Art Reference Materials

Just art reference materials. Main blog: trans-girl-nausicaa.

[silurisanguine]

Linktree will be feeding your images with DALL-E, Open AI from 5th July 2026.

Warning to anyone using Linktree.

From the 5th July, they'll be feeding all imagery you use on your landing page into DALL-E by OpenAI.

I deleted my account just now, because there was no way to turn this off or opt out.

[silurisanguine]

Update with some alternatives-

Carrd.co. Free alt with paid features.

Bento.app Currently free, integrated with bluesky

Everlink.tools Closest to Linktree, has some paid features.

Omg.lol Currently $20 a year. If paying for Linktree features this is a great upgrade.

[art-res]

 🛑 Stop Working for Exposure (Mathematically)

I'm an artist and medical student, and I use art to help me pay some bills.

I built a free, helpful tool because to help prevent other talented creatives from undercharging, as I really see this a lot online.

It's a calculator with a built in reality check

Input your survival costs and expenses

True billable hours

Get the rate you actually need to charge to hit a 20% (or whatever you choose) profit margin.

It generates the rate, a template negotiation email + final invoice.

Plan to keep this tool free, ad-free, and open to everyone.

🔗 Check your math: fairpaycalc.artres.xyz

If the "Thriving Rate" calculation empowers you to double your quote on your next job, please consider hitting the "Buy me a coffee"button. It keeps the server running and the code flowing <3

AL is creating web apps, art resources, and illustrations

I am an artist and medical student and creator of Art-Res, a blog where I write and curate art resources. Hopefully you find art that bring

[art-res]

Thank you for all who tried/spread awareness of the tool and also to people who tipped, truly touched by the support and it means the world! <3

[circumference-pie]

Website idea: Writers of all nationalities give each other advice on how to name OCs from their native culture/language.

For example, a native English speaker can tell you that "Henry Edward" is kinda weird and evokes Tudor kings, and a native Chinese speaker can tell you that, I don't know, "mīmī" sounds cute but means titties.

[supernumerarianism]

Re: Chinese names, there is something cool people should know about, (maybe you already know):

Using this database, you can access the names and biographical information of real people across Chinese historical periods and dynasties. You can go on here and find the names (not just given names but courtesy names and other sorts of honorary aliases, depending on the period) of thousands of real individuals, though it's almost entirely men in the older dynasties. Very few women.

Need a character name for your Tang Dynasty official? Check out the CBDB and find a *literal Tang Dynasty official* to grab a name from!

[catsdelightful-deactivated20240]

Hey artists, C. Spike Trotman, founder of Iron Circus Comics, just posted an invaluable thread on depicting different types of black hair. I’d do the thing where you screencap the whole thread and post it but it’s just too long (which is great because it’s a whole lot of useful information!) Give her a follow while you’re there.

Anyway, go check it out. I just wanted to save it and share it because I didn’t know how much I didn’t know!

[misslunarose]

This is an amazing resource, not only for artists, but for writers too! I love this!

{ID - tweet from @/Iron_Spike that reads, “Black Hair for Non-Black Artists: a Cheat Sheet Thread. Hi, folks! Just spur-of-the-moment decided to put together some reference for folks who want to draw/model black characters in their work, but arent confident they won’t make simple, obvious mistakes w/r/t black hair. END ID}

[obi-mom-kenobi]

I noticed in the comments that some people can’t see the thread, so I took screenshots for y'all!

More will come in reblogs, since tumblr has an image limit

[obi-mom-kenobi]

[jamiegeode]

@creatingblackcharacters !!!

[trans-girl-nausicaa]

If you want to open your mind on how you think about art analysis and you’ve never taken any college courses on art history or analysis please read Ways of Seeing by John Berger (1972)

[trans-seraphim]

prettier web version here

[quarter0master]

even better: the tv show it was originally conceptualized as

[trans-girl-nausicaa]

If you want to open your mind on how you think about art analysis and you’ve never taken any college courses on art history or analysis please read Ways of Seeing by John Berger (1972)

[jordanbolton]

New post on my Patreon where I talk about how I write comics. Subscribe to get BTS posts along with exclusive content and early access to new comics.

Subscribe here

[agnesmontague]

you can kinda tell when a writer has spent a lot of time around kids bc they avoid most of the pitfalls that come with writing children. namely, not giving them a too cutesy or twee voice but making them sound more like extremely weird little adults. kids playing pretend will almost never cutely slot into some romantic scenario for the adults' benefit bc the adults are usually too busy cleaning up or wondering what the fuck is wrong with their child. kids also have surprisingly stringent hangups ranging from very petty grievances to downright chauvinist gender roles, more often than not the result of a tragic education but sometimes far surpassing what they were taught in intensity. what im saying is there's nothing inherently wrong with treating fictional kids as stock characters but it's always quite nice to see when they aren't

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

It's extremely common for very young children to suddenly say something extremely cogent and articulate, that's jarringly inconsistent with their normal speech. This is usually something that they heard an adult say recently. A kid will spend ten minutes telling you a story about how they fought a wolf yesterday using simple sentences of fifty cent words, then nibble a snack, wrinkle their nose and say something like "I feel like Mum was overenthusiastic with the salt today, and not for the first time either" before going back to their clumsy story. (They do understand what they're saying when they do this. Kids' communication is usually held back by their vocabulary and pronunciation, not their understanding.)

Young kids are also a lot more socially aware than people give them credit for. Young children are perfectly aware that adults don't take them seriously. They know when their parents don't actually like them. They listen and remember when adults talk about them while they're in the room. Kids will develop basic abilities to charm etc. from babyhood and will begin experimenting with social norms and concepts of deception, appropriate information, and acceptable language and attitudes in toddlerhood. By the time a kid is five or six, they have solid social strategies for relating to adults and separate ones fr relating to their peers, that they'll continue to refine for the rest of their lives. They will also say completely off the wall shit because they don't have the context to know what is and isn't considered super fucked up yet.

By the time a kid is eight or nine, their main difference from adults is in experience, interests, and ability for long-term focus. An eight year old can think as intelligently and coherently as a thirty year old, they just have less experience and information to draw from, and are likely interested in very different things. They're also likely still slightly hamstrung by vocabulary and literacy, though much less so than a younger kid.

Teens will behave like adults who have little power (a teen is often at the mercy of their parents and the state and rarely taken seriously, which is extremely frustrating) and who are high stress and mid-crisis, because they're going through a transitory period where their bodies and moods are changing and are having to constantly learn and adjust; a fourteen year old in a stable situation will act pretty much like a thirty year old with an oppressive boss who's just left a tumultuous relationship.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#oh is *that* why i feel 14 again after my fiance broke things off with me and i had to move halfway across the continent back in with my ma?

Yeah that's just what humans feel and act like when they're unmoored and powerless and unpredictably changing. Teenagers are pretty much constantly unmoored and powerless and unpredictably changing, and react reasonably to those circumstances.

[alphauke]

an angel on letterboxd just dropped a whole playlist of films free on youtube I was filled with so much love and light I had to share with you guys

[alphauke]

it also includes short films, animated movies, documentaries of every genre, full recordings of live performances. all spanning different decades from different countries. YOU DONT EVEN FUCKING KNOW

[anphivenas]

there are also websites like worldscinema, solidaritycinema, and rarefilmm hosting incredible obscure world cinema for free! and if you're more inclined towards the esoteric, there's also evilbjork's avant-garde canon playlist on youtube! also important to mention Maya S. Cade's incredible black film archive and the otherness archive, an obscure queer cinema archive! You could always be watching more films !

[ohcorny]

it turns out i really enjoy making educational posts about the comics making process and ways of thinking. here's another one featuring characters from my graphic novel in a very anachronistic art museum.

[fallout-lou-begas]

do you have any advice on character design?

watch The Sopranos

[fallout-lou-begas]

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

[roganaut]

Fellini’s movies have remarkably interesting and unique looking actors

[fallout-lou-begas]

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.

[sartorialadventure]

(Since I know a lot of writers/artists follow me for costume/character design ideas!)

[theelectricdreamsofddx]

Hey, wanna make music? Yeah? Got a buncha money? No? Well that's perfectly fine, check this free stuff out:

Vital - A powerful wavetable synth, my personal favorite VST synth, very easy to figure out creating new synth sounds, with the help of the plenty of tutorials that are out there for the plug-in. (There are paid versions but they are completely unnecessary to get 99% of the features of the plug-in.)

Synth1 - A classic piece of synthesizer software.

Pendulate - An interesting, chaotic synth that you can make weird little sounds with.

Native Instruments' free plug-ins - Various cool VSTs, including the Komplete Start pack.

The Free Orchestra - A set of orchestral instruments for Kontakt Player (see previous link).

BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover - More orchestral stuff! This one has its own player so you don't have to download a separate VST to use it if you don't want to.

Magical 8bit Plug - A chiptune plug-in, intended for producing sounds like that of 8-bit systems like the NES and Master System.

Genny - A synth VST made to emulate the soundchip of the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive.

MT Power Drum Kit - A nice rock n' roll style drum kit plug-in.

This guy's weird VST collection - 6.4 gigabytes of weird VSTs, including some you might know, like Delay Lama and MeowSynth!

sforzando - A free player for soundfont files.

Musical Artifacts - A resource I mainly use to find soundfonts, on which you can find other various things as well.

Kilohearts Essentials - 30 effect VSTs including reverb, delay, compression, pitch shifting, transient shaping, ring modulation, phase distortion, and more.

Xfer's freeware VSTs - Exactly what it says on the tin, including the one and only OTT compressor.

Illformed - The good ol' dblue Glitch 1.3, Crusher, Stretch, and TapeStop.

Hysteresis and Fracture - Two interesting glitch effects, one being a delay and the other being a buffer.

Codec - A cool digital audio degradation effect.

Le Phonk - A slick distortion plug-in.

MAIM - An effect that mimics the sound of MP3 compression.

Soundly Shape it and Place it - One is simply an equalizer VST, the other is an effect that emulates a speaker (ex: a radio) and a space (ex: a cave).

Fresh Air - An effect that adds high end information to your sounds, to provide brightness.

ValhallaSupermassive - A combo reverb and delay plug-in that sounds quite big.

UnplugRed - A collection of various interesting VSTs, most of which have free versions.

Chowdhury DSP - I can't personally speak for all of these but their tape model effect is great for some lo-fi style effects.

TAL-Chorus-LX - A thick sounding chorus, good for "retro" sounds too.

Polyverse Wider - A great effect for widening sounds up, really simple too with only two controls.

Freesound - A good audio file resource, mainly for foley recordings.

Cymbatics Dubstep Starter Pack - A little sample pack with some good drum and synth samples.

fishmonger drum kit - A pack of samples from the album 'fishmonger' by Underscores!

WangleLine's sample packs - Free samples put out by my awesome mutual WangleLine!

aaand I might as well include this set of drums I made a while back :P

As for DAWs, it's been a long while since I've used anything other than FL Studio (not counting Audacity, which I still occasionally use for specific purposes), which, while being the only one I can directly recommend, is paid. However, I've heard good things about Reaper which has a "free trial" that you can technically use forever, akin to WinRAR. Additionally, I've also heard some good things about Waveform Free.

[uboatheflesh]

Don't forget the GOAT for turning any sound into a beautiful drone paulXstretch

and I mean ANY sound

[iamoutofideas]

Digitally Preserving Classic Synthesizers through Emulation

these guys have been emulating just about every synth from the 90’s/2000’s for free. installation is a little bit finicky but not too hard to do.

[thereisselfpreservation]

I'm seeing warnings about scammers trying to commission artists but the "reference sheet" for their character they want commissioned isn't an image but a .vbs file ("visual basic script"), and will run a script when you open it, probably to yoink your account(s), but I haven't seen this from anyone who's actually clicked it yet. Just be careful and never open a file like that, 'cause people suck.

[thereisselfpreservation]

For reference (heh)

At a glance, file name checks out. But!! Do not open a .vbs file!!!

[6vcr]

I made dithering brushes & patterns pack!

[writingnothanyu]

What are your writing/characterization pet peeves when it comes to Chinese characters in media?

'the morally grey' without the actual complexity of an actually well written morally grey character... like... they just kill people? but it's never expanded upon why

honour!!! -> why does everyone seem to think saving face is like some exotic concept. it's not that hard to understand. litmus test: replace self-respect in your statements that contain the word 'honour.' does it seem ridiculous to say whatever the characters are saying at that moment? if it sounds ridiculous to say self-respect in that phrase, then chances are, it's ridiculous to say the word honour in that phrase as well

only depicting rich chinese ppl -> idk why this one bothers me... like yes most of us have meet rich chinese international students as they certainly exist, but like??? some portrayals seem to make them seem like the enemy because they're Chinese?? Like it's just repackaged yellow peril 2.0? I find that there's this weird tension between lower income white ppl and rich pocs... there is def an element of classism, but let's not forget this bizzare unspoken entitlement that what rich pocs have, should inherently belonged to the white lower income classism simply b/c they are white.

shrinking asian ppl -> idk why white ppl have this weird size fetish for tiny asian ppl in general, like do yall not like us taking up space? Like chinese guy whose power is to shrink is just... a bad dick metaphor... Chinese girl whose power is to shrink just... screams weird kink

portrayal of chinese bodies as disposable as they are numerous -> yes there are over a billion people in china... but lets not forget they are all people, with unique stories and personalities... lets not forget their humanity just because there is a lot of them... scarcity adding value is a lie

I'm not saying you can't write these, but like, pls ask yourself why you're making certain authorial choices, and what you're saying when you do write this kind of stuff.

[mevil]

being black in any art community is such a strange feeling cause you’ll see just blatant racism being expressed in others art and you have to just casually ignore it, for your sake if anything, colorism being something that’s just fundamentally there in every artist and you deal with it cause it’s not worth it in the end to even think of it too hard let alone even mentioning it, it’s definitely something

[creatingblackcharacters]

Hello nonblack reader of this post, I think you ought to share this one so that you and your peers can actively remind yourselves 1) of how your Black peers feel when you tolerate antiblack racism in your art spaces for entertainment and 2) that we notice it, but don't believe it is secure around enough of you to bring it up 🙏🏾

[eameschairs]

me and @microbiologistmusings made a guide! we were talking about how frustrating it can be when so much (well meaning!) art of wheelchair users seems to get the chairs...not quite right. so maybe this will help :) i had a lot of fun drawing it and thank u to levi for your unending wisdom <3