Progress on the Michael doll. The joints were all cast in resin. They were meant to all be yellow, but the elbows didn’t cast properly so I replaced them with some spares. I’m also trying out a new kind of joint for the shoulders, since I had a lot of trouble sculpting the upper arms last time. The hands were VERY fun to make. I showed them to a friend and he asked if I was making Edward scissorhands, which really isn’t all that far off.
I also switched over to polymer clay which was a very good decision. I used Apoxie clay for Nikola and the parts would always stick together during sculpting, but polymer clay doesn’t have that problem. The clay I’m using is translucent Sculpey Premo along with some scraps of a much cheaper and stickier polymer clay in order to colour it. The really cheap polymer clays can get very sticky, though, so the cost of the better clay was definitely worth it in my opinion.
I would like to ask for guidance since I look up on your work, your one of my biggest inspos.
When you get to create your comic strips/stories, how do you plan your backgrounds?
I've been wanting to make my own stories for the longest time but I never know when to start with sceneries. I've tried to look for possible tutorials out there but I never find ones that are clear enough on actually "teaching how to plan for them" or "how to think when making them" (for lack of better explanation). The closest guidence I've find that helps a bit is composition tutorials, but they're not really what I'm looking for qwqUu, I mostly struggle to imagine and plan "where my characters are supposed to be in scenery wise. I mustered up the courage to ask for some tips from you today since I come by on Tumblr from time to time, and I saw that you were gonna start over with your "Felt World" comic and was really curious on what was your process ●0● ✨️
If there's any misspellings I apologize, my main language is Spanish qwqUu
HII Sorry for the late reply, I haven't been online much!
I think what you're referring to is staging! Basically staging is where do you place things for most clarity and interest, like a stage or set.
I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a very experienced comic book reader or artist, BUT I do use a lot of my animation knowledge when making comics; I keep in mind where characters stand in relation to each other so readers don't get confused, I vary the camera angle so it's not all static, straight ahead angles (although that might be what you want, it depends on the style) and I use the shape of the panel to convey mood.
I will say, a lot of it is just experimentation! What conveys the mood I want, how do I tell that the most clearly and with as little room for confusion as possible?
For example, let's use a prompt; Albin, Donna, Ricky, Lune, and Myra are sitting around a dinner table in Ricky's family home, and they're having a lively conversation about something lighthearted.
That's usually enough text to fill one page, and I'm gonna use my knowledge of the characters to tell as much as I can using just visual storytelling.
Here's and example of what I'd make based on the prompt:
This is a really rough doodle of what my sketches usually looks like, and as you can see I added notes to show my thought process :)!
Basically, I like to answer these questions in the following hierarchy:
Do we know where we are? What time of day? What weather? (choose weather relevant to the story, i.e. if it rains it has to be for a reason) - you don't need to reestablish the setting on every page but if the setting is unclear, this is priority nr 1!
who is where and what are they doing? - once you've established where everyone relevant is, you don't need to show them in every panel. Only for visual interest or when their dialogue or reaction is important.
What do the readers need to observe and what are they supposed to feel about it? - This is a bit more vague but also the most relevant, if you can't answer this question, you have made an unnecessary filler page!
As an example, the answer here is "the characters are enjoying each others company in a safe setting. Donna is comfortable enough to cackle loudly and the rest look like they are laughing at something Albin said/did and playfully teasing him about it. Lune drinks out of a champagne coupe while the rest uses regular drinking glasses because she's fancy, Myra needs cushions to reach the table because Ricky's family has large furniture, Albin has picked a spot not close to Donna (what is so special about this spot?), and Ricky sits where he can get up and serve people quickly (he never relaxes)"
I realize this is more about character staging than backgrounds in general, but I think backgrounds are kind of complementary to what the characters are doing rather than the opposite. The characters drive the story, the backgrounds are there to give the context!
I hope that helped at least a little bit!! :) Thank you for the question!! ^^
ANYONE UP FOR A MICHAEL SHELLEY POST-DISTORTION AU IN THE BIG 26 ?????
Aka my friends finally convinced me to post this
These are just quick sketches to get the idea across, I will draw much better things for this later
yapping and explanation under the cut !!!!
Okay! SO.
While Michael may have come back from the Distortion, he most definitely did not come back unchanged.
Perhaps the most noticeable change is his skin. It looks as if it were stretched much farther than it should've been, and in an attempt to appear like a regular person again, the skin was scrunched back together by winding it up real tight. This leaves large twisting creases up his arms, legs, and neck. This also causes increased sensitivity and risk of injury due to his skin being a bit thinner than it should be.
> He attempts to cover his markings up, meaning he is almost always wearing scarves and/or turtlenecks, long pants, long sleeves, and even gloves! weep for him in the summertime.
Another big difference is his eyes. His pupils may look only a bit odd from afar, though upon closer inspection you can see they take the form of a fractal. Irises are somewhat blurry, blending into the eyewhites and shifting colors. Everyone who sees him will see his eyes as a different shade, though it's usually a light cool tone.
> Along with his eyes changing, so have his glasses. That means that, at least for now, the lenses he wore in the Distortion are the only ones that will work for him. Shame that one lens is broken.... at least his prescription isn't too high! He can see somewhat well without his glasses, but on top of the normal blurriness the glasses were originally for, now his sight on it's own is just distorted and wrong enough to be a bit disorienting, like watching a 3d movie without the fancy 3d glasses on. It's less headache inducing just to wear the previous glasses, even if they're cracked.
> Through the lenses of his glasses he can see more than is normal. Not to a great extent, and it may just be instincts and feelings of his and not his actual sight at all. But it feels like sight. He can literally see through lies (as in he can detect that someone is lying, not see the actual truth), sense paranoia and mental instability around a person, and can generally see connections to the Spiral as an aura around the person or thing. He can also see things' connections to other Fears, though less well and less reliably. He can see if something is connected to a different Fear if the connection is extremely strong, like a very powerful avatar or an old building/location, but if the connection isn't extremely strong it can be much more difficult to see, and it is always hard to tell exactly which Fear something connects to if it is not the Spiral. Though, even if the connection is very strong, his sight can still be unreliable, as he may not realise the aura around the thing is a connection to a Fear and may assume it to simply be a bad feeling or paranoia. He can almost perfectly detect the Spiral's presence however. Human(?) lie detector! Kinda. This may give him a connection to the Eye as well (he was probably a bit connected before, as he worked for the institute, and I plan for him to still work for or at least be connected to the institute in this au), though it is not meant to be an Eye-aligned ability.
His hair, skin, eyes, and the clothing he wore in the Distortion is now a much more vibrant color. He rarely wears his old clothes, so really only the hair and skin is noticeable. His hair is blonde, yes, but in a way that almost looks yellow, so you may assume it to be dyed. Over time it grows out to be a more natural color, but it never really goes back to normal. All this combined gives him a somewhat fake appearance, as if he isn't real.
> There is also a slight fuzziness to him, making him look even less real. A kind of fogginess around the edges, though this doesn't happen often and is only noticeable sometimes.
Now this doesn't have to do with post-distortion specifically, but a headcanon of mine is that after Michael was fed to the Distortion, not only was his body and mind altered, but so was everyone's ideas and memories of him. Everyone who knew him has the same idea of what he looks like, fairly tall, skinny, with long blonde curly hair, but was his hair a very light blonde or more dirty blonde? How tall was he, exactly? Someone who is 6'0 may remember him as a bit taller than them, while someone 5'11 may remember him as shorter than them, which one is right? Were his eyes a solid light blue, or more green tinted? Or even gray? What color were his glasses? Did he even wear glasses? What shape was his face? Every little bit of information is wobbly and shifting and distorted, so that someone who knew him before the Distortion may not even recognise him now, especially with the other changes the Distortion made. This is also my explanation for the conflicting information in the canon timeline if you couldn't tell.
There are also MANY mental effects that have happened as a result to the Distortion. Of course, I will never pass up a chance to project my give a character horrible dissociation and horrible identity issues! Yay! He has also became very very wary of trusting people, which is both due to constantly questioning his reality in the Distortion, but also due to Gertrude's betrayal. I will touch on more mental issues specifically later !!!
I plan to turn this au into a fic (which I wrote the first chapter of, and then immeditely scrapped it because I thought of a better way to start it), that also includes some ocs of mine that I may eventually post about! If/when I post the fic I will reblog this post with a link :] For now the most stuff I will do for this au is write when the motivation allows me and draw whenever I'm bored. Oooooohhh I could make a comic too.... we'll see !
Come to think of it, it really is insane that my entire country is burning alive and literally no one in the rest of the world cares. Thousands of Indians are dying every day from the heat, it's 45+ degrees in multiple areas, the government couldn't give two fucks, we're getting severe warnings and red alerts, and not a soul outside of South Asia is speaking about it because why would you ever care about brown people
USA folks, that is a consistent temperature range hitting 113°. Death Valley temperatures. In Banda, it hovered between 116°-118° (47°-48° C) for a week straight.
This has been happening all month with little to no international media attention. Here are a few organizations you can check out for resources or to support:
areudirty
dailybridgerton
theartofmadeline
amandla
origamiaround
prguitarman
germansingergirl
