Mozilla, in its finite wisdom, embedded LLM bots into recent versions of Firefox for the vitally-important purpose of… naming tab groups. Now, some users are noticing CPU and power usage spikes caused by a background process called Inference.
Ugh. Reminder again for Firefox users to visit your about:config page, search for the browser.ml.chat.enabled key, and set that to false:
If yours says true then double-click it until it reads false.
Doing that turns off the AI chatbot features in Firefox, but also the stupid new LLM tab-naming feature that's rolling out.
This! I think a lot of animation students get caught up in making things exactly accurate to real life (and don’t get me wrong, anatomy is good! it’s important! study it! keep studying it forever!) but one of the really cool things about animation is that we have the ability to push things beyond what a real person or object could, in terms shape language or pose or movement, etc. don’t be afraid to push things a bit, especially in school.
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.
gonna show u guys a little opalescent highlight hack i threw together today
rainbow gradient above your main figure (i usually have all my main figure folders/layers in one big folder, so i can clip gradient maps + adjustments to it!). liquify tool to push the colors around a bit. STAY WITH ME I KNOW IT LOOKS STUPID RN I'M GOING SOMEWHERE WITH THIS
THEN: set it to add/glow (or the equivalent in ur drawing program), lower the opacity a bit, and apply a layer mask. then u can edit the mask with whatever tools you like to create rainbow highlights!!
in this case i'm mostly using the lasso fill tool to chip out little facets, but i've also done some soft airbrushing to bring in larger rainbow swirls in some areas. it's pretty subtle here, but you can see it better when i remove the gradient map that's above everything, since below i'm working in greyscale:
more granular rambling beneath the cut!
u could also just do this with a brush that has color jitter, but what i like about using layer masks for highlight/shading layers is how simple and reversible it makes everything. i can use whatever brushes i want, and erasing/redoing things is super low stakes, which is great when i often approach this stuff with a super trial-and-error approach.
example: have u ever thrown a gradient w multiple colors over an entire piece, set it to multiply etc, and then tried to erase it away to carve out shadows/highlights? it's super frustrating, bc it looks really good, but if u erase something and then change ur mind later, u basically would have to like. recreate the gradient in the area u want to cover up again. that's how i used to do things before figuring out layer masks!! but masking basically creates a version of this with INFINITE undo bc u can erase/re-place the base layer whenever u want.
anyway, back to rambling about this specific method:
i actually have TWO of these layers on this piece (one with the liquified swirls shown above, and another that's just a normal concentric circle gradient with much broader stripes) so i can vary the highlights easily as needed.
since i've basically hidden the rainbow pattern from myself, the colors in each brushstroke i make will kind of be a surprise, which isn't always great -- but easily fixable! for example, if i carve out a highlight and it turns out the rainbow pattern in that area is way too stripey, i can just switch from editing the mask to editing the main layer and blur that spot a bit.
also, this isn't a full explanation of the overall transparency effect in these screencaps! there's other layer stuff happening below the rainbow highlights, but the short version is i have all this character's body parts in different folders, each with their own lineart and background fill, and then the fill opacity is lowered and there's multiply layers clipped to that -- blah blah it's a whole thing. maybe i'll have a whole rundown on this on patreon later. uhhh i think that's it tho! i hope u get something useful out of this extremely specific thing i did lmao
Library of Congress - historical posters and photos
NASA - you guessed it
Creative Commons - all kinds of stuff, homie
Even Adobe has some free images
There are so many ways to make moodboards, bookcovers, and icons without plagiarizing! As artists, authors, and other creatives, we need to be especially careful not to use someone else’s work and pass it off as our own.
Please add on if you know any more resources for free images <3
PSA to fan creators who don't have a lot of regular contact with children: They are almost always bigger than you think. A 1-year-old baby may already be walking. A toddler is likely already hip-high. A 10-year-old may already be taller than at least one of their parents. A 14/15 year old may already have reached their adult height.
90% of art advice videos on youtube are unhelpful dogshit btw no matter how good someone is at drawing knowing how to draw is different from knowing how to teach people art skills
Excal's Art Tips has a ton of very specific, very clear advice with non-exaggerated visual examples of anatomical mistakes you might be making, why you're making them, and how to go about fixing them. I recommend his shorts over his full videos.
Sinix Design has longer videos but they are also very clear and helpful with slightly more intermediate advice on digital painting, style, and composition.
Art By Annabelle's video on color theory is a very concise and visually descriptive guide if you're not familiar with basic color theory.
Derek Yu's website has lots of very clear advice on how to get started with pixel art.
I can't link them but I recommend the Morpho books, they have VERY valuable advice regarding anatomical studies. In particular the books on fat and skin folds, muscled bodies, and hands/feet will be invaluable if you feel you already have a decent grasp on drawing form and want to improve and add variety to the bodies in your art.
Feel free to add on but these were very helpful for me as a digital artist and hopefully will help others 👍
love this! though interestingly never in my life have i ever heard of stretch marks and cellulite being confused or called the same thing. maybe a regional thing? idk but that was a neat thing to learn and i’m glad it was distinguished in case that is a common misconception elsewhere!
@dimiclaudeblaigan asked for a tutorial on how to begin drawing. Good news! If you can draw a funky looking stick man, you have already started!
I think that stick people are a great starting point for artists because of the things you can learn from them that will be important later on.
If you are able to draw a circle and a couple of lines, you can easily put together a stick person.
Congratulations! You have started to draw. :)
A stick person is a very minimal artistic representation of a real life person. It is simple yet recognizable, and is widely used in art, media, and signage.
But what can a stick person teach us about drawing people that look more like… well, people? Lets have a look!
By simply adding a few more lines, we can add a pair of eyes and a mouth. Maybe even a little triangle nose! Or half circles for ears. We can now draw a face, which provides a basis for all sorts of expressions.
These simple additions can allow us to explore the wide range of human emotion and individuality.
This may seem like the basics of the basics. But that is what we want! In order to get to the point where we are able to draw complex, elaborate representations of humans and objects, we will need to start with simple shapes like lines and circles and build our understanding from there.
For instance, lets give our stick person some cool new features, such as hands and feet. I chose little squiggly circles to represent hands, and triangles to represent feet.
We can go a step further and modify the body of the stick person to include shoulders, hips, elbows and knees. These parts of the human body are quite complex in real life But here, all we need to do is add a few simple lines and dots to our stick person.
The lines provide some additional structural elements to our stick person's body, which are the shoulders and the hips. The dots indicate the points of articulation - elbows and knees, the places where the arms and legs bend!
Now we can use our stick person to show us an even wider range of human movement, action, and expression.
Our little drawing of a human being is evolving! All it took was adding a few more lines and shapes here and there.
By elongating some of the existing lines and making the head an oval instead of a circle, we can give our stick person proportions that resemble that of a real life human.
By this point, we have managed to add more complexity to our stick person simply by using our ability to draw lines, circles, and other basic shapes!
These basic ideas are the building blocks that will enable us to create more complex shapes.
The next part may be a considerable step up if you are absolutely new to drawing, but I have decided to include it in order to show you how complex objects like the human body can be built from shapes that are a bit more complex than circles and lines.
For example. Two ovals and a rectangle can be combined to create a cylinder.
Six squares can be combined to create a cube, or a box. Here, each square is distorted slightly depending on which way the cube is facing.
Note that the back faces of the cube and the bottom of the cylinder are hidden. These shapes allow us to visualize that which should not normally visible.
A sphere from all perspectives can be represented by a circle. But we can make it more like a sphere by adding lighting and shadow if we so desire.
Cubes, cylinders, and spheres are examples of 'solid shapes' because they consist of 3 dimensions.
Lets see how these solid shapes can be used to compose the human body.
By stacking three cylindrical objects, we can create a torso. Two spheres have been added to form shoulders, while a smaller cylinder forms the neck.
An arm is an alternating sequence of spheres and cylinders connected together. Note that the hand has been simplified for this example.
We can apply these solid shapes to the rest of the body to give us a more recognizable representation of the human form. It doesn't even have to be perfect. And just like that, our stick figure now has a silhouette that is unmistakably a person!
In the above examples, notice that we kept the stick person at the beginning while building up the shapes and solids around it. This is because the stick person serves as a guide for positioning the body and its various parts -> also known as posing.
You can do the same thing to everyday objects! Here, I drew a wine glass by stacking these three dimensional solid shapes.
The cup and its contents are two ovoid shapes that were cut in half. The stem is a very thin cylinder shape. The base is a cylinder with a slightly wider bottom.
Solid shapes help inform us how objects and parts of the human body may appear from different perspectives.
For example, a sphere can be used to demonstrate how the human head appears when looking up or down, turned to the side, or tilted at an angle.
With these examples, I hope I have managed to convinced you that if you can draw a circle and a couple of lines, you can draw a person! You just have to train your eye to recognize the simple shapes within complex objects. Try it with everyday objects as well! Or even your favourite media! A drawing subject can be as simple or as complex as you envision it to be.
Once you have mastered that, there are many aspects of drawing you can explore from here that may require you to seek additional resources or a fellow artist's advice.
Last of all, remember that drawing is an iterative process. Even if you draw something correct the first time, you will need to draw it again and again to get it right all times! And by making small changes like the ones we explored in this tutorial, your drawings will gradually transform!
I hope what I've demonstrated here are enough to provide the basics of how to get started with drawing objects and people, and also to help refresh more experienced artists. :) Hopefully I didn't go too off topic with what was requested, and let me know if there are any more questions I can answer.
Some hand references from an old pack on DA.
If you need some more hands I recommend checking out my Handy Hand Book in my Ko-Fi shop! It has over 400 hand references and comes in a PDF or physical book format.
stormborns
jacobvanloon
annaxmalina
jbbartram-illu
areudirty
germansingergirl
