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wizard college is going to kill me I swear to god. I just saw someone without a component satchel reach into their pocket and pull out a handful of LOOSE tapioca to use as a substitute for blood in their fell ritual. and it worked. I've never been so fucking mad.

orcboxer

experiencing microaggressions apparently

kvothbloodless

Elvish King behavior

sonisis

still trucking on that amv.

ivan-fyodorovich-k

I wish to purchase goods and services without entering a blood covenant that entitles the provider to email and text me forever and also store a bunch of my personal data that they’re going to apologize for exposing in a breach in the next five to ten years

allthingswhumpyandangsty

tw: bruises

reference for my fellow whump writers out there

queermaddscientist

Get yourself a fabric store that will light your fabric on fire for you

No but legit I asked what the fiber content of something was and the guy didn’t know so he cut a chunk off and lit it on fire and felt the ashes and was like. Yeah this is mostly cotton with a lil bit of silk. And that was the moment I knew. This is it. This is the fabric store for me. Also that guy is marriage material. Not for me but damn some person is gonna be so happy with him.

rawringthroughthetwenties

Ok but this is actually one of the easiest ways to tell what something is made of! I did a textiles degree and one day as part of a class we all went outside with a pile of scrap fabric and set fire to the little pieces and recorded how they burned. We were given a chart that looked something like this to tell what each fabric was (it gets a little tricky is it’s a mix of fabrics though). Why did we do this? There is very little regulation in the textiles industry so a lot of materials are mislabelled as something they aren’t and sold for more than they should be, also sometimes people buy fabric second hand or discounted which doesn’t have any label at all. If you have a fabric you are having doubts about, cut a tiny piece off and do the burn test and you should know pretty fast what you are dealing with. Anyways your fabric store should be lighting things on fire because this means that they are actually checking what the fabrics are and aren’t trying to pass cheap stuff off as more expensive than it is.

queermaddscientist

Ooh! I knew it was a standard test but I hadn’t seen a chart as detailed as this thank you!

pixel8or

rabidrobotrabbit

This is how your computer works btw. This little guy transports information to and fro.

sasquapossum

Data. One byte at a time.

aranvhetin

Extra cookies

basiliskonline

jeanjauthor

THIS, writers. Unless your characters are very wealthy (can pay people to be very industrious in growing, spinning, weaving, sewing on their behalf) or live in a post-textile-industrial-revolution world (aka modern/futuristic), they're not going to have that many clothes.

What they will have is protective outerwear. Aprons are a very real necessity for a lot of jobs, from cooking to blacksmithing and beyond.

Women wore aprons and housecoats into the 1940s and 1950s when doing cooking & cleaning because it was still a bit expensive to own a lot of clothes...so this is within 100 years. Within living memory for many folks.

Coveralls were created to protect clothing, and were handed out as uniforms by factories because the workers complained that their own clothes were getting damaged by their workplace. (Unions helped with this, strongly encouraging the companies doing the damage to their regular clothes to step up with replacement garments that could get damaged and then replaced by the company whose work was damaging them.)

Businesses started having their employees wear uniforms to make them look good and as a signature of their company (UPS brown, for example), but unless the design teams are idiots, those outfits are going to be stitched in ways that you can move easily & comfortably while doing your assigned tasks.

In corporate culture in Japan, the salarywomen are often given a uniform dress to wear, and I know of one business that held a work-slowdown because the way the sleeves of those dresses were cut and stitched, they literally couldn't bring their arms forward to type on their computers in a comfortable way. The company balked at replacing the uniforms, until a section manager agreed to let his female workers wear their own "office-dressy" clothes for a day...and productivity leaped forward by over 200%, literally because they could move their arms and position them comfortably.

Another example of those who effed it up are the officers' uniforms for the Germans during WWII, which were focused on looking fashionable--and they were!--but were horrible to don quickly, awkward wear in actual combat, etc, and it took them far too long to "drop trousers" to use the bushes in a swift, efficient, and safe manner. (Not saying they didn't deserve to be shot for supporting such an evil regime, but you should be able to go to the bathroom without worrying that it'll take you over a minute to put your clothes back together enough to run for cover in summer.)

Prior to the 1700s, servants in manor houses & noble estates often did not wear a uniform; they just wore whatever they had, and depended on aprons and watchcoats and whatever to protect their clothes. Then it became a status symbol to put one's servants into uniforms, also known as livery. If you could afford to do that then, by gum-golly, you were wealthy, and people could literally see that you were wealthy!

As for those famous black maid's dresses with white aprons that every manga loves to draw? Black dye was still a bit expensive, but black hid most stains. White aprons were protective, and were to be changed out frequently...and it was far easier to bleach cloth than it was to dye it black, plus the stark contrast was very eye-catching, and since the aprons could be swapped out frequently (very small amount of cloth compared to a whole dress), the fact that your maidstaff were wearing clean aprons was another sign of how wealthy you were, rather than just making the maid wear the apron all day long, progressively getting dirtier and dirtier.

With all this said, how valuable clothing was also affected how armies moved. Throughout most of recorded history, armies were composed primarily of men...but there were almost always 2 categories of women who followed them on the campaign trail. One, of course, was sex workers (for obvious reasons), but the other was Laundresses...and the laundresses would be ransomed first, ahead of the sex workers, if captured by enemy forces. (Not all were women by any means, btw, but the majority were, so I stuck with that gender.)

They worked hard to get the clothing clean, helped with getting leather armor clean, and provided other grooming services such as lice-combing. "But Jean, why would getting the soldiers' clothing clean be that important?" Dudes, dudes, my dudes...if you need to take a piss or a shit, combat will not stop for you. Peristalsis will happen mid-sword-swing. This was one of the sources of "deadly infections killed many of the fighters who went to war," and laundresses literally cleaned that shit up.

When you're a warrior in an army, marching off through the forests of Gaul, you can only carry so many spare sets of clothes because you're also carrying your armor, your weapons, and your rations, etc, etc. You will want to take care of your clothes, because you don't have many replacements, and you won't get many replacements.

So, writers, when you're writing about pre-industrialized cultures...go easy on how many clothes people own. Also realize that accessorizing can make an old outfit look new, which includes small parts of the clothing that can be swapped out for other pieces in a mix-and-match style.

...One last note:

The most expensive, time-consuming part of building a Norse ship to go a-viking on wasn't the actual ship, which took many men 2+ years to craft. It was the sails, which took many people, males and females, 3+ years to spin and weave and stitch together. There are literal stories of brash sailors robbing other norsemen of their sails because thieving it was faster & easier. (It also explains a lot of the fury of certain blood feuds between clans & holdings, if you think about it.)

thaylepo

Bringing this back to writers again, your period fantasy or historic characters are also going to know how to do upkeep and basic repairs on their own clothing. Laundries and tailors might be a thing in their world, but spot-cleaning and being able to mend small tears before they become big ones is crucial when off doing quests or campaigns or world-saving missions or what have you. Garments are expensive to replace. It may be sexy to have your hero discard their bloody, torn, and ruined shirt after a fight, but even if the garment is ruined beyond repair or wearability, woven cloth is still so valuable that it's worth keeping and cleaning to be turned into something else (legwraps, bandages, resewn into a hat, or used as patches to repair other garments, etc.).

We live in an unprecedented era of wastefulness, where our clothing is often so cheap (and cheaply made) that it's barely worth the efgort of repairing once it begins to wear out, and so easy to replace that we end up amassing more than we need of it. Even less than a hundred years ago, this kind of frivolity was reserved for the EXCEPTIONALLY wealthy. Even fairly well off people would continually recycle their old garments again and again. (Think of Cinderella's mice making that old pink dress into something new with just bits and pieces of the sisters' discarded accessories.... taking ribbons or lace or whole sections of an old dress to use in a new one was very common until quite recently!)

And never underestimate the usefulness of rags. If the clothing is beyond all repair or salvage, it has a new life as rags. You can wrap food in them, stuff them in your shoes for warmth and fit, pad your pillow with them, use them for cleaning, for bandages, for tying and belting your drawers, for patches.... rags are invaluable in a world where paper towels and disposable hygiene products do not exist.

alex51324

This, and I'll add, vast secondhand market in clothing. That one simple tunic would cost the equivalent-in-labor of a new car today, and it would change hands as many times as one.

People in Ye Olden Times--the earliest garments we have evidence of, up through the middle ages (and well beyond, for all but the wealthiest people)--didn't wear simple, box-shaped garments because they didn't know how to sew anything fancier.

They did so because a Big Rectangle had the most resale/re-use value, since it could be tied, laced, belted, or otherwise fastened to fit a wide range of bodies. The same garment could be worn throughout pregnancy, as well as before and after. If it was no longer needed, it could be passed down or sold to virtually anyone. And when it became worn at the seams or hems, it could be re-sewn as a slightly smaller rectangle, and still fit a lot of people.

In Renaissance Europe, clothing got a lot more structured--and to a significant degree, this was as a status symbol. If you wore a fitted, short jacket over tights and those silly-looking puffy shorts (or a doublet, nether-hose and trunk hose), everybody who saw you would know that you could afford to buy all that fabric and then waste a bunch of it by cutting it into very specific shapes.

And if it fit well, then they'd also know that you were (probably) the first owner of said garments. Because the clothes were still expensive, they'd still be passed down, but there was a lot more need for clothing resellers, where secondhand clothes could wait for a buyer whose body they would fit. (Used clothing was a common gift or tip for servants, and if it was something they couldn't wear, they'd sell it.) In this way, clothing styles would percolate their way down the class ladder, both in the form of actual garments that had once belonged to a very rich person, and dupes made with simpler/cheaper materials and techniques, and perhaps modified for practicality.

And that's how you get fashion cycles: once something starts showing up on too many of the common people, the rich would move on, either exaggerating the trend to a point that, outside of that fashion context, looks ridiculous--

Like these silly, silly shoes:

(Note: these are probably exaggerated; the name of this picture is "Young Man Meeting Death," and we're presumably supposed to see him as a frivolous type of person who is about to find out why he should have lived a more serious and pious life.)

--or going in a different direction entirely.

So yeah, if you're writing secondary-world fantasy, give some thought to where the clothes are coming from, and how that's going to affect the styles and choices the characters make. If your working-class character in a Vaguely Medieval Fantasy Land is wearing fitted clothing, either that society has magic spinning and weaving technology, or your character is a serious fashionista/o, who is putting in a lot of time and effort into the project.

Similarly, if that type of setting has courtiers in a dazzling variety of impractical and elaborate garments--and several different outfits of it apiece--that implies a significant degree of urbanization and upward mobility, driving a secondhand market for those items, as well as providing the skilled labor to make and maintain those types of clothes. (You know these?

There was an entire trade centered on washing & ironing these things. Separate from actually making them, I mean. It involved tiny, specially shaped irons, and buckets of starch. Royalty or major nobility might have a servant dedicated to this highly specialized labor, and people a little lower on the ladder would send them out to be done. Ideally, you'd have each of your ruffs washed and re-set every time you wore it; people did re-wear them to save money, but they got droopy fast--hence the emphasis, in paintings featuring this trend, of crisp stiffness.)

nerathul

How would this all compare to leather and hide based clothing? As the material doesn't need spinning and weaving, only tanning, cutting and sewing would it be cheaper and more common?

quill-of-thoth

So. Not a tanner or a cloth maker here but - tanning can be very chemically specific. For those curious my perspective is of an animal pathologist's assistant. I have cut up several cows.

You do have the opportunity to amass a lot of leather if you hunt large animals, but post the adoption of farming and herding, most people are not feeding themselves that way. And there is just more small game overall. Leather is not necessarily easier, quicker, or less expensive to make than cloth, it just depends on what resources you have that are most abundant.

So the steps to making leather are as follows:

(Under the cut because, uh. I know this stuff from my job, which is “open a dead animal and let the doctor see what’s wrong with it” and most of it is messy.)

3) Assuming you have completed steps 1 and 2, you need the chemicals to tan the animal. Historically brains have been used a lot. DO NOT DO THIS if you are a modern person who wants to hunt for meat or leather. Prion diseases like CWD live in the brain, as do a lot of viruses that will kill or disable you painfully and slowly. It’s a relatively low risk (compared to things like accidents with your hunting gun) but it’s a risk you do not have to take. Yes, this is why some states want you to turn in the heads of any deer you shoot, regardless of how many points they have. This is part of how we tell you if the deer you shot is actually safe to eat, and not full of said viruses that will kill or disable you painfully. The other thing that you need is a steady location and a fuckton of water, because these bitches need to soak for a long time. Way longer than soak times for retting flax or other plant stem fibers. And in multiple different solutions of the foulest smelling shit that you can imagine: in addition to brains, the steps included soaking in urine, possibly dung if you didn’t have enough brains, salt curing, soaking until the hair is loosened and then scraping all that off, and then the actual tanning, which is soaking it in a high tannic acid tree bark solution until it’s ready. You can skip some of these steps, especially if you are, say, a paleolithic hunter gatherer. But your leathers will degrade faster. They will be less comfortable and less good for your range of motion. So the production of leather is not necessarily less time consuming than cloth. It is also resource expensive at many steps – from start to finish you need animal wealth, mineral and plant resources, time, and a lot of water that you don’t need urgently for something else, like irrigation or watering your livestock. You’ll also want to do your tanning away from where you eat and sleep, because, the odor of fermenting cowhide is not fun. Finally, it is way more difficult at every step to construct a garment out of leather: cutting it, using an awl to punch holes in it so you can actually sew, or boiling it into shape. It’s also a specialized process when it comes to the chemical aspect, more so than cleaning wool or beating flax, both of which you can produce way more of (eventually) as a small household in the middle of nowhere. Spinning and weaving are both activities you can pick at slowly – you can also get a very small child to spin yarn acceptably with practice, freeing up your adult hands to do things like the weaving, while you really can’t bring your tots into your leather working and expect them to do anything but get underfoot. And shitty cloth smells way better than shitty rotting leather. And none of this even scratches the surface of the material property reasons why a society may prefer leather for some applications (saddles, shoes...) and cloth for others.

jackironsides

Addendum to the leather reblog above, but salt is also historically very expensive, and pretty crucial to most of the older European methods of hide treatment I was able to find when reading up on tanning a few months ago. I can't remember if you still need it if you're using alum, but alum is still something you're going to have to buy in order to process your skins. (From what I read, tanning with brains was an Indigenous American technique, which was rapidly adopted by the colonisers bc of its efficient use of resources that are easy to hand, but modern American sources tend to drown out everything else when looking at historical stuff online without institution access, so I wouldn't state that categorically.)

The original thread is why I cringe every time I read a fic in my home fandom – which is roughly Fantasy Medieval/Renaissance in technology – that has main characters tear each other's clothing to show how excited they are for boning down.

In a premodern context, if someone tore my clothing carelessly, let alone deliberately, we're not fucking. We're no longer on speaking terms. They're dead to me. A shirt is bad enough; at least those were comparatively disposable, and could probably be repaired in a way that's unnoticeable when you wear it (shirts in most premodern European societies are underwear, not outerwear), but a doublet? Fuck right off into the sun.

‘Ooh, you can tell how ~horny~ I am for you because I crashed your car in order to get into your pants.’ That's what you sound like. Tear your own fucking shirt if you're that keen.

It's such an incredibly modern trope to me. I could MAYBE understand it if it's supposed to be a flex on how wealthy someone is, but my poor as shit blorbo with his hand-to-mouth existence who owns three shirts MAXIMUM should not be doing this. Would not be doing this.

The earliest I could see that trope as plausible in my mind is the Victorian period. There was still a healthy second-hand market for clothing, but clothing production had become far more mechanised than it ever had been before, and tearing a shirt probably wouldn't send you to the poor house. (But please still don't tear a suit jacket or a woman's bodice. That's hours of sewing work alone, even after the advent of treadle sewing machines. What's wrong with you.)

aetherograph

Don't forget dyeing, which had to be re-done and was itself a whole fucking profession.

Indigo is one of the hardest natural dyes to start a pot of, especially without a thermometer or indigo white, so once you got that pot started you kept it going. Indigo also has to be processed into a water-soluble form by treating it with ammonia. How do you source ammonia in a pre-industrial world? Well, the local piss barrel at the tavern is full of something that will certainly turn into ammonia if you let it sit. There were almost wars over the argument of whether the dyers should have to pay money to take the piss from the tavern or whether the publican should pay THEM for the SERVICE of taking away the piss, which after all is garbage.

Dark or vivid colours are expensive, and natural dyes are not fast--that is, they fade with washing and sunlight and wear, so you have to keep re-dying them every so often. Black in particular was VERY expensive, moreso than ANY other colour. Certain fibers dye very well and certain ones do not.

Yellow and green were favourite colours of the common folk--bright yellows in particular were very easy to get with cheap dyestuffs, and you see bright sunshine yellow very often in medieval art of ordinary folks. Denim blue was middling expensive. Purple, pink, and orange did not exist as perceived colours--remember, colour is a function of language. Meaning if you don't have a word for the colour, you don't perceive it. Red was difficult and the only thing more expensive than red was, as I said, black.

Dyers and fullers had smelly jobs and worked with piss--their workshops were, like the tanner's, on the edge of town, and downwind if possible.

Oh yes, what's a fuller. Well, wool is full of oils and stuff from the ship, and you need to eliminate those if you want the fabric to be thick and warm and insulating. So you need to soak it in urine and use your feet to rub it over a special textured surface to get all the oils out and shrink and felt the fabric. Loden, felt, and duffel are all fabrics that require fulling in order to become.

Spinning was done by most everybody all the time every day; that's why you see pictures of women with long distaffs leaning on their shoulders as they go about, in some art of ordinary life in the middle ages. You could spin all day while doing everything else. Weaving, however, was a profession, usually male, and weavers were very respected people in all societies that had them.

Pulling the fleece was an activity that you had to do before the wool could be spun. The process for turning a sheep's wool into a garment consisted of many more steps than shear, spin, weave, sew.

Shear

Pull the fleece: this involved sitting around with everyone and pulling the long guard hairs away from the undercoat. A lot of stories, songs, and gossip happened during this process. It also leaves you with very nice soft hands from all the lanolin.

Comb the undercoat hairs with a brush or comb to line up all the fibres in the same direction. This leaves you with rolags or roving.

Spin using a distaff and drop spindle. This takes forever. But there was a very important, revolutionary machine that came up the silk road to Europe and changed--and I cannot emphasise this enough--EVERYTHING.

This machine eliminated the drudgery of spinning, spreading from the East to Europe starting in the late 1200s. It freed up women's time to do more, and made spinning itself a job you could make money doing--the word "spinster" is the term for that profession, and elderly women suddenly could have money of their own, support themselves. This was very important!! This was a labour-saving machine that gave more power to women in Europe and made the making of fabric and fiber faster and easier than ever before!

5. Dye the threads. It's much easier to dye skeins of yarn than it is to dye fabric or garments in pre-industrial ages, so dyeing would be done at the yarn stage. Dyeing the yarn also means you can do things like have the weft be one colour and the warp another. This results in some of the most exciting and beautiful fabric in existence:

6. Weave the fabric. The loom was another piece of technology that was constantly being improved upon, because society was built on looms. In fact, the predecessor to the computer was the loom! Look up a video of a jaquard loom sometime, you'll see it uses punchcards to "program" in the different patterns of the fabric it produces. The song "four loom weaver" is actually "power loom weaver". Power looms were another improvement that made weaving faster. The luddites were the first labour strike and organization, and it was about? That's right, WEAVING.

7. Fulling, polishing, and other finishing techniques. Moire is made by calendaring. Felt is made by fulling. Polishing, waxing, and all kinds of other techniques are used to make all the different varieties of fabric that exist. The way we live now is sad and pathetic, we don't come into contact with much in the way of variety of fabric anymore. Everything is disposable, paperthin and made of plastic or cotton or bamboo, knits mostly. When you get into historical costuming, you meet all kinds of fabrics--lush brocades, velvets, and coutils, and silk. But it's NOTHING compared to the hand-woven fabrics of times past.

Machines can make fabric fast, but it's looser than when a human is doing it. The density of some hand-woven fabrics is so great that you don't need to hem them! Likewise, the translucency of some ancient linens made in Egypt is still a mystery we're trying to figure out how to reproduce, because machine-spinning and machine-weaving meant we LOST these techniques. People who spin and weave and hand-make fiber their whole lives can make it as thin as a spider's gossamer, and not even machines can do that today. Machines are wonderful and humans should not have to labour so much if a machine can do it, but it's worth noting that just because it's made by machine doesn't mean that it's better quality, just that its cheaper and faster to make. I'm sure if we tried, we'd find ways of machines being able to do it, especially with the "sort things and detect things" algorithmic programs software engineers have come up with, the ones that detect cancer and so on.

8. Sewing the garment. I'm putting a note here for sewing bc sewing by hand is a lot easier and faster and better than by machine sometimes. I hand-sewed an entire pair of pants and the hems were utterly invisible when I was finished, it was astonishing. I also used a running stitch for most of it and that's. That's the normal stitch to use, you just backstitch every ten stitches or so and then keep going. It wastes far less thread than a sewing machine. To make those pants I only needed three stitches: running, backstitch, and whipstitch. And I learned by watching Nicole Rudolph when she's sewing, she does the same stitches for the most part! There's speciality stitches for locking in the ends of corset bones (flossing) and so on, but the majority of the long seams are just the running stitch! Needles and pins were precious commodities in pre-industrial times, and there are letters between John Adams and his wife Abigail that illustrate this, which were famously made into the latter half of the song "Piddle, Twiddle and Resolve" in the 1969 musical 1776.

Needles were at first made of bone, hand-carved, in very ancient times; but needles and pines of steel and brass were also produced later on as metalworking tech started being able to do so. These were very precious, and the little tiny strawberry that hangs off a traditional tomato pincushion, the one full of what feels like sand? That was for cleaning the rust and tarnish off your needle, so it would go through the fabric easier. You can still buy bone and brass needles in the traditional style from historical merchants, and try for yourself sewing the historical way!

Many people in fact already practise an ancient form of fabric and garment-making: Knitting and crochet! There's a much older predecessor to these, called nalbinding, that is very interesting and practised with roving rather than spun and plied yarn, and uses a flat wooden or bone needle. It creates very dense, not very stretchy things, and was used by the Norse. Nalbound things are VERY cold-proof, and eventually felt--and that's a good thing, felt is very warm stuff! My mom made me a nalbound hat once and I miss it every winter.

Now, garments were not just fabric of course. People have liked decorating everything since time immemorial, and embroidery, buttons, beads, and other things were used. Another type of decoration, one very popular in the SCA, is TRIM! Trim is made by weaving on an inkle loom, which looks like this:

This one doesn't have the cards visble, but the pattern can be produced with cards that can be turned:

This produces a brocade, and yes, you can weave letters or all kinds of patterns into the "tape" that is produced. Depending on what fiber you use, and how fine the threads, these can be trims or hair-ribbons or shoulder-straps or all kinds of things!

Lace was also a very precious and complex form of decoration, and pieces of lace were so incredibly expensive and treasured that they were passed down as heirlooms. We're used to lace being white or maybe cream, but at certain points in France, blue lace could be found. And nothing is really stopping you from dyeing your lace, or using dyed threads to make it, other than fashion and convention.

Of course, places outside Europe (which is my speciality and has been my whole life) have their own fabric and decoration techniques, from the wax resist of batik to the special tie-dye from Japan called Shibori, to ikat, to the quilling of many North American Indigenous people (not to mention wampum beads, hand-carved of shells!). Everyone likes to decorate themselves and their clothing!

patheticprogrammingperson

@elodieunderglass, this seems right up your alley, at least in the latter parts.

elodieunderglass

Thank you so much!

headspace-hotel

have some questions re: brain tanning, because I listened to this fascinating podcast for a class that talked about how Native Americans were reviving the practice. I don't know if chronic wasting disease is a concern with brain tanning or not. but generally yeah laypeople shouldn't mess around with animal brains

also, black wouldn't be expensive in areas where wool or fleece bearing animals came in black. alpacas and llamas can be black

horsefigureoftheday

Horses are easy to draw and their anatomy makes perfect sense

aerinis

this was a fun exercise OP, thanks :)

grandenchanterfiona

Why do my interests in canning, couponing, and homesteading overlap so often with blogs with titles like ‘The Obedient Housewife’?

livingdeadpoetssociety

Like, I’m like, “I want to learn to make soap and farm,” and suddenly I see 500 “traditional family” motherfuckers like no you are mistaken. I am just a simple lesbian anticapitalist looking to limit my consumerism as much as possible.

roachpatrol

‘these fun crafts will keep your kids occupied until your husband gets home!’ no i want a clothespin crown for me

plantyhamchuk

As a nerd who homesteads, let me share the data I have gathered!

First is my megalist of homesteading-related links I’ve gathered over the years. I’m a mod over at r/homesteading and this is where I’ve put a lot of good sources (not all, admittedly some are still sitting in my bookmark folder waiting to be added). The search function at reddit is wretched, but there’s also been lots of good things I’ve shared there too. Please note that many of these sources are not actual webpages, but PDFs. That’s not an accident, PDFs are where you find the really good in-depth stuff.

Many of my sources are from the Extension Service. They won’t try to relate to you based on your lifestyle or sexual identity or religion or whatever, but due to that, they also won’t be alienating you either.

The Cooperative Extension Service (US only) exists in all 50 states and in most counties. It is taxpayer funded. The Extension Service exists to help people become more self sufficient, for farmers to be more successful, for people to be healthier, for kids to be well adjusted, to figure out how to grow the best plants in your area, etc. Some county offices even offer cheap classes in things like gardening, canning, soap making, and they’re taught by people with training in these areas (I once heard a great talk on composting from a soil scientist that way). Do you want to know what type of plant something is? Do you need help figuring out a plant disease or pest issue? You can now contact them online and get great info.

I HIGHLY recommend checking out your state’s extension service website, because they do offer different types of information, depending on what is grown/raised where you are (and how well funded they are). My county extension puts out a monthly gardening newsletter, which includes a helpful ‘this is the time of the year to do —-’ part.

Here’s an example from North Carolina - check out that left sidebar

Here’s an example from California - this website is HUGE so dig around

Here’s an example from New York - they have a calendar at the bottom, showing how they have things like hydroponic and urban agriculture workshops coming up.

Interested in raising animals? Penn State Extension is really really good. They have tons of free materials and courses available online, some I pulled for my megalist at the top of this.

National Center for Home Food Preservation - they cover the important aspects of food safety, and also have some recipes. Many state Extension Service websites will have lots more recipes.

If you have kids, check out 4-H programs for them. It’s part of the local public school system here. If you’re homeschooling, you can also purchase their science-filled educational and self sufficiency materials (materials are divided by age ranges - Cloverbud Member: ages 5-8, Junior Member: ages 9-13, Senior Member: ages 14-19). One of my coworkers is in 4-H, she’s still in high school, and last year she raised an award-winning heifer.

Congress grants the money for funding these programs, and they’re connected with various universities. There’s a level of cutting edge scientific knowledge and academic rigor you don’t find in blogs or even most books. There’s LOTS of homesteading books filled with outdated information like ‘till the earth every year’ hell I still have older coworkers who do it and I’m trying to figure out how to gently tell them that they’re destroying their soil that way, and that there’s better methods now, methods grounded in science.

Knitting - try this youtube series

DIY Crown - here’s a youtube video on how to make a mermaid crown

Hope this is helpful to someone out there.

systlin

HOLY FUCKIN SHIT BLESS

bareboneswitch

@crazycatsiren up your street I think?

possessedpasm

Something I try to keep in mind when making art that looks vintage is keeping a limited color pallette. Digital art gives you a very wide, Crisp scope of colors, whereas traditional art-- especially older traditional art-- had a very limited and sometimes dulled use of color.

This is a modern riso ink swatch, but still you find a similar and limited selection of colors to mix with. (Mixing digitally as to emulate the layering of ink riso would be coloring on Multiply, and layering on top of eachother 👉)

If you find some old prints, take a closer look and see if you can tell what colors they used and which ones they layered... a lot of the time you'll find yellow as a base!

Misprints can really reveal what colors were used and where, I love misprints...

Something else I keep in the back of my mind is: how the human eye perceives color on paper vs. a screen. Ink and paint soaks into paper, it bleeds, stains, fades over time, smears, ect... the history of a piece can show in physical wear. What kind of history do you want to emulate? Misprinted? Stained? Kept as clean as possible, but unable to escape the bluing damages of the sun? It's one of my favorite things about making vintage art. Making it imperfect!

You can see the bleed, the wobble of the lines on the rug, the fading, the dirt... beautiful!!

Thinking in terms of traditional-method art while drawing digital can help open avenues to achieving that genuine, vintage look!

possessedpasm

ALSO!!

YELLOWING!! Digital art is very blue-light based. Cold, clean, flat. But traditional art has warmth to it. Why?

Over time, paper gets yellowed with dust, oil, dirt, and nicotine from cigarettes! So colors got warmer. This makes art look pretty aged, on top of the slight toned papers and hand made/factory made inks they printed with.

possessedpasm

Learn how to simulate retro artwork in this three-part series dedicated to the history of printing methods and how to recreate them digitall

If I told you to think of a Silver Age comic book, what image does your mind conjure? Chances are, you’re picturing a comic with bold lines…

Dang y'all like old art!! Here's a couple resources too for those who wanna learn some more :]

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ADDITION: I KEEP MEANING TO MENTION THIS-- YOU CAN SET YOUR CANVAS TO CMYK INSTEAD OF RGB FOR BETTER COLORS! :D

CMYK is meant for printing, while RBG is a light spectrum color setting.

You can look up how to do this for whichever drawing program you use since it can change from program-to-program!

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)

unusual-suspects

thelovingend-deactivated2025073

mcnuggyy

i felt like there wasn’t enough polyam trio art memes so i decided to make my own <3 self indulgence be damned

❤️💛💙

( feel free to share and tag me in any of the cute art you make i would love to see!!! 🥺💕)

feluka

we need more pathetic female characters written by authors who don't hate women

feluka

to be clear since this is making the rounds: she has to be an absolute loser in no way that can be pinned on her gender. no "i'm just a girl tee-hee" stuff. straight up just a loser (nondenominational)

feluka

addendum: she must be the most important person in the whole narrative

feluka

I decided to sit down and concentrate and properly write the list of rules that qualify a character for this role.

FIRST LAW: This character must be a woman.

SECOND LAW: This character must be a loser, but not in a way that can be pinned on her gender. Misogynistic response from the audience does not disqualify the character.

THIRD LAW: If the audience does not enjoy this character, then it becomes impossible to enjoy the show/film/book/game altogether. It is not possible to ignore this character, for better or for worse.

FOURTH LAW: The character must make bad decisions, and not just be a victim of poor circumstances outside of her control. The character can also be a victim of poor circumstances outside of her control, but it has to be primarily her personal choices that deem her a loser.

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!