29. hi, i'm wisp! this blog is currently on an indefinite hiatus! (i'll pop back in often to answer any questions or respond to replies!) blog archive is listed below:
Posts:
𖤝 everything | edits | cas | bb | other games | b&a | wips
The Violet Moon:
🗡 Hallowmire | Lore | Playlist | Character Page
🗡 Start | Latest
Nordhaven:
✶ Start | Latest
✶ Extras | Playlist
Misc:
𖤝 CC Finds | Downloads | Reblogs | Personal Tumblr
☆ put this star in the inbox of your favorite blogs. it’s time to spread positivity!
Where do I even begin with this😭 You are so so SO talented. I spend literal days just looking at and admiring your edits because they're so jaw dropping. Every single detail is so carefully thought out and constructed. I really aspire to be able to convey the same kind of emotions that you do with my own work one day <3
AHHH! hello! this made my day thank you so so much ;_; you have such a great eye when it comes to rendering! i enjoy coming across your edits and i feel like i'm transported to a different dimension! again, thank you for sending this ask, i appreciate it sm :")
☆ put this star in the inbox of your favorite blogs. it’s time to spread positivity! - I always admire your inspirational editing style and the detail and hard work you put into everything < 3
AHHH! hai!! thank you so much bnuuy! ;A; <3 i appreciate you being such a beam of light in this community! :3
These guys are so fun to paint and I love how freeing it is for me to paint them. It was such a great exercise to paint this way..
I think I'm gonna open up slots specifically for these types of portraits every month, they are just so fun.. of course other comms for other things still exist and are available, and you can ask me about em if you want, but I think it's fun to have a dedicated thing, you know??
Trying to learn hair drawing/editing/painting. What is your best advice or how-to? <3
hi! hi! of course! <3 something i've come to recognize with editing is that /especially/ when you begin, it can feel incredibly discouraging at times yet growth is a lot about adding layers to a foundation. you'll try things that make sense or observe other processes that don't necessarily align with you, however, it's always great to expose yourself to many methods. there's a lot of trial and error so it's important that if you do start your journey, be kind to yourself, comparison literally kills joy/will/all-of-the-above, and celebrate each edit. there will be a day you look back with pride from all of the growth :D
so with that being said, i'd be happy to show you my drawing process! you'll notice there's a lot of redoing/undoing/erasing, i even forgot two steps i've slowly added into my editing process, and that is completely normal! happy little mistakes or so the ancient texts say... U_U anyways i use both photoshop and procreate :D (divider credit)
step one: liquidfy in photoshop
-> before i export my photos to procreate, i will liquidfy any sharp corners as well as crop if needed. there are reshade/gshade shaders that can assist with this, usually i'll only liquidfy if necessary (for this photo i normal wouldn't have) but for the sake of the tut, i'll include it! the liquidfy and crop tool is included in procreate but it's more of a preference for me to use photoshop. something about struggling with a mouse is nostalgic to me-
step two: doodle in procreate
-> just a warning, this is sped up so it brings the video to about 5 minutes (took me 33 minutes irl) but i feel like it's easier to show you the process rather than explain it. i don't normally organize or label my layers but for the sake of the tutorial i did! this is typically the structure i follow. depending on the vibe of the photo as well as the oc, i'll go with darker shadows/brighter highlights but for Violetta, i lean a bit more subtle. it's quite easy to make her look like a glow worm or for her shadows over-contour her features. it's almost a push and pull when it comes to shading. i also showed both ways in which i edit hair. the first option i labeled as hair highlights a. i use this for longer story posts whereas hair highlights b is like a bare bones version of warmsol's hair tutorial! i only draw hair highlights b, hair base, and hair shadows for like smaller edits or an important story frame. i would not say i'm an expert when it comes to hair drawing 💀 my thought process is just adding volume to the hair and mostly following the natural curves, highlights and shadows of the hair!
O YA! before i forget, brushes i use: light pen, soft brush, pixelstains' skin brushes, and sandra's hair brushes* (*free brush set recs here: A and B ! gumroad offers a bunch of free brushes for editing!)
step three: textures, color grade, sharpen and export
-> this part i won't go too much into detail because color grading and texturing is where i like to add in my personal touch ~ however i go in depth about sharpening and formatting here! :D
hopefully this helped :D here's a whole tag dedicated to my tutorials as well as a tag dedicated to tutorials by the community!
I really miss you and your stories! I want to read (or watch) more fantasy stories. What simmer do you recommend? Or books and series.
I would like to know your recommendations 🥺💜✨
Thank you so much! 🥺❤️ I miss sharing my stories, I think about them and Simblr often. Finding a balance of free time and work and hobbies is a task! But I will conquer it! ⭐️
I’m not reading much of anything on simblr these days, sadly I am sooooooo behinddddd on all my favs and I fear I’m missing all the hot new stuff. So I am asking anyone who would like to self promo to use this post as an opportunity to do so, that way you and me and anyone seeing this can eat good!
In the meantime, here’s some storytellers I’ve been recommended to with the help of an inquiry from the fine folks in the discord:
thank you for the mention! i wanted to add in @pixelsinmyveins! such an amazing fantasy blog with highly detailed world-building and stories peppered throughout :')
final update but we made it safely! this is the trees that surround my new home and the driveway leading up to it 🥹 being a desert rat my whole life, this is something else. i don’t even think pictures will do it justice but man. we have a lot of projects to complete so it feels like build/buy irl but i’m excited!! buggie is not used to all the space so he’s staying under curtains for now 🐈⬛🤍 oke talk to you guys soon ✨
well divas, today is the day of our three day road trip and the first day of a new start! i’m so flipping excited! they say the first six months are the hardest, but i have such a hopeful outlook. with that being said, i really want to commit to a six months hiatus so i can refresh, settle in and catch some sunshine and waves! love you guys and see you soon ☀️
If you haven't, follow a Black American creator* on here! If you follow a Black American creator* already, make sure to share their creations and share why you appreciate them! If you've got any Black American friends, make sure to tell them Happy Juneteenth!
*I don't count- support someone else today! Directly!!
Happy Juneteenth, Black simmers! Let's not forget that none of us are free until all of us are free. That includes the enslaved people incarcerated by the mass carceral system which took the place of plantations. In fact, almost 40% of the federal prison population is Black people! Because, as we know, "except as punishment for a crime" is that tricky little exception used in the 13th amendment.
No wonder states like Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana have the highest rates of imprisonment in the country! Prison is profitable just like cotton and tobacco used to be and these mfs want that cotton money back! This is why if you are a Black man born in 2001, 1 out of every 5 of you will serve some form of time in your lifetime. Wild right?
thank you for the tag kris! rules are here. i tag: @coldmatee @goldenwaves @feroshgirlsims @stormentsims @crownsofesha
@wrixie @pink-chevalier @solitude-paradise @sour-trait @moonwoodhollow (idk who's been tagged or not if so ignore me i'm senile !!!)
this is going to be quite a lengthy post as i've been posting on tumblr for about 14 years but i really wanted to showcase that growth is possible. i would love for people to learn how to create with true pride but also engage with each other for community resources. there are so many free editing tutorials but if that's not your thing then that is completely valid. a community should be an accumulation of everything and not just one single style ✨
here's my journey. under the cut i break down each year, what was going on in my mind at the time as well as more photos i couldn’t fit into the collage! (warning, it is very long, u guys said yap and i said ok):
✶ i really was just a 15 year old kid who spent a lot of time imagining. like many of us here, i've played the sims for a really long time but i liked that this life simulator had an element of storytelling. (sims 2 castaway stories i will always love u...) however, i didn't start off by editing photos, but rather spending my summers and school nights creating sims 3 video series and machinimas on youtube. a lot of these were inspired by series like Anon or creators like Faalq and of course, I can't forget the creator of Pleasantview. eventually a friend at the time told me about how there was a community on tumblr who posted their pictures and that was the start of my first blog. 2012 through 2016 feels so much like the tumblr era, which true, i was inspired by a lot of the faded images with a pop of color here and there. i sure love injecting nostalgia into my edits. still do. around 2013, i discovered photoshop and used actions from other creators but it never really felt like me. you can see, i still tried shoving little pops of color here in there (middle row, far right) but it felt too washed out for my liking. between 2015 and 2016, i started experimenting with color, layer styles in photoshop and brushes. lol i remember i wanted to draw hair so badly and when i discovered brush stamps i was SO freaking impressed. eventually... i learned how to add on textures.
✶ in 2017, i recreated my blog because someone from school found my simblr. i really value my anonymity, still do, LMAO, so i obliterated my blog and regenerated as "pixelsymoi." i only remembered that because i found a pinterest with my old cc and people asking for a working link (I'M SO SORRY-). 2017 through 2019 i was leaning into grungier aesthetics, textures, contrasting boarders and staged backgrounds. everything here was about making something pleasing to the eyes. even when i started experimenting with storytelling (bonk and bonk), i found myself inspired by so many cinematography scenes from directors like Sofia Coppola as well as different music videos i'd watch. everything had to be photogenic in a way and i think that's just how my brain viewed the world at the time. romanticizing every element. this editing style oddly feels... romantic. my experimenting with lighting also really started to take off here. i also tested out the sims 4 around this time but it never really stuck. i struggled a lot with transferring the style i had in ts3 to ts4 which is what kept me away from the game. side note, but it was really neat looking back on these photos because there was SO much collaboration going on, it was a really nice time for roleplaying, collaborative storytelling and editing other oc's in my game! the community felt really strong here
✶ 2022 i returned to my blog after a long hiatus. i needed a creative output so i dusted off the old blog, the characters that live in my mind and my laptop. then decided to actually give the sims 4 a try. i had joined around the time where storytelling was dying down. like so many good stories were left open and i was like NOOOOOOOO! so on a whim, i started posting tessellate. i had the little dudes just sitting there. they were somewhat developed and eh, i could figure out the details later, right? i had a vision that was more like uncontained water. i'll circle back to this thought though! i tested out two different reshades (bonk and bonk) before exploring how to create my own. i was quite proud of myself because i genuinely did not know what i was doing!!! i do look back at older presets now and go holy shaders- U DO NOT NEED FIVE VERSIONS OF MXAO pls... something that i noticed while putting this together is when i work with colors, i like blending academia (??) colors with saturated elements. i think that right there is what unifies my style omggg. when i discovered these lights, i was finally able the same knowledge in my prior years for color as i did for my edits around this time. and then there was this shader that released towards the end of 2023 that could take what i knew about lighting and apply it with precision...
✶ ...and then in 2024 everything exploded into colorful lights and fractured off into pretty little flecks of silver and gold. i could give quint relight the whole credit, but i'm not. LMAOO. there was a lot of meticulous thought of everything, whether it was positioning the lighting for the shader, to color hues of said shader, to the introduction of color grading to in game lighting/backgrounds. i took a shader like relight and went how can i keep pushing this tool? another tool i used was my first wacom. i used to dodge and burn my highlights and shadows by mouse so this helped my hand from not cramping up as much during larger edits. this was probably the year for discovery. i edited about 2000 photos, storytelling photos included. tessellate was moving along and in between i would practice editing or posing. i started watching a lot of typography videos and thus began my font hoarding.... sigh. i was really ill during this year so i had a lot of time on my hands. simultaneously, my blog was being seen for the first time. in my earlier years, things were close knit, like it was super rare for my post to break out of containment. this was the first post where that happened and i remembered my partner and i celebrated that because, well, i had a really rough couple of years. it was the first time in a while i felt like i was doing something right creatively. i do look back at this time with bittersweet feelings, i was so unsure of myself throughout it and put more pressure on myself than i needed to. i've come to realize that being disabled and chronically ill, there was this desire to "do something" and if i wasn't constantly preoccupying my time, i'd be tough on myself. and that truly wasn't fair to myself.
✶ and then 2025 happened. *jazz music stops* while i feel like what is seen doesn't accurately represent what i felt, i was genuinely burnt out at that time. and around this time, i experienced the monotony of routine. i was in this liminal space where things never changed. around this time, a lot of people conflated my image as a content creator and the thought of that was like being hit by demotivation juice. i was constantly overthinking my image, remembering many people with abandoned blogs in the past who were torn to shreds for less. so much so, i was incredibly afraid to start posting the violet moon. it was a very anxiety inducing time and the thing that originally helped me unwind became uncomfortable. looking back on it now, i have a difficult relationship with being creatively seen and that's been something that's followed me throughout. there's the need to make myself smaller, sell myself short, apply brutal criticism and none of that is healthy. i really needed to trust myself but also allow myself room for growth. backtracking to 2022, i said tessellate felt like uncontained water. since the only plan was what i had known about the characters, there was no overarching story i could weave together. while that's okay in a gameplay sense, it made it feel like nothing was progressing. plot holes appeared, at least ones i noticed and i just did not want another unfinished project. so i shelved until i was ready. more on that later lmao. i branched away from simblr and started watching and reading a lot of tips for writing. not only that, i watched a lot of film analysis, read a bunch of books as well as watched/read artists thought process for anything i had a question on. i started hanging out in my "your tags" feed and immersed myself in so much art. i picked up blender rendering at the start of the year which taught me how to layer an edit on top of different textures, different cutouts, different movement. although i haven't been back since march of last year, i applied what i had learned. i began writing nordhaven which became my digital scrapbook. the violet moon followed and i fell in love with hallowmire. the pride i feel from not only the editing style, but the worldbuilding and storytelling... it reminded me why i enjoy this wildly niche hobby. (pause, i'm listening to minecraft music and i started tearing up again.) i got serious about drawing, something i kept putting off for years. during that, i learned how to freaking draw magic! my editing style began to evolve rapidly again yet unlike 2024, it wasn't contained to one style. it was every piece of me. the gritty parts, the happy parts, the imaginative parts too. there was finally a sense of authenticity i had been looking for. but the end of the year was difficult for me, like things inevitably get worse before they get better and it lingered into the next year...
✶ ... but then this year, i was reminded the importance of community and connection. i had opened up about some things that were happening in the background and people reached out to me privately or publicly, shared their own experiences, and i've slowly started to feel safe again which in return has helped with a clearer mind but confidence as well. sometimes, all you really gotta do is be honest and reach out. i spend a lot of my time in procreate. my reshade preset being the assist while remembering, applying and drawing all of the fundamentals i learned. it honed in how i drew in shadows and lighting. i'm less nervous with those layers specifically! i keep improving on my hair drawing. huge thank you to Isa! i had read and watched so many tutorials but this one breaks it down so clearly. i've pumped the brakes on posting quite a bit, but it's become more about enjoying the process and being more intentional with my editing rather than trying to strike lighting twice or do fifty backflips. it's being able to complete a project and go, i've communicated some sort of emotion here. it holds weight. there was this quote i heard idk where, but someone said that it's good to learn rules so that when you break them, it doesn't leave you misunderstood. something about that just changed my brain chemistry but also made me want to communicate better visually and narratively. what's the meme that goes listen.... and learn.... LMAO!! i have been writing tessellate privately in the background and although it's not in a state where it's ready, i love what i have so far. each character feels so alive but also, there's a story! a story that..... dare i say it.... tessellates together *explodes* i want to get in the habit of periodically visiting that save and sharing updates but ! i also don't want to give too much away or send mixed signals about certain characters O_o in the meantime, i'm still committed towards working on hallowmire and completing nordhaven. there's a lot of layers to my editing currently, like it'll probably shift some more by the year ends. to me, art is beautiful in the sense that there are traces of other people left in each edit you make. whether it's inspiration, experience, or different engagement of thought, the more time passes along, everything seems to bloom in cycles. and that's something meaningful that generative ai can't replicate. at the end of the day, i can say, i have the skillset to create something that causes people to feel. for people to connect for a moment. to make people feel seen.
and there's magic in that.
if you read this you are the truest tank there is! thank you so much and if you've been around for a long time, i really really appreciate it. shocker but i'm not good with words, my blog oddly enough removes the pressure of socialization and masking because i do think about this as if i'm chucking something into the void 💀 anywho, i've yapped. here's some extra pictures with my incredibly unserious commentary:
I never thought I'd need more than 2 sessions to furnish this flat, but I do. I still haven't finished the hallway. I'm thinking of furnishing 2 other flats on this lot, as there are still 4 left. But I'm indecisive which one of my sims will move in, so I'll probably just take a break from this lot, I have too many WIPs anyway.
