edgebug's art reference blog!! @edgebugsrefs - Tumblr Blog

Background tutorial WOAHHH!! The people have been asking for this so apologies for taking so long whoops,,,

This doesn’t apply to everyone’s art style ofc! Just how I do it ^^

I'm making a loose 3D model of the Heated Rivalry cottage for illustration reference and it's just really driving home how baffling rich people design choices are. Like. Someone PAID to build this house from scratch, designed it from the ground up, and yet they only put one bathroom on the entire upper floor and you can only access it by going through the main bedroom. And seemingly only one window on the entire upper half of the main main floor seems like it opens???

Very much a form over functionality type place.

thatdisasterauthor

Also, while doing this, I found this awesome website that has dimensions and 3D models of fucking everything:

A comprehensive reference database of dimensioned drawings documenting the standard measurements and sizes of the everyday objects and space

It has been stupidly helpful for throwing together some quick blocky models of different furniture.

thatdisasterauthor

When I say they have dimensions of everything, I do mean everything.

guttedpulsars

here is a master list of great art tools that can make your workflow easier! 👇 (consistently updating)

homoeroticjunoincident

people NEED to stop gatekeeping making music like ohhhh i don’t have an instrument ohhhhh i don’t know music theory ohhhhh i’m not gonna pay for some program. SHUT UP. take my hand.

you need NONE of that shit!!!!! there’s a website called beepbox.co. literally all you have to do is press things until it sounds a modicum of nice. it’s easy it’s free and it works on anything which has a browser because it’s a website.

if even ONE person starts making music bc of this post it will be worth it.

making bad music is just as important and okay as it is to write badly or draw badly or sing badly. you AREN’T BEHOLDEN TO MAKE GOOD MUSIC. making music is not utilitarian HAVE FUN. HAVE FUN!!!!!!!!!

homoeroticjunoincident

love how people will encourage people to just start making shit and see what happens when it comes to drawing and writing but when it comes to beginner musicians (music makers if you wish to be less formal) it’s just COMPLETE RADIO SILENCE. it feels like no one even knows you MAKE music it just sprouts up from the ground one day and some guy picks it up. am i alone in this dark cave

godofautism-deactivated20240303

Fuck it

I'm gonna try and make music

Call me betovan bc I'm deaf as fuck /j

terri-theslime13

HELL YEAH!!!

unhinged-popsocket

Alternatively if you wanna get into music producing in a more “proper” way, you still don’t need any money.

Ableton has excellent free websites to learn the basics:

Learning Music

Learning Synths

You can learn basically everything you need on YouTube. I recommend:

Mercurial Tones Academy

Dan Worrall

Bthelick

A lot of your favorite artists, mainly in electronic music, likely have done track breakdowns, you can watch those to learn how they do things.

DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) ultimately all do the same things, and Cakewalk is a great FREE fully fledged one. Sure it has some issues, and doesn’t have many plugins included, but it works just fine. All the music I released so far was made there, before I made the jump to Ableton.

As for VST plugins:

Vital is an excellent free synth

Native Instruments Komplete Start is a good free collection of plugins

TDR Nova is a great free EQ

There’s a lot of others and I don’t wanna name everything I’m aware of here, but feel free to DM me for more (Or if you have any other questions and stuff too).

And as for samples, you can get a bunch of free ones at:

Cymatics

Ghosthack

Having good headphones is nice and what I’d recommend you invest in first once it comes to it, but even your current ones will probably be fine, mainly if you slap AutoEQ onto them to flatten the frequency response. And ultimately, music isn’t all about the mixing, the most important part is conveying an emotion.

I know this goes against the spirit of the original post a little, but I want people to know that getting into music production also no longer costs thousands, you can just do it at home on your computer without no money.

unhinged-popsocket

Yeah, there is still quite the learning curve, I get that, though it’s also why it’s managed to hold me as a hobby for so long.

I do however have something of the exact opposite variety too, the most simple way to make music I know of, and a wonderful little semi-social experience, along the lines of the game Journey:

The New PLINK! is the long overdue update of #plink by @DinahmoeSTHLM. Jam with friends and strangers all over the world.

plaguery

hi op i think you should know that i did indeed make a song for the first time because of this

Visit Original Link

midwinterhunt

hot artists don't gatekeep

I've been resource gathering for YEARS so now I am going to share my dragons hoard

Floorplanner. Design and furnish a house for you to use for having a consistent background in your comic or anything! Free, you need an account, easy to use, and you can save multiple houses.

Comparing Heights. Input the heights of characters to see what the different is between them. Great for keeping consistency. Free.

Magma. Draw online with friends in real time. Great for practice or hanging out. Free, paid plan available, account preferred.

Smithsonian Open Access. Loads of free images. Free.

SketchDaily. Lots of pose references, massive library, is set on a timer so you can practice quick figure drawing. Free.

SculptGL. A sculpting tool which I am yet to master, but you should be able to make whatever 3d object you like with it. free.

Pexels. Free stock images. And the search engine is actually pretty good at pulling up what you want.

Figurosity. Great pose references, diverse body types, lots of "how to draw" videos directly on the site, the models are 3d and you can rotate the angle, but you can't make custom poses or edit body proportions. Free, account option, paid plans available.

Line of Action. More drawing references, this one also has a focus on expressions, hands/feet, animals, landscapes. Free.

Animal Photo. You pose a 3d skull model and select an animal species, and they give you a bunch of photo references for that animal at that angle. Super handy. Free.

Height Weight Chart. You ever see an OC listed as having a certain weight but then they look Wildly different than the number suggests? Well here's a site to avoid that! It shows real people at different weights and heights to give you a better idea of what these abstract numbers all look like. Free to use.

gaphic

I am so serious when I say if you want to learn about light, you NEED to at least look at modeseven’s tutorials. even if you’re not pursuing a painterly style, this is all essential theory that can be easily adapted to different coloring styles. notice how none of these ever say ‘light with these colors and shade with these colors’? notice how this is teaching how light works on a mechanical level, and reminding the audience to adjust the actual colors they choose by context? THAT is good advice.

(if you’re thinking ‘wow I want to study more of this persons art!’ I encourage you to do so, but proceed with the knowledge that modeseven draws pretty much exclusively weird as hell kink art. sometimes wisdom comes from horny places)

succubusboyfriend

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

succubusboyfriend

someone: oh yeah, do this exercise during your warm ups! it’ll help

me: my what

suave-eddboy

thepioden

What’s up I have an actual college degree in art and I was never ONCE taught to do warm ups.

sparksel

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!

concerningwolves

t-c-art-inspiration

How on earth are you supposed to draw from a sholder? might as well tell me to draw from the foot. It makes no sense

justpickupthatpen

https://youtu.be/pMC0Cx3Uk84

https://youtu.be/NBE-RTFkXDk

:3

stupidlittlesideblog

Reblogging to save a wrist

justpickupthatpen

briarbramble

Hi I have a literal animation degree and I learned fucking ✨none✨ of this

saphushia

btw. i made this quick guide of some of the natural size and proportion reference points in the human body. of course this all varies even irl, and you can stylize however you want, so ymmv but thought it might be helpful for some folks.

saphushia

like i said all of these vary, but adding on to clarify that that's especially true for hand + foot size, and thumb length. hands + feet are quite frequently smaller than stated here, and the thumb tends to vary from hitting abt the middle of the first finger bone to reaching the end of it. i made the graphic while half asleep so not as nuanced as it could've been lmao

runningwithscizzorz

I wanted to ask you an art question. I was self taught and I start drawing people with the circle head but even tho it does give me the emotion i want when the expression is done I feel like it limits the movement of the character. What do you suggest when drawing

This is a really good question! I’m also self taught haha.

The main thing I focus on when it comes to drawing expressions is capturing the life of the person underneath. Your face holds a very watered down version of what’s actually going on inside of your head, so I try to emulate the thoughts and anguish of a character as if I’m writing their emotions on their face (if that makes any sense haha.)

Several emotions and thoughts can be happening on your face at once as well. Your eyebrows could be shocked while your mouth is angry, your nose can be disgusted while your eyes are happy, your forehead could be confused while your cheeks are thoughtful, stuff like that. Your face is a marionette for your characters thoughts and ideas

Some real life examples of how to break down and simplify the face into something you can control

marat

i know we joke about cis artists having the weirdest sense of anatomy, but also even when the anatomy is fine, no one seems to want to draw women doing normal things

marat

Drawing challenge: draw your favorite male characters like this

thatdemonbish

this is exactly why i’m a huge fan of posemaniacs!

you get 3d model pose references with the option of having a male or female anatomy for each pose

they have a WIDE VARIETY of poses that you can search for using a TAG SYSTEM

(as you can see by the scroll bar in the second image there is Even More Tags)

you can select a pose you like for larger viewing and the convenience doesn’t stop!!!

you have full 360 viewing range of the pose plus zooming in and out

and what’s that? a TOOLBAR?? MENU?? THING??

Correct!

the eye button hold a very fun menu

negative space blacks out the background and fills the pose with a solid white silhouette

the “texture” refers to the skin situation of the model with the “color” and “grey” shown below

(i usually use color personally)

then there’s the option of different sized drawing grids(4 and 16 below)

idk wtf bounding box is about but it looks like this if it matters to you

“floor” toggles all shadows on the floor, “floor grid” you guessed it puts a like perspective guide grid on the floor that goes to forever, and “shadow” toggles ALL shading. there is NO lighting happening if you turn that off. NONE.

NEXT ITEM! that box thing with the line through it? flips the pose horizontally.

the little person symbol? lets you switch anatomies

camera icon? you can choose from a selection of preset camera angles PLUS an option for … idk what to call it but you can do this!

less flat right!! i’m sure there’s a word i just don’t know but this is maximum *that* so there is less *that* if you want it

the lightbulb gives you a menu like the camera one but it offers a selection of lighting styles with variable intensity

CHARMING!

and that’s not even everything this site provides!!!!!!! they have tutorials, instructional videos, lessons, all sorts of shit!!! (although they are vast majority if not all in japanese just a heads up)

AND ITS ALL FREE

DONT EVEN NEED TO SET UP AN ACCOUNT OR APPROVE OF COOKIES JUST GET IN DO YOUR THING GET OUT NO STRINGS ATTACHED

and if you don’t have ad blocker or are on mobile(like me) NOT TO WORRY

the ads are few and far between! ZERO video ads, NONE take over your screen or glitch you at all, they are of no concern i forget they’re there!

(this is not at all sponsored btw i’m just a genuine fan of this site and i’m happy to spread the good word unprompted)

thatdisasterauthor

Oh, they've really leveled up since I last poked around their site! Nice.

therobotmonster

Color Like a Classic Comic Book

I'm doing some tinkering on Fauxstalgia stuff, and since I believe in sharing resources, here's an RGB PNG version of the official DC pantone guide, with the swatches re-sampled from current pantone standards. This set is from 1982, but should be generally believable for most stuff post-WWII.

The versions floating around online (two of which are under the fold) are scans of prints and are not accurate for color-picking.

Now, these colors would also be altered by the printing process, but for clean, pre-print versions, here's some authenticity.

edgebugsrefs

fellow artists,

if you have an ipod or iphone or ipad or whatever then Please download the app “Make a Pose”

it gives you a lil figure like this

and you can make them do whatever you want!! Like

Took me about 1.4 minutes to make this sad little guy it’s Really easy to get the hang of

they Happy

you can change the camera angle so easy too so you can get perspective + foreshortening reference

THIS IS ALL FREE TOO but if you pay $2 you unlock the ability to have two figures onscreen at the same time so you can make COUPLE POSES

AND YOU CAN CHANGE THE LIGHTING,

you can also make rooms and place some objects or characters like so:

YOU WANT A CHARACTER W/ A BIGGER CHEST? HERE THEY ARE

YOU WANT A FRICKIN HORSE?

NEIGH NEIGH MOTHER FUCKER

ANYWAY YOU CAN PAY ABSOLUTELY $0 TO GET THE APP WITH THE ABILITY TO POSE ONE FIGURE AT A TIME AND IF YOU PAY $2 YOU GET TO PUT UP TO 6 CHARACTERS ON THE SCREEN AT ONCE AND YOU ALSO GET A GOTDAMN HORSE. again it is called “Make a Pose” and it’s for iphone or ipod touch or ipad and i cannot recommend it enough

jar-cup-deactivated20230118

OH MY GOD

lespoopypodle

I️

iPod touch

lespoopypodle

😐😑😐 iPod Touch?

Also HONSE

edgebugsrefs

this post is from 2017 and I still used my itouch Extensively, it was basically just an iPhone without the phone part lmao

in other news the app still exists and it still slaps ass

gbirrd

Hey, everyone! Have this translated Studio Ghibli guide to watercolours that a classmate sent me.

midwinterhunt

hot artists don't gatekeep

I've been resource gathering for YEARS so now I am going to share my dragons hoard

Floorplanner. Design and furnish a house for you to use for having a consistent background in your comic or anything! Free, you need an account, easy to use, and you can save multiple houses.

Comparing Heights. Input the heights of characters to see what the different is between them. Great for keeping consistency. Free.

Magma. Draw online with friends in real time. Great for practice or hanging out. Free, paid plan available, account preferred.

Smithsonian Open Access. Loads of free images. Free.

SketchDaily. Lots of pose references, massive library, is set on a timer so you can practice quick figure drawing. Free.

SculptGL. A sculpting tool which I am yet to master, but you should be able to make whatever 3d object you like with it. free.

Pexels. Free stock images. And the search engine is actually pretty good at pulling up what you want.

Figurosity. Great pose references, diverse body types, lots of "how to draw" videos directly on the site, the models are 3d and you can rotate the angle, but you can't make custom poses or edit body proportions. Free, account option, paid plans available.

Line of Action. More drawing references, this one also has a focus on expressions, hands/feet, animals, landscapes. Free.

Animal Photo. You pose a 3d skull model and select an animal species, and they give you a bunch of photo references for that animal at that angle. Super handy. Free.

Height Weight Chart. You ever see an OC listed as having a certain weight but then they look Wildly different than the number suggests? Well here's a site to avoid that! It shows real people at different weights and heights to give you a better idea of what these abstract numbers all look like. Free to use.