Lycaboros @lycaboros - Tumblr Blog

hmm... *gets in evil bed and holds my evil stuffed animal* evil night.. *turns off my fucked up evil lamp*

Have you ever wanted to play in the world of Critical Role? This is your chance! Exandria is vast, and there is plenty of adventure to be h

I am looking for three players for the above campaign! 😁

Come play in Exandria! This campaign is currently in Emon, between the events of campaigns one and two!

#critical role #dungeons and dragons #dnd #d&d #d&d 5e #ttrpg #critrole #looking for players #paid game #start playing #startplaying game

eameschairs

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

madsciencepottery

You have been visited by the twocumber. May you receive twofold luck in the coming days

gorgynei

TWO cups of soup for lunch. greed they speak of in the bible i fear.

gorgynei

mmm nutritious

Looking for Players!

Hey guys! I've been having a great time running games through Startplaying, and I have some spots open in my games! I have ONE SPOT LEFT in this Exandria game that's running session one on the 28th!

Have you ever wanted to play in the world of Critical Role? This is your chance! Exandria is vast, and there is plenty of adventure to be h

Then I have a completely open Exandria group for Tuesdays

Have you ever wanted to play in the world of Critical Role? This is your chance! Exandria is vast, and there is plenty of adventure to be h

And an open Beginner's group for the Wild Beyond the Witchlight module! (These are specifically catered towards players who have never played D&D before!)

Come join as we run the Wild Beyond the Witchlight! Beginner D&D players encouraged to join! LGBTQIA+ friendly!

Come play with me! I love running games for new players in particular, and if you want to play but there's no sessions that work for you right now, follow me here and I'll post whenever I start something new!

#critical role #critrole #dungeons and dragons #dnd #d&d #d&d 5e #Looking for players #ttrpg #roleplaying games #d&d campaign #seeking players #StartPlaying

Well, I finally did the thing and made a personal website for my art.

Behold!

www.lycaboros.com

#personal #artist #personal website #trans artist

miyuliart

I collected my art tips on hands over the years. It ended up being 54 pages of notes I took and some guides I tried to create for myself. Maybe some of these can be useful to others as well. You can buy the pdf here or join my Patreon to get it for free.

laboratoryrats

“Thinking about compression from a side view”

Source: Anime Private School on Twitter

barnlarn

Revising some of my horse drawing tips pages, starting with necks!

Corrected some muscle names and added more explanation/ method.

barnlarn

Hip page update!

barnlarn

Here are a couple more sections! Going to put all of these into a poster format soon

feathernotes

I made a mini tutorial on how I approach Those Face Angles in my art, for free!

I've got a few more mini tutorials on my patreon if you'd like to support me too :D Patreon Link!

lycaboros

Do you want to play D&D?

I recently got set up on StartPlaying, a website where players can connect with professional dungeon masters and start playing the game!

I have a couple campaigns set up, but two in particular that I just need a couple more players for!

I've been playing D&D for a long time, and have been running games for almost two decades now. Previous players have reviewed me on StartPlaying already, and have all given me five star reviews!

I ESPECIALLY enjoy running games for new players! If you want to play, take a peek at what I have available below!

Wild Beyond the Witchlight (For Beginners)

The Wild Beyond the Witchlight is a D&D 5e module that takes place in the Feywild- the land of the fairies! I will be running this module for players who are new to Dungeons and dragons, and want to learn to play.

Read More Here!

Come join as we run the Wild Beyond the Witchlight! Beginner D&D players encouraged to join! LGBTQIA+ friendly!

Adventures in Exandria

Play in the world of Critical Role! This campaign is for those who want to set their character in the same world as the Critical Role universe, and play in the world Matthew Mercer built for his friends.

Read More Here!

Have you ever wanted to play in the world of Critical Role? This is your chance! Exandria is vast, and there is plenty of adventure to be h

Want to play something else?

Are you interested in doing a homebrew world with your friends instead? Would you rather play something like Vampire the Masquerade, the Fantasy Flight Star Wars system, or a Fallout Equestria campaign?

Hire me for a private campaign through Start Playing and I will happily oblige!

I look forward to meeting you and building an incredible story with you and your characters.

Do you want to play D&D?

I recently got set up on StartPlaying, a website where players can connect with professional dungeon masters and start playing the game!

I have a couple campaigns set up, but two in particular that I just need a couple more players for!

I've been playing D&D for a long time, and have been running games for almost two decades now. Previous players have reviewed me on StartPlaying already, and have all given me five star reviews!

I ESPECIALLY enjoy running games for new players! If you want to play, take a peek at what I have available below!

Wild Beyond the Witchlight (For Beginners)

Read More Here!

Come join as we run the Wild Beyond the Witchlight! Beginner D&D players encouraged to join! LGBTQIA+ friendly!

Adventures in Exandria

Read More Here!

Have you ever wanted to play in the world of Critical Role? This is your chance! Exandria is vast, and there is plenty of adventure to be h

Want to play something else?

Hire me for a private campaign through Start Playing and I will happily oblige!

I look forward to meeting you and building an incredible story with you and your characters.

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 :]

------------------------------------------

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!

brehaaorgana

Too many artists are held back by outdated and bad color theory rules, or even rules that are fine but have built in limitations that you should know and I want to set everyone free.

brehaaorgana

Tertiary Red and Secondary Blue could be in your color theory understanding and make paint mixing way easier but they played you

brehaaorgana

Also hot takes:

Learning color theory through oil painting is more difficult than learning it through gouache & watercolor, primarily because it takes way more time to find mass tone and mix everything and also it's much less obvious to easily and quickly discern if a paint pigment is highly staining or transparent.

Oil painters like to seem like they have the richest and most storied traditions in color theory to past down but also inevitably they are the most likely to retain an extremely limited chroma palette based on classical palettes for the sake of classicism and not always make that fact very apparent to a beginner aside from saying it's an "old masters palette" watercolor/gouache painters are bad at using paints that are not light-fast and clinging to them despite having better alternatives, but generally still understand chroma gamuts and pigment importance better or at least talk about them more.

When you're mixing paints, the earth colors (browns) don't need to handled and thought of as brown. Ask yourself if the brown is yellow, orange, red, or leaning towards a black (which would be treated as a violet or blue, depending on whether black is warmer or cooler).

Yes there are cool reds and warm blues

Any reference color wheel that places red on the very top hurts my feelings, stop doing this just because you learned "roygbiv". Yellow is at the top and the Indigo-Blue range is on the bottom because this also means the color with the lightest possible value is opposite the color with the darkest possible value, so you have the colors arranged with a value scale from top to bottom BUILT IN.

this is related to why ivory black is actually very dark blue.

brehaaorgana

@rizahawkeyesmuscles

This makes me think makeup artists have good color theory, having to understand undertones of skin, warm v neutral v cool toned red lipstick....

Yes!!! I mean first of all, makeup artists are artists.

and they are ALSO ultimately just blending pigments to produce certain colors and effects, so yeah professionally do study the basics of color theory and then necessarily have to adapt it to their medium. And they tend to generally add like, what you talked about with recognizing cool/warm/olive/neutral undertones and such as a big consideration to their canvas.

And that IS why people will say "this is a cooler red lipstick" (although even cooler than that would be magenta or fuschia!).

I think the only thing I've noticed wrt to honestly mostly beauty influencers and not actual professional MUAs is that too many people buy an eyeshadow palette of cool tones in the palette and then put it on and complain it pulls "too warm for their cool skin." And it "isn't actually a true cool tone palette."

I just want to grab all these people by the face and say:

"Shhhhhh. Color temperature is relative. Although you have cool skin undertones, you ALSO have blood under your skin which will inherently make your base skin-canvas slightly warm no matter your foundation shade. So when you put any kind of pigment that isn't fully opaque onto your skin, the transparency WILL be warmed by your skin because you're alive and have blood still. The eyeshadow palette IS a cool palette. You're just not a vampire, which is why that cool taupe shade suddenly looks different from the mass tone in the palette."

These influencers would understand this better if they did some watercolor painting on pre-tintedpaper and then compared it to painting on pure white.

But a MUA probably already figured this out yeah.

brehaaorgana

In case anyone is curious here are my top color recommendations

Handprint.com is hands down the most comprehensive scientific explanation of how different color wheels or palette choices work. It's big and dense and exceptionally thorough. I skim frequently and find myself always learning more. https://handprint.com/HP/WCL/water.html everything is done using watercolors as a reference point but a LOT of this translates to other mediums. For the record his CIECAM color wheel is what I consider to be the best (not 3 dimensional) color wheel for artists. Period.

He uses pigment numbers for some of the most common watercolors rather than specific paint brands or color names to place the pigments. It's also a case study in why yellow being at the top is the best because it also means you have a value scale from top to bottom (since black paints are just dark violets or blues, ultimately.)

When you look at this, you can start realizing more and more why the earth colors can be used as if they were like, straight red, or yellow, or orange. Like if you wanted to make a limited palette, you could use "burnt sienna" as your dark yellow (which will make the whole palette lean orange!) Or it could be your orange or you could use burnt sienna as your red. (Look at gamut masking links below)

Seriously it's good to try and swatch your medium (even really quickly!) Within a CIECAM Artist's color wheel. Below are two of my attempts:

From loose memory and then mapping pigments roughly.

He also discusses the difference between visual complements and mixing complements!

Anyways absolutely try to read bits and pieces. The whole site is amazing. Handprint is amazing.

Also:

https://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com and James Gurney's book: Color and Light: a guide for the realist painter. James Gurney is the dinotopia guy. That book is also amazing for painting fantasy with lots of fantastical examples. Here are two short videos on gamut mapping and gamut masking. Accompanying blog posts.

No surprises here! His book also charts pigments:

Actually these are my four favorite books hands down:

Color and Light: a Guide for the realist painter - James Gurney

Color for Painters: a guide to traditions & practice - Al Gury

The oil painters color handbook - Todd m casey

Artist's master series: Color & light - 3d total publishing. This one emphasizes digital!

The first two have been out for awhile now and you can more easily find them cheaper/used online than the latter two which are relatively newer and hefty hardbacks.

Also, from personal experience: al gury is a sweetheart angel who is a huge crazy cat man. I adore him, he's so kind and helpful. I think it's a little late to join the current session (although they did only start Jan 28, so you can always ask! Class videos are recorded), BUT he frequently offers a class on color that is fully online through PAFA continuing education, as well as other classes. I haven't taken it yet, but I HAVE taken other classes online with Al and he's really great.

Oh also online gamut masking tools:

In krita: https://docs.krita.org/en/user_manual/gamut_masks.html

https://claudiamatosa.com/resources/gamut-masking simple tool

https://mypaintingclub.com/blog/post/39-The-Gamut-Mask-Tool another tool with more complexity

The tl;Dr of a gamut mask is to show you the full range of possible colors you can mix within a given palette (choices of colors/pigments).

Watch this video on Twitch Live

MY WIFE She's only FOUR FOLLOWERS AWAY from affiliate!! Please give us a watch and a follow!

Tonight she's streaming New Vegas and we're going after benny

#nilesdaughter #livestream #twitch stream #twitch #gaming #streaming #livestreaming #fallout new vegas #FNV #Fallout

shirecorn

How I Study Anatomy

Everyone says NEVER TRACE!! THAT'S ART THEFT! Ok but we can do a little crime in the name of Learning.

Trace to learn, not to earn.

I like to take my own photos, but you can study whatever you want. Link back to original photos, and don't post copied artwork unless the artist is dead, cool with it, or both.

As always with learning, start every sketch with the intent to throw it away (trash for paper, quitting without saving for digital) This takes the pressure off and lets you make Bad Art, which is very important.

So let's make Bad Art of a Deer because I happen to have one handy

Start with a photo of your subject in a nice/neutral pose with all four feet visible. (so not like me)

Freehand copy it. Try not to stylize, focusing instead of matching proportions and pose. Don't get too detailed!

It's ok if your art looks terrible and has broken legs. I've drawn LOTS of deer so I have a leg up. Everyone's art sucks in their own eyes and here's where mine went wrong:

Either lasso-distort (recommended for beginners) or redraw a copy of your first sketch with your reference behind it (scaled to match the main body of your sketch)

Put the original and modified sketches together and compare the differences. Write it down if you want. This shows you where your eyes saw things the wrong size, so you can correct for that next time.

After learning about both deer and yourself, try freehand copying again.

Marvel at your newfound knowledge and skill!

but there's always room for improvement

You can stop here and move on to your real drawing, Or do another freehand-fix-compare cycle. I actually overcorrected my "draws heads too big" and veered into "heads too small."

Another note on tracing: Learning HOW to trace is more important than anything you could learn By tracing. Draw the Anatomy, not the outline. In real life, things don't have outlines, they have bones.

These are from the same shoot which is extra useful for consistency. The lines are minimal and follow where the animals joints are, and only important parts are drawn.

You won't know what Important Parts means right off the bat, which is where in-depth study comes in. You need to do learn the hard parts to do the easy parts right.

Next up: how to study bones and muscles.

shirecorn

How to study Bones and Muscles

"Study the anatomy study the anatomy" but they never tell you HOW. It's not "read a book," It's more like flailing around wildly and crashing your browser from too many tabs.

This is going to be about How to Make a bones and muscle chart. Because even if your art sucks, you learn so much more by doing than by seeing.

References I gathered: X X X X X X X X

Get Set up. Get a photo, like above, but it doesn't have to be the same photo. And now... gather reference.

We'll start with bones. Search up "[animal] skeleton" and get photos or super scientific illustration. Add in things like "top view" to spice it up.

Next, search "[animal] skeleton sketchfab." This pulls up 3D models that you can rotate in your browser. Remember that these are art and the anatomy is only as good as the artist, so pick a good one.

Time for bone!

The spine is the most important, and in a lot of animals it will surprise you. Draw it in over your photo and then add spikes because skeletons are punk. These are not scientific and I didn't count them because their number doesn't matter to art. So you better be referencing from scientists and not me!

The rest of the bones and some notes. These are my notes to myself about things I want to remember. My personal discoveries in anatomy that made my art better. You can make the same notes but also make sure you have your own thoughts on there as well. that's how you help yourself the best. Be as detailed or vague as you want.

Same deal with muscle. Here are my personal notes to myself. Label stuff that is important to you. I actually grouped a bunch of muscles together based on what is visible from the outside. Muscles are way more complicated than this, but Baby's First Anatomy Chart gets to be simple.

This is good enough for me because I have intimate knowledge of the other muscles working under and over these ones. Feel free to add as many or as few muscles as you like. You chart your own course.

This is very VERY much not an anatomical chart. I'm sure there's nerds out there pulling their hair out looking at this. But listen, it works for art!

And you know the wildest part about this?

I don't need to look at it to use it. The act of making your own anatomy chart puts that knowledge in your brain. Like how you can make "cheat sheets" even for tests that don't allow them - the act of making the sheet helps you remember what you struggle with most.

And after all that complexity? Your simplification will be based on Real Knowledge and you'll put those random circles in the right spots.

Look at all this hard work you've done. Eventually this will be second nature to you.

Show me what you make! I'd love to see what creatures yall make anatomy charts of.

shirecorn

Photo Reference Packs

I put together some photo packs and uploaded them to my gumroad. You can use them and this guide to study! So far there's only a Doe and a Fawn pack, but if I get sales I will put in the effort to do more for deer, horses, cats, birds, and anything else I can point my camera at.

Doe Pack

Fawn Pack

spirits-of-kin

Animal Photo Reference Repository

@animalphotorefs is a great place to get photo refs of many different animals and is in fact made for that purpose! You can freely download the photos, use them in art projects, and if you want to trace them to learn, or upload whatever you make with them, it’s usually fine! The site has its guidelines listed, and anything not stated, you can contact the owner about

animalphotorefs

Boosting because this is a great guide on learning to see and draw anatomy.

To clarify prev: if you’re making art or learning to do art or even vaguely thinking about art-like ideas, you can use the repository photos!

As long as you’re not using GenAI for it you can trace, sketch, scribble on, scrapbook, decoupage, satirize, collage, sticker over, sculpt, animate, make cartoons of, paper mache, finger paint, wood-burn, and anything else you can think of with the photos.

The only guideline is for your use to be transformative/derivative in some way: please don’t reproduce a copy of the images without using them in something or changing something or making your own version. An exception here is if you’re showing the references you used alongside a piece - just link back to the site alongside it. You can post your art and sell art you made using the reference site with no restrictions - it’s your art!

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

Lycaboros