#apologies for the photo quality i don't have a scanner

[most--curiously--blue--eyes]

so in January, @finngualart made this awesome lineart and shared it with the fandom as a coloring challenge. the deadline was end of January 🤣 I really wanted to finish it in time, but I was off my meds and had too hard of a time focusing on anything. so even though the challenge is long over, I still decided to share my final result now that I finished.

I learned so much from this! I'm mostly new to colors, coloring pencils and all that, but this challenge allowed me to try different things. I would do a lot of it differently now that I know, but still I'm proud of this end result.

Thank you @finngualart for this fun challenge!

[blueoctopussss]

I think I finished the Caduceus illustration I've been working on. I'm not 100% happy with it but I'm happier than I was last night so I'm calling it good for now.

He's in his home in the Blooming Grove, which was described as stone building with an arched window that used to have glass but doesn't anymore (I don't remember the exact phrasing but I listened to that scene while I was planning this drawing). It makes me sad to think of him alone for so long in a place that is falling apart, waiting for someone to come so he can leave.

Below the cut are some progress images and an explanation of why the photo quality is poor.

I apologize for the poor photo quality, but I don't have access to a scanner currently. I will upload a better quality version if I figure that out (my college has a scanner in the library but you have to bring stuff to a librarian to scan and that makes me anxious because I think it's intended for homework. May or may not be brave and bring it in to scan later this week!).

So many thumbnail sketches! With a bonus Yasha and Beau doodle because I needed a break.

I taught myself to use Sketchup for this and then didn't even end up using the layout I made, but the sketch from that is the top right one in the third photo.

The initial sketch of the illustration is on the left. The right photo is the second version of the sketch (I uploaded it to my computer and made changes in Clip Studio).

Left is a quick grayscale version on the computer so I knew what I wanted my values to be. Right is a photo of the finished colors before line art (I later went back and upped the contrast/shadows).

And here is the finished illustration again!

[krem-does-stuff]

Hi Krem! I don’t know if anyone has asked you this already but I’m very curious, from one artist to another. 🫶🎨 What’s your process for uploading such high quality pictures of your art? Do you have a way you scan each piece? Do you do anything digitally afterwards or do you usually keep it fairly simple when you upload?

(do you mind getting these technical kind of questions? Apologies if you do. Love your watercolor work.)💗

I love receiving technical questions! I literally cannot shut up about this things.

I have a very specific way to scan my paintings which very clearly shows my masochistic tendencies. I paint on fairly large formats (usually 40x60 cm / 15.7x23.6 inches) and I have an old shitty A4 scanner which means I have to scan every 1/4 of the painting individually and then merge all pieces together in Photoshop. Why won't I buy a new bigger scanner and save myself the trouble? Excellent question 🤔

I scan my paintings in 300 DPI so they are really fucking huge on the computer screen. And I do postprocess them in Photoshop in regards to contrast/shadows/lighting/colors, because watercolors is a pale technique and scanning absolutely DESTROYS all of those (or maybe my shitty scanner is guilty of that? What a mystery).

Anyways I made a little graphic to show you the differences.

(The phone camera photo has such a shitty quality and it's unfinished because that's a still from my in-progress video. I don't have any other photos of this painting on my phone, I'm on vacation right now and I didn't take my paintings with me 😂 )

Thank you for asking, I love your art too!

[ruskapi]

°˖✧◝(⁰▿⁰)◜✧˖°

I apologize for the very-clearly-not-scanned quality level of these pictures, I don't have a scanner or a terribly good place to take photos, but here is...

The Glamorous Collection sheet music and Red Shoe Waltz written by Takano Fujio for the OVA/Drama CDs of Fujimi Orchestra.

Fingers crossed that tumblr won't resize them to the point where they're illegible, so long as you click to enlarge them.

[quanticowrites]

His touch (Alden Parker x Reader)

•• Hellooooooo everybody! It had been TWO months since I last posted a fic and I apologize but life has been screwing me on all ends lately. But! I finished a fic so I am WINNING right now. Anyhoo this fic was requested by @toheavenwmydrms I hope you like it! :) Enjoy! ••

You looked at the huge expanse of the Navy Yard. NCIS sure had a nice property. It was hard to believe a bomb nearly destroyed this place in 2012. You found yourself white knuckling your duffel bag. This was your first day as an NCIS agent. The paperwork hadn't even gone through yet. You were transferring from ATF. You were getting tired of constantly going on missions so far from home. By joining NCIS you could stay home more often and still utilize your skills to catch murderers, corrupt CEO’s, and other criminals.

Naturally, when the Director called you and told you you'd gotten the job, you'd done your homework on the team you'd be working with. He said his name was Agent Parker. You couldn't believe your ears. Back when he worked for the FBI you'd worked a few cases with him. By with him you mean you'd see him from afar and had never actually talked to him. He probably wouldn't even remember you if you told him. You made your way in through security and followed the signs to Human Resources. You walked in and were greeted by Agent McGee.

“Welcome to NCIS, (y/n).” You shook his hand.

“Thank you!” He walked around you to the door.

“Ready to meet the rest of the team?”

“Sure!”

“Great, just follow me, I'll show you to the squadroom.” You followed him down a number of hallways. There was no way you weren't going to get lost at some point working here. As soon as you walked up to their section your eyes fell on Parker. Alden, if you remembered his name right.

“Everyone, this is (y/n), our newest member of the team.” Agents Torres and Knight made their way to you first. Offering their congratulations on getting the job and hoped you'd like it there. Parker came up last and shook your hand for far longer than anyone else.

“(Y/n), it's been awhile. We last worked together on that case out in Rhode Island, right?”

“Y-yeah. Serial killer. We didn't make any headway for two weeks as he raked up two more bodies.” Holy FUCK he remembered you? How! He never even said a word to you before today!

“Good memory, a good quality in an agent.” His phone went off and he finally released your hand. Was it hot from how long he'd held it? Or from your blood pressure rising?

“Go for Parker.” He nodded. Agreeing with everything the caller said. You knew the look on his face. They'd found a body. “Alright, who's up for a road trip to Oakwood Maryland? We have a dead Navy Commander.”

“Should I stay here or-?”

“No, this should be a good learning opportunity. You'll see how we operate. Don't worry, I'll make sure you get paid. I know the paperwork hasn't officially gone through yet.” You smiled. You couldn't reply. You found your heart racing, liking how he took charge. Were you admiring him as a boss or was this the crush you had back in your rookie days?

A jogger had found the body. The local police had already taken a statement, but she might have had time to remember something she didn't think was all that important before.

“Torres, Knight, take as many photos of the scene as you can. I don't really want to come back after we get back to DC.” They head off to work and McGee holds up the fingerprint scanner.

“Figure out just who our commander is.”

“Good. (Y/n), you can interrogate the jogger with me.”

“Okay. Should be simple enough.” He laughed.

“When are things ever simple in our line of work?”

“Not often.” You follow Parker over to the local PD cruiser where the jogger is sitting in the backseat.

“Miss Gio?” Parker asked. “We're NCIS Agents Parker and (y/l/n). Is it alright if you tell us what happened?” You pull out your notepad and click your pen. Your memory was fine but you didn't want to miss a single detail. As you interrogate her Parker’s hand lands on your lower back again. Did he do this with all of his coworkers? You had to pull yourself out of a fog as the jogger went on to say that about ten minutes before she got to this bend in the road she'd heard screeching tires. That's enough for Parker to call over Torres and Knight to start looking for fresh tire tracks.

“Hey, Jessica?” You reach out and grab her shoulder before she can get too far away from you. “Can I ask you something?” She blinked.

“Sure. What's up?”

“Does…Parker ever put his hands on you?”

“What?” She looked taken aback and you shook your head.

“No, not like that! It's just, whenever I'm next to him he likes to put his hand on my lower back, and earlier he shook my hand for so long.” Her face changed into a big smirk.

“Oh. I see what's going on.” You could feel the heat rising in your face.

“What?”

“You've got a crush on the boss, huh?” She pats you on the shoulder. “No, Parker doesn't do that with any of us.”

“Knight! Are you helping me make a cast of these tire tracks for Kasie or what?” Nick yelled and Knight winked before running off to join him. You watch after her and cross your arms. Your face turning even more red. Somehow, knowing he only touched you like that made you feel...something. Did he like you back, by chance? How were you crushing so hard?

Parker went to brief Vance on the initial findings as everyone went to their desks and picked up a task. All except you. You didn't have a login yet for the NCIS system. So, you just read through some papers McGee had been kind enough to print out for you. A highlighter stuck between your teeth when you weren't using it.

“Alright, let's have a sitrep!” Parker called out as he headed back to the bullpen. Everyone scrambled to stand up in front of the plasma. Parker finds his way to stand next to you again. You find yourself already arching your back, waiting for his warm hand to caress it. You have to stop yourself from quivering as he finally makes his move as McGee shows what Kasie found out about the tire tracks. It belonged to a Range Rover. And it just so happens the Commanders daughter owns one. Torres clicks the remote and brings up her rap sheet. A mile long list of drug trafficking charges. McGee found some property the daughter owned in the mountains. Seemed like the place someone would go so they weren't suspected of murder.

“McGee, you head up to MTAC and monitor things on the satellite. (Y/n), Torres, and Knight with me. We’ll do some recon just in case she might be running there.”

Torres and Knight were positioned higher up the hill while you and Parker were stationed behind the cabin. You were crouched on the ground and peering around the corner. Just watching and waiting. God, waiting is one of the worst things about the job. Parker puts his hands on your shoulders and leans up against your back. You loved the touching, but you didn't want to get the wrong idea, and you didn't want to look like an idiot in front of your new boss.

“I don't want to over step on my first day but what's with your hands?” You find yourself saying and kind of wincing at how the words came out. Parker immediately backs off and starts stumbling his words.

“Are you uncomfortable? I'm sorry, all those other scenes we've worked together, I thought you were so beautiful but I was married then, so I didn't say anything. Then I thought I saw a look back at the office when you first arrived. I thought-”

“Wait, you never even talked to me before today and you thought about me?”

“Yes.” He breathed.

“I did too. I didn't even know you were married, I just didn't have the nerve to come up to you. I was a rookie back then and you were my superior.” It's a tense minute of silence as you look between each other. Parker's lips suddenly split into a charming smile. It made you forget why you were really doing there.

“Then, uh, how about we go out for coffee after this?” You find his smile contagious.

“I'd love too.”

Tag list: @stanathanxoox , @nikkiwierden , @malindacath , @havlindzk , @countrygal17a , @memyselfandmaddox , @octobersmog , @mizzezm , @diaryofafan17 , @emmitheacefangirl , @littlepersonbigworld , @a-sad-excuse-of-everything

[merchantarthurn]

Hi, there! I saw your art on my dash and it was love at first sight. I'm also a longtime user of alcohol markers, and I was wondering if you don't mind answering what type of scanner you use or what kind of process you went through to make your image so crisp and perfect? When I scan, my art always looks faded and muddy, or so bloomed, the contrast burns. I'm just so jealous of how perfect your art looks!

Oh my gosh I know this pain so well! When I moved into my own place and had to get my own printer/scanner, I did a bunch of research on scanners in my price range that I could buy locally - the one I've got is a Canon Pixma TS8300 series (TS8350 i believe?) and it does a fantastic job maintaining colour and lets you scan at a high dpi. It's still a domestic quality device but it's quite pricy to buy with a printer - I'm not sure if there's models that are just the scanner. But! Here's the same pen (raw scan) under my old scanner and my new one as an example. The second picture is honestly exactly how the colours look IRL, so it really can make a massive difference.

It's unfortunately true though that if your scanner is a really poor quality, it can be more effort than it's worth to fix a scan - don't beat yourself up over that. I've not found a scanner to date that properly translates fluorescent or neon tones though, so if you use a lot of those you may find a lot of editing or a photo is necessary. Photos can look pretty good even with just a phone, just make sure you have a good natural light source, are taking the picture parallel to your art, and see what it looks like on a computer monitor, I've found my phone looks more vibrant than other screens.

However!! One thing I noticed and plagues me like nothing else is that some pigments radically change when scanned as opposed to being viewed under natural sunlight - presumably there's some polarised light guff going on there and the way it reflects in a scanner can change anything from saturation to hue of only that single colour.

This is a bit of a nightmare if you don't account for it correctly - especially if you're blending using that colour, or two colours in the piece scan to look very similar. Here's a recent example that boiled my blood!!! (this is with decobrush paint pens, so this is something to consider with various media)

I've observed that this problem occurs most with the red-orange-yellow end of hues, across multiple scanners and can be very unpredictable - it's not consistently a single-brand issue, nor is it obvious by sight which colours will change. So it's very important to also have a scan of your swatches to cross check - with the same scanner you're planning to use.

It's not the end of the world if a colour comes out a little weird when you scan, so long as you can isolate it and edit it. I'm not very skilled with digital editing unfortunately, but a program with a range of selection tools (CSP's colour gamut selection can be helpful sometimes, but often manually painting a selection area is needed), a hue/sat/lum slider, tone curve and/or level correction tool is a must. I haven't used Fire Alpaca in a while, but I definitely had everything except the tone curve last I checked (and level correction tends to be easier on the pixelating anyway) so that's a good free option for editing.

Apologies for going off on one but! I feel this pain anon, I've been there & it can be super frustrating to have a clean-looking artwork turned into mush by a bad scan. Photos are also a good alternative - if you're struggling to edit them to look like a scan consider leaning into the photo aspect and maybe lie some pencils or pens artfully next to your work XD

[ladyyatexel]

Hi Lady! I've taken up marker/ink cartooning, but I'm feeling discouraged because 99.9% of the fan art I see floating around here is digital. I don't enjoy digital painting nearly as much as I do using the actual physical art supplies, but I'm worried that my stuff is just gonna get written off as crappy because it hasn't got that digital polish. You do "analog" art--do you have any thoughts on that?

Experiences and mileage may vary, but I used to get a lot of people very excited by my Doctor Who work because it was traditional physical media and they had seen so little of it.  I haven’t noticed a lot of disparity between the two types when I put out fanwork in general, though it’s hard to measure something like that perfectly without putting out exactly the same image in both media or something.   Based on my own experience, I would think the reason most of the art you see is digital is because it’s ‘easier’ on many levels.  There’s no mess or extra space taken up to do it, you don’t have to scan or photograph it, extreme lighting and effects are vastly easier to create, and it’s something that doesn’t have to be paid for more than the cost of the tablet and/or software once.  (My work right now is largely digital because of this - the bleeding into my retina nonsense has made doing things traditionally more challenging so even though I’m truly happiest painting in the physical realm, I’m making it work with digital at the moment.)

There’s something to be said for most of the media we see being digital in some manner, too.  All the animated shows we’re watching aren’t painted cells anymore, they’re digital.  Manga art that used to be airbrush is digital.  Disney has been all CGI for ages.  Photographs of humans are more digital.  Everything is HD rendered down to people’s pores.  So there’s a Shiny to the mass media that kind of lingers as The Norm.  I don’t think there are many, if any, people who consciously think, ‘ugh, real ink’ by any means, they just don’t see the ink processed nicely as often as they see digital things that are naturally crisp and internet-ready and so they gloss over it.  

So I think what is critical is having a good scanner and a good grasp on the digital cleanup of a traditional image.  One of the big things I keep being asked about my deer painting is how I got it to look so nice and I’ve discovered people are asking about the quality/clarity/etc of the final scan.   I was baffled for a while (”I just... scanned it?”) but I think I’m just used to cleaning things in a way that not everyone is seeing or thinking to do!

I’m not saying ‘punch up your traditional work with digital effects’ to the point of like adding lensflares or anything -  you definitely don’t have to add digital elements to traditional media to make it worthwhile or enough - just invest in having a nice scanner and learn how to counteract the effects of transfer to the digital realm.  Things like cancelling out indoor lighting conditions if you took a photo, or adjusting levels so white paper is actually crisp white on the screen and not slightly beige.  A scanner can leave a bit of a haze on images and dull some colors, sometimes unevenly, so bringing them back to the hues you see in real life will help other people see on screen what you see on your desk. 

So I wouldn’t be too quick to assume people don’t or won’t like your work because of how it is made, they might just miss it because of what they have been primed to expect (shiny, digital, extremely clean).  If you’ve got a skill and you’re presenting it well, people will see it.  Digital artwork is native to a computer screen, but physical paper is not, so you just have to help with the translation.  

I hope that’s some kind of help!  I don’t know where you are in your art-making adventure, so I apologize if I’ve completely missed the mark as far as what you needed or wanted. 

[stephanie568]

Sorry about the coloring and photo quality, we don't have a scanner. These 2 came to me in a dream last night, had to make up the outfits and the guy (except his hair) since I didn't remember them. I'm gonna share my dream since someone may be able to use it.

TRIGGER WARNING! Obsessiveness, guns, a mention of a skull and ghost.

Girl (Catherine, 16-18 years old) goes back in time and meets her dad and uncle as kids and her great grandmother who figures out she's from the future and lets her play video games with her uncle (who's 7 year old at this point) and a teenage blonde whom the great grandmother said was her aunt but she grew up without an aunt so Catherine follows her to a small door and they both go through and she finds this music house and an older woman who's a music producer and tells her to sing and she starts singing a sad song which makes the house cry. Catherine apologizes but the woman she had promise as a singer and Catherine basically became an over night sensation (and Cathrine wore flapper dresses when preforming). She wanted to perform a song with the blonde girl (who's stage name is SkullGirl) but the music producer told her "no" and said that was weird that that that's what they do in "the human/mortal" world and said that in their world it was all a competition so Catherine quit and ran away. A male fan found her and hugged her and said she was his and told people she was obsessed with him and told her that he became a singer because of her. Catherine ran away from him and somehow got her memory erased so she forgot all about being a singing star and about the guy. He found her again and a Ted like she was an obsessed fan and followed her around and said that he is a great musician and she found a girl with headphones and asked for help so the girl got her out of that world safely. But the guy said "oh O one, oh one with orange hair you are mine and I will find you." Then Skullgirl found the headphone lead, yanked it and took it to a lost and found and told them to lock up the headphones really well and the lost and found people did so. The guy was angry and shot SkullGirl with a shotgun in her leg and she tried running away but he cornered her. He prepared to shoot her again but she ducked and used a shield spell which bounces the bullet to him and he transformed in to a ghost and SkullGirl captured him so he couldn't do Catherine anymore harm. Guy also said he was the best baker but he got eliminated from a junior baking show.