I've been resource gathering for YEARS so now I am going to share my dragons hoard
Floorplanner. Design and furnish a house for you to use for having a consistent background in your comic or anything! Free, you need an account, easy to use, and you can save multiple houses.
Comparing Heights. Input the heights of characters to see what the different is between them. Great for keeping consistency. Free.
Magma. Draw online with friends in real time. Great for practice or hanging out. Free, paid plan available, account preferred.
Smithsonian Open Access. Loads of free images. Free.
SketchDaily. Lots of pose references, massive library, is set on a timer so you can practice quick figure drawing. Free.
SculptGL. A sculpting tool which I am yet to master, but you should be able to make whatever 3d object you like with it. free.
Pexels. Free stock images. And the search engine is actually pretty good at pulling up what you want.
Figurosity. Great pose references, diverse body types, lots of "how to draw" videos directly on the site, the models are 3d and you can rotate the angle, but you can't make custom poses or edit body proportions. Free, account option, paid plans available.
Line of Action. More drawing references, this one also has a focus on expressions, hands/feet, animals, landscapes. Free.
Animal Photo. You pose a 3d skull model and select an animal species, and they give you a bunch of photo references for that animal at that angle. Super handy. Free.
Height Weight Chart. You ever see an OC listed as having a certain weight but then they look Wildly different than the number suggests? Well here's a site to avoid that! It shows real people at different weights and heights to give you a better idea of what these abstract numbers all look like. Free to use.
In your view/experience. is the rate of "incompleteness" among webcomics more or less the nature of online personal projects as a whole? Or is there something specific to webcomics like laboriousness, audience expectations, relative medium infancy or whatnot?
well for one thing webcomics has changed significantly in the last ten years. it used to have a much lower barrier for entry, just get a smackjeeves account or set up a website with a wordpress plugin. starting a webcomic when i started my webcomic vs starting a webcomic now are totally different experiences.
so i can only speak to people who started their webcomics roughly ten years ago. and roughly ten years ago a lot of us were a whole lot younger with a lot more time and energy to spend on a comic for free. this part is probably still somewhat true for new artists.
but then you get older. your ideas change. your skill develops and the old stuff isn't as good. or you don't have as much time, you got a day job. unless you're one of like five people on earth your webcomic is not paying your rent. you need to make money. your shoulder hurts. you're 30 now. you're struggling to make updates on time between whatever else makes you happy and what else you need to do to live. you wrote this story when you were 21, you don't relate to it anymore, you have different ideas, you've grown up, your audience has noticeably dropped off from the peak, social media managing is hard, you have to go to work, you're so tired, all the time.
Taylor touched on it, but yeah webcomics are EXTREMELY not the scene they were when a lot of people our age got into it (people our age now being in the position of having enough work behind them to 'abandon' it meaningfully).
Almost everyone I know who used to run a webcomic back then still cares a lot about those stories. Some people have moved into different mediums, some have rebooted their work and repackaged it for places like patreon or aggregators, a lot of them still produce free work for their audiences in one form or another even if it's not a continuation of their original 'one big story'. And some of them ARE still plugging away at the same projects, the same way they always did. But the skills that got people into webcomics 10-15 years ago are not the skills you need to get any kind of attention in today's market.
I complain a lot about 'hustle culture' taking over artistic spaces online, and that grievance really roots from what happened to webcomics more than anything else. There is no reason that you should need to be a marketing guru to publish an free indie comic online. There is no reason that you should be expected to update daily, or three times a week, or even once a week if you don't want to. There was genuinely a time when some of the best examples of the genre (and best known among Webcomic Likers) were uncategorisable experiments published one page at a time every other phase of the moon on wordpress blogs or static html sites.
If you were excited by webcomics as a medium in 2010, you were probably excited by qualities of the scene that simply don't exist any more - or at least certainly don't exist in the same form, or to nearly the same extent. Project Wonderful and webrings meant tiny comics still had shared readerships, and an avenue for connecting with new audiences through peers with similar interests. Micro-forums and comment sections meant each comic had its own little mini community, often full of other artists who were excited to talk process. Maybe the defining artistic relationship of my whole career, which has opened up more job opportunities than my actual degree, was forged in a webcomic forum with about 8 regular users.
The biggest loss I felt, personally, was the disappearance of spaces for talking about art with amateurs who really cared about experimentation and expression. A lot of it was super goofy, but bouncing off other teenagers with messy over-ambitious ideas about infinite canvas and found-object comics and branching storylines really ignited my passion for trying things. There were always parallel conversations about how to find an audience, whether merch was worth it, which conventions made money, but they were just as questing and experimental. Today, creative spaces are (somewhat necessarily, by nature of the way the internet has changed around us) dominated by marketing talk. The question hanging over every creative question for webcomic artists today seems to be 'but will it drive engagement'. And that's fucking miserable.
Anyone who got into webcomics before the shift to algorithmic feeds, omnipresent adtech and the premeditated murder death of Project Wonderful has probably looked around at some point and thought 'where the fuck am I?' Some artists have adapted comfortably, but a huge proportion of those who were most invested ten years ago were just never going to be interested in the skills that drive the current webcomic market. Because it is a market now, not an art scene. People have always needed to make money, and webcomics have never been especially profitable, but there was a time when they were an outlet - something you did after your shift at the bar, because it came with broad possibilities and a vibrant social scene. Now they are a second job.
Here's my point: when you notice the great proportion of long-running comics that just faded away or stopped altogether at some point, it is worth recognising that this wasn't just burnout. It was an extinction event.
JOIN. COMIC. FURY.
https://comicfury.com/index.php
There's still a thriving social scene full of crazy experimentation if you know where to look. It's true that a lot of the 'pop culture' view of webcomics has shifted to trying to 'make it big' on webtoon, but there are alternatives. If anyone's interested in making comics and feels overwhelmed, don't let social media expectations kill your love of the craft. I've been making comics and posting them online for 10 yrs with very little social media presence, and have a small group of readers who I love and value + have formed some incredible frienships through shared interest. It can be done! You dont have to turn something into a career for it to be worth doing
This got long, sorry, but I’ve been having this conversation a lot lately and I have a lot to say.
I was incredibly lucky to join that 2010s wave of comics… and it was just dumb luck. Right place, right time. Webcomics back then was a small but supportive community of scrappy DIY-ers. Putting out a comic every week (let alone 3x a week, or daily) was NO small feat on its own and success was never guaranteed. It was hard!! JUST making a comic is hard. We had to rely on each other to navigate setting up our own websites, learning how to make and sell merch, learning how to table at conventions. We had to take our own preorders and update a stupid little thermometer jpg on our website. We linked to each other and helped each other, and (some drama aside) we had each other’s backs.
And it worked! For a time. Nobody was living large then, but some of us could make enough that way to get by. Our communities of readers were (and still are) amazing. Even for a smaller comic like mine, I could get enough reader support to print gorgeous high-quality books and get them in people’s hands. That’s something I’m still incredibly proud of.
When social media came, reader habits changed dramatically. Very few readers would leave their feed. Most readers stopped clicking through to the url (so ad sales imploded), and sometimes the ones that did would just screenshot the punchline and repost it to their own social page without credit. As time went on, fewer and fewer people would share a comic, let alone follow…now most just (maybe) click like and scroll along.
As the barrier to getting your comic on the web got lower, the quality of art got higher - and readers started demanding a much higher standard for an indie webcomic. In addition to this, some artists who gained traction at this time were subject to high levels of writer scrutiny, and that was tough to navigate.
In recent years the costs of shipping merch has gone through the roof (especially outside the US) and even if we could convince someone to buy, they started expecting rock-bottom next-day shipping like you’d get with Amazon. Every single micro service you need to keep a modern webcomic machine running demands its piece of flesh (hosting/domains, shop/payments, newsletters, post scheduling, premium accounts or plugins or whatever blablabla), and there’s less and less flesh to go around these days. You basically need to give it full time hours for the chance of it maybe becoming a part time money. A few new webcomics have found their feet and thrived in the modern era, but no, it’s not the same scene as it was back then. And every service that pops up to help you out has its own rules… rules that are subject to change without notice.
Google Reader was killed in 2013. Then non-chronological algorithms stopped showing us each other’s posts, even if we were following, circa 2015-2016. Then the various social sites stopped being viable at all. These days the mantra is “pivot (to video) or perish”. Or sometimes… just perish.
I’m not blaming the readers for these changes. These behaviours were designed. Webcomics was just one victim, but it’s also happened to a lot of other scenes (music, journalism, blogging...). I’m still learning how to fit into this new paradigm.
***
Yes, in light of these conditions many webcomickers are pushed to quit. But not all. Many of my contemporaries are putting out the best comics of their careers today.
There’s tons of incredible new work that even I’m struggling to keep up with because there are so many amazing comics now.
Some OG webcomickers pivoted into the publishing market which comes with its own challenges: a gruelling schedule, limitations on the stories you can tell, paltry advances and then you still have to do all your own marketing. But they’re still putting out incredible comics, or writing them, or helping them get made. Or hell, printing them. I’m so proud to be part of a community where creatives like these got their start.
Some went into Animation where you live under NDA and big studios can cancel your project on a whim, but they’re still making amazing art.
A couple went to Indie Games, which has to be at least 10x as difficult as webcomics, and they’re making their mark. Others went to a “merch-first” kind of creative practice, and others still got art-related corporate jobs.
And to those of us who have had to tap out or step back, or if you haven’t been able to make it click for whatever combination of reasons… you’re still a part of the community and I’m honoured to have shared a time on the internet with you. There is NO shame in quitting something that no longer resonates with your creative goals, or needing to take different measures to meet your human needs or build the kind of life you want. Stopping under those conditions is not failure. Every single page you put down is a victory.
***
Webcomics is far from a dead scene, it’s just a bit more underground again. You like webcomics? Welcome to the Resistance to the attention-economy. It’s a bit punk to do webcomics again.
We have lots of reasons to be optimistic about the scene:
All the technology we used to make that happen in the 2010s still exists today. RSS still exists. You can still type in a url, or keep a comic links folder on your browser, or use comic rocket to hold your place.
If you wanna make a comic, ComicFury is free. Neocities is free and rarebit is free. Or just put it on social for now! Who cares, just draw comics. Worry about the rest later.
If you really want to you can still get a domain and fairly cheap hosting (though it’s a bit dicier now, and idk who is doing the best WP comics plugin now) but then FileZilla is free, VsCode is free. All in it's probably ~$300 to self-host, unless you got a friend who can hook you up.
Software for making comics has never been more powerful or accessible than it is today. Tablets and scanners are cheaper than ever. Clip’s affordable, Krita is free.
Information on how to set this all up is easier to access than it ever has been
It’s never been easier to access vendors for low-minimum-quantity but high-quality custom products.
Shop services aren’t perfect, but the barrier to entry of selling something to someone online has never been lower, except for maybe when people were willing to use a Paypal html Buy Now button
And I can’t emphasize this enough – there are so so many diverse and unique creatives making their most incredible work RIGHT NOW.
If you want to make comics… if you have a song still in you… don’t give up! Do what you must to stay safe and well. Do what you can to make your best work and share it. You don't "have" to do anything that doesn't feel right to you.
Go make a zine and give it to your friends. Go to a convention and meet a local artist. Go join a local collective, or start one. Print a sticker at home and sell it for a few bucks. Join the cooperative, or a webring or two, or hell just tell another artist you think their work is neat.
Dear reader, if you want to see more webcomics that get to their conclusion? The only thing missing is YOUR. CHOICE. Choose to read webcomics. Most of us put them up for free, we're just delighted for you to read them. Go click around a few links and find something weird and cool. Choose to use RSS, and share the comics you like with your friends, and teach them RSS. Choose to kick us a few bucks when you can, buy our books and give them to your local libraries if you can. Choose to let comics be challenging and weird, choose to let artists be messy humans who are growing and learning just like you are.
The attention-economy game is boring, but this one is still here for those who want to play :)
Hello OP, i don’t have anyway to prove this is the same recipe they make in the shows but i make this to calm my inner kid from wanting the fictional soup:
300gr bacon, beef or chicken. A meat of your choice. These go specially well. I prefer chicken tights. Diced
1 medium onion, diced.
Garlic minced (i used 2-4 pieces depending on size)
300gr carrot, cleaned, peeled and diced.
3 sticks of celery, washed and diced.
800gr potato. Washed, peeled diced in quarters.
1 head of broccoli.
8 cups of stock of your preference. I recommend using the bones of the beef or chicken, but veggies stock works too for a vegetarian or vegan version.
3 tablespoons all purpose flour.
1 cup whole milk. (Almond or rice milk work fine for a vegan option)
½ cup heavy cream. (Skip it for a vegan option)
Salt and black pepper to taste.
½ teaspoon paprika, use the spicy one to get the warmth up a notch in winter.
1 tablespoon fresh chopped coriander. Optional.
1 cup diced gouda or manchego cheese. Optional but really ties all together.
Make sure you have all your ingredients ready and at hand for this one to make sure it comes out nice and tasty!!!
In a pot put water and the bones to prepare your stock (chicken, beef, veggie) You can use premade or bouillon cubes, just make sure its 8 cups worth of broth. In a different pot boil the potatoes until soft.
In a big pot put some butter or olive oil to fry the onion, when it turns a little transparent add the garlic, move constantly.
Add the celery and diced carrots, moving constantly.
The carrot will get a little brighter in color, add the diced meat. Salt and pepper to your taste.
Meanwhile, blend the potatoes with enough stock so your blender wont have trouble blending. If you have a food processor, it’ll be easier.
Ad the remaining stock to you big pot with the veggies and meat, add the broccoli chopped in bite size pieces. Add the paprika and taste for salt and pepper. Let over a medium fire for 10 min.
Separate 3 tbsp of the stock to mix with the flour, set aside. This will be a thickening agent.
Pour the potato mix on the big pot, move to integrate and taste for salt and pepper.
Add the milk and heavy cream. Move with a laddle. Have a final taste and let over low fire for 5 min.
Serve hot and decorate with a pinch of coriander and some cubes of cheese.
ENJOY!
Notes:
I personally prefer to use chicken, love how it goes with potatoes and veggies. Also the tight is very tender and flavorful. With beef you have to be careful not to overcook it or it’ll get gummy and hard to bite, so make adjustments.
VEGAN: could also skip the meat, cheese and heavy cream for a vegan option.
I make it for my younger sister and she loves it. Instead of meat i add some diced, toasted nuts when served. Cashew, pecan and pistachios work nicely.
You’ll have to use 5 tbsp of flour to thicken up the broth a tid bit more without the heavy cream but you can still use a vegan milk.
You can totally skip the coriander, but it adds another dept of flavor.
Do try it with the cheese tho, i promise it’s GODLY. Gouda and manchego are my fave, the melt nicely and have a strong after taste, but i guess any cheese that melts could work.
Finally, if you are like me and like spicy food you can add chopped chili. Serrano and arbol chiles are my go to’s, freshly chopped sprinkled just after serving my bowl.
Hope y'all give it a try and if you have any doubts do ask!
Substituted spinach for broccoli because my partner is not a fan of the latter and used chicken and bacon. Gonna try it again with a nice Italian sausage in place of the chicken next time.
I've been resource gathering for YEARS so now I am going to share my dragons hoard
Floorplanner. Design and furnish a house for you to use for having a consistent background in your comic or anything! Free, you need an account, easy to use, and you can save multiple houses.
Comparing Heights. Input the heights of characters to see what the different is between them. Great for keeping consistency. Free.
Magma. Draw online with friends in real time. Great for practice or hanging out. Free, paid plan available, account preferred.
Smithsonian Open Access. Loads of free images. Free.
SketchDaily. Lots of pose references, massive library, is set on a timer so you can practice quick figure drawing. Free.
SculptGL. A sculpting tool which I am yet to master, but you should be able to make whatever 3d object you like with it. free.
Pexels. Free stock images. And the search engine is actually pretty good at pulling up what you want.
Figurosity. Great pose references, diverse body types, lots of "how to draw" videos directly on the site, the models are 3d and you can rotate the angle, but you can't make custom poses or edit body proportions. Free, account option, paid plans available.
Line of Action. More drawing references, this one also has a focus on expressions, hands/feet, animals, landscapes. Free.
Animal Photo. You pose a 3d skull model and select an animal species, and they give you a bunch of photo references for that animal at that angle. Super handy. Free.
Height Weight Chart. You ever see an OC listed as having a certain weight but then they look Wildly different than the number suggests? Well here's a site to avoid that! It shows real people at different weights and heights to give you a better idea of what these abstract numbers all look like. Free to use.
literally they just used an interpolator technology to make the the lines follow the curve of the face regardless of the camera angle. Thats a shader. That is literally just a fancy shader. Claiming any procedural technology is the same as midjourney is INCREDIBLY fucking disingenuous. Goddamnit
ADHD at night: I could write a book. I could get my Master’s Degree. I could go to the club and come home with 12 new friends. I could get a job at that club and meet the mother of my children. I could cure every disease and use my wealth to bring world peace.
ADHD during the day: Fold laundry too hard :( Come back next week
I had a tattoo client ask if I ever used AI to design tattoos for me. Man I spent the better part of a decade doing shitty bit work as a graphic designer and now that I have the space to do whatever I want, I'm gonna let the computer generate random garbage for me? What next should I have a computer that eats my dinner and fucks my wife?
I feel like people get so hung up on the results of a thing that they don't appreciate that the process of making it is, actually, enjoyable.
It's like if you have a friend who likes to bake, asking if they'd like to just buy cupcakes from the store instead of making them. The end result of the cupcake is secondary to the joy you get from having made cupcakes.
Art isn't a slog or a chore or something I want to avoid. Art is fun. It's rewarding. It feels good to do it. You may as well be asking me if I want the AI to watch television for me, it doesn't make any sense, I'm not participating and would gain nothing from it.
also we fucked up as a society the moment we started telling teens and aspiring artists to conflate being an artist with building a brand as if the two things are inextricable. the name of the game if you want to share your art is to work a job and sell yourself as aesthetizied content. back in my day we could just POST SHIT. to deviantart! what the fuck!
pro-tip if ur a teen or aspiring artist: stay the fuck away from tiktok. tiktok is not the place for your art. your art is not content to be sold. don’t listen to art youtubers advice if they dilute being an artist to stats and algorithms. trying to make a business or career out of art is actually something that takes a lot of experience and consideration to go into it is Not an inherent facet to getting started/expressing yourself as an artist. conflating art = selling something/working a job is the fastest fucking way to ruin it for yourself i am so serious. find communities that share your artistic interests make friends and share your art there. be indulgent and creative and experimental. you deserve a period in your artistic journey that is purely selfish and fostering of your growth. don’t let capitalism take that from you yet
boy it's me the textiles speaking to you inside your head. you need the yarn. you need thread. your soul hungers to participate in the act of creation. you must feed it. you must buy so many beads.
I think that what people want, when they talk about a pastoralist fantasy is actually an anti-capitalistic fantasy: i noticed, even from my experience, that most people don't mind phisical labour if it gives them results: actual, tangible, results.
Once my boss asked me to copy every article from a website and paste them in the new one. It took me roughly four hours for three days to do and my soul was slowly leaving my body. It was easy work, i mean who wouldnt want to earn money to just click here and click there, rinse and repeat? But it was boring, ripetitive and basically useless.
But when I take some time and clean my house, i sweat, i am tired but... satisfied. I see in front of me the result of my hard labour and I am happy, or at least i don't think i wasted my time.
So the fantasy of working hard but at least getting something out of it is appealing: why do people work in kitchens? Or bakeries and wake up at dawn to make bread? Or any hard job like that? I knew a guy that had the possibility of having every job he wanted, but he opened a bar and couldnt be happier.
This is my idea, i'm not a student in sociology or anything but I hope i made a point.
I have two degrees, and my previous job was the marketing department head for an international biotech company. I was well-paid, but dreaded work every morning. The endless cycle of low-grade manipulation and feeling like “making money for someone else to pocket, HELPING no one else” felt miserable.
I left and now work at a garden center. I haul around plants and educate people about them, so they can make informed choices. I help people, and seeing the plants grow under my care is wonderful. My soul is flourishing, my heart is at peace. My coworkers are all honest (as far as I can tell), and there’s no push for upselling or pushing people to buy stuff if it’s not very suited for their landscape.
Even if my wallet is a lot lighter these days, so too are my worries!
I worked IT in a city and fuck. People try to controll your every second. Faster! More efficient! You took a second too long to type that. You drove 56 kmh but could have gone 58 without getting caught. I messaged you a minute ago but you didn't reply so I walked to your cubicle to ask you. Also let's have an efficiency meeting. You are too slow. That's your feedback. How long will that task take? Can we somehow shorten that?
And all for what? To manipulate the user to buy product. Not to improve the website mind you. Whenever I suggested: hey, our website is not useable for the visually impaired/people with motor problems. I got back an: we don't care they're too small of a market value
So can you really blame me for fantasizing about a life where I can just plant flowers and vegetables and walk everywhere without the need of manipulating people and mikromanage my every second
my current job is managing a plasma cutting machine, so i have to spend a lot of time dragging big chunks of iron on and off conveyor belts and i end up sore and filthy at the end of every shift, and usually a bit scratched up.
but it’s third shift and there’s no supervision whatsoever, so while the machine is running, i can type on my phone. i’ve written most of a novel so far with my thumbs, covered in grease and iron dust. and i also produced a lot of construction materials for bridges, dams, warehouses, and skyscrapers.
When people are removed from the tangible results of their labor, they become distressed and dissatisfied - and this is the result of capitalist profit-focused processes.
I think this is in part why writers crave feedback. Otherwise, we're throwing those words into the void and hoping they connect with someone--but otherwise, we're separate from it. It's gone now. Bye.
But when someone takes the time to say "hey, this? this made me (laugh, cry, smile, sob, find joy in something I'd forgotten, have The Feels, get horny, etc.)", then we aren't as alienated. We *know* it's doing the thing it's supposed to. It *is* affecting people. Once we're done and our work is in the audience's hands, we can only hope that what we've done has made an impact - that all the effort has been worthwhile.
Feed your writers; emojis, keysmashes, short comments, long comments, kudos, reblogs, whatever it is. Let us know our work is making an impact.
Looking back at the first post, there's also that "stressful" comes in lots of different forms, and everyone's tolerances are slightly different. "Risking pain if you get something wrong" vs "being under time pressure" vs "potentially letting down someone you care about" vs "not having a moment to relax", for example.
If "alienation" was no longer an issue, all tasks and lifestyles would still have their own potential stressors, and maybe you can handle "sometimes thing will fail and it's out of your hands" better than "if things go wrong then it's due solely to your own actions", or vice versa.
And of course there's also the eternal "I'm intimately familiar with the problems of my current situation, so that situation over there must be objectively better (because I can't yet see the problems that are associated with that situation)".
“if no art makes you feel anything, make your own art and feel something” is too raw of a line to have come from a jenna marbles video of her painting a rainbow/polka dot seahorse saying “it’s seahorse time” on a denim jacket
In case you missed it, here’s a #TutorialTuesday someone requested on Twitter to go with last week’s process video on how to create a perspective grid from a photo (from Tomomi Sato) which you can use for studies, drawings, paintings, etc. Hope this helps with drawing/painting in perspective!!
