Mike Driver
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RMH
Fai_Ryy
will byers stan first human second
@theartofmadeline
taylor price
oozey mess
tumblr dot com
★
Claire Keane
sheepfilms
almost home
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
d e v o n
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🪼
Jules of Nature
Sade Olutola
izzy's playlists!
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@standingonsound
art books on the internet archive for you
morpho books
figure drawing for all it's worth (+ creative illustration)
framed ink
will eisner comics and sequential art
will eisner graphic storytelling and visual narrative
understanding comics (+ making comics)
folder of various animation production art
burne hogarth drawing dynamic hands
perspective for comic book artists
michael mattesi force drawing
the animator's survival kit
color and light james gurney
be free
hayy. heres a random, spontaneous, niche art note compilation
A tutorial on a (bit cheating) way of creating fictional maps.
Open your editing software (RECOMMENDING Krita, since it's free and it's very good).
Step 1: Google "X country silhouette" and copy it.
Paste it onto the canvas.
Step 2: Separate the silhouette from the background you copied with it! You can do that by using magic wand selection tool or by making a gradient map with black on 49,9% and transparent on 50% on the slider.
Step 3: Repeat several times with numerous countries and/or islands, cities, municipalities, communes, continents et cetera.
Step 4: Combine, mesh, stretch, rotate, mirror - go ham, make it work.
Step 5: Erase and add.
Step 6: Have your map outline ready, copy/paste it several times in the same doc on different layers and edit in different ways like biomes, kingdoms, mountains and other.
Step Mountains+: To figure out mountains, make another layer on the doc and do something like this:
-and then in every polygon you add an arrow.
Where arrows meet or transfer onto continents, add mountains.
Color the sea with a couple layers of depth and you're done :D
Hey! I was wondering, how do you draw the tattoos? I've been trying lately in an OC and i feel like something isnt right hahahah But yours seems very natural looking
I don't know if the way I draw tattoos is the most natural looking or the best way but I can show you how I do it!
The thing that will make the tattoos blend with the character in a more realistic way is the color. Tattoo ink fades and changes color a little once your tattoo is healed, and I've noticed that using a saturated color instead of pure black helps to achieve that effect. Of course, your color choices will vary a little depending on the skin tone of your character (use a darker reddish color for a character with darker skin tone, a lighter one if the character is very pale, etc), but the multiply mode will help make the tattoo design stand out regardless. You can play around with opacity levels too. Here's a side by side comparison of how the tats look if you use a brown/reddish color vs an achromatic black/gray.
It's a matter of taste, really. I don't think the 2nd image looks worse, but I like the look of the first one better because it blends with the skin tone a little. If your art style is more graphic/bold than mine, you may want to stick with bolder tattoos that stand out more than the ones I draw. For example, I don't always do this process; here's an example of tats I drew that do not blend as much with the skin:
For Frankie's tats I wanted a bolder look (she's the only one with colorful tats). None of these tats have a lower opacity setting, but I did color the lettering in a way that some parts are lighter/more saturated following the shadows of the skin. Again; this is all a matter of taste! My advice is that you should use the liquify tool a lot because as long as the tats "bend" and follow the body shape they will look like they belong to the character. Whether you prefer a "natural/faded" look or a bolder one it all depends on personal taste and your art style in particular. The gaussian blur trick makes a big difference too, although I don't always use it.
draw more fat characters ok. i love you
Ayyy thankssss!!!
It's very #problematic of me I'm sure but if they must do either I really desperately prefer authors coming up with fancy always-italicized elven words for being gay or trans than having preindustrial warrior aristocrats and barely-socialized monsters have a vocabulary that casually includes 'demisexual' and 'enby'.
This is only slightly a principled stance (queernorm fantasy worlds are very obviously not trying to have any sort of realistic political economy of gender, which I only slightly judge them for), mostly just painful aesthetic mismatch.
The thing that irks me about using modern queer terminology in fantasy is that you're depriving yourself of a way to Say Things about people in your world.
In my YA fantasy book with the trans prince stealing back his kingdom, trans people are called cymerans. Cymerans are named after the goddess Cymera, who presides over death and change.
A person who decides to trans their gender is, in this society's conception, dying and being reborn. They throw a wake for the person they used to be, a big party with food and drink and stories and laughter. (Part of the wake is the 'deceased' giving their own eulogy, which is often an incredible self-roast.) It's equal parts funeral for your past self and coming-out ball for your new self.
When someone is born, in this world, they're consecrated to a god. Most of the time, you're consecrated to the Lady of Currents (goddess of luck and the sea), Atheran (the god of bloodlines, and patron of the royal family), or the Beetlemaker (god of craftspeople). It really depends on who your parents are and what they want for your future. If your parents want you to be prosperous, they'll consecrate you to the Lady. If your parents want you to be clever and inquisitive, they'll consecrate you to the Beetlemaker. And if you're the eldest son... you'll get stuck getting consecrated to Atheran.
Most of the time, people don't get consecrated to Cymera. If your baby is really sickly and you're scared they'll die, maybe? However.... there's no formal rebaptism process, but most people see cymerans as having been re-dedicated to Cymera after their rebirth.
In this world, cymerans are Cymera's children. They died and came out the other side of death, like a moth from the chrysalis.
.... You cannot get that across the same way if you just say 'transgender'.
You just can't. It's a completely different mindset. It's a completely different conception of gender, trans genders, and religion-re:-queerness. Calling my protagonist "trans" isn't inaccurate, but it leaves out a huge dimension of how he interacts with his gender and his world.
Using modern queer terminology in a secondary-world fantasy story is the same kind of thing as having your characters eat potatoes. Sometimes, it's the right choice. A lot of the time, they should be eating cabbage, or turnips, or aklano root.
LOVE the trans worldbuilding there and 100% agree that giving them a Word for it is the same thing as giving them a Concept for it, and the Concept (as illustrated above) is so much deeper and more interesting. Cultures all over the world have had their own ways of categorizing/classifying the gender spectrum, and those categorical systems are can't really be fully "translated". For example, we can't say that being two-spirit is the same as being nonbinary, because it's not -- it is as much an expression of Native culture as it is an expression of gender. That cultural element is significant enough that it must be considered as its own thing rather than shoved under the umbrella of "nonbinary" and therefore erased.
Now, there has been an ongoing conversation in the fantasy community about, "When is it appropriate to make up a word, and when should we just use the English word?" This is sometimes joked about as The Great Kahvee* Debate (*or other fantastical spellings of the word "coffee"), because of a trend in the 80s/90s for scifi/fantasy writers to anxiously try to erase all real-world concepts from their books in pursuit of Worldbuilding. "Well, you see, they can't drink coffee because they're not on Earth and they've never heard of it," says the Fantasy Writer™, except the drink in question looks like coffee, tastes like coffee, has the same physiological effect as coffee, is drunk in the same contexts as we drink coffee, and is potentially flavored with sukrr (fantasy sugar; spellings vary) and milk from a creature you've never heard of (or, if your author is really unhinged, some other appalling bodily excretion). We have, as a society, mostly agreed that this is Silly, and now characters drink coffee in your fantasy novels.
So the question you face as a writer is, "If this character is [trans, gay, nonbinary, whatever], and it's exactly the same as it is in the real world, should I bother to make up a word for it?" The authors who are answering "If it is the Exact Same, I will use the IRL word for it" have swung the pendulum of fashion on the Great Kahvee Debate allllllllll the way to the other end, possibly out of a desire to do Good Representation. Except... I don't really feel like mentioning a label IS good representation (except perhaps to small babies who don't have enough reading comprehension to recognize a concept unless it is Clearly Labeled), so the way it actually comes across is, rather, a desire to BE SEEN to be doing Good Representation without actually doing much work. Because being queer in your fantasy world ISN'T going to be exactly the same as being queer in the real world. Whatever culture your character is operating within IS DIFFERENT, that is why you have gone to all the trouble to talk about their special magical tattoos or their special magical dragon familiars or their special magical prophecies or whatever. Give them their own word for what they are, IF that categorization system is important in their culture -- and it might not be! In which case they might not have a word for it! Like, a character might just say, "Oh, that man? No, girl, you don't have a chance, he only has boyfriends" instead of "He's gay."
You don't have to give them a label, either a fantasy one or a real-world one. You're allowed to say, "They don't think about sexuality that way" -- that is a perfectly valid worldbuilding choice, and I encourage you to lean into that and explore it! You don't have to have a label! But what you DO have to do is treat your queer characters like whole, complex people and honor the culture that they come from even if it's a made-up one.
Which brings me to the subject of italicizing the special fantasy words -- I'd encourage people to just leave them in plaintext, actually! This ties into an ongoing discussion on the exoticization of foreign languages in English text (link to an article on the subject). Basically, it marks those words out as jarringly OTHER, which 1) doesn't make a whole lot of sense when the speakers themselves are using the words with fluent familiarity, 2) implicitly frames English as the dominant language over all other languages (linguistic imperialism as an expression of white supremacy), and 3) doesn't even make sense from a descriptive-linguistic perspective when you look at how easily and readily English adopts words from other languages into common parlance.
Consider the sentence: "I went to the cafe and ordered a chai latte" -- italicize chai for emphasis is fine ("no, i didn't order a coffee latte, it was a chai latte"); but it is patently absurd to italicize it (or cafe!) for being an ✨exotic foreign word✨. We know what chai is, we know you can buy it at a cafe. The words have entered our language. English speakers are very, very used to learning new words for a Specific Concept ("Sitting in the sauna eating naan and sipping boba that I bought from the tomato-colored kiosk"). Scifi/fantasy readers will do this even more readily (see Jo Walton's article about SF Reading Protocols).
If you're in the dialogue/narration of someone for whom the word/concept is just part of the ambient cultural background, honor that! Even if they are a fantasy person from a fantasy culture, honor it! It's good practice for real life. :)
💀 Making Your Villain Make Sense (Without Making Them Right™)
("because if I see one more war criminal with a sad diary entry get a redemption arc, I’m gonna throw my laptop.")
Here’s the thing: your villain doesn’t need to be redeemable. But they do need to make sense.
And I mean sense beyond "they’re evil and they monologue about it." Or “they have a tragic past, so now they do murder <3.” Or “they were right all along, the hero just couldn’t see it 🥺.”
Let’s fix that.
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🧠 STEP ONE: BUILD A LOGIC SYSTEM THAT ISN’T OURS Your villain shouldn’t just be wrong, they should have their own internal system that works for them. Morally flawed? Absolutely. But coherent.
Ask yourself:
What do they value more than anything? (Power? Order? Loyalty? Vengeance?)
What do they believe about the world, and how did they get there?
What fear drives them? What future do they think they’re trying to prevent?
The villain doesn’t need to know they’re wrong. But you should.
Make their logic airtight. even if it’s awful. Give them cause and effect.
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👿 STEP TWO: STOP GIVING THEM THE BETTER IDEOLOGY Listen. I love a “morally gray” moment as much as anyone. But if your villain is making all the good points and the hero’s just like “no because that’s mean,” your arc is upside down.
If your villain is critiquing injustice, oppression, or inequality, make sure their methods are the problem, not their entire worldview.
✖︎ WRONG: Villain: “The ruling class is corrupt.” Hero: “That’s not nice.”
✔︎ RIGHT: Villain: “The ruling class is corrupt, so I’m burning the city and everyone in it.” Hero: “So you’re just… committing genocide now?”
Your villain can touch a real issue. Just don’t let them be the only one talking about it, or solving it with horror movie logic.
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🔪 STEP THREE: GIVE THEM POWER THAT COSTS THEM The best villains lose things too. They’re not just untouchable horror dolls in sexy coats. They make bad choices and pay for them. That’s where the drama lives.
Examples:
They isolate themselves.
They sacrifice people they love.
They get what they want, and it destroys them.
They know they’re the monster, and choose it anyway.
If your villain can kill a dozen people and feel nothing, that’s not scary. That’s boring. Let them bleed. Let them regret it. Let them double down anyway.
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🧱 STEP FOUR: MAKE THEM PART OF THE WORLD, NOT OUTSIDE IT Villains shouldn’t feel like they were patched in from another genre. They should be part of the world’s logic, culture, class system, history. They should reflect something about the setting.
Villains that slap:
The advisor who upheld the regime until they decided they deserved to rule.
The noble who’s using war to reclaim stolen legacy.
The ex-hero who thinks the system can’t be saved, only reset.
The priest who truly believes the gods demand blood.
They’re not just evil, they’re a product of the same world the hero is trying to save.
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👁 STEP FIVE: SHOW US THEIR SELF-JUSTIFICATION You don’t need a tragic backstory™. But you do need to show us why they think they’re right. Not just with exposition, through action.
Let us watch them:
Protect someone.
Choose their goal over safety.
Justify the unjustifiable to a character who loves them.
Refuse to change, even when given a chance.
A villain who looks into the mirror and goes “Yes. I’m correct.” is 1000x scarier than one who sobs into a journal and says “I’m so broken 🥺.”
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🧨 BONUS ROUND: DON’T MAKE THEM A HATRED MEGAPHONE Especially if you’re writing marginalized characters: don’t let your villain become a mouthpiece for slurs, abuse, or extremism just to make them “evil enough.” That’s lazy. And harmful.
You don’t need real-world hate speech to build a dark character. You need power, consequence, and intent.
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TL;DR: Good villains don’t need to be right. They need to be real. Not a vibe. Not a sad boy in a trench coat. Not a trauma monologue and then a sword fight. They need logic. They need cost. They need to scare you because you get them, and still want them to lose.
Make them dangerous. Not relatable. Make them whole. Not wholesome. Make them make sense.
—rin t. // thewriteadviceforwriters // villain critic. final boss consultant. licensed chaos goblin
P.S. I made a free mini eBook about the 5 biggest mistakes writers make in the first 10 pages 👀 you can grab it here for FREE:
✦ A free (and actually helpful) guide to leveling up your first 10 pages ✦If you're unsure whether your opening is ✨doing enough✨ to hook re
Problem with making sci fi dungeons is coming up with places that aren't just military tech bases, research facilities, mines or abandoned space stations.
I have the entirety of modern life to pull from and I come up blank somehow.
fair, though let me make unsolicited suggestions anyways in case it helps:
A highspeed railcar, ideally big enough for freight so that you can make "walls" from various crates and scatter interesting/useful stuff around them. At some point either coming across a locked or barricaded door and having to crawl out and deal with the rushing wind and timed hazards like signs and tunnels.
The surface of a dyson sphere, preferably still under construction, so you can have a mixture of purposeful design, open areas exposed to the sun, control rooms to manage energy or maybe even move platforms around for passage.
The interior of a luxury space cruise, with the added benefit of being able to make some wild themed rooms on the justification of "it's rich people being excessive, again".
Future library, with increasingly bizarre security systems for the seemingly endless parade of even more restricted sections.
A cathedral for some future sci-fi religion. Themed statues that shoot lasers from their eyes, stained-glass that turn into thousands of coloured drones, and you get to reuse any of your greatest hits from your local fantasy campaign but refluffed as robot-slash-art-slash-security system.
@five-by-five I'm adding your additions here because I think they are fucking awesome.
Anyone is completely free to add their sci-fi/space opera dungeon ideas here.
Thought of this while reading but: (this is all one idea, each point is just a different layer to it)
Large skyscrapers with dozens, maybe a hundred different floors
Most likely office buildings of mega-corps who can not only afford to build such buildings but also require all that space
Maybe evacuated due to a threat the party is responding to, either externally or even something caused internally, like mega-corps messing with shit they shouldn’t have
Maybe even completely abandoned due to messing with shit they shouldn’t have, and now the threat is getting ready to leave the quarantined building unless the party can stop it
Or the building is completely occupied and the goal of the mission is infiltration and stealth, stealthily going by security checks and convincing all the tired, burned out office workers you’re supposed to be there, trying to reach one of the uppermost floors avoiding as much conflict as you can
I'm all for turning this into modern/sci-fi dungeon megapost hours here
A dam, churning as water passes through and filled with complex machinery to keep things working. With a variant for it being after some environmental change that drained the reservoir and now the dam is the only passage across a chasm, with the party needing to adjust the now-defunt mechanisms so they can pass through.
A hab dome in some extreme environment, an abandoned colony that only just got started. Not unlike some of the other suggestions but a bit more "open" at the costs of the risk of environmental hazards.
Adjacent to the "military tech base" thing is, of course, a spaceship. Presumably with the party launching an attack on it from a boarding vessel at some point. Mix it up by having the ship they're attacking currently docked with another ship, exchanging supplies or personnel, so now you've got two potential dungeons ships to traverse through. Maybe one is transporting cargo and has lesser security, so you board that one so you can cross over to the higher security one.
Fancy space McMansion, with a courtyard (complete with hedge maze), a fancy pool (that's also a weird underwater course or boat racing rally because this is the future wealthy), the mansion interior with Resident Evil style puzzles, and of course the bunker holding all the valuables/target for assassination/hidden intel.
A place struck by a timestorm, so you have a bunch of different zone of the "same dungeon" that flickers into different things. Sometimes it's underconstruction, sometimes it's a military base, sometimes it's a club from a city in another era, and sometimes the planet is undergoing an invasion. All instances of the same timestorm across the ages, existing simultaneously, and you have elements from one zone spilling into the next so you have an eclectic mix of challenges, but also the potential to find something that doesn't exist in your time.
Sorry I'm in the mood to add more:
Rich person's menagerie. While I'm not particularly a fan of killing a bunch of endangered space animals, you can have a bit of characterization mixed in where it's not really endangered animals but rather whatever the owner thinks is "cool" which just so happen to be encounter appropriate enemies. Rooms themed around their natural environments (rooms clearly too small and thus adding to the agitation, rooms that are big for the owner's "favorites"), corridors between exhibits with patrolling guard bots, maintenance tunnels. Lends itself to puzzle interactions (don't make eye contact with the space gorilla and you can pass through the room), and environmental interactions (guards in the way? push them into the eel pit). Can be there to rescue one of the animals, or it's a route into one of the other dungeons suggested.
"The Collector" aka, some person's fiercely guarded vault or spaceship full of art, jealously guarded by the finest security they could get their hands on. Maybe some of the art itself is dangerous: "This pillar is made out of more Psycite than seven systems naturally produce. The artist tuned all of it to express the pure psychic wave length of pain as a means of invoking a sense of universal emotion between all species... also save or be staggered from feeling like all your nerves are on fire when you're in the room." Naturally you could be there to steal one of the pieces, or it could just be a side hobby of your villain.
Any kind of alien ecosystem.
These are just Doctor Who episodes.
Ooh, more neat ideas!
I have a few potential ideas.
Abandoned Seastead/ocean habitat - a series of interconnected modules where a bunch of corporate folk/libertarians attempted to make their own floating settlement that would in theory be resistant to climate change/helps them dodge tax collectors. Partially sunk now and damaged by tropical storms, the seastead is still mostly habitable, while the descendants of the original inhabitants run the spectrum from straight up pirates to grizzled loners who litter their section with traps while complaining about how no one for the plumbing sorted before people moved in. In fiction the Madeline Ashby novel Company Town is based around a city built on and around a converted oil rig, as a possible reference.
Floating city/arcology - similar idea to the above, but on a larger scale, an idea from several tax averse billionaires (and/or scam artists) is the idea of having a kind of residential super-yacht that constantly circles the globe as a means of staying in international waters, with supplies and staff boated or flown in as the ship passes by various ports. In fiction several of these have cropped up, such as the big bad's home in the novel Snowcrash and also in the Third Body Problem. Snowcrash's variant had the addition of an additional floating city of smaller vessels that followed in the larger ship's wake consisting of hundreds of climate refuges whose ships and boats have become intermeshed into a kind of hodgepodge floating town, which offers a variety of environments and interactions from the main ship itself.
Gas Planet/high altitude Structures - The same basic idea can be used in more hard science fiction settings or in more whimsical steampunk ones, but the idea is essentially to extract a form of valuable gas (or say, process aerial beasties who might have usual resources) you could have a form of platform or settlement held aloft with balloons. The idea effectively being like a flying oil rig or old timey whaling station or fish cannery. There are various ways you can spin stories out of a setting like this, from air pirates to a murder mystery/Among Us situation (6km up and the crew have vanished while all the escape-balloons are still present, what's up with that), you could get a lot of mileage out of it.
If you're wanting to go into a more straight post-apocalyptic territory, pretty much all of the examples about can take on a whole different flavour if the player characters in-universe have lost the context for what these things are. For example, this is pretty much the Horizon series of games bread and butter, as due to shenanigans, the native humans of the setting have effectively built entirely new cultures from scratch after the end of the world, but ruins left behind by the near-future, cyberpunk society that was destroyed by the robot apocalypse are completely alien and wondrous to the inhabitants of the new world.
For example, in the second game the protagonist visits a ruined Las Vegas that by now has mostly been buried by the desert, but scavengers and primitive archaeologists uncover a futuristic casino/resort which still has functioning (to a degree) holographic light shows.
Within the pre-apocalypse, the cyberpunk casino/resort could act as a form of dungeon for heists (ditto relatively near future post-apocalyptic settings like Fallout: New Vegas). But for player characters who have no concept of what a casino is, let along holograms, it can effectively be played as them having circled back from to their thinking they're in a traditional fantasy setting of a sort (depending on how much they understand the difference between magic and technology).
It's done! You can find the Absolutely Ripping It Up pack here.
Tear your artwork. Decay it. Blast a giant hole into it. Go nuts. Note that these are compatible only with Clip Studio!
here’s 200+ freebie brushes | and my brush tag is here ✨
reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics
@dragonpyre any chance you could elaborate on this
I grew up learning about land formations. Seeing fictional maps that don’t follow the logic and science of them makes me upset
What are the most common sins you’ve seen relating to this? I wanna know
Mordor.
Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.
And then the misty mountains!!!! Why isn’t there a rain shadow!! And why is there a FOREST where the rain shadow should be!!!!!!!!
So what is a rain shadow?
Wind blows clouds in from the sea, but mountains are so tall the clouds can't get past 'em, so you get deserts on the windward side of mountain ranges because clouds can't get there to water the land, or do so only very rarely.
Oh yeah nothing is more annoying than fantasy maps that can't get mountains, rivers and rain shadows right.
May I recommend my new favorite tool: Mapgen4. You start with a random seed and then add mountains, valleys, shallow water, or oceans as you like. You can adjust the wind direction to make wind shadows off the mountains fall where you want. You can adjust overall raininess to make the rivers larger or smaller, or have more or fewer tributaries. It works best for small, isolated landmasses (think islands more than continents) but as there’s no scale bar and it’s all slightly abstracted anyway you can do whatever you want with it. I’ve only just started playing with it but it’s SO FUN.
I do think this could be useful for writers! ...Caveat, if you're going to use this for making a map for anything published (digital or paper, even if it's only in a fanfic archive or whatever), please, please credit the creator and their program as how you made that map! The more ways information like this gets out there, the more useful it'll be to other writers, roleplaying game DMs/GMs, creators, etc.
One of my favourites for mapping plates, biomes, etc is Tectonics.js. If you're familiar with how tectonics shape a planet, you can guess where the features go by toggling plates, crust thickness, etc. Between Mapgen4 and Tectonics.js, we've got some pretty sweet tools at our disposal.
More stuff!:
European Geosciences Union Blog — Beyond Tectonics: Building fictional worlds to better understand our own
Reshaping Reality's Worldbuilding Tips
Worldbuilding pasta's series, An Apple Pie from Scratch also check their resources page!
R/worldbuilding's Reading List. Also check out their collected resources link. This basic geology guide from 11 years ago is still nice.
Creating an Earth-Like Planet, and The Climate Cookbook (aka Geoff's Climate Cookbook) technically the climate cookbook is a part of Creating an Earth like Planet I think.
Related: Worldbuilding Workshop's "Working Out Climates Using Geoff’s Climate Cookbook." Which goes through using the resource in order to map make. Also just the Worldbuilding Workshop in General.
Madeline James Writes's Worldbuilding Guide
Worldbuilding 101 (this links to the Biomes section but there's like...everything.)
Also I would recommend looking into Landscape Archaeology as well! That's because Landscape archeology is basically adding the social/cultural layer on top of all that geology and geography. Environments change when communities live in them, and communities likewise adapt to various environments.
This is a short free introduction to the concept: "Notes on Landscape Archaeology." To summarize, Landscape archaeology sort of like...studies the relation of people to places/spaces (that is, landscapes) in time.
Also this paper [An Archeology of Landscapes] breaks down/introduces the key concepts that I learned which is first that you can form the "construct paradigm" of a landscape from settlement ecology, ritual landscapes, and ethnic landscapes.
And then the highlights of their summary of what constitutes defining a landscape:
Landscapes are not synonymous with natural environments. Landscapes are synthetic (Jackson, 1984, p. 156), with cultural systems structuring and organizing peoples’ interactions with their natural environments ...
Landscapes are worlds of cultural product ... Through their daily activities, beliefs, and values, communities transform physical spaces into meaningful places. ...
Landscapes are the arena for all of a community’s activities. Thus landscapes not only are constructs of human populations but they also are the milieu in which those populations survive and sustain themselves. A landscape’s domain involves patterning in both within-place and between-place contexts ...
Landscapes are dynamic constructions, with each community and each generation imposing its own cognitive map on an anthropogenic world of interconnected morphology, arrangement, and coherent meaning ...
Basically a "landscape" is made by a community living in an environment. Once you have a geological environment that makes sense, landscape archaeology is like... Basically how I feel confident knowing where trade routes would be on a map, where there are areas of continual high conflict, what kinds of agriculture exists where, etc. once the geological stuff is hammered out, it's like...I know how that would influence the local cultures and vice versa. At that point, it's easy to start marking the natural borders, settlements, trade/port cities, and even strategic fortresses. If you have properly put rivers on a map, then marking your port cities is effortless, basically.
Also:
This course syllabus for a Landscape Archaeology class is freely accessible. It includes an online resources page.
Place, Landscape, and Environment: Anthropological Archaeology in 2009
(Landscape Biographies is open access, as is Landscape Archaeology between Art and Science: From a Multi- to an Interdisciplinary Approach. But I wouldn't try to read every essay.)
If you are like me and find it helpful to have video reference for a process/activity in addition to a written guide, Artifexian is a YouTube channel that does a LOT of world building stuff and specifically he's in the process of creating a world following a lot of Worldbuilding Pasta's methodology!
Regarding Mordor: the being upset with the shape of it is pretty much what Tolkien wanted. Because an evil wizard literally made it that way in defiance of the rules of nature. It's supposed to be wrong and upsetting. That's the point of it being that unnatural shape. It's the will of the person being forced upon the land. Same vibe as big-ass mining pits that ruin the local ecosystem. Nature's not supposed to look like that, and nature did not make it.
Mordor's mountains are man/maiar made damage.
So, fantasy writers, go ahead an make scientifically impossble things (that's why you're fantasy writers, not sci-fi writers) but have a justification for why the unnatural thing exists.
And by justification I mean: a reason that ties into your themes of your work (you do have themes, right? you're not doing a D&D GOT bullshit "themes are for 8th grade english" failure to understand how writing works, right?) not just slapping a wizard did it down on things to make them look cool.
Overview of some topics when it comes to drawing characters who are burn survivors.
DISCLAIMER. Please keep in mind that this is an introductory overview for drawing some burn scars and has a lot of generalizations in it, so not every “X is Z” statement will be true for Actual People. I'm calling this introductory because I hope to get people to actually do their own research before drawing disabled & visibly different characters rather than just making stuff up. Think of it as a starting point and take it with a grain of salt (especially if you have a very different art style from mine).
Talking about research and learning... don't make your burn survivor characters evil. Burn survivors are normal people and don't deserve to be constantly portrayed in such a way.
edit: apparently tum "queerest place on the internet" blr hates disabled people so much that this post got automatically filtered. cool!
i feel like we don’t talk about things like this enough
THIS, writers. Unless your characters are very wealthy (can pay people to be very industrious in growing, spinning, weaving, sewing on their behalf) or live in a post-textile-industrial-revolution world (aka modern/futuristic), they're not going to have that many clothes.
What they will have is protective outerwear. Aprons are a very real necessity for a lot of jobs, from cooking to blacksmithing and beyond.
Women wore aprons and housecoats into the 1940s and 1950s when doing cooking & cleaning because it was still a bit expensive to own a lot of clothes...so this is within 100 years. Within living memory for many folks.
Coveralls were created to protect clothing, and were handed out as uniforms by factories because the workers complained that their own clothes were getting damaged by their workplace. (Unions helped with this, strongly encouraging the companies doing the damage to their regular clothes to step up with replacement garments that could get damaged and then replaced by the company whose work was damaging them.)
Businesses started having their employees wear uniforms to make them look good and as a signature of their company (UPS brown, for example), but unless the design teams are idiots, those outfits are going to be stitched in ways that you can move easily & comfortably while doing your assigned tasks.
In corporate culture in Japan, the salarywomen are often given a uniform dress to wear, and I know of one business that held a work-slowdown because the way the sleeves of those dresses were cut and stitched, they literally couldn't bring their arms forward to type on their computers in a comfortable way. The company balked at replacing the uniforms, until a section manager agreed to let his female workers wear their own "office-dressy" clothes for a day...and productivity leaped forward by over 200%, literally because they could move their arms and position them comfortably.
Another example of those who effed it up are the officers' uniforms for the Germans during WWII, which were focused on looking fashionable--and they were!--but were horrible to don quickly, awkward wear in actual combat, etc, and it took them far too long to "drop trousers" to use the bushes in a swift, efficient, and safe manner. (Not saying they didn't deserve to be shot for supporting such an evil regime, but you should be able to go to the bathroom without worrying that it'll take you over a minute to put your clothes back together enough to run for cover in summer.)
Prior to the 1700s, servants in manor houses & noble estates often did not wear a uniform; they just wore whatever they had, and depended on aprons and watchcoats and whatever to protect their clothes. Then it became a status symbol to put one's servants into uniforms, also known as livery. If you could afford to do that then, by gum-golly, you were wealthy, and people could literally see that you were wealthy!
As for those famous black maid's dresses with white aprons that every manga loves to draw? Black dye was still a bit expensive, but black hid most stains. White aprons were protective, and were to be changed out frequently...and it was far easier to bleach cloth than it was to dye it black, plus the stark contrast was very eye-catching, and since the aprons could be swapped out frequently (very small amount of cloth compared to a whole dress), the fact that your maidstaff were wearing clean aprons was another sign of how wealthy you were, rather than just making the maid wear the apron all day long, progressively getting dirtier and dirtier.
With all this said, how valuable clothing was also affected how armies moved. Throughout most of recorded history, armies were composed primarily of men...but there were almost always 2 categories of women who followed them on the campaign trail. One, of course, was sex workers (for obvious reasons), but the other was Laundresses...and the laundresses would be ransomed first, ahead of the sex workers, if captured by enemy forces. (Not all were women by any means, btw, but the majority were, so I stuck with that gender.)
They worked hard to get the clothing clean, helped with getting leather armor clean, and provided other grooming services such as lice-combing. "But Jean, why would getting the soldiers' clothing clean be that important?" Dudes, dudes, my dudes...if you need to take a piss or a shit, combat will not stop for you. Peristalsis will happen mid-sword-swing. This was one of the sources of "deadly infections killed many of the fighters who went to war," and laundresses literally cleaned that shit up.
When you're a warrior in an army, marching off through the forests of Gaul, you can only carry so many spare sets of clothes because you're also carrying your armor, your weapons, and your rations, etc, etc. You will want to take care of your clothes, because you don't have many replacements, and you won't get many replacements.
So, writers, when you're writing about pre-industrialized cultures...go easy on how many clothes people own. Also realize that accessorizing can make an old outfit look new, which includes small parts of the clothing that can be swapped out for other pieces in a mix-and-match style.
...One last note:
The most expensive, time-consuming part of building a Norse ship to go a-viking on wasn't the actual ship, which took many men 2+ years to craft. It was the sails, which took many people, males and females, 3+ years to spin and weave and stitch together. There are literal stories of brash sailors robbing other norsemen of their sails because thieving it was faster & easier. (It also explains a lot of the fury of certain blood feuds between clans & holdings, if you think about it.)
Bringing this back to writers again, your period fantasy or historic characters are also going to know how to do upkeep and basic repairs on their own clothing. Laundries and tailors might be a thing in their world, but spot-cleaning and being able to mend small tears before they become big ones is crucial when off doing quests or campaigns or world-saving missions or what have you. Garments are expensive to replace. It may be sexy to have your hero discard their bloody, torn, and ruined shirt after a fight, but even if the garment is ruined beyond repair or wearability, woven cloth is still so valuable that it's worth keeping and cleaning to be turned into something else (legwraps, bandages, resewn into a hat, or used as patches to repair other garments, etc.).
We live in an unprecedented era of wastefulness, where our clothing is often so cheap (and cheaply made) that it's barely worth the efgort of repairing once it begins to wear out, and so easy to replace that we end up amassing more than we need of it. Even less than a hundred years ago, this kind of frivolity was reserved for the EXCEPTIONALLY wealthy. Even fairly well off people would continually recycle their old garments again and again. (Think of Cinderella's mice making that old pink dress into something new with just bits and pieces of the sisters' discarded accessories.... taking ribbons or lace or whole sections of an old dress to use in a new one was very common until quite recently!)
And never underestimate the usefulness of rags. If the clothing is beyond all repair or salvage, it has a new life as rags. You can wrap food in them, stuff them in your shoes for warmth and fit, pad your pillow with them, use them for cleaning, for bandages, for tying and belting your drawers, for patches.... rags are invaluable in a world where paper towels and disposable hygiene products do not exist.
@catherinekal
Mimi Tachikawa character sheets - through the ages
10 year old Mimi Tachikawa in Digimon Adventure (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th pics)
13 year old Mimi Tachikawa in Digimon Adventure 02 (8th, 9th, 10th and 11th pics)
16 year old Mimi Tachikawa in Digimon Adventure Tri (12th, 13th and 14th pics)
21 year old Mimi Tachikawa in Digimon Adventure: Last Evolution Kizuna (15th, 16th and 17th pics)
Scott Pilgrim is, I think, the best example I can think of for establishing a setting's Nonsense Limit. The setting's Nonsense Limit isn't quite "How high-fantasy is this". It's mostly a question of presentation, to what degree does the audience feel that they know the rules the world operates by, such that they are primed to accept a random new element being introduced. A setting with a Nonsense Limit of 0 is, like, an everyday story. Something larger than life, but theoretically taking place in our world, like your standard spy thriller action movie has a limit of 1. Some sort of hidden world urban fantasy with wizards and stuff operating in secret has a nonsense limit around 3 or 4. A Superhero setting, presenting an alternate version of our world, is a 5 or 6. High fantasy comes in around a 7 or so, "Oh yeah, Wizards exist and they can do crazy stuff" is pretty commonly accepted. Scott Pilgrim comes in at a 10. If you read the Scott Pilgrim book, it starts off looking like a purely mundane slice of life. The first hint at the fantastical is Ramona appearing repeatedly in Scott's Dreams, and then later showing up in real life. When we finally get an explanation, it's this:
Apparently Subspace Highways are a thing? And they go through people's heads? And Ramona treats this like it's obscure, but not secret knowledge. Ramona doesn't think she's doing anything weird here. At this point, it's not clear if Scott is accepting Ramona's explanation or not, things kind of move on as mundane as ever until their Date, when Ramona takes Scott through subspace, and he doesn't act like his world was just blown open or anything, although I guess that could have been a metaphor. there's a couple other moments, but everything with Ramona could be a metaphor, or Scott not recognizing what's going on. Maybe Ramona is uniquely fantastical in this otherwise normal world. And then, this happens
Suddenly, a fantastical element (A shitty local indie band finishing their set with a song that knocks out most of the audience) is introduced unrelated to Ramona, and undeniably literal. We see the crowd knocked out by Crash and The Boys. but the story doesn't linger on the implications of that, the whole point of that sequence is to raise the Nonsense Level, such that you accept it when This happens
Matthew Patel comes flying down onto the stage, Scott, who until this point is presented as a terrible person and a loser, but otherwise is extremely ordinary, proceeds to flawlessly block and counter him before doing a 64-hit air juggle combo. Scott's friends treat this like Scott is showing off a mildly interesting party trick, like being really good at darts. The establish that Scott is the "Best Fighter in the Province", not only are street-fighter battles a thing, Scott is Very Good at it, but they're so unimportant that being the best fighter in the province doesn't make Scott NOT a loser. So when Matthew Patel shows off his magic powers and then explodes into a pile of coins, we've established "Oh, this is how silly the setting gets". It's not about establishing the RULES of the setting so much as it is about establishing a lack of rules. Scott's skill at street-fighter battles doesn't translate to any sort of social prestige. Ramona can access Subspace Highways and she uses it to do a basic delivery job. It doesn't make sense and it's clear that it's not supposed to. So later on, when Todd Ingram starts throwing around telekinesis, and the explanation we're given is "He's a Vegan" , you're already so primed by the mixture of weirdness and mundanity that rather than trying to incorporate this new knowledge into any sort of coherent setting ruleset, you just go "Ah, yeah, Vegans".
Fantastic analysis. No notes. This has reignited my desire to read the whole series, too.
PLEASE do yourself a favour and check out this wikipedia-styled template for google drive, made by @ Rukidut on twitter
I decided to try to sort my ideas and whats canon regarding my ocs with this and ITS PERFECT. IT ALL FEELS SO CONRETE. and i sure as hell AM Going to continue to use this with every single OC I have until google drives is set ablaze- Just!!!!!!!!
Also; link directly to the doc, just copy the file and you have your own lil template!!!!
how to play chords in DGDGAD tuning i made this mostly for myself cus i dont think theres literally any resources out there on how to use this tuning so here
