Art resource collection

Header and Icon from "The Reluctant Bride" 1866 by Auguste Toulmouche.

[dionysiaproductions]

[rubyjones]

Create your own book cover - without generative 'AI' | Ruby Jones

Get more from Ruby Jones on Patreon

Too many writers are using generative 'AI' to make their book covers, so I've written a guide on how to make your own cover for free or cheap without turning to a machine.

If you can't afford to pay an artist, you CAN make your own!

I hope this is a helpful overview that covers the basics and points to some free resources.

[rhube]

I annoyed my cat by writing this and not playing with her; you might find it useful?

[copperbadge]

This is a fantastic guide not only to the technical aspect of cover design but the aesthetic aspect as well!

[naamahdarling]

This is GREAT STUFF. Highly recommend! Exactly the techniques I have used on covers in the past, and they look great!

[laboratoryrats]

“small thread on drawing plus sized characters!”

Source: Ullaiin on Twitter

[infinitybetareader2]

When You Know the Story… But It Still Won’t Work

You can see it so clearly in your head. The scenes. The emotions. The moments that are supposed to hit hard.

But when you write it down… it just doesn’t feel the same.

The Problem Isn’t Your Idea

It’s frustrating because the idea is there. You are not stuck due to a lack of creativity.

You’re stuck translating something vivid into something readable.

And that gap? It can make you doubt everything.

You’re Too Close to It

You know what every line means. You know what every pause is supposed to feel like.

But readers don’t have that context. They only see what’s on the page.

So sometimes what feels powerful in your head… lands flat for someone else.

It’s Not Failure; It’s Distance

Usually, nothing is “wrong” with your writing. It just hasn’t been seen from the outside yet.

Stories need distance to breathe. They need someone who doesn’t already know what you meant.

A Quiet Reminder

If your story feels off, it doesn’t mean you’ve lost it. It usually means you’re still inside it.

And that’s a very human place to be.

[creatingblackcharacters]

Welcome!

I'm going to update this list as I post more. So make sure to check periodically!

Anon Office Hours: Mon 12:30pm - Wed 6:30pm. (EST)

I DELETE ASKS THAT DO NOT CAPITALIZE THE IDENTITY OF "BLACK" ☺️

SENSITIVITY/BETA READERS LINK 👍🏾

Causes

"Your posts are too long"- Teacher's Note

Feedback Rules

FAQs!

Please take the time to review the one relevant to your questions! They are long- some longer than others- but they likely have a link contained within that can better guide your research!

📝Syllabus📝

Lesson 1: "White Man Painted Black"?

Lesson 1.5: "Hair for Thought"- how visualizing affects your writing

Lesson 2: “That One Hairstyle? RETIRE IT!” Black Hair is an Art (pt.1)

Lesson 2.1: Addendum to Hair pt 1

Lesson 2: "It Takes HOW LONG?" Black Hair is an Art (pt.2)

Application! Examples of Protective Hair Coverings

Application! Ice's Lazy Loc Wash Routine

Application! How to: Simplified Braid

Application! Daisy E's Simplified Hair Drawing

Lesson 3: "Defying the Default"- Skin Tones and the Presence of Black Characters

Application! What are Black fans looking for in Commissions?

Lesson 4: "Do Black People Blush?" Bringing brown complexions to life

Application! Humanæ- Resource for Skin Palettes!

Lesson 5: "The Same Place As the Music" Lighting & Color

Lesson 6: "Let's Have A Talk, First" Stereotypes, pt 1

Lesson 6: “Why’s she so rude?” (She’s Not)- Stereotypes, pt 2

Lesson 6: "Is He the Threat (Or Are You?)"- Stereotypes, pt 3

Application! How to Spot a Stereotype: An Example

Lesson 7: "That's the Black one!"- Imagery and "Black-Coded" Characters

Lesson 8: “Across cultures, darker people suffer most. Why?” Multiethnic and Multicultural Blackness

Lesson 9: “Romance Will Not Solve Racism”- Interracial/Biracial/Blended Black and White Relationships and Families

Application! "Not Black Enough"

Lesson 10: “The Ambiguously Brown Character™”- The Attachment to Eurocentric Beauty Standards

Lesson 11: “No, That’s Not ‘How Color Works’.” - Whitewashing

Lesson 12: “The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth” - Violence, Violent Imagery & Black Horror

Lesson 13: “It’s Giving” AAVE, and the Denied Yet Undeniable Impact of Black Culture

Lesson 14: “On Human Dignity.”  Blackness, Gender & Sexuality

Lesson 15: How To Guide Your Research

Lesson 16: "Make Your Peace With The Chaos..." Childhood While Black

Lesson 17: "D.N.A."- Blackness and Health/Medical Antiblackness

Application! Where do I find books by Black authors?

Application! @carmahnart 's Afro Index for Black Hairstyles!

[creatingblackcharacters]

with stuff like Black vampires, how do you feel about their skin being that ashy grey tone thats usually considered incorrect? ive made a Black vampire character before, though i made his skin more unnatural colour (purple-ish undertones) due to his colour scheme. i felt that was the more sensible way to go around with making a classic vampire with a slightly "nonhuman" or "undead" skin tone, while also keeping his Black identity. do you have any other ideas or recommendations for how Black vampires should be represented?

Sounds fine to me! Stylizing skin as ashy and grey when that character is supposed to be dead checks out. It's when they're alive that I have a problem. I also have a problem when people think we change colors when we die 😅 the melanin doesn't vanish just because we're dead. I'm the same brown I was when I was alive, just pallid.

I wish I could find the video that this Black cosplayer did, where she mixed some blue into her regular brown foundation to cancel out her undertone and make her skin look more pallid, but still brown.

[creatingblackcharacters]

Post by @sometiktoksarevalid · 1 video

💬 47  🔁 9991  ❤️ 17095

This one!

[boyd-stevens]

SHARPENING TUTORIAL — requested by anon

Edit: Here is the action, after anon requested it. First and foremost, I apologize ahead of time because this is not going to be an action. At the end of the tutorial, I'm going to include a link to a PSD with the smart filters plugged in. So you don't have to go through the trouble of loading an action and then playing it. Before we get started, this will only be compatible with photoshop. Also, you must have a basic knowledge of giffing and photoshop and how to convert all your layers for smart filters. If you cannot do that, this tutorial might not be for you.

Go to Filter > Smart Sharpen. Amount should be set to 500%, then your radius amount must be set to 0.4px. Make sure you remove the Gaussian Blur, and don't touch any of the other settings.

Go to Filter > Smart Sharpen. Amount should be set to 20% - 40% (play around with it, see what looks good). Radius should be set to 20px (again, play around with it, see what looks good).

Go to Filter > Camera Raw Filter. Find the Effects tab. Texture should be anywhere from +25 to +45 (sometimes, depending on the movie, I have it in the high 60s or 80s). Then set Clarity anywhere from 10 to 25 (again, it all depends on the movie, play around with the sliders). Find the Detail Tab next. Set the Sharpening anywhere from 5 - 15. Set Noise Reduction anywhere from 10 - 20.

Go to Filter > Other > High Pass. The radius should be .4px, then go to the blending options and set it to soft light, or screen. I usually set mine to soft light.

The last step is the blurring. It subtracts a little bit of the grain that the denoise didn't cancel out. Set the radius to 1px, and then go to blending options and set it anywhere from 10% to 25%. Click here to download the psd with the coloring included. It will load as one screencap and the smart filters will be there. You're going to window the psd and then drag the smart filter settings to the caps of your choosing.

[creatingblackcharacters]

Guiding Your Own Research!

The Livestream I did on tips for self-guided research for Black character design. Also helps in general, really!

Thank you all for your patience as I got this lesson up! I did my best to edit the stream down to the powerpoint itself, so it's 31 minutes. Feel free to just listen to it as a podcast if you must. I have added this to the syllabus as well, for easy finding. Please be nice to me 👉🏾👈🏾 I did my best.

Time markers underneath for each section as well.

Intro: 0:00

#1: 1:56

#1.5: 3:59

#2: 5:28

#3: 7:08

#4: 11:29

#5: 14:05

IMPORTANT! 17:15

#6: 20:45

#7: 24:39

[carmahnart]

Hey y’all I have an announcement! My web app that I’ve been working on, Afro Index, is now live! It’s a visual reference library of Black hairstyles, for artist, animators, writers, and anyone who wants to learn more about them!

Check it out at afroindex.org! 💛✨

Afro Index – Black Hairstyle Reference Library

A reference library for Black hairstyles with accurate naming, structured filtering, and curated reference images.

[redstonedust]

pet peeve is when you look up fashion references from a specific era and you keep getting modern day '[era]-inspired' fashion like NO i want authenticity damn it. i can see your 2020 photo quality and your 2020 hair and your 2020 makeup. youre not fooling me.

[bincliff]

hello i'm a historical fashion researcher and i have a lot of experience looking up things! this is a very widely experienced irritation and you're definitely not alone in this, but i am here to share everything i know!

so, ways to get around this:

turn off AI results. they're literally nonsense to us

don't use pinterest because the sources/provenance is often hard to trace

a standard internet search can be okay, but museum collections are the top tier (list of collections below this list)

instead of broad terms like victorian, regency, tudor, renaissance etc. try using the decade you're looking for. if you're not sure of what decade it is but have a vague image in your head, look on the fashion history timeline and just jump around until you find it. but even changing to e.g. 19th century will give better results than victorian

including terms like womenswear/menswear, daywear, formal wear, evening wear, court dress should increase the value of your search too

including "fashion plates" in your search can give you a nice impression of the intended silhouettes of the era. some of these might be a little stylised but will show you what was considered in vogue

for pre-fashion plate eras or things like makeup and styling, you'll have to look at portraiture or manuscripts. these are harder to actually find what you're looking for, but searching museum collections and limiting results to specific date ranges will be your friend

when looking at art, do bear in mind sometimes artists would paint fabric extra flow-y to show off their skills. it might not have been exactly like that in terms of fabric weight or drape. so, a pinch of salt required!

if you find something on image search where the provenance is dubious, reverse image search and you might find a source! i've been able to trace random pinterest images to real sources, but this does take a lot of time and effort and is often not worth the headache

some online resources and museum collections:

fashion history timeline is an invaluable resource if you're trying to get a feel for everything and should be your first port of call. it'll also link to good examples

the met has a vast number of extant examples of clothing, as well as fashion plates

costume institute fashion plates is a subcollection of the met for fashion plates (1800s-1922)

v&a also has many extant garments, fashion plates, and incredible articles on clothing and aesthetics. read the details of the objects because they'll often reveal a lot about the piece

lacma is good for C19th-20th pieces

nypl digital collection for photographs

national portrait gallery or similar for portraiture, or literally any museum in your country that has historical art

national museums scotland can be useful situationally but might be oddly specific

stout style history is a great collection for finding image references for fat people wearing historical clothes. survival bias of a lot of museum pieces tends towards smaller clothing that couldn't be repurposed, but this aims to counter that. it's not sortable, but is still a really nice resource

wikimedia commons is surprisingly handy! and the images, if you should need to link/repost them, are public domain

auction websites sound like a funny one to recommend. some won't have mannequins and some will. just look up historical garment auctions and you'll find some!

anyway, i hope this has been a good place to start for anyone interested! there are probably some i've missed because there are so many museums across the world and i don't know about all of them or can't remember them. but these are the ones i've used the most! (my specialisation/jobs i've had to research for have only really been in western fashion, so my resources reflect that)

[haemey]

Wikipedia has a list of fashion museums. Unfortunately, the page itself is only available in German, but the introductory paragraph is very short and after that, it's organised by country, and then it's a simple list. If you click on a museum's article, the website is usually linked in the overview table.

[hackedmotionsensors]

This may not help for before Sears was a store and its very specific to America but if you look up Sears Catalogs not only will you find of era clothing but also furniture, appliances, and other household stuff. Its basically the same as looking up fashion plates but for a bit more contemporary stuff. example I just searched "Sears catalog 1984" and internet archive provided

[concerningwolves]

A piece of writing advice that i will always kick and scream about because it's annoying but it works is: if you ever feel like you're stuck with your writing, go back to the absolute basics. Like, middle school English creative writing exercises for people who have never done a creative writing in their life. do a character creation exercise. list things you're experiencing with your senses. analyse a bit of someone else's writing that you like. write ten first lines off the top of your head. hell, even if you're not feeling stuck with your writing, going back to the fundamentals is very good for you! it really does remind you about the nuts and bolts of the craft. gets the brain unstuck. you can be a bitch about it and groan and wail if you like while you do it, but unfortunately it is very good advice

[concerningwolves]

Another writing tip that makes me unspeakably angry because it's infuriating but it works is that sometimes wordcount limits are Good, Actually. Sure they make you want to commit atrocities but they teach you how to improve readability by trimming excess words & improving clarity, which in turn makes you think hard about the construction of your sentences/phrases. this is an absolutely invaluable skill and i will continue to be mad about it forever probably

[backfliips]

A lot of people on twitter wanted me to explain how I draw expressions, so here you go

Unless you're drawing explicit realism, in my opinion, expressions should be exaggerated to some degree. If you aren't doing a 1:1 recreation, the point is to get the FEELING across. Try making the expression you want to draw and feeling how your face pinches and stretches.

Skin doesn't just "disappear" when your face moves it around --- that's where wrinkles come from! Pay attention to where your skin creases when you emote, and use it to your benefit. It's a fine line between overdoing it and underdoing it -- find your own balance.

Ultimately, every expression has a little bit of push and pull, unless your face is completely neutral (and even then, there are still some wrinkles...). Learning to think of expressions as actions and reactions is VERY helpful in learning to draw them without needing a reference, and in learning how to stylize and push expressions based on references as well!

I think a lot of people end up with stiff or unexpressive emotions in their art because they're just trying to recreate a picture instead of understanding WHY and HOW the face is moving --- and it's a tough thing that takes a while to really pick up and learn. Hopefully is helpful in showing a way of thinking about it that can influence your process and approach to emotions!!!

Also, bonus: even without the lines, the planes alone still show a LOT of emotion.

[aqua-regia009]

Motherland Chronicles #10 - Throne lady by Tobias Kwan           

[obsidian-bone]

Sketch of newborn Wisdom patreon.com/ObsidianBoneArt

[charlesoberonn]

(maybe) problematic writing advice: If you want to create a group of characters with engaging dynamics, assign them dysfunctional family roles

[sanatorium-industries]

Lighting Wizardry: A Quick Tutorial🧙🔮 Your model today:Eisenhorn (and sorry for my terrible English

[thatsbelievable]

TRUTH. What you need is imagination, and you don’t need to go anywhere to use it.

[caitymschmidt]

Yeah, sure, seeing new things is helpful as a fantasy writer. But. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that exposure to new things is the same as traveling. You know what else exposes you to new things?  The internet. Documentaries. Books. Freaking Youtube. So when you’re bored of cats and cooking tutorials, go on an adventure!

You wanna write create some fantasy creatures but don’t know where to start? Go check out some videos The Weird Creatures Earth has Had.

Want some inspiration for your Super Evil Villain’s Villanous Deeds?

Or maybe you want some weird locations to kick start your Fantasy World Terraforming?

Or maybe you need knowledge of bunches of historical places and cities and cultures?

But maybe you’re basing fantasy on the modern world?

Okay but lets say you want to start from the same inspiration as GRRM? (and part two!)

That’s just the stuff I could quickly grab. Things I’m subscribed to, that I know offhand. There is So. Much. Stuff. Online.

The best thing about the internet is that it means its not just the fortunate sons that get to learn, and explore and imagine and write. We get to see stories from all over the place, from all sorts of people, who bring All Kinds of New Ideas.

[ultimatebottom69]

I like you.