. I'll re-type everything because everything is subject to change, from the characters' personalities to the pacing to the order of events. It's all primordial goop, basically. i'm just poking and prodding and making a few adjustments, but mostly trying to create a more stable version of the first draft. All shortcut tricks continue to be my best friend.
By draft three I'll let myself copy-paste between documents if I'm particularly happy with a passage, but try not to get hung up on anything specific. I'll still make liberal use of square brackets etc. as I need to, but try to address as many from the previous draft as I can. This is where I get more brutal with making decisions and trying to fix parts of the story in place.
Draft four is usually my final draft, but there's literally no rules about how many drafts you're allowed to write. It's at this point that I try to keep square brackets etc. to a minimum (unless i've diverged significantly from the plot of a previous draft and having to rewrite large chunks), and make sure to address all the notes and problems encountered in previous drafts.
This is when I move on to revisions. Revisions are the "final do-overs", for me. I start them when I'm satisfied with all the large-scale aspects: plot and chronology; characters' personalities, motivations and arcs; large-scale pacing (so the over-arcing pace, rather than the pacing in individual scenes); backstories; and worldbuilding. I'll copy the last draft's document instead of starting with a blank one. First I run through those large scale things one more time and tweak until I'm happy, not just satisfied. Then I shrink my focus to in-scene pacing, dialogue, and the quality of the writing itself.
I'll also rewrite my plot outline between each draft, too. The act of actually re-writing stuff is very helpful for making your brain think about it.
Drafting like this isn't for everyone, but realising that you can just bullshit your way through chunks of text was a massive game-changer for me. Some people will do a draft, then work on something else, then come back and do another draft, work on something else, etc. Some people's drafting process will look more like what I consider to be revisions. Do whatever works for you. Just remember that from the moment you first decide you Want to Write a Thing to the moment you hit "post" or "publish" or give your manuscript over to a publisher, you can keep making as many changes as you like in any way you like. (And if you go the querying to traditional publishing route, you'll probably get suggestions for, and have space/time to make, changes to the manuscript quite far into the process).
Yes!!
I don't believe I've ever met two writers who have exactly the same process. Every writer I've spoken to about the craft of writing has their own process, usually developed over years and years of practice and trying things out.
For example, I don't rewrite at all, that sounds horrendous, I just save-as to create a new draft. I also get the big structure stuff done in outlining, but I'm a weirdo who writes 20k word outlines. As mentioned above, I am one of those people who needs space between drafts--or at least, between rough draft and first revision. And I do my first revision on paper, always. The human brain processes screens and hardcopy differently! I write all over my printed rough draft, and then go back to the doc and apply those edits and anything else that occurs to me at the time, so my draft 2 is more sort of draft 2.5??
There's a lot more, obviously, and it's different between novels and short stories (I don't print short stories unless I'm really struggling). But I'm always experimenting with different ways to write, and sometimes they work and sometimes I get stranded and have to go back to the drawing board. Some people have a lot more hand writing in the prep stages, in notebooks or on index cards--I visited someone once whose dining room walls were covered in butcher paper and index cards with pushpins!
So if you're a newbie writer, experiment! Read about a bunch of different ways to get those words down! Try new things! Put notes and placeholders and such in your drafts, write by the seat of your pants, try out the whole in-depth outline thing, revise every paragraph before moving on to the next one, whatever works!!
Also please feel free to come talk to me about it! I love hearing about how people write.