What would a Yankee Candle go for in ancient Greece?
tbh the most confusing thing about it to them would probably be the glass that the candle is contained in. They might try to buy information about glass from you.
Yeah I should’ve clarified (pun intended). They had glass in the ancient world especially in Rome and Egypt but it was basically super heated sand and color additives put in a mold and often looked opaque and kinda lumpy. Even if it was blown like it was in some regions it wouldn’t have looked like modern glass.
Clear blown glass like you’d see a modern scented candle contained in wasn’t invented until the late Middle Ages and certainly wasn’t mass produced until the 1500s and even then places like Venice that had knowledge of these techniques literally forbid their glassmakers from leaving their city or region so other people couldn’t make it, forcing artificial scarcity and making it a very expensive material.
So if you showed a yankee candle to an Ancient Greek, especially one from a city or something, they’d be like burning scented wax okay not something I’d do but it makes sense. Also how the fuck is that glass transparent.
Like imagine if someone brought you something weird but understandable contained in a material that they said was made out of wood and you could tell that it’s clearly made out of wood they’re not lying about that but it was also completely transparent and see through with no visible flaws. That’s about the level of weird we’re talking about here.
i love this because it's like. why did paleolithic peoples paint the hunt. perhaps to celebrate and honour brave deeds that kept the community alive. perhaps to bring luck for future hunts. perhaps to instruct those who came after how to slay the beast. perhaps to remind us we can: that the mammoth is not unkillable.
hey anyone remember this archival art project i dedicated lots of time to building? it's enormous (on purpose, it's meant to be an explorative experience) and best viewed on desktop, but mobile should be fine too so long as you bear that in mind.
SAINT VAGRANT / KINGFISHER COVE - links, news, events
just remembered it because as it happens now and again, saw people asserting that trans men have never been called/have never said/have never been allowed to say tranny and in response to this i'd like to introduce some history and folk art. alternatively: i have another collection of historical documents from the 60s-80s i'd either love to digitise someday, or hand off to someone trustworthy who's up for the job.
a forcibly discontinuous history creates a collective amnesia— it's in our worst interests! due to the sensitive nature of the project though, i don't advertise it often and insist on respect and privacy 🖤
be canny about what you yourself put out there online. what you want forgotten may stay forever, what you want remembered may vanish forever. approach others with this in mind too.
custom websites are legitimate artistic expression, museums... digital spaces with zine characteristics!
fuuuuck i just realized that the future idealized version of myself cant exist without current me being the catalyst for change and doing hard things. has anybody heard about this
READ: On average, it takes more than 2 months before a new behavior becomes automatic — 66 days to be exact. And considering that 2025 is precisely these many days away, why not start with our glow up plan already?
Physical Glow Up-
BODY
— 5-10K steps a day.
— 7-8 hours of sleep.
— workout everyday for 1 hr atleast- yoga/stretching/pilates/cardio/lifting weights. a workout may take one hour, but your mood will be boosted for the next 12 hours.
— posture training.
— sunlight exposure after waking up for at least 10 minutes.
NUTRITION
— 2-3 liters of water every day.
— limit your caffeine intake.
— avoid sugars as much as you can.
— high protein diet, pre and probiotics.
— more fruits and veggies (+ green smoothies if you like).
— no junk/processed food/trans fat.
— no eating after 8 pm.
SKINCARE
— be clear on your skin type (oily, dry, combination, sensitive).
— once you're clear, use these accordingly- cleanser, toner, targeted serum, eye cream, moisturizer, sunscreen (≥50 spf).
— keep your bedding clean as well.
— no picking of skin on your lips, cuticle etc.
— gua sha to help improve blood circulation and lessen toxins.
— cold therapy may take three to five minutes of being uncomfortable, but your energy levels will be boosted for the rest of the day.
— remove makeup before you go to bed.
BODY CARE
— shower every day.
— exfoliate 2x a week.
— use body lotion (shea butter/aloe vera gel/coconut oil).
HAIR CARE
— wash hair 2-3x a week
— oil your scalp 2x a week, at least 3 hours before shampoo.
— hair mask 1x per week.
— never brush wet hair.
— use silk pillow case.
HYGIENE
— brush your teeth 2x a day, clean tongue and the roof of the mouth daily.
— floss daily.
— cut your nails 1x a week, never remove the cuticles.
— glycolic acid under arm for odor and discoloration.
— never use soap on your coochie.
Mental Glow Up-
MINDSET
— set clear goals- define and breakdown your aspirations.
— start your mornings with positive affirmations.
— surround yourself with uplifting content and people.
— be shamelessly selfish to your career and mental health, remove anyone or anything that doesn't align with your priorities and wellbeing.
— boost your brain health by these 4 neuroscience tools:
difficult first: start your day with the most difficult task (cortisol and dopamine are high in the body meaning that your body/mind is primed to work).
rest your eyes: introduce a micro-pause after learning by resting/closing your eyes - will help retain information better.
tomorrow's worries: write tomorrow's to-do list before bed as it is proven to be effective in helping you fall asleep.
find time to play: engage in low-stake play. can be anything you find fun but where the outcome doesn't matter (induces neuroplasticity + reduces stress).
MIND
— meditation might take as low as ten minutes, but your focus will be improved for the rest of the day.
— no social media after waking up and at least an hour before bed.
— keep aside 1 hr of time to read daily! reading a new book may take five hours, but you will keep the knowledge forever.
— journaling, gratitude.
— digital detox once a week or for 12 hours.
— limit unnecessary screentime, unfollow or cut off people you don't want to see.
JOURNALING
— choose a regular time each day to journal, making it a part of your routine.
— find a quiet, comfortable place free from distractions. light a candle if you want.
— allow your thoughts to flow without censoring or editing.
— write about your feelings and emotions to understand them better. write about things you are thankful for to boost your mood. write about your short-term and long-term goals. identify what triggers certain emotions or reactions
— set a timer for 5-10 minutes and write continuously during that time.
— reflect on both positive experiences and challenges.
— make lists, journal your thoughts on these questions.
— journal at night to clear your mind before bedtime, because emotions and thoughts lose their power once we acknowledge them.
— a gratitude practice may take five minutes, but your mindset will be shifted for the rest of the day.
AFFIRMATIONS
— customise affirmations to your needs.
Personal Life-
WEEKLY TASKS
— initiate small changes: begin with small, manageable tasks such as making your bed or cleaning your room every sunday.
— celebrate your success: reward yourself when you achieve your goals or have a consistently productive week. consider treats like buying flowers for yourself or watching your favorite show.
DAILY WORK
— set achievable goals: establish realistic goals for the day, week, or month ahead.
— track your progress.
— organise your work space, declutter your shelves etc.
— embrace the power of lists: keep a list of tasks to be done and their deadlines. this way, you start each day with a clear plan. to make it visually appealing and motivating, consider using productivity apps like evernote, habit tracker, or notion.
PRODUCTIVITY TIPS
— wake up early.
— plan ahead everything, do scheduling. you can use:
google calendar / notion / tasks .
— if the task takes less than 2 minutes to finish, do it immediately.
— countdown rule, if you are procrastinating, count 1-2-3-4-5 and jump.
— start slow, don't rush and try to do everything at one time.
— follow a proper routine, use app locks based on screentime.
— pomodoro technique, 25 min work, and 5 min break.
— schedule longer break times as well e.g 30 min nap.
For this gif tutorial I’m going to try to keep it as basic as possible, I may add a few tips for coloring at the end, but for the most part this is going to be how I make my basic gif. Also I’m not going to use my vapoursynth to process the video beforehand, just because I know not everyone uses it and it’s harder to learn. This is going to be just a downloaded mp4 video through the gif process. Don’t let the idea that this is a BASIC TUTORIAL fool you, I’m going to try to teach you a lot of things. It’s gonna get wordy, but i will try my hardest to keep the process easy. I’m just going to explain what things do instead of having you just copy + paste my method and not know what it means. okay? okay.
here is the colouring tutorial i promised to go with my beginner's gifmaking tutorial.
to save image space, i've written up a simple explanation of how each adjustment layer works here, so i'm just going to over my colouring for these 4 different gifs.
as always, very image heavy underneath
there are many ways to get the same results and i'll use various methods usually just based on what i'm feeling at the moment. some of it is a little convoluted, but hopefully this will give you a rounded idea of how it all works so you feel more comfortable playing around with your own colouring
NADJA
this is the base gif with zero colouring adjustments, just resized and sharpened.
unless the base gif is already very bright, which doesn't often happen because directors nowadays are allergic to light, the first layer i add is always a brightness/contrast layer. i don't adjust any of the sliders, i just change the blending mode to "screen", and then adjust the opacity if needed. this gif was pretty dark, so i left it at 100%,
my next layers are always curves to even out the white and blacks. i use two curves layers, one for white and one for black. i used the white drop-picker and selected just below the lightshade on the lamp behind her, and for the black drop-picker i selected her hair near her neck which gives us this
it's already looking much better, it's not as green tinted, but i want to make the red of her dress pop a bit more. in order to do that without making her face too red, i'm gonna remove some of the yellow. so next i'm gonna add a selective colour layer, and under the yellow channel i moved the yellow slider to -5 and the black slider to -52. now
now that the yellow is reduced, i add another selective layer, and under the red i move the cyan slider to -66 and the black slider to +29. now the red of her dress pops and her face is still a realistic tone. when i first made the gif, i added the red selective layer first, then added another selective layer under it and adjusted the yellows to offset it. you can always shift layers around or add a new layer underneath as you go.
voila
TOMMY
here is our base gif
this scene is better lit than the nadja one, but i prefer bright and colourful gifs, so i'm gonna once again add a brightness/contrast level and keep it at 100%
and then the curves layers to even it all out. since there isn't a spot that is immediately noticeable as white, you can hold the alt button with the white dropper selected and it will highlight all the white/very near white pixels. you can also zoom real close in to select specific pixels. i selected a from the white area around his chin/mouth. the same process works for finding a black spot with the black dropper, and for that i selected from a dark spot in his hair
the curves layers evened it out but also made the gif a bit more red and warm toned, and since i've decided i want the end result to be more blue/green, so i'm gonna add a colour balance layer. in the shadows channel i moved the cyan/red slider to -16, and the yellow/blue slider to +11
now the gif already looks great, it's bright, skin tone is accurate, he's not washed out, but like i said i like my gifs colourful, so i'm gonna add two more selective colour layers. in the first i'm gonna adjust the greens, bringing the magenta slider to -87, and the black slider to +81. in the second layer i'm gonna adjust both the blues and cyans, because when you see blue in a gif it's rarely ever straight blue or straight cyan, so always adjust both. (you could adjust the blue and green in the same layer, but i prefer to do them separately in case i need to move the layers around)
now finally i'm gonna add a hue/saturation layer because i think the blue of his suit is too blue when the sky behind him is more cyan. (also, since you only have 256 different colours to work with, you don't want too many different colours otherwise it will distort the colouring.) in the blue channel i move the hue slider to -12 to make the blue a bit more cyan, and i also move the saturation to +38 to make it pop more
and voila
RHAENYRA
here is the base gif
(this one is going to get very convoluted and imo best exemplifies what colouring gifs is like most of the time)
as always, a brightening layer set to screen
now the curves layers. for the white i clicked on her hair at the top of her head, and for the black i i clicked in the shadows to the left of her.
but as you can see, while it added contrast, it also made the gif more green tinted than it was. you could click around more, or manually adjust the red, green, and blue lines on the curves until it looks better but i decided to add a channel mixer layer instead. in the green channel i set the greens to -95, and in the blue channel i set the blue to -97
next i wanted to add a little contrast, but i find that using the contrast in brightness/contrast can saturate it too much, so instead i added a levels layer. first i adjusted the bottom bar, moving the right slider to 230 which reduces the overall brightness of the gif, so when i adjust the top bar it doesn't brighten the gif too much. on the top bar, i moved the right slider to 212, and the left slider to 9
now, i'd like it to be not exactly warm toned, but less cool, and while i could use colour balance or a photo filter, i'm instead going to add a gradient map, using the default gradient pink 08, and setting it to blend mode soft light at 50% opacity
next i just want to increase the blacks a little, so i'm gonna add a selective colour layer and under black i'm gonna set the black slider to +10
it's still not as warm as i'd like, so i'm gonna add a colour balance layer, in the midtones setting the cyan/red to +10 and the yellow/blue to -5
we're almost done, but i want to make her dress pop a bit more, so first i'm gonna add another selective colour to bring the yellows down a bit, setting the black slider to -15
and finally one more selective colour layer, in the reds, setting the cyan slider to -50, the yellow slider to +10, and the black slider to +15
voila
NATALIE
here's the base gif
as always the brightness/contrast layer set the screen
now the curves layer. for the white, i zoomed in and selected a pixel on her cheek under her right eye. for the black i the dark spot just above her head
now she's very yellow, so i added a channel mixer layer. in the red channel i set the reds to +88. in the blue channel i set the reds to +10
she's still a little too yellow for my liking, so i'm gonna add a hue/saturation layer, and under the yellows i'm gonna adjust the saturation to -60
finally, i want her to be a it brighter, so i'm gonna add another curves layer, but instead of using the drop, i'm going to manually adjust it. the two points along the line are where i selected it and then i dragged until it looked how i wanted. i start with the upper dot, which made it brighter and moved the line into an arch, and then selected at the lower end of the line and dragged in back closer to centre to add some darkness and contrast
voila
and that's how i do my colouring. it's generally all trial and error, using a layer to fix one thing and then needing another layer to fix something the previous layer did.
play around, have fun, see what works for you and what doesn't. it will take a while for you to develop your own method and style, and even then you'll come across scenes that make you question if you have any sills at all. you do, directors just hate us
do you have a coloring tutorial? your gifs are so nice and vibrant, how do you do it? :)
hi, here's a simple basic coloring tutorial that I use pretty much for all of my gifsets:
I won't get into the basics of making a gif as this is just a coloring tutorial, but here is my gif after I just crop and resize it:
and here it is after I sharpen it:
sharpen can affect the depth of shadows in a gif, so I do this before I add any coloring, but I know some people color first and only then sharpen, so both ways work!
alright, ready for some fun coloring? let's go!
before adding any adjustment layers, I suggest creating a new group, so all of your coloring changes can neatly sit in one place.
I always start with levels and curves, they often help to make the overall gif more natural if the lighting is too yellow, too dark, etc., it's a very useful guide, especially if you're new to gifmaking. so, let's start by clicking on the levels icon, a new adjustment layer should appear over your gif layers:
the next step is to click on each of these little icons (I usually only use the top and bottom ones) and to select the lightest and the darkest parts of your gif. pick the top one, select the darkest part and then pick bottom one and pick the lightest part, you should see some changes on your gif, sometimes they're subtle, sometimes they're very obvious:
in my gif the lightest part is somewhere near her shoulder where the light hits, the darkest part is her sunglasses (if there are a lot of dark/light parts, I just click around and see whichever looks more subtle. for example, I tried the part on top of her head where the light hit, but it made the gifset too blue because the lighting is yellowish, but since the whole scene is not very yellow, it looked weird so I'm sticking with her shoulder, it just simply looks better overall):
and then I do the same thing with the curve adjustment layer, selecting the darkest and lightest part of my gif just like I did with the levels layer:
while this is a good guide for beginners, it doesn't always fix all the problems. it can be quite harsh, so I recommend setting the opacity to a lower percentage and if it looks a little weird, sliding the arrows to one side and another with each color until it looks better to you:
like I said, it's a good guide but manual work is often needed, don't be afraid to mess around with the settings. for this gif I set levels layer opacity to 60% and curves to 37%.
moving on, I'm adding a selective color adjustment layer to fix how the skintone looks with red and yellow colors. it differs with each scene, sometimes the skin is too yellow and orange, so I add more cyan and less yellow but in this case I chose these settings and I set the opacity of this layer to 35%:
I want to mention that with poc it's very important not to mess around too much with their skin tone and not to white-wash and orange-wash them, there are quite a lot of tutorials on how to avoid doing that.
the next layer I add is exposure, I want to brighten my gif a little bit. you can do that by selecting either brightness or exposure layer like I did:
the scene I'm working with is pretty bright, so I'm not adding too much of exposure, here are my settings:
next up, I want to deepen the shadows a little bit, so I use a gradient map for that:
I use black and white gradient and set the opacity to 10%:
moving on, color balance is another great trick to make the gif look more smooth with one consistent color overall:
if I'm working with scenes that have a lot of green/yellow in them and I want to get rid of that, this is a quick way to slide the arrow to the opposite color and soften it a little bit by adding another color. I usually like to add more magenta to midtones and make the gif have a little bit of a pink look. here are my settings for this specific gif and the opacity of this layer is set to 30%:
and here's what difference it made to the gif:
as you can see, the colors outside the circle are less green on her skin and hair. it's all coming together nicely!
let's move on to the background colors. I add another selective color layer and I'm gonna play with the colors I want to enhance the most. in this case it's green grass and her blue clothes. here are my settings for these colors:
and finally, to enhance the vibrant coloring even more, I like to add one final hue/saturation layer:
here I like to add more saturation to the colors we're focusing on in the background and add around +20 of saturation. I did this to green, cyan and blue colors:
and that's it! here is the finished gif compared to the completely raw one:
this coloring tutorial is very basic, but it works for most scenes I work with, I just sometimes focus on other colors, add more or less layers but the overall process is very similar.
I encourage to mess around with all the settings and see which ones look the most pleasing to your eye. let me know if you have any questions :)
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