#is this a tutorial?

[diggingforkuponuts]

This is the gist. I use procreate and default brushes. And I’m gonna do it again. =D

[khaoala]

could u do a behind the scenes of you gifing process? i would love to see how you do it

well, first and foremost, i gotta give credit where it's due. i've learned all i know about basic gifmaking because of this post made by @bobbiedebruyn, but especially @hayaosmiyazaki's tutorial. also @heybaetae's crop sizes helped to get rid of the transparent borders i was struggling with.

but my process... oh boy. i don't know how detailed you want this to be, because genuinely, explaining it sounds a little boring, but i'll give you a run through. like i said, better people have made much better tutorials if that's something you'd like to check out.

first, i need prompts because otherwise, finding a caption would be insanely difficult. so i find a scene i particularly like, or after watching an episode, i will check twitter and see what stuck out the most with people, or compilations of the character i'm most interested in, or a set just of a scene bc said character looked particularly good. but sometimes, i just want my favs doing silly dances with their son/mascot and that's how we begin.

then i use 4k video downloader+ to download the videos from youtube or dailymotion. if it's twitter videos or tiktok, then i use cobalt, and then mpv player to take the screencaps.

then we get to photoshop. to be honest, because there's a thing called actions, i don't have to do a lot, just load the screencaps, and use them. below, you have the sharpening settings. sharp, sharper and extra sharp. i rarely use sharp or extra sharp, and i usually stick with the middle option for most things tbh.

after that, it's the most interesting part. that's coloring. that's where you'll find out if things are going to be unicorns and rainbows or your worst nightmare.

i recently started using curves first. when i first started making gifs, i'd use the brightness setting (the first one) before anything else. but now i use curves (the third option) once in the auto mode to brighten everything up, and then a second time in the find dark & light colors option (it's not always that this is helpful. sometimes it washes the image off and it turns people's skin tones to awful tones of blue/green).

i get to levels next, usually (that's the second option in the single adjustments tab), and idk what to say about this other than i darken the shadows until i feel they have a nice contour going on for them.

next is selective color (second to last in the bottom line) and usually, on most sets, i only mess around with the red and yellow options.

the red-black usually heightens the shadows again and to me, makes things looks nicely contrasted. the yellow comes often because sometimes, their skintone can look way too yellow.

if i was giffing a scene and adding subtitles to it, i wouldn't change anything else, but since i plan on using this on that one project that is blocking me creatively from doing any of my many requests, we can play with colors a lot more. since the background here is heavy on the blue/cyan, we can use this adjustment to change colors.

notice how yok's skin tone looks ashy now? that's not pretty, so next, i use color balance to make it look a little less worse.

recently, i started using vibrance a lot too, and i tune up the saturation a little just bc it makes skin tones look a lot better than making them look pale af.

next it's credits. now, because i do this a lot, i want my gifsets to have a pattern, so if i were to write my credits every time i make a set, i would go insane having to remember and find the exact position, so i made myself another file where i have my credits in every cropping size. is this the best way to do this? probably not. but it does work for me, and that's enough, so i only need to duplicate layers to the file i'm working on.

then we get to convert it to frame timeline where i'll be able to save it as a gif. you can also set the frame delay and most people will agree that 0,05 seconds looks the best. however, if i have very few frames, i'll change it to 0,06 or 0,07.

now it's the moment we sit and cry, because tumblr only accepts gifs smaller than 10mb.

if you look down there, we're at a shameful 11,61 mb. that means i have two options. i either use lossy, that will make me lose some of the quality of the gif (in some cases, if you use up to 10, the gif doesn't look at all that bad, but i avoid using it if i can).

or we cut down frames.

while posting this, though, i realized yok look kind of green, so i went back to the color balance again, and added some magenta to balance that that out.

and there you have it. pretty yok in purple that i might as well change when i actually get to my project.

i have no idea if this was enlightening or absolutely confusing. but pls know, it's very fun and kind of meditative to make these. ofc, it's time consuming, and sometimes can be frustrating, but it's honestly the best thing i picked up as a hobby in recent times.

[huntressao3]

Was confused drawing front facing fragons/dragons so I made a handy dandy guide…thingy

[theeio]

Do you have any tips for finding poses to draw? When I try to think of any, off the top of my head, I rarely find interesting ones

waaah i wish i had a concrete answer for you! drawing with intention is something im struggling with myself because i always fall into my comfort zone of stereotypical poses or headshots T-T

but in the cases where i AM thinking when drawing, heres the things off the top of my head of what i usually do:

Drawing from references. from highest to lowest priority:

1. drawing inspiration directly from life, from your own lived experiences and observations. 2. Taking your own photo references 3. Referencing off the internet.

I mostly do 3, and i use Pinterest, though it is finite. my favourite thing to do when im stuck is to just do studies and then transition into character art. heres some examples of studies i referenced from photos, using my OC.

from the warmups, its easier to transition to your own original poses (shown below). and it kinda leads into the next step

2. Really think about the character you are drawing. Ask questions about them and lean into what poses and actions they would do.

How do they present and hold themselves? How's it like in their head? How do they normally engage with other people? What are they like alone, or with someone they're comfortable with? Stuff like that, haha.

You can start off simple as the overall posture of the individual like "This person would slouch" or "They'd have their chest out more". Then you start asking questions like, "why do they slouch or stand upright? What other mannerisms do they have?" and you can either move towards or straight up jump to something weirdly specific like...okay wait heres a list of things id think about and the corresponding drawing to it

"This guy would use chopsticks to eat with anything because he likes his hands clean. also they both are bak chor mee enthusiasts so thats what they're eating here"

"Their arms kinda go everywhere because they have longer and lankier limbs"

"They're more prim and proper, and they stand more upright but their hands are always covering their face because they're a very closed book"

"This guy is born to be a crybaby but forced to lock in. he would explode at any given moment"

"Here is him exploding the second he has a moment alone. he'd be CLAWING to get his mask out because god that cannot be comfortable"

"This guy's head is empty but carries a mild perpetual emptiness, sadness and loneliness in him he cannot put his finger on"

"This character hunches because they're ashamed of themselves"

3. Doing it as it comes / ANYHOW WHACK LORRR

Honestly most of the time my art is just me shitting out whatever comes out of my hands SGJDHSJL but there IS a chance to develop on this by either:

Building on a mindless headshot, step by step by asking questions about what you've drawn, and why a character would looks this way/have an expression like that etc etc. So eventually, it forms into the a similar workflow as step 2 above!

Thinking of a specific part of the body you want to focus on. Draw the head + that body part, and then try your best to make the rest of the body make sense from there DSGKHJSH.

As an example, ive been realising that i need to be less afraid of making a character's hands cover their face and body. so recently ive been really just thinking n drawing in order of Face -> Hands -> Arms -> Rest of the body. you yield really interesting results from this like shown below! Don't be afraid to challenge yourself to draw hands, it gets easier every time you take a step forward to draw a bad set of them XD!

Tbh, all these steps come hand in hand, and in reality its practicing so much that the three steps flow together! Some other thoughts:

The more you think about and draw any character or oc of yours, the more you could expand the pose ideas too, because their character and mannerisms will come easier to you! as an example, my oc Plague (the ones above w the arm bandages) has been an oc ive had since 2018, so they come super naturally to me and are much more realised in my head compared to my other OCs

I'm a very strong advocate of drawing from life, on public transport, at food places, at home, etc. Its an overlooked way to practice poses and to get better at drawing in general. It's precisely that people are moving so much IRL that you're forced to train your eyes and hands to get the essence of poses done quickly before they move again. Heres a recent study last weekend

And as a last thing: Fall in love with humanity. Our minds are a little limited at times! so draw from life, people watch and engage with and observe others around you with fascination and love. it is something that will inform and grow your depth as an artist. Being inspired from real life is something needed now more than ever, and it is an endless source of inspiration <3 !

so sorry this got a lot haha!! i hope this helps in some small way, let me know if yall have other questions! :D

[latmosims]

DDS and Linux

… surprisingly don't mix all that well (yet?). 😆

Krita doesn't support .dds formats, but supposedly has a plugin for that, which doesn't seem to work atm.

Affinity (which I'm running through a Wine prefix) doesn't support the format either, but is supposed to be able to accept Photoshop plugins. Sadly, neither NVIDIA's nor Intel's respective plugins for Photoshop have worked during my attempts.

And then, there's GIMP. Ah, GIMP! I wish I had nice things to say, but sadly I don't 🙃 HOWEVER, it supports .dds out of the box, which is good! But the DDS exporter is… well, it def. c̸̦̑o̸̭͐m̵̟̈́p̴̗͌r̸̭̽e̶͖̎s̵͓͛s̷̭͌e̶͓̔ṩ̶ the texture alright, a bit too much for my liking.

(I should also mention Photopea, which also has support out of the box, but automatically applies the Alpha layer at import, so it's like working with a PNG… 😮‍💨 We can't have that!)

In any case, if someone else is wondering how to do it in a non-destructive way on Linux, here's my method for now:

Install the NVIDIA Texture Tools (NVTT) standalone utility (not the Photoshop plugin, they do the same thing however) through Wine ;

Import .dds image into GIMP ;

Do "File > Export as…" and select a common lossless format (e.g. TIF with the compression turned off) ;

Import that into NVTT

Select BC3/DXT5 as the output ;

Choose the "Highest" compression effort (better quality, smaller file sizes, ""longer"" export time) ;

Export ;

Profit 😎

A convoluted process I know, but I haven't found a better way to go from DDS to DDS another way. Feel free to suggest your method though, I'd be happy to know 😁

[dreamstatesims]

the very lovely @kimorasimz asked about my inspiration for chris and kaila's house, palm haven (01, 02, 03). i probably could've answered this privately, but i figured maybe others can draw their own inspiration from my methods?

my initial inspiration for palm haven were the homes of cliff may, the creator of the rancho style. i've loved midcentury modern forever, so i've become really familiar with key features specific to it. but i wanted something distinctively californian for this house because you have those epic del sol valley views and all the palm trees.

this particular house is modeled after cliff may's own home (not an exact copy). it was his crowning architectural achievement with a functional skylight that spanned the whole length of the house. unfortunately, it was torn down years ago to make way for a subdivision, but some black and white photos survived that i was able to reference. chris and kaila's house is on a much smaller scale, though, and i took liberties with the floor plan.

palm haven was a labor of love for oc's i hold very dear to my heart. i took all i'd researched about this style and let it spill out. i kept in mind things like the low roof pitch, a windowless façade (believe it or not, this was hard for me), and the easy way indoor/outdoor spaces flow. i let the house take on a character of its own and become an evolving thing that sort of grew into what it wanted to be.

i wanted to bring the outdoors in and the indoors out to make it one seamless living area that feels comfortable and familiar. the atmosphere guided my color choices like the bright blue skies in the mornings and soft pinks of the sunsets. sometimes it feels like you can't tell where the house ends and the exterior begins.

it was important for the house to feel old. like if the walls could talk, they'd share memories of other families who called this place home before. that informed other design choices i made, like the terrazzo flooring and oversized stone fireplace in the family room. i wanted it to feel like chris and kaila updated the house but stayed true to its original vibe. more like they were writing a new chapter in the house's history, not writing a whole new book within its shell.

lastly, it's all about the little details for me like the pink awnings that are midcentury in design, and all the nods to coastal living from seashells to glass bottles that look like they washed ashore. plants, lots and lots of plants, both inside and out to really marry the spaces. and finally, personal mementos like family portraits and photographs of their travels. it's okay to be a little messy, that's how you know sims actually live there and it's not a museum. things should have a purpose, whether for functional use or an emotional connection.

i realize this was probably a whole lot more than you were asking for, but i really love this house and i wanted to share why it's so special to me. and, honestly, the reasons i think others connect with it too.

if there's a style you really like, research it first, at length! find out where it comes from, what its original purpose was, what regions it's found in, what era it was built in. all these things inform the house even if you do an updated version of it, because it's built into the structure and layered on with the architectural details. if you understand why a style is what it is, then you can more freely create something authentic both to you and the architectural inspiration.

[qarameiio]

i’ve spent hours trying to decipher your emerald duo paintings and i have to ask- do you color completely in overlay or do you overlay the flats and then do a normal layer on top to add extra color bits?

hi anon, its your lucky day, bc i actually have screenshots of that painting's wip stages! i actually paint in grayscale first:

once im happy with the values i clip overlay layers to their respective characters and then airbrush colour onto wherever theyre supposed to go:

after that its just a matter of cleaning up the edges and adding details & additional shading wherever necessary!

also i usually spend a hot minute mucking around with tone curves and colour balance/hue sliders because the colours never look good from the get go