Off the back of the truck merch (my cc- always free)
Active Stories:
Adrift: Giovanni, a low-level civil servant in a Venice controlled by the Habsburgs must move carefully in a city filled with intrigue, political unrest, and things that should never be spoken of. Prologue/Character Sheet/Beginning/Current
Quiet Hours: College students Niran and Jeff couldn't be more different... And that's just what draws them to each other. Teaser 1/Teaser 2/Beginning/Current
Summer 🍃: It's the story of senior siblings Aurelia and Auguste Vasilescu, lifelong Mourningvale residents who realize it's not too late in life to pursue happiness. Beginning/Current
Tact: About a grumpy vampire dude and his assistant, who takes no prisoners- they're constantly at each other's necks, and not in a fun way...Yet... Beginning/Current
Bite Me!: Lawrence and Julian fall hard for each other but neither one will openly admit it. A story involving a book store, insults exchanged over The Little Prince and Curious George, a lot of banter, some obscene gestures, a smitten vampire, and a pissed off grad student. Teaser 1/Teaser 2/Teaser 3 Beginning/Current
Completed Stories
The Unexpected: Two guys, each having a crappy night, cross paths one evening. They decide to hang out and salvage the evening...Date 1/Current
Amaranthine: Terence needs a place to live and a new job. He gets more than he bargained for when he answers a curious ad. Beginning/Current
Tomarani Adventure: Newlyweds Lee and Henry move to Tomarang. More slice of life than anything with an involved plot. They'll pop up now and then.
On Hiatus but on My Mind a Lot:
Darker: Sasha, a hard-on-his-luck walking disaster of a human walks right into icy vampire Gideon's field of view...The rest is one hot mess. Beginning/Current
Hello dearies, quick tutorial because the fabulous @ruthplaysthesims asked me how I did this in my last chapter, and I realized it might be helpful to share with everyone. Shout out to @thebramblewood and @aheathen-conceivably, who I am pretty sure showed me how to do this the first time around (sorry if my elder millennial brain is remembering this wrong, lol!).
I’m not an actual comic book artist, so if I’m bastardizing some of these terms, I’m sorry! The effect I’m talking about is when you want the panels (individual images or scenes) to overlap on your page. Like this:
A few things before we start:
I’m working in Canva Pro and using the background remover tool; however, you can also create this effect using the polygon lasso tool and masking. I’ve done both, but I think Canva is probably more accessible for most people.
My “pages” are 1080 X 1920 px, and I find I can fit about 3 images comfortably, depending on how I'm layering things.
Do background remover tools technically use AI? I think yes (don't quote me), in the sense that they are artificial intelligence, but they are not genAI. You're not scraping anyone else's writing or art. Back when I first learned Photoshop ::cough cough 20 years ago cough cough:: I was taught to do this with a green screen, lol. TLDR: This kind of digital photo editing tool has been around for a long time. Also, can I be a nerd for five seconds and say check out the Science and Media Museum's digital exhibition on the History of Digital Photo Manipulation? Ok, I'm done, I promise.
1. PLAN IN ADVANCE
Boring, I know, but hear me out. I think of this effect as a narrative tool. It’s great for action sequences, when I want to show off motion, or make the reader feel like a bunch of things are happening all at once. If I have a general idea of which shots will be overlapping, and the order I want them to be in, it’s easier to make sure I’ve framed the main subject correctly so I can make the effect without crying.
Here are the three shots I used for the page above. The first thing I do while taking screenshots is make sure that there is lots of dead (ha) space around the main subject (I have no idea if this is what it’s really called). I think of dead space as any area of the image boring enough that I don’t mind covering it up with something else.
The “boring” part is subjective and mostly based on the vibes of whatever scene I want to create. In this case, I care more about the zombies than the background, so even though that church is pretty eerie, I don’t care about being able to see it.
LAYOUT YOUR IMAGES
The next thing I do is lay these images out while keeping the dead space in mind so I can figure out where and how I want each panel to overlap. Generally, I find I need at least one panel as a base layer that doesn't overlap anything else, or the layout gets too busy and therefore confusing. Usually, it's the first panel on the page, but not always.
Here, I can already see that the dead space for the top two images is on the same side. It’s not “wrong,” but I want this scene to feel like zombies are bursting out of the ground and coming at Wolfgang, Darling, and Morgan from every which way. To fix this, I’m just going to flip the center panel horizontally.
In thinking about my scene, I realized that the zombie ballerina should be walking towards Wolfgang, Darling, and Morgan, not away from them, so later I flipped her too. This is not an exact science! I always end up playing around.
Alright, so next, I position the first two images so they overlap approximately where I want. I’m going to end up with some white space. Don’t worry about it, we’re actually going to need it in a minute.
Once I’ve got the top layer pretty close to where I want it, I resize the image so it fills the white space, and then I duplicate it.
REMOVING THE BACKGROUND
We’re almost done!
If you’re using Canva, you can press the Background Remover button to remove the background of the image you duplicated. As you can see, I ended up with a cutout of your primary subject (zombie butler) that I can use to overlap with zombie grandma.
Sometimes it looks a little off-center or creepy, especially if you moved your mouse while doing it. Don’t worry, that’s an easy fix. The important thing is not to duplicate your image until you’ve resized it, because then you’ve got to be a lot more precise about making the images line up and do a bunch of annoying resizing after the fact.
Next, I’ll just temporarily move the cutout to another area of the image and crop the original image so it’s no longer overlapping zombie grandma. After that, I simply move the top layer in place, make sure it lines up with the OG image, and voila!
You can also do this with the polygon lasso tool if you’re working in a more traditional photo editing program. In this case, you follow all the same steps, but instead of using the background remover, select the polygon lasso tool and use it to isolate the areas of the background you want to mask out. I’m doing this in Behance, but honestly, it should work in most photo editing programs.
It takes a little longer, and you’ve got to do more of the adjusting yourself, but it’s not terrible. I’ve sped this up a smidge, but really, it took me a few minutes. And I’m not super precise about it. The scene is already dark, and the human eye is not going to catch every tiny imperfection.
The rest of the effect is just my own embellishments. I like to add some motion lines and descriptive text. I usually pop in a white line to make the “gutter.” I move it behind the top layer, which makes it sort of feel like the main subject is bursting out of the panel.
You can use this same method to add all sorts of effects. The vampires with their red magic energy? Literally, this exact same process, only I put a haze of red smoke in between the base layer and top layer.
"While I was fearing it, it came,
But came with less of fear,
Because that fearing it so long
Had almost made it dear." ~ "The Inevitable," Emily Dickinson
Posting my very first CC post is honestly so nerve-wracking 🥲
I have absolutely no explanation for why I decided to make a huge bunch of books in different variations, but... maybe your Sim is a total bookworm, so I hope they’ll be happy to have their room completely covered in books ❤️
I was tagged by @m0n0lithical, who is passionate and creative about her OCs and shares her excellent edits from different games. I'm not one bit surprised she came up with this color-centered tag game because she's a master at the contrasts. Her colors pop and her images are gorgeous. I was also tagged by the fabulous @thebramblewood, whose Zhaoverse is visually rich and has fascinating lore/storytelling (and features my favorite sibling hot messes). Thank you for tagging me, friends! I enjoyed the deep dives into your edits. We are united in our love of community the sims storytelling editing VAMPIRES! 🦇
COLOR THEORY IS MY PASSION TAG GAME
✮ Pick existing OC(s) that you always have a consistent color scheme for.✮ Take a screen (or a few! or a lot as many as you want tbh) of them in those colors.✮ Optional [PART 1]: be a nerd and talk about your reasoning behind their specific palette if there is one. If you’re doing multiple and their reasoning is linked, absolutely be even nerdier about that (see: my own characters I’m using for this starter, who were my initial inspiration for this).✮ Optional [PART 2]: color theory memes.
I'm primarily a character creator/storyteller here, so I am going to focus on OCs rather than builds/environments. I chose Sasha and Gideon (again...surprise) for this because they are the only characters whose wardrobe I very intentionally thought about.
Gideon is a worldly and sophisticated man who appreciates art in all its forms. He is a vampire who has seen the world change enormously and that passing of time is starting to weigh on him. He is icy—everything about him evokes this sense of coldness and aloofness—from his hair, to his eyes, to his unnaturally pale skin. His wardrobe reflects that, with a palette that is filled with formal clothes in classic colors: blacks, grays, navy blues, and occasionally muted browns. It makes sense: he's a vampire, no longer "alive" in the human way, and somewhat frozen—frozen in time, in a certain formality in how he conducts his affairs, and in his beliefs (he's above mortal laws, and even his coven's laws, which doesn't go over too well with the Strauds... Oopsie)
Sasha is the opposite. His colors skew to warmer, even when more muted. Also, Sasha is perennially broke, so he does not really care about following fashion trends and has created his own look. While he is usually a t-shirt and jeans kind of guy, he has been seen in more colorful outfits such as this . Sasha is very comfortable with his body...and apparently with Gideon's, too... Being a chaos gremlin, he has tried to style poor Gideon in outfits that are anathema to his very essence (lololol) but that Sasha kinda not-so-secretly digs.
My favorite trope is opposites attract, so I think I have that in mind when I create my couples. They're either opposites physically or personality-wise. It's just where I go to pretty naturally. With Sasha and Gideon, however, it was deliberate. Everything, from Sasha's t-shirt featuring the Grim Reaper in the first chapter, to Gideon's wardrobe in blacks and blues in their first meeting, was done for symbolic effect. As they grow closer and fall in love, Gideon begins to "thaw" out a little and begins finding more color in his life...in many ways.
Someday I WILL finish that story.
OKAY! Tagging these peeps who have unique styles: @naginatah, @sims4sanity, @melok-a-verse, @dandylion240, @disastermage, @likelyamused, @cockatoocc, @changingplumbob, @soultreesims and @aurorangen. Feel free to ignore and I will hunt you down and find you. (Kidding, kidding...my lawyer begs you...)
sims 4 — ck3 to TS4 mod release：ck3 Version O-Yoroi and helmet（Heian period Japanese samurai armor）
After six months of hard work and modifications, the mod is now available, offering a Japanese Heian period samurai armor set（ck3 Version）.The clothes and shoes are connected.Includes handguards
The shoulder panel can be found in the socks option.
（Note: You need to uncheck the gender option when entering CAS.The shoulder armor has no color designation; it only needs to be matched with the armor.）
You can change the colors as needed for your own use, but please do not release mods without authorization.
You are free to change the colors, but please do not release this mod without authorization.
Someone Else's OC In My Style (Sort Of)
Saxen Smith (@herecirm-warcry
I asked Herecirm if I could hang with Sax for a bit, so here we are! My Dark Magic Reignited poses suit him to the ground.
I tried painting over the hair to add some glow on the hair in Procreate, but I can't paint or draw hair at all, so it looked awful, so that version isn't here. I had fun doing these!
