joanne / 30ās / ubo_ubo on AO3 / sometimes horny on main, mostly disorganized / same tumblr for like 10 years now Iām invested sorry AKOTSK sideblog: hardsaltdilf
On the subject of artistic competition/jealousy/inadequacy, I read this earlier today and found it very helpful. (As a fanfic writer I get this feeling on the regular and it is NOT a fun experience let me tell you what.)
But usually the feeling is stranger than jealousy. More like witnessing athletic ability from inside a collapsing lawn chair. Admiration tangled with despair. You love the work. You hate the work. You want to mail the author flowers and also challenge them to mutual combat behind a CVS.
Very normal artistic ecosystem.
The dangerous moment comes afterward, when you return to your own draft too quickly. Big mistake. Rookie maneuver. Your pages are still wearing pajamas while the masterpiece you just finished walked past in a custom-tailored suit smelling faintly of genius and expensive soap.
Comparison at that stage becomes chemically unsafe.
Because drafts are ugly on purpose. People forget this constantly. The novel you just worshipped probably existed once as a horrifying document full of bad dialogue and placeholder names. But readers never see that version. We compare our wet cement to somebody elseās cathedral. Then panic arrives.
Writers start shape-shifting after reading somebody brilliant. You can actually feel the influence trying to climb into your bloodstream. Suddenly youāre rearranging your syntax unconsciously. Using semicolons you havenāt emotionally earned. Writing sentences that sound like literary identity theft.
Iāve done this. Everybody does.
Influence panic usually fades after a few days. Your natural voice crawls back eventually like a raccoon returning to the porch after a thunderstorm. But thereās still value in the devastation. Real value. Great writing recalibrates your internal standards whether you enjoy the experience or not.
Sometimes a masterpiece exposes laziness youād hidden from yourself. Sometimes it reminds you language can still surprise people instead of merely functioning correctly like emotional Ikea furniture.
NPT: @greensagephase @angel-of-the-moons @fujii-dlc @sincerely-sofie-shoebox @cage-with-human-soul-and-parts @rowanisawriter and anyone else in the moodš
Oooh!! Scrolling through the Tomcat tag and found this!!
1. The F-14 Tomcat, why it never should have been decommissioned and why we should bring it back (I wrote a very long paper on it)
2. Star Wars (itās been my first and longest standing love besides Jesus Christ)
3. Transformers (mainly Prime but also why G1 is still gold and why the bayverse movies are okay-not great but okay-)
4. Writing (my Ocs and the stories I come up with)
5. The importance of media and how it depicts ppl but most importantly why children should occasionally watch something that scares them, and that they should watch something that makes them think and might be a bit too āmatureā in language as it can help teach them etc etc..
1. Squid Game, obvs, especially the biblically accurate version of it that doesn't exist
2. Self defense takedowns
3. GUNS!
4. Anything to do with gay sex
5. Acting
Now im putting @mr-stendahl @nickmpreg @sapphicsaebyeok @largoindminor and @kwidawpirmi and @jointhedogcult on the mic (/np tags obvs, only if u wanna!)
The important thing to know about me is that Iām a very stupid person, both in terms of their remembering things and explaining. So if I talk very slowly, I could probably talk at length about the ff with no prep:
1. Asthma
2. COPD
3. What I like about my cats
4. The relative risks and benefits of different central lines
5. Vasopressor selection
Donāt ask me the names of the studies that support these practices. As I said, Iām very stupid.
My Favorite Cheap Art Trick: Gradient Maps and Blending Modes
i get questions on occasion regarding my coloring process, so i thought i would do a bit of a write up on my "secret technique." i don't think it really is that much of a secret, but i hope it can be helpful to someone. to that end:
this is one of my favorite tags ive ever gotten on my art. i think of it often. the pieces in question are all monochrome - sort of.
the left version is the final version, the right version is technically the original. in the final version, to me, the blues are pretty stark, while the greens and magentas are less so. there is some color theory thing going on here that i dont have a good cerebral understanding of and i wont pretend otherwise. i think i watched a youtube video on it once but it went in one ear and out the other. i just pick whatever colors look nicest based on whatever vibe im going for.
this one is more subtle, i think. can you tell the difference? there's nothing wrong with 100% greyscale art, but i like the depth that adding just a hint of color can bring.
i'll note that the examples i'll be using in this post all began as purely greyscale, but this is a process i use for just about every piece of art i make, including the full color ones. i'll use the recent mithrun art i made to demonstrate. additionally, i use clip studio paint, but the general concept should be transferable to other art programs.
for fun let's just start with Making The Picture. i've been thinking of making this writeup for a while and had it in mind while drawing this piece. beyond that, i didn't really have much of a plan for this outside of "mithrun looks down and hair goes woosh." i also really like all of the vertical lines in the canary uniform so i wanted to include those too but like. gone a little hog wild. that is the extent of my "concept." i do not remember why i had the thought of integrating a shattered mirror type of theme. i think i wanted to distract a bit from the awkward pose and cover it up some LOL but anyway. this lack of planning or thought will come into play later.
note 1: the textured marker brush i specifically use is the "bordered light marker" from daub. it is one of my favorite brushes in the history of forever and the daub mega brush pack is one of the best purchases ive ever made. highly recommend!!!
note 2: "what do you mean by exclusion and difference?" they are layer blending modes and not important to the overall lesson of this post but for transparency i wanted to say how i got these "effects." anyway!
with the background figured out, this is the point at which i generally merge all of my layers, duplicate said merged layer, and Then i begin experimenting with gradient maps. what are gradient maps?
the basic gist is that gradient maps replace the colors of an image based on their value.
so, with this particular gradient map, black will be replaced with that orangey red tone, white will be replaced with the seafoamy green tone, etc. this particular gradient map i'm using as an example is very bright and saturated, but the colors can be literally anything.
these two sets are the ones i use most. they can be downloaded for free here and here if you have csp. there are many gradient map sets out there. and you can make your own!
you can apply a gradient map directly onto a specific layer in csp by going to edit>tonal correction>gradient map. to apply one indirectly, you can use a correction layer through layer>new correction layer>gradient map. honestly, correction layers are probably the better way to go, because you can adjust your gradient map whenever you want after creating the layer, whereas if you directly apply a gradient map to a layer thats like. it. it's done. if you want to make changes to the applied gradient map, you have to undo it and then reapply it. i don't use correction layers because i am old and stuck in my ways, but it's good to know what your options are.
this is what a correction layer looks like. it sits on top and applies the gradient map to the layers underneath it, so you can also change the layers beneath however and whenever you want. you can adjust the gradient map by double clicking the layer. there are also correction layers for tone curves, brightness/contrast, etc. many such useful things in this program.
let's see how mithrun looks when we apply that first gradient map we looked at.
gadzooks. apologies for eyestrain. we have turned mithrun into a neon hellscape, which might work for some pieces, but not this one. we can fix that by changing the layer blending mode, aka this laundry list of words:
some of them are self explanatory, like darken and lighten, while some of them i genuinely don't understand how they are meant to work and couldn't explain them to you, even if i do use them. i'm sure someone out there has written out an explanation for each and every one of them, but i've learned primarily by clicking on them to see what they do.
for the topic of this post, the blending mode of interest is soft light. so let's take hotline miamithrun and change the layer blending mode to soft light.
here it is at 100% opacity. this is the point at which i'd like to explain why i like using textured brushes so much - it makes it very easy to get subtle color variation when i use this Secret Technique. look at the striation in the upper right background! so tasty. however, to me, these colors are still a bit "much." so let's lower the opacity.
i think thats a lot nicer to look at, personally, but i dont really like these colors together. how about we try some other ones?
i like both of these a lot more. the palettes give the piece different vibes, at which point i have to ask myself: What Are The Vibes, Actually? well, to be honest i didn't really have a great answer because again, i didn't plan this out very much at all. however. i knew in my heart that there was too much color contrast going on and it was detracting from the two other contrasts in here: the light and dark values and the sharp and soft shapes. i wanted mithrun's head to be the main focal point. for a different illustration, colors like this might work great, but this is not that hypothetical illustration, so let's bring the opacity down again.
yippee!! that's getting closer to what my heart wants. for fun, let's see what this looks like if we change the blending mode to color.
i do like how these look but in the end they do not align with my heart. oh well. fun to experiment with though! good to keep in mind for a different piece, maybe! i often change blending modes just to see what happens, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. i very much cannot stress enough that much of my artistic process is clicking buttons i only sort of understand. for fun.
i ended up choosing the gradient map on the right because i liked that it was close to the actual canary uniform colors (sorta). it's at an even lower opacity though because there was Still too much color for my dear heart.
the actual process for this looks like me setting my merged layer to soft light at around 20% opacity and then clicking every single gradient map in my collection and seeing which one Works. sometimes i will do this multiple times and have multiple soft light and/or color layers combined.
typically at this point i merge everything again and do minor contrast adjustments using tone curves, which is another tool i find very fun to play around with. then for this piece in particular i did some finishing touches and decided that the white border was distracting so i cropped it. and then it's done!!! yay!!!!!
this process is a very simple and "fast" way to add more depth and visual interest to a piece without being overbearing. well, it's fast if you aren't indecisive like me, or if you are better at planning.
let's do another comparison. personally i feel that the hint of color on the left version makes mithrun look just a bit more unwell (this is a positive thing) and it makes the contrast on his arm a lot more pleasing to look at. someone who understands color theory better than i do might have more to say on the specifics, but that's honestly all i got.
This is so silly but I'm watching a short video essay on sincerity in cinema and the creator is talking about how he watched Lord of the Rings for the first time at 17. He explains that he'd grown so used to the 'ironic' meta style commentary in the movies of the 2010's that as he was watching the opening narration of LotR, he spent the entire time waiting for the joke to come. For someone to take it all back with a zinger line. He listened to Blanchett describe and explain the backstory, and he waited for the other comedic shoe to drop.
And he kept doing it. Scene after scene.
He spent the film expecting someone to make a joke about how unserious things were or to break the fourth wall or do some other self referential type thing.
Now, maybe I'm just at that point in my cycle or maybe I'm too delicate in general, but I literally teared up hearing that. Straight up cried a bit. It is so fucking sad that sincerity and genuineness is being bred out of people.
People say all the time 'this generation can't take anything seriously!' and really, is it any wonder? Younger people have been trained out of it. You are no longer encouraged to be genuine or show emotion or be honest. You are actively punished for it. In fact, you are almost guaranteed to suffer for it.
That is so fucked up. I'm sorry to go on a bit of a random ramble rant but it's so fucking gut wrenching to see younger people lose that element of themselves. You can't express your passion without being told you're 'crashing out' or 'cringe'. You have to live in this neutral state of fear of perception, and god forbid anybody step outside of it!
You're told you should only consume and succumb and be ironic and emotionless and cool.
Listen, if you're following me and you're like.... 25 or under, let's say. Please. I beg of you. Do not fall for this rhetoric. Please, for the love of all things, feel. Feel and create and be honest with yourself. Indulge in things that make you happy. Be sincere. Wear your heart on your sleeve. Do not let this hyper-capitalistic, hyper-consumerist, self-centred, individualist culture take that from you.
Bleed yourself into the work you create. Live. Don't fucking let anyone tell you different.
Itās so hard to be sincere especially when you were born to Clown Around. I love a good Clowning. Sometimes when I am expressing my genuine emotions on here it is absolutely agonizing. I relieve the agony by admitting that things I say can sound stupid or cliche or lame. That can also be part of honesty, and that can be a little ritual that lets me go on and take myself seriously.
But sincerity and truth and compassion and ethics are our real defenses against fascist thinking. Theyāre our real way to be in touch with what it means to be human and to tell our stories and love each other.
Born to crack jokes, forced by the world to be kind and conscientiousā¦
amandla
prguitarman
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
turnnoffyourmind
gamechangershow
romaincrisis
gummygunk
