blacksapphire

[blacksapphire]

I'm a contributing writer to The Webcomic Travelogue, an independent repository for webcomics! My first article for the site is about the 5 things you need (besides determination) to start a webcomic. Check out the article, and when you're done, use the discover feature to find some awesome comics to read!

[blacksapphire]

im sure someone already made a post about it but i came across a ublock origin add-on that blacklists around 950 AI websites and disables AI overview ☝️ so u can be free from seeing AI in your search

[blacksapphire]

This is gorgeous, and I love the concept that it's about healing and not just wallowing in that void of apathy (or worse) inside.

theres too many pokemon games where you play as a kid whos full of life and full of potential. there needs to be a pokemon game where you play as a college dropout who lives in a shitty apartment

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[blacksapphire]

This 100% was my feelings when Adobe Flash was announced to be discontinued. So many things just... lost to Time now, with little, or without any, evidence they existed in the first place.

Explore affiliate links, see who your favorite artists watch and listen to, you might find some new and amazing!

somewhere on a long dead forum there's a link that no longer works to a mod to a game nobody plays that would be a valuable contribution to the way people see level design if it got a chance to be seen. somewhere on a website that gets 15 monthly visitors there's a webcomic that woulkd inspire and resonate with you and change your life even in a small way if you could just find it. somewhere theres a music artist that would inspire you for years to come but their work just can't manage to be seen online or off. theres so many things that would change your life that just can't seem to rise to the surface and remain undiscovered and forgotten. or maybe never shared

[blacksapphire]

YOU ARE ALLOWED TO HAVE FUN

If you're an adult...

You are allowed to read comic books. You are allowed to write fanfiction. You are allowed to play video games. You are allowed to collect stuffed animals, dolls, Funko Pops and whatever else. You are allowed to go to cons. You are allowed to cosplay. You are allowed to have a comfort show, even if it's not popular, or hasn't been "on the air" for decades. You are allowed to have anime crushes. You are allowed to have fun. You are allowed to pursue hobbies, even if you can't monetize them or turn them into a career or a "side hustle." You are allowed to take time out for yourself; that's not the same as totally neglecting all your responsibilities to their detriment. You are allowed to write your own life script, instead of following the one your parents and culture mapped out for you at birth. You are allowed to decide you don't want to have children, or don't want to get married. (Or that you'd like to do those things someday, but not today.) You are allowed to go at your own pace, on your own path. You're allowed to have a life that's not all bills and back pain, fatigue and drudgery. You are allowed to play, as well as work.

[blacksapphire]

Hello Tracy

I hope this doesn't come off as rude but I saw somewhere that Lackadaisy supposedly only pays their animators $35 per second, is this true?

I've been wanting to try out to work for you guys some day which is why I ask

No, that is not true. Normalizing transparency may ultimately stand to benefit artists, though, so... We paid $52 per second for rough animation, and $52 per second for cleanup on the pilot. For some more complicated shots cluttered with characters, we paid a higher rate and split the work between multiple animators. We knew that wasn't up to par with a full-fledged studio rate, but it's what we could do based on the Kickstarter budget we had raised in 2020. We were upfront about it with anyone who applied for work, and we enacted a policy of not animating on 1s. Moving ahead, feeling that rate was insufficient, we doubled it to $104 for a number of smaller animated projects we did after the pilot, including the teaser. The "per second" model is a pretty industry-standard way to pay animators, but it is flawed, especially when you consider how common it is to send work back for multiple revisions. We've since been trying to move away from it to a more salary-like pay structure for anything that isn't a short, standalone assignment. ***** For those who may not understand what "per second" means here, it refers to "per second of completed, approved animation". It's not based on the amount of time the artist spends animating, but on the output.

[blacksapphire]

pro-AI in the sense of "they taught a bread scanning computer to recognize cancer cells" etc etc

against AI in the sense of "we stole artwork from hundreds to thousands of artists, didn't credit them and didn't financially compensate them"

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[blacksapphire]

Stop-motion is an animation technique in which objects are physically manipulated in small increments. By capturing 24 frames per second, the object comes to life

The movement of each character, the speed at which they move, and lighting are all taken into account. Everything is crafted and captured manually, frame by frame. By doing everything manually, the handmade nature of this series exudes warmth filled with the unique charm only stop-motion can provide.

As the process requires extreme precision, each animator can only create up to 4 to 5 seconds of footage a day. Approximately 86,000 individual images were required to create this series.

[blacksapphire]

illus. so-taro "Vaporeon" from Sword & Shield Promos

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illus. Ligton "Mimikyu" from Lost Origin

[blacksapphire]

DOING ARTFIGHT! Already doing better than previous years because i’m almost 1 doodle a day so far. PLEASE LET ME KEEP THIS MOMENTUM UNIVERSE! I’ve been needing it.

Sugar (the winged dog) belongs to @lovelysweetdreams (LucidHomey on Twitter) and deserves all the naps.

I am uncertain of everyone else’s Socials but Characters and Species are (c) their owners!

[blacksapphire]

Oh right! I'm supposed to post things on a blog. Good thing I have some sketches to share then! This is my OC, Cadey! An adorable Arcade inspired Dino-Dog designed by LucidHoney!

[blacksapphire]

A complaint sent to Discord (via their "Help & Support" page):

Let's pretend that usernames were always restricted to the Latin alphanumeric character set. Removing case sensitivity alone reduces the number of available usernames by 2^n, wherein n is the number of characters in a given permutation (as the service no longer distinguishes between, for example: ken, Ken, kEn, keN, KEn, kEN, KeN, and KEN; or, for that matter, kent, Kent, kEnt, keNt, kenT, KEnt, KeNt, KenT, kENt, kEnT, keNT, KENt, KEnT, KeNT, kENT, and KENT; as I hope should be obvious, exponential progressions of even small numbers advance quickly).

The elimination of unique tags has an even MORE catastrophic effect, reducing the number of available usernames by 10000^n, wherein n is the number of unique permutations in a given character set (from ken#0000 to ken#9999, for example).

18% of the world population use the Chinese character set, or a derivative thereof. 14% use the Arabic character set. Another 14% use Devanagari (the Indian character set). Those three scripts alone account for 46% - almost HALF - of the world's potential Discord users, and this change prevents them from having usernames in their native script. Throw in Cyrillic and various other minority scripts like Hmong, and it's OVER half. You are alienating a majority of your potential userbase.

Now, there are a large quantity of permutations available in a case-insensitive Latin alphanumeric character set (specifically, 36^n + 36^(n+1), wherein n is the length of a given string, as iterated to the maximum string length), HOWEVER most of these permutations will be linguistic garbage, and thus harder to remember than a meaningful case-sensitive string plus a four-digit number. Or do you expect users to be able to intuitively recall whether a potential new friend's username is "aaaaaaaaaaa" or "aaaaaaaaaaaa"?

[blacksapphire]

Feel like I should tell you I showed my animation college professor your ‘blending and splicing’ tutorial for our class in designing mythical creatures and he added it to the enrichment section of the official course.

He should add the rest of my tutorials too! All Tutorials Tag

Splice Vs Blend (ft: minotaur)

Splice vs blend 2: when to splice! (ft: chimera)

Splice vs blend 3: Ready, study, go! (ft griffons)

Don't forget the creature design masterpost!

[blacksapphire]

What’s your process? How do you control your edges? When I apply my strokes it just goes everywhere and doesn’t look as sharp as yours, what layer type do you use? Thanks from a mediocre artist T_T

That’s a pretty broad question but I’ll try to give some pointers! 

I tend to make heavy use of clipping masks when first establishing a painting to avoid it turning into a confusing mess. I start by “masking out” (coloring in) the subject and then creating clipping masks on top which basically allows you to only color inside the subject and nowhere else. To create a clipping mask, just right click on a layer and choose “create clipping mask”. You can mask out other elements as well, in the golden retriever painting I masked out the lighting on the dog with some large brushstrokes (3rd pic on the process shots below) and then added different hues to it on a clipping mask. 

Beyond that, it’s just a matter of using a decently large brush and making confident brushstrokes. Lower the flow setting instead of opacity if you need a softer brush. And if you need a sharp edge, don’t be afraid to get in there with a hard brush and make it happen.