sheepfilms
Xuebing Du
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
pixel skylines
Janaina Medeiros
Discoholic 🪩
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JVL
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Jules of Nature
hello vonnie
Keni
★
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⁂
Claire Keane
will byers stan first human second
if i look back, i am lost
we're not kids anymore.
ojovivo
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@tutorial-stuff
Disclaimer: I don’t know for sure if this technique was done historically, but I’m willing to bet I’m not the first person to have ever tried it and found that it works. Do with that what you will!
More archery nonsense, as always, can be found on Patreon
thinking about that one wordless calvin and hobbes sunday strip thats just calvins dad ditching his work to go play in the snow... its going to make me cry
ohhhh my god
”#I LOVE that the comic keeps the lens on Calvin’s dad to the degree of not even showing Calvin’s excited face when his dad surprises him, #You can see the joy and excitement of the moment in his pose and reflected in his dad’s expression, #it’s a great little artistic decision, #I realized what gets me about it it’s the hat covering his dad’s head and hair so the dad just looks like Calvin. #you don’t HAVE to show Calvin! You already see him in the dad becoming a kid for a moment you only have to draw that once”
(source)
Unsplash - photography, illustration, & art
Pixabay - same as unsplash
Pexels - stock photos and videos
Getty Images - photography & illustration
Veceezy - vectors and clipart
Gumroad - photoshop brushes (and more)
StockSnap.io - stock photos
Canva - needs login but has lots of templates
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
recently found out about openverse which i think aggregates a bunch of creative commons images from flickr, wikimedia, nasa etc… pretty handy
I’m shocked so many people don’t know about my go to – Morgue File.
It’s full of searchable, rights free images uploaded by photographers.
"Aro/Ace person gets given a love potion" story but instead of them being immune or whatever, it DOES work, and they realize IMMEDIATELY that they've been fed a love potion because this feeling is so wrong and foreign but everyone keeps laughing off the idea of it being a love potion because "they were probably just a late bloomer" or "no, you just finally found the right person!" and it's just a horror story about how no one believes them even though they know, they KNOW this isn't right and they can't stand it.
All the people who keep saying “or, consider, they just suddenly really love their family/friends/pets/hobbies/etc!” in the notes 1) are missing the fucking point and 2) owe a loveless aro ten bucks
It's about the feeling of something foreign invading your body and your mind. It's about finding yourself inexplicably obsessed with something that's completely out of character for you. It's about feeling like you've been body snatched and absolutely nobody around you is clocking the imposter. It's about being forced to confront how there isn't anyone around you who would even be worth loving, because if they were then they'd be trying to help you when you say you need help, for no other reason than that you have said it.
It’s sad how much of what is taught in school is useless to over 99% of the population.
There are literally math concepts taught in high school and middle school that are only used in extremely specialized fields or that are even so outdated they aren’t used anymore!
I took calculus my senior year of high school, and I really liked the way our teacher framed this on the first day of class.
He asked somebody to raise their hand and ask him when we would use calculus in our everyday life. So one student rose their hand and asked, “When are we going to use this in our everyday life?”
“NEVER!!” the teacher exclaimed. “You will never use calculus in your normal, everyday life. In fact, very few of you will use it in your professional careers either.” Then he paused. “So would you like to know why should care?”
Several us nodded.
He picked out one of the varsity football players in the class. “You practice football a lot during the week, right Tim?” asked the teacher.
“Yeah,” replied Tim. “Almost every day.”
“Do you and your teammates ever lift weights during practice?”
“Yeah. Tuesdays and Thursdays we spend a lot of practice in the weight room.”
“But why?” asked the teacher. “Is there ever going to be a play your coach tells you use during a game that requires you to bench press the other team?”
“No, of course not.”
“Then why lift weights?”
“Because it makes us stronger,” said Tim.
“Bingo!!” said the teacher. “It’s the same thing with calculus. You’re not here because you’re going to use calculus in your everyday life. You’re here because calculus is weightlifting for your brain.”
And I’ve never forgotten that.
THIS.
When it’s taught right, learning math teaches you logic and how to organize your brain, how to take a problem one step at a time and make sure every step can bear weight before you move to the next one. Most adults don’t need to know integrals, but goddamn if I don’t wish everyone making arguments on the internet understood geometric proofs.
Scientific concepts broaden our understanding of how the world is put together, which does not mean that most adults ever really understand how light is refracted through a lens or why spinning copper wire creates electricity–and they don’t need to. But science classes in general are meant to teach the scientific method: how to make observations and use them to draw conclusions, how to test those conclusions, how to be wrong and grow stronger from it.
History isn’t about dates and names of battles, it’s about people, patterns, things we’ve tried before and ought to learn from. It’s about how everything is linked, how changing one circumstance can lead to changes in fifty others, cascading infinitely. Literature is about critical thinking, pattern recognition, learning to listen to what somebody is saying and decide what it means to you, how you feel about it, and what you want to do with it.
Some facts matter: every adult should know how to read a graph, how global warming works, some of the basic themes and symbols that crop up in every piece of fiction. But ultimately, content is less important later in life than context.
The good thing is, students who learn the content are likely to pick up at least some of the context, some of the patterns of thinking, even if they don’t realize it. (The unfortunate thing is how the current educational system prioritizes content so much that a lot of students, and a lot of adults, don’t see the point in learning either, and teachers are overworked and held to standardize test grading scales such that it’s hard for them to emphasize patterns of thinking over rote memorization, etc etc etc, but that is a whole different discussion.)
I would also add that giving as broad an education to as many as possible gives everyone the opportunity to follow a career that might use calculus. Or colour theory. Or electromagnetism. Or [insert specialism here]. If we gatekeep specialisms, those careers are only available for the ones who were privileged enough to have the background training. That’s why Classics as a degree subject is full of private school kids: it’s not offered in state education.
Not feedist at all but if any of you are looking for plus size characters that are just… great people, heroes even in a story- check out “common side effects”!
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a, speaking plainly, *fat* character be so clearly & meaningfully written as a hero. The show hasn’t touched on his size at all but his belly is large and protrudes his waistband. It’s always out, and it literally 0% defines him or how people talk to him. It’s an excellent show in its own rights but if you want to see a bigger guy not be a villain, or a comic relief best friend, then *watch* *this* *show*
some dnd backstory ideas that give your character a reason to leave home that isn’t “everyone in my family died.” (just to say: i have nothing against those backstories (i use them a lot), but its fun to mix it up!)
family/friends/personal
someone close to you is sick. you need to adventure to find a cure
someone stole something important from you and you need to find it
you’ve received a message from a long lost relative and are trying to find them
someone that you love has been kidnapped (maybe you have to earn money to pay a ransom or complete some deed…)
adventuring runs in the family! everyone is expected to complete one quest in their lives
your family/culture sends people out to complete certain tasks when they reach a certain age as a rite of passage
another player’s character saved you in the past so you feel indebted to them and travel with them, protecting/aiding them
there’s a magical drought in your hometown and you have to fix it
your hometown doesn’t have a lot of jobs so you have to travel and send money back home
some childhood friends and you made a “scavenger hunt” where you try and complete a checklist of certain tasks (ie. defeat a barbarian in hand to hand combat, steal x amount of gold, slay a dragon, etc) in an allotted amount of time
quests/jobs
a god/patron has sent you on a quest to do something for them
you’ve been hired by someone to complete a task (and you get sucked into the big adventure along the way)
you’re on a quest for knowledge. maybe it’s to learn the best ways of fighting, maybe it’s something more academic related
your priest received a vision from your god and they sent you on a quest
you’re writing a book about the world and different cultures and you need first hand experience
you’ve found every map you’ve come across is shitty, so you decide to become a cartographer and make your own
you’re a detective who helps solve crimes and need to travel to solve a particular case
you’re a collector of a certain object and travel across the land to find it
you’re apart of an adventuring academy and have to complete a quest to graduate
you’re an artisan and you travel with your wares, trying to sell them. alternatively, you’re trying to spread word of your business and gain new business partners
you worked at a tavern your whole life where an old bard would sing songs of their adventuring party and that inspired you to go and do some adventuring of your own
feel free to add some of your own!
Honestly I get so bored of “MY PARENTS ARE DEAAAAD” backstories. Not to say it can’t be done well, but it makes it a lot easier to give a character some… character… if they have family and friends to bounce off of.
I need folks to understand that "conflict resolution" does not mean
"every time I accuse someone of something":
they will instantly shut up,
not ask what they did wrong,
never attempt to explain themselves,
apologize perfectly in a way that completely satisfies me without me needing to explain how to apologize nor exactly what they need to apologize for,
and then we "move on" but I'm still allowed to shun them and
I expect everyone else to be on my side and hate this person
Sometimes, conflict resolution means you learn that your accusation was unfounded and you were in the wrong. You misunderstood something, you overreacted, and YOU caused harm.
Sometimes, conflict resolution means YOU end up apologizing.
See Also: If you talk about how you're in favor of rehabilitative/restorative justice over punitive justice but your take on any real life situation where someone does something bad is "you are now an 'outlaw' from civil society and everyone is now irrevocably and permanently exempt from any moral obligation to treat you with basic human decency and may take it upon themselves to exact further punishment at any time for any reason: you are not allowed to respond to harassment related to your past actions in any way other than grovelling (and only the specific right amount of grovelling: grovel too hard and you're making it about you); trying to defend yourself means you're not really sorry," then sorry but you aren't in favor of rehabilitative justice, you're the kind of person that used to show up to public executions to throw eggs at the condemned.
(and just to prevent bad faith readings I'm not saying there's anything wrong with not wanting to be around someone who's hurt you or that you're obligated to accept an apology or forgive someone, I'm talking about people going full on Pound Of Flesh bloodthirsty in places like the AITA comments when it's something like "I (30s) got an apology from my middle school bully, I was still mad at them so I stalked them on FaceBook to craft a psychological profile and wrote the optimal list of reasons why they should kill themselves. They got mad and blocked me so I posted a callout thread and tagged their employer" and the comments are like "NTA once a bully always a bully, the fact that they responded with anger proves they haven't changed." I'm saying if you're completely unwilling to ever believe someone can actually change and have no sense of proportionate vs disproportionate consequences and just side with revenge even when you aren't even personally involved with the situation, then you need to reexamine what the hell you think justice means)
Gentle reminder that often creativity decides to hibernate for a bit.
It’s okay. You’re not broken, you’re resting, and much like spring, creativity comes back.
In Art Therapy we call this incubating.
You’re incubating ideas. Like an egg. There’s stuff growing inside. Your ideas are collecting and culminating and melding, merging into something.
Don’t crack it open before it’s ready. Wait until you hear it tap tap tapping with its egg tooth. Then slowly help it from its shell bit by bit.
Be kind. Be gentle. We are all growing things tender and soft but capable of great power if given the time to grow and change.
I was ruminating on this a lot a few months ago, being so frustrated with feeling depleted with the interest to do the thing that usually gives me so much joy, comfort and connection. The thought I held onto was that creativity is the like the Wadden Sea. The ocean is gone and it looks like what’s left is boring, plain mud flats all the way to the horizon. But this is actually precious ground full of life and an important part of our ecosystem. So it is okay to cherish the plainness and muddiness of it. It is just part of the rhythm. The tide will be back soon again.
I want to step away from the art-vs-artist side of the Gaiman issue for a bit, and talk about, well, the rest of it. Because those emotions you're feeling would be the same without the art; the art just adds another layer.
Source: I worked with a guy who turned out to be heavily involved in an international, multi-state sex-slavery/trafficking ring.
He was really nice.
Yeah.
It hits like a dumptruck of shit. You don't feel stable in your world anymore. How could someone you interacted with, liked, also be a truly horrible person? How could your judgement be that bad? How can real people, not stylized cartoon bogeymen, be actually doing this shit?
You have to sit with the fact that you couldn't, or probably couldn't, have known. You should have no guilt as part of this horror — but guilt is almost certainly part of that mess you're feeling, because our brains do this associative thing, and somehow "I liked [the version of] the guy [that I knew]", or his creations, becomes "I made a horrible mistake and should feel guilty."
You didn't, loves, you didn't.
We're human, and we can only go by the information we have. And the information we have is only the smallest glimpse into someone else's life.
I didn't work closely with the guy I knew at work, but we chatted. He wasn't just nice; he was one of the only people outside my tiny department who seemed genuinely nice in a workplace that was rapidly becoming incredibly toxic. He loaned me a bike trainer. Occasionally he'd see me at the bus stop and give me a lift home.
Yup. I was a young woman in my twenties and rode in this guy's car. More than once.
When I tell this story that part usually makes people gasp. "You must feel so scared about what could have happened to you!" "You're so lucky nothing happened!"
No, that's not how it worked. I was never in danger. This guy targeted Korean women with little-to-no English who were coerced and powerless. A white, fluent, US citizen coworker wasn't a potential victim. I got to be a person, not prey.
Y'know that little warning bell that goes off, when you're around someone who might be a danger to you? That animal sense that says "Something is off here, watch out"?
Yeah, that doesn't ping if the preferred prey isn't around.
That's what rattled me the most about this. I liked to think of myself as willing to stand up for people with less power than me. I worked with Japanese exchange students in college and put myself bodily between them and creeps, and I sure as hell got that little alarm when some asian-schoolgirl fetishist schmoozed on them. But we were all there.
I had to learn that the alarm won't go off when the hunter isn't hunting. That it's not the solid indicator I might've thought it was. That sometimes this is what the privilege of not being prey does; it completely masks your ability to detect the horrors that are going on.
A lot of people point out that 'people like that' have amazing charisma and ability to lie and manipulate, and that's true. Anyone who's gotten away with this shit for decades is going to be way smoother than the pathetic little hangers-on I dealt with in university. But it's not just that. I seriously, deeply believe that he saw me as a person, and he did not extend personhood to his victims. We didn't have a fake coworker relationship. We had a real one. And just like I don't know the ins-and-outs of most of my coworkers lives, I had no idea that what he did on his down time was perpetrate horrors.
I know this is getting off the topic, but it's so very important. Especially as a message to cis guys: please understand that you won't recognize a creep the way you might think you will. If you're not the preferred prey, the hind-brain alarm won't go off. You have to listen to victims, not your gut feeling that the person seems perfectly nice and normal. It doesn't mean there's never a false accusation, but face the fact that it's usually real, and you don't have enough information to say otherwise.
So, yeah. It fucking sucks. Writing about this twists my insides into tense knots, and it was almost a decade ago. I was never in danger. No one I knew was hurt!
Just countless, powerless women, horrifically abused by someone who was nice to me.
You don't trust your own judgement quite the same way, after. And as utterly shitty as it is, as twisted up and unstead-in-the-world as I felt the day I found out — I don't actually think that's a bad thing.
I think we all need to question our own judgement. It makes us better people.
I don't see villains around every corner just because I knew one, once. But I do own the fact that I can't know, really know, about anyone except those closest to me. They have their own full lives. They'll go from the pinnacles of kindness to the depths of depravity — and I won't know.
It's not a failing. It's just being human. Something to remember before you slap labels on people, before you condemn them or idolize them. Think about how much you can't know, and how flawed our judgement always is.
Grieve for victims, and the feeling of betrayal. But maybe let yourself off the hook, and be a bit slower to skewer others on it.
Forgetting your character is disabled isn't a "good representation" flex: Writing Disability Quick Tips
[ID: An image with “Writing Disability quick tips: Forgetting your character is disabled isn't a good representation flex” written in chalk the colour of the disability pride flag, from left to right, red, yellow, white, blue and green. Beside the text is a poorly drawn man in red chalk looking down confused at his leg, one is drawn normally, the other is drawn to resemble a basic prosthetic. He has question marks above his head. /End ID]
For a while, I was involved in the booktok and Tik Tok writing communities, specifically parts of the community focused on more diverse books and authors. During this time, I noticed a reoccurring pattern when people were highlighting stories featuring disabled characters, or even promoting their own books, and that was how often people would say "I kind of forget they have [insert disability here] because they're such a badass."
The intention behind this statement is (usually) good, with people trying to show that their disabled characters are self-sufficient and don't fall into the tired old sad/helpless disabled person trope, however, you can - and very much should - do that without erasing your character's disability. If you find yourself forgetting your character is disabled, or your beta and pre-release readers are commenting about forgetting it, then there's a good chance that's exactly what you've done - and as a disabled person myself, if I see that statement being used in your marketing in particular, it's a giant red flag and a sure fire way to make sure I give the book in question a skip.
Remember, disabilities (especially major ones) are a part of your character's identity, and they're important regardless of the character's personal relationship with it. Even if your character doesn't specifically identify with the label of disabled or doesn't really care that much, it's should still be impacting their daily life, even in small ways. If you're finding yourself forgetting about a major part of your character's identity, it might be a good idea to check and make sure their disability is having an impact on the character.
I see this comment most often with amputee characters, and to me, it's a pretty consistently good indication that the author has treated their character's prosthetic as a cure rather than the mobility aid it is. It's far from unique to amputees, mind you (I talked about this a lot when I was discussing the character of Toph from Avatar), but it's when I tend to see it the most. Remember that mobility aids and other forms of assistive technology and assistive magic (if it's a fantasy story) are just that: they're aids, they assist, they shouldn't be cures.
Of course, this wasn't unique to Booktok, I've seen it on nearly every other social media site with a writing and book-focused community at some point, but Tik Tok was just where I spent the most time and it seems to be where I see the most people specifically gloating about it.
THem, beaming: "Oh but I don't SEE your Disability!!11! : D "
Me: "Why not? There's nothing wrong about seeing it. Why are you trying to avoid it? Why look away and then pat yourself on the back for it like it's a moral triumph?"
Yeah don't do it to us, don't do it to characters. Badass and disabled are not mutually exclusive. When I am a badass I am ALSO usually at my most disabled.
tutorial for drawing characters with cleft lip! sorry that it's mostly unilateral-centric but it makes up the vast majority of resources and photos. still tried to get tips for drawing bilateral clefts in though.
please keep in mind that this is an introductory drawing tutorial and has some generalizations in it, so not every “X is Z” statement will be true for Actual People : )
if you draw any characters using this feel free to tag me!!
"I cant draw" then do it bad who gives a fuck.....
Partake in the joy of creation just for the fun of it. Just for a laff.
Me @everyone in the notes
Colors vs Final Illustration <3
I wanted to give folks here a heads up that I've deleted my Redbubble account (they added a crappy fee structure + they've never been good at paying artists fairly), so if you want prints you should use my Inprnt. Thanks!
Commissions are currently open; email at [email protected] for inquiries.
Enemies to “I found you while hurt and had to take care of you and in your vulnerable state I saw a side of you I’ve never seen before” to lovers
Starting a Collection of Dyas
