This way to nowhere, please

This is a blog for every artsy thing I manage to make myself. There will be writing and drawing and occasionaly reviews and a mess of languages

[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)

[malunalay]

I cannot love

I cannot love

I cannot love

I cannot love

I cannot love

I cannot love

I cannot love

I cannot love

I cannot love

I cannot love

I cannot love

I cannot love

I cannot love

I cannot love

I cannot love

I cannot love

feel free not to love me

[mirrepp]

14 Different kinds of asian eye shapes.

[exrpan]

I’m so glad someone put this together. ASIANS DO NOT ALL HAVE THE SAME EYES.

[supernormalstep]

I don’t do tutorials usually, but I get asked about this a lot! I don’t think many people have thought of it.

[yamino]

I’ve use the same technique for patterns on curved surfaces before. It’s a good one!

[mulattafury]

i just found myself using this random trick that one of my art professors taught me and i thought other people might like it!

other tips: -at rest, the elbow hits the bottom of the ribcage, and the wrist hits the bottom of the crotch -the distance from your inner elbow to your wrist is about the same length as your foot -the length of your hand (from wrist to the tip of your middle finger) is about the same length as the distance between the bottom of your chin and your hairline

so, if you have a feeling that proportions are wrong on something, those work as quick gauges. like, if a character’s forearm looks too long, try to visualize their foot being the same size and see if that works. if the hands look too big, look at their size in relation to the face.

hope this helps someone!

[soledadcatalina]

Here it is, my long winded tutorial, complete with some step by step action. I see a lot of people talk about wanting to diversify their artwork but not knowing how. This is my help to you. You really should take the time to invest in learning diverse eye shapes as diverse artwork always makes you a better artist. And frankly I’m really tired of drawing tutorials that talk up character diversity but only have the stereotypical “one Asian eye”.

I did some step by steps for those three diagrams, but I actually got them from this blog which has 14 of those examples! (Bonus: it’s a makeup blog so if you need help with that or want some idea of how to shade these eyes, there ya go)

[reshopheda]

I was looking for fonts recently and fell in love with many, so I figured I’d compile all my favorites. Some of them require a tweet or Facebook post to download. All credit goes to their respective makers. 

SIMPLIFICA | OTAMA | CORADIUM | BARON NEUE | BROWNIE | LOT | CHOPLIN | SEQUI | KOMODA | CUTEPUNK | FARRAY | HIPSTELVETICA | HIGH TIDE | ANDERS | ORANIENBAUM | LANDSCAPE | ONTWERP | SALOME

[artofpan]

@theamazingartofescapism asked me about how I draw hair. I’m sure I missed out heaps of stuff but in general this is how I approach it. Hope it’s helpful :D 

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How love and integrity made Welcome to Night Vale a massive success #1yrago

To celebrate the release of my new book, Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age, I’ve invited some of my favorite creators and thinkers to write about their philosophy on the arts and the Internet. Today, Jeffrey Cranor, co-writer of the amazing Welcome to Night Vale, shares the secret of his success. -Cory

I think it was late July 2013. I was in Astoria, Oregon, having a weeklong vacation with my family, not really checking in on the internet so much.

“How are you enjoying the podcast?” family asks

“It’s good. Night Vale just had its first anniversary. Joseph and Cecil and I are having a lot of fun with it,” I reply.

“Great. Also, congratulations. We saw you passed Marc Maron on iTunes,” family says.

“I’m sorry. What?”

And two days later our podcast Welcome to Night Vale passed This American Life on iTunes. We were the #1 US podcast (not just comedy, but all podcasts) for the next 3-and-a-half months. And at one point in September, we were #1 in 9 different countries.

At first, we didn’t know what happened. Maybe Glen Weldon mentioned us again on Pop Culture Happy Hour? John Darnielle had also mentioned us on twitter. So had John Green. We saw bumps in our download numbers from those very gracious mentions by very gracious men. But the jump we saw in popularity that July was nothing like we’d seen before.

After a few weeks, we figured out what happened: Tumblr happened.

Tumblr happened in a massive way. Basically, we had just over 100,000 total downloads in our first 12 months of doing Welcome to Night Vale (24 episodes). In the very next month, we had 2,500,000 total downloads. The next month alone tripled that number.

Looking back, I’m pretty positive the catalyst was the culmination of the romance between Carlos the scientist and Cecil Palmer, the radio host/narrator on Welcome to Night Vale. We receive a lot of feedback from the LGBTQ community about representation on our show, and we’re happy people have these characters and stories have meant so much to so many. Very few other media storytellers have gay main characters in shows not specifically created for a gay audience.

But when talking about July of 2013, the questions usually revolve around numbers, rather than craft or social representation.

If you’re a marketer, you probably have lots of meetings around wood tables under energy-efficient lighting discussing how to harness the young, energetic audiences of Tumblr (or Twitter, or Ello, or Telepathy Clubs, or ham radio, or whatever the kids are into these days).

“How did you do it,” you might ask if you’re a marketer, or my step-father, or just someone interested in things like demographics and art cynicism.

“How did your podcast, Welcome to Night Vale, become the number one podcast in the US for four straight months, topping the massive This American Life? What’s the secret to your success?”

“That’s easy,” I might say, leaning in to a near whisper. “Here’s the secret.”

This is the secret to all success. You’ve heard a version of it before. It’s a three-step process.

Make art. Make art with people you love. Respect the art you make.

By success, I presume you mean artistic success, because that’s all I can attest to. I’m proud of Night Vale as a podcast, as a touring stage show, as a story. I’m very pleased that enough people listen to it that i can afford to work more on it by not having an unrelated day job.

I am happy and overwhelmed to have a fan base that has opinions and concerns and feelings and email accounts. (We learn a lot from our fans.)

But for 30 years I have been trying to write things I think are funny and interesting (still trying). I have made bad works and good works. All of them lead to the next work. None can exist without the previous.

One of those works is Night Vale, listened to by hundreds of thousands of fans across the globe (I write this from a hotel lobby in Helsinki the night after a sold-out show).

Another of those works was “This could be it,” a dance piece I co-created with my wife Jillian Sweeney. We got a very good NY Times review and were personally ecstatic with the work. A total of 100 people saw that show, and that’s all that will ever get to see it. It was a glorious success.

Make art. Make art with people you love. Respect the art you make.

From time to time I get to perform in NY with the Neo-Futurists, where a sold-out show is 99 people, and back in 2007, when I first joined the company, it wasn’t unusual to perform for 9 people. The Neos do a fast-paced show that requires the company to write and perform new short plays every single week in a completely random order under a 60-minute time limit. It’s theater as sport. They’ve written over 3500 short plays in 10 years in NY. I’ve written 125 of them. I’ve performed in over 1,000.

My involvement with the NY Neo-Futurists is an enormous success for me. (Make art. Make art with… etc.)

Here’s the thing. You have no real control over popular success. You only have control over artistic success. If you’re not concentrating on the latter, the best case scenario is you do not achieve the former. The worst case scenario is you gain popular success but you:

a) No longer make actual art, and/or

b) No longer love those you work with, and/or

c) No longer enjoy what you make.

More than any other question, I get: How do you become successful. This is it. Make a home for yourself in your creativity. Make a family of artists. Respect all involved. No amount of marketing success or lack thereof can destroy that.

-Jeffrey Cranor

http://boingboing.net/2014/11/07/how-love-and-integrity-made-we.html

[happierman]

Here’s a thing I wrote a year ago for boingboing. I still stand by this.

[dou-hong]

[dou-hong]

dou-hong:

Filters | Blend Modes | Want more Undos? | Deleting Brushes Easily

Not to be confused with Blend Modes, filters are additional tools that can help enhance your work in photoshop. The thing about filters is the sheer number of them, which can be confusing not to mention intimidating. Tips below! To see the image full size, right click and hit “open link in new tab.”

You’ll notice that some of the filter groupings are missing, namely Blur, Render, Sharpen, and Video. Blur and Sharpen are self explanatory (they blur and sharpen things, hoorah!). Render creates new unrelated assets (like clouds and lens flares) and doesn’t really manipulate the current images while Video is… well, I simply don’t use Video. There’s only two filters in that category anyways.

The category name is usually an indicator of what’s gonna happen. Distort has filters that distort things, and Sketch has filters that can make your work more “traditional” looking

This is a SIMPLE guide. Within the filters themselves, there are tons of settings that you can manipulate. Take the case of Styllize->Extrude In that image, I extruded pyramids, but if you wanted, you could also extrude in rectangular prisms. It depends on what button you choose. You can choose how large the prisms are as well as how “deep” they extend.

Some of you will look at these filters and go “ooooooh, That’s how they do it” or “hey, I recognize that!“ Pixelate->Color Halftoneand Pixelate->Mosaic are some examples.

Distort->Displace is the most involved filter, but it can do some cool stuff!

There are some filters that seemingly do nothing and don’t pay rent. To hell with them!

Some filters depend on the foreground and background colors selected. The most notable example of these is the Sketch category. You’ll notice that some of the duotone images are light purple and white, black and white, and magenta and white. That’s because as I went through these filters, the colors picked were changed BEFORE activating the filter. A lot of the filters however, do not rely on foreground or background images.

Some filters have no parameters, meaning that once you click them, whatever result you get is just what you get (e.g. Sharpen->Sharpen). Most of the filters have controls though, so you can manipulate how strong or weak the effects are.

Filters should not be your first choice in some cases; finding images online can be just as effective. Sketch->Halftone is not a bad filter, but I simply don’t like how little controls it has. If you wanted to find halftone patterns then stick them on top of your images (maybe to create a manga look), it actually might look better than if you used the filter by itself.

Some filters are OBVIOUS. Stylize->Extrude and Texture->Stained Glass are examples of this. They’re so distinctive that they scream FILTER. Should you not use these types of filters in your art? No, but sometimes the one thing that sticks out when you overuse filters (or don’t use them properly) in photoshop is how over processed or contrived an image may become. Your viewers should remember your art for it’s content, not that filter you thought you could get away with.

Don’t take my word for it, try it! Even if you don’t like how some of these filters look, that doesn’t mean that they’re useless. Going through filters is good practice; you will begin to understand the filters that work wonders as well as filters that are better left alone

The thing to keep in mind about filters is to use them to ENHANCE your art, not detract from it. So keep calm and filter on!

Character featured is a quick sketch render of one of my gemsonas, Angel Aura.

[bleep0bleep]

i’ve put together fun fic prompt generator with thousands of possible combinations! each prompt combines different settings, genres, tropes, and a prompt idea to get you started in a direction. you can use one or more of the ideas or the entire combination if it works out, or just refresh until you’re inspired. 

two versions! the safe for work version includes all pg-13 prompts, and the nsfw version includes a kink category as well as many more sexytime prompts.

sfw prompt generator

nsfw prompt generator

i hope this is a helpful resource!  (✿◕ ‿◕ฺ)ノ｡₀: *ﾟ

[ifshehadwings]

THIS IS AMAZING. ALSO I AM WRITING THIS IMMEDIATELY. IT’S EVERYTHING I LOVE. 

[sanjanasart]

Layering technique for vibrant greens, using Dr Ph. Martin’s Hydrus liquid watercolours. 3 colours used - Turquoise Blue, Hansa Yellow Medium and Blue Aqua :)

[malunalay]

Treat all your books like sacred text. Let no dent or bruise befall its back. Keep all the pages clean. Lock them away in glass cases. Preserve all the words as they were. Let the author speak their mind and listen quietly, in awe. 

Treat all your books like a unfinished thing. Bend the pages to remind you were to return. Underline the lines you love. Draw the pictures that came to mind right on top of the words that evoked them. Let it rub against the things of live in your backpack on the way to everywhere. Add the words only you can hear to the authors thought. Take a bit of work from them into your own hands with awe.

[malunalay]

All the worlds colours began to fade at the borders, like an unfinished oil painting. But just as much as an empty canvas is still something, and not nothing, there was still a world there, under the world. Just not mine

an idea i did not want to vanish in the chaos that is my filing system

[tanuki-kimono]

Kimono drawing guide ½, by Kaoruko Maya (tumblr, pixiv, site). Booklet is available in pdf for ¥ 900 here.

Here you can see:

female kimono and yukata (note how the juban underwear peeks when in kimono + how belts differ)

male yukata and kimono (note how the juban underwear peeks when in kimono)

dressing up: male (kimono is not closed yet) and female (kimono closed with datejime belt and ready to put on obi)

differences between female and male kimono once dressed (note how the collars and belts set)

common drawing mistakes (compare with previous picture: shoulders lines are too defined, there is a double hem, collars are narrow, belt is not at the right place etc)

women back collar (the lower the sexier) and men back collar (close to the nape)

back and sleeves differences between men and women

collars and sleeves and view of how kimono drapes around body

Furisode back (long sleeves kimono) and formal furisode obi knot example

[shakespork]

Hemingway is a writing checker that is absolutely brilliant.

checks all spellings for you

checks if you’re over-using adverbs

picks out over-complicated sentences

suggests replacements for over-complicated phrases

picks out the passive voice

tells you how readable your text is (Grades/College level/etc)

calculates reading time

USE IT. USE IT FOR YOUR FANFICS. USE IT FOR YOUR PAPERS. IT WILL SAVE. YOUR. LIFE.

[youngbadmanbrown-deactivated201]

!?!?!?

[prinxely-archive]

[scarplire]

Reblog to save grades

[anatoref]

Dynamic Poses by Modelfactory