#getting back on my reading grind!!!!

[tumblasha]

book review: yellowface by r.f. kuang

overall rating: ★★★★★/5

literally it was so good; i couldn't put it down once i opened the ebook on the plane. originally i was reading the vegetarian by han kang, but the ebook download didn't finish (it ended suddenly on a random page), so i started this one!!

synopsis: (cw: anti-asian racism) athena liu is a very famous author. her college friend june hayward is not a famous author (her first book flopped big time). athena suddenly dies and june finds athena's latest unfinished manuscript. after various edits (including to her own name, now "juniper song"), she publishes that manuscript as her own. the story follows the rest of june's story with this new book

this book was literally so good. every other sentence was just this white woman saying some microaggression (author makes it v obvious that she's wrong in a funny way). i was on my flight back home and i just read this book for ~3hrs w/o stopping. kinda feel bad for the guy sitting next to me who saw me make this "shocked but about to start laughing" face i always make lmao

i've always liked kuang's writing! i read the poppy war by her, and it was really good too (started the second book that trilogy but school kept me busy) ((might re-read))

one little thing is that i saw this tweet a month ago that said "it sounds like kuang has an agenda and is just using these characters as a vessel" which doesn't make sense since that's all that fiction writing ... is. alas, sometimes june acted so comically racist that i felt that tweet bounce around in my head, but there's nothing we can really do about that

pls read! and support ur local libraries. this review was sponsored by the libby app /j

[ricky-mortis]

A portrait of Sir John Herschel because I‘m normal about Pulp Musicals

[covvboytears]

The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro

[chocokano]

it is officially the one year anniversary of hz episode 16, aka THE spinel pokemon episode, therefore!

a redraw of my very first (08/01/23) digital drawing of spinel (*'▽'*)

plus cool overlay hehe

i can't believe it's been a whole year since he got his big episode ∑(ﾟДﾟ) i don't think i'll ever be as excited for any episode as i was for 16

here's to another year of this freak !! maybe he'll actually show up soon outside of a 5 second appearance that sets up him being suspicious just for it to be forgotten for months

og under cut! (old art alert)

[kacievvbbbb]

Gonna do two cause I haven’t done them in a while. And because I want to encapsulate the whole goth family

- @Alonesomes, Crybaby

Do I even have to say it or can you see the vision?

This is just very Mihawk. I mean he lives by the blade ever meaningful relationship he has (except perona) is defined by it and he one day hopes to die by it.

You get the sense that he is more sword than person that Yoru is probably his soul made physical form.

And

(I swear I couldn’t find a credit for this anywhere so if you have an idea please let me know)

But yeah this is very Perona and Zoro. I can imagine Perona just telling Zoro all her fears like her deepest fears that she’ll never really belong anywhere and Zoro dumbass that he is will just be like “well you’re here now aren’t you” and down a bottle of absinthe. Like he just has the bluntest form of reassurance it’s honestly so nice. And if Zoro (maybe after he loses his eyes or just after a really bad day) feels like what if l he won’t even beat Hawkeyes what will that make of him then and perona would laugh in his face and tell him he’s still young and the old man’s just gonna keep getting older so who knows maybe sim for his bad hype. And then she’ll paint his nails.

Like they just feel like they would never actually, out loud in the exact words, reaffirm each others dreams or dismiss their fears but Zoro will let Perona paint his nails and do her share of the chores and Perona will make stitch up his cuts and make him a snack and they’ll know.

[mikeru6]

heyyy mutuals sorry i disappeared off the face of the earth!! i almost failed like 3 of my classes so. had to get that worked out. but it’s fine now so im back:3

[knifekris]

every day i struggle to make choices

[quirinah]

how do you get your colors to look so nice and your lineart so red and vibrant? i love it

omg anon thank you!! 😭 im going 2 be honest I am Not Great with color theory... but i like having my sketch pages look cohesive to me...

BUCKLE UP this is going to need a readmore bc i like talking.

I always sketch in neon colors it's a habit i picked up from an old teacher but I'll think of a color usually on a whim and draw with that. and then if i want to draw something else ill pick another color that i think goes well with the page. usually most of my color schemes r analogous (colors right next to each other on the wheel)

yanked this from recent dunmesh post; i kept most of my colors within the pink/red/orange range.

i wouldn't recommend doing everything in monochrome or analogous palettes though because it's sort of a guilty crutch of mine XD.

sometimes when im coloring ill change the layer mode of the sketch. color burn gets you either very very bright or very very deep colors depending on the color of the flats underneath. multiply and linear burn do the same thing but they're a lot tamer and generally always return darker colors. im sure there's some technical bits behind this though. ill either color my lineart afterward to compliment the color of the flats, leave it as is, or mess with layer modes if i feel like it. my favorite trick is color burn + linear burn + some combination of two lineart layers and just fiddling until i get a nice burn effect.

mithrun was done with crimson red on color burn.

coloring... like 999% of this is relative color which is like. kind of the idea that colors look different when placed next to each other. if you eyeball it a bit it's pretty noticeable.

what i used to do a bit ago was i would fill in the area i wanted to color with one big mask of color, make a new layer that has a clipping mask down to the flat layer of color, and then draw my actual flat colors. the color of the mask helped me pick my flat colors bc if I picked a color i think stood out too much next to the mask i could kind of just adjust it until it looked a little more cohesive.

old ish drawing next 2 a canon reference. i ignore local color a lot...mea culpa....but my overall color palette here was a light pink, so the shirt here is actually a desaturated pink? or violet i believe. if you shift sort of that purple color far enough into the gray area of your color wheel it can take on a blueish or even greenish hue. it being next to a lot of warm pinks/fuschias helps.

a neat thing that kind of helps is that if you desaturate or saturate certain colors they can kind of take on a certain hue? not sure if this makes sense. sort of how orange here turns tealish blue the grayer it gets. so if im drawing something that's predominantly orange and i have a blue color i can just take an orange color and desaturate it until i get a color that sort of looks like blue. and that way it kind of looks more harmonious? at least to me XD

shading. i don't apply serious lighting to a lot of my drawings, but a helpful bit is that the shadows tend to be the opposite of whatever color the lighting is? i try to think first about the "mood" or the main color i want to go for in the drawing and then i pick a shadow color opposite of that. so for here, i wanted the lighting to be a coolish magenta so the shadows r lime green. if there's anything off i fiddle around until i get something i like. the shadows on the skin here were too green initially so i shifted them a little more orange.

there's a "band" of color going on between the transition of the shadows to the light. generally this could be for a lot of reasons and i tend to use it differently (core shadow? overexposure? etc etc). but this is a color post so ill try not to go too off track.

but generally digital doesn't "mix" colors the same way traditional colors do if you use RGB (cmyk is a bit better with this but is kind of a pain to get used to), so to make blending a little less muddy, i sometimes add an intermediate color to smooth things out a little. for example, mixing digitally blue n yellow tends to get you gray, but generally, blue + yellow makes green, so if im making a blue->yellow transition ill slap some green color in the middle so it flows a little better.

I do a lot more cel shading nowadays. if you've been on here for a while earlier this year i have another style of coloring but it's not really accurate to how shadows really work so i wouldn't recommend looking at it. it's mostly to add zest and texture to the underlying flat colors.

coloring your lineart does a TON to helping your colors look vibrant, though its like the garnish on a dish to me (same with shadows). i think it's good to try and play with your flat colors and try to make sure those look in order first before adding flourishes. usually ill leave it a dark, saturated color that again matches my overall palette but sometimes i go in and color them by alpha locking my lineart layer and picking a color that matches the flat colors underneath? not sure how to explain it properly.

i used a darkish purple for shuro's ponytail to match the dull red of the flat colors (more relative color! trying to simulate a black/brown while keeping the pink palette there) but a lighter crimson for laios's blond. the light was this super intense like blush pink so i thought it might be cool to add this neon salmon red in the areas of that light to really give off that vibe of a very bright intense rim light.

sometimes you could also tweak with gradient maps or color balance, which adjusts hue based on how light or dark a color is. these r fun to mess with as a final touch but i need to watch using them because they can become crutches real fast XD but those are also just tools to help you. in the end just developing a good sense of how color works and how you want to use it is the best place to start.

LONGASS ramble but yeah. tldr just kind of train ur eye for color and look at what you like best. which is unhelpful and a little sucky but it really is just observation and practice and maybe some personal zest.

happy drawing!

[six-of-cringe]

Firepox just doesn't have the same ring to it

Bonus:

[raeganpog]

Rae rae and her bae bae

[empathicxo]

working on another 5+1 fic (this ones already 10k and i'm only at the 1st part). any billy batson fans in the chat.

[gontagokuhara]

have managed 2.6 hours of work being available to me in the 4 hours sitting down TRYING to work i’ve spent at my fucking computer and my paycheck may be suffering but you know what isn’t? chapter 24. positively COOKING on the new chapter + hoping to be done at this pace by wednesday

[risingsunresistance]

feels weird to not have much to post, i feel like i basically disappeared off social media compared to how i used to post but. there is simultaneously so much going on (things that are boring/heavy and not fun to post about) and nothing at all going on (i have not been able to play anything very much and havent been watching anything besides random documentaries i stumble across), leading to me having nothing to say lmao

i did finally write down a bunch of hypixel worldbuilding headcanon junk instead of having it only be word-of-mouth between me and ark lol. only 1700 words, i can do better 👍 it was literally only about admin magic, what exactly it means to "hack," what a server is, and limbo kjgfhk. i might make a big post about the limbo section one day :]

[chiistarri]

actually you should always go for it because even if it doesnt turn out the way you wanted at least you tried and now know instead of living your life with what-ifs!!!!!!

[nervocat]

Got bored hunting might be getting back into the orv obsession HAHA

[infizero]

grgrhgahahh i wanna read more pokespe but i cant do it on my phone and im not unpacking my stuff until the morning