Hi! I’m really sick of whitewashing and the various excuses that artists come up with, so I wrote a guide! How To Not Whitewash, at least with regards to skin tone.
Please make use of it, and encourage other artists to do so as well.
Here’s a link to this guide on a Google Doc - this document has image descriptions.
Feel free to contact me if the link stops working, or if you have questions (in good faith).
So on my recent revisit of centaur bodyplan challenges on my Centaur Wheelchairs post there was some talk of how centaurs would be stretching to make up for the decompression horses usually get in their backs when they graze, and also I've just seen a few tags and other notes curious about centaurs stretching and folding so.. here ya go! Some new stretches focused on stretching more like how horses do with their necks, and then just a collection of all my wibbly wobbly Big Stretch! and general range of motion doodles
folks in my discord liked how I drew the void-y tentacles, and since it's a super fast and easy method, I made a little tutorial for them - thought I'd share it here too! maybe it helps someone 🔮
Calling all artists, animators, and fans of fun and useful pose references! In 2 weeks time I will be taking part in @adorkastock & Friends' MASSIVE Group Poses for Artists Shoot.
We've got a bunch of models of different sizes and shapes, more props than you can shake a stick at (including bows, a pole and a POOL), and two full days of shooting to get as many reference photos as we possibly can. It's gonna be awesome, and there will be some PHENOMENAL references coming out of this.
If you'd like to pre-order Photo packs, you have until the 25th October. Get them here:
A group of experienced pose reference models coming together with professional photographers for a weekend long epic group photoshoot to mak
In the meantime, as a taster, here are some of the photos from last time I collaborated with @null-entity (who's also part of this project!) Enjoy!
(You can find the rest of these sets in my Patreon Shop)
@blumineck I know you're a professional and it seems like the photographer is as well, but these photos are making the Health & Safety Inspector part of my brain go crazy. How did you ensure the safety of your fellow model while appearing to point a drawn arrow at him? Is it clever use of perspective? A prop bow?
Great question! The arrow is not, in fact, on the string in that shot. The string sits next to the arrow, so if I were to accidentally release it, it would pass harmlessly by without propelling anything into anyone’s face. I wouldn’t do a shot like that if there were any chance of shooting the arrow!
tutorial idea: how to draw teeth / toothy smiles!! i think teeth are difficult for a lot of artists, esp me. im terrible with drawing smiles with teeth. So I would really appreciate if you made a tutorial for teeth! /gen /nf. Thank you.
Your wish is my command, dear anon!
[Transcript]
->Gums show a little
→ Smiling pushes cheeks out
Mouth corners look like triangles with lil' hooks
A closed-mouth natural smile will show the top teeth only
There are four incisors (the flat ones) followed by a canine & five molars on either side
I usually group the incisons together fon a more stylised look
While smiling, the lips stretch and look thinner
Start with simple shapes and work your way up to detail!
i feel bad for being sassy cos i realized now this poor person is asking about the background of images like this
which is obviously not handmade. sorry for getting confused, it happens more often than you think that people accuse me of using a filter for my pixel art or something
so here is a tutorial for aseprite on how to crunch the colours of a photo like this into any palette !!
step 1. find a royalty free photo or take one yourself
heres one i just took on my camera
2. open it in aseprite and change the image size to be smaller whatever you need
MM yes nice and crunchy
Select a palette of your choice on the left side of the screen on the palette panel. use the middle icon to open the palettes dropdown.
i am using my palette i made at 20k followers, you can download it free here
once you have chosen your palette, in the top bar go to sprite > color mode > indexed. it should automatically choose the nearest colour it can from your palette for every pixel
as you can see its quite messy and i do like to clean it up a little but it looks good messy too like old games!! sorry for being sassy
Every now and then someone will ask if or tell me they think that an image I shared is AI. I don’t mind this, you all know I’m aggressively against AI and with how saturated the internet has become with it I can’t say your hypervigilance is unwarranted…
But sometimes people will insist even when I tell them otherwise, and that’s when I take offense and we’re going to have a problem.
I won’t pretend to be an expert on identifying AI. I’m familiar with the usual tells, of course, but as it progresses some images can he increasingly hard to distinguish. I’ve definitely heard thought an image was or wasn’t AI generated only to find out the opposite…
But cats? I know cats.
I spend 6 days a week handling cats all day as my job, then I come home to my own cat and spend time scrolling through images of cats for this blog. So I’m confident that any cats I share aren’t AI generated.
But here are some resources to help you all. The page the images are sourced from is a great resource that I recommend checking out, I’ve only shared the guides here that I think are useful in identifying cat/animal AI specifically.
Another thing to do is check the source, which I always include. If nothing else at the source appears AI, or if the original image was posted several years ago, etc. there’s a good chance this isn’t AI either.
And a final note!
Photo editing is a thing and isn’t the same as AI.
It is very commonplace to edit photos to a degree. To make the color pop more, to draw attention to specific features, to improve the lighting, to remove blemishes and so forth… so keep that in mind when trying to make a judgement.
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
I tend to draw everything with the same soft pillow-like texture, so painting different surfaces is important practice for me ~ If you want to learn more about how I do this, check out my tutorial on painting different surfaces over on patreon!
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