#im trying out a new workflow and i think i like it

[raphaerolo]

since you asked for requests: a modern day Satine with a fencing sword and angry expression so she can be Stabby Satine

I was entranced by the idea of Stabby Satine so I have slightly more than a doodle ahaaa

Shes pretty and im normal about her o.o

[newttxt]

hi quip! i really like your one piece comics and i am curious how you do them! i'm not good at comics and want to be better at drawing them! how do you learn how to make comics?

thank you!

uh oh... im afraid u have caught me at the perfect crossroad of "bored at work" and "unrelated task ive been meaning to do but keep putting off."

this is long. i hope you like reading (and grayscale progress pics). and of course!!! disclaimer before we begin that this is just how I, personally draw comics. there is no "right way."

quip's comic-making process!

Switching my typing to make this more legible...

My process can kinda be broken down into 6 steps:

Brainstorming

Thumbnailing

Sketching

Panels & Text

Lines

Tones/Colors

1. Brainstorming

My brain is a leaky sieve on a good day, so I sloppily jot down ideas in my phone notes the moment I have them. This helps me when it's time to draw too, because if I feel art blocked, I can look through old concepts and see what catches my interest.

Otherwise, I love drawing for other people's writing. :) And if worst comes to worst, doing manga/comic page redraws in my style teaches me new things every time.

Once I have my idea, I'll usually make a bulletpoint list of "plot points" or "story beats" I want. Then I plan the comic with this format that I've adapted from a tutorial I read once. I'm going to use my most recent comic (original comic post) as an example.

I start in the third column, writing notes of what I'd want to see in each panel. I also include the dialogue (in this case, I didn't have to write the dialogue! it's from the fanfic linked in the original comic post!). I usually write the whole name like [Luffy:], but at this point I've drawn so much of these guys, just the first letter works.

I like to handwrite these notes to get an idea for how much text I'm putting in a single panel.

After I describe all the panels, I go back and separate them into pages. I can't tell you how to know how many panels to a page. It's whatever works for you. I just kinda know about how big each panel will be, and so I can feel when I'm probably running out of space. (Also. You can change things later. I don't in this example, but I add/drop pages/panels all the time.)

2. Thumbnailing

Thumbnailing—as the name suggests—should be done tiny. Too tiny to accidentally get sucked into details.

This is about marking down blobs where items/characters go, and figuring out the paneling. I'll draw and redraw these a bunch of times too.

This is also the most time-consuming/brain-working part for me. If I were in a zine that did progress percentage, I'd try to finish thumbnailing around the 50% mark (but I'm also a moderately fast artist, so your mileage may vary).

I think the terrible quality makes them charming, actually. I really like how silly they look. :')))

I will add, when you draw your "page" rectangle, make sure it's the same proportions as your actual canvas for the final image. You want an accurate idea of how much space each panel will take up, especially if you have a lot of text.

3. Sketching

This is my most recent change to my usual workflow, and it's saving me a lot of time. I make my thumbnails a bit bigger (each one about half the size of the final canvas), and I sketch these basic body forms right over them.

It just helps give me placement for my actual lines!

I usually draw these in a paleish color so I can lower the opacity and not get distracted by them while lining. The random darker parts are to either help keep two forms separate (like when two characters have their limbs all over) or to better define sections that were too sloppy/poorly proportioned.

I also think this helps my poses stay looser, because I have more dramatic/wriggly shapes that aren't too bogged down by proportions yet.

Sidenote: I CANNOT show this here, but sometimes this is when I take videos. Of myself. I prop my phone camera up and shoot a video of me acting each panel. :/// It looks really dumb, but it also shows me fun body language ideas like hand gestures, expressions, weight distribution, etc. Just pretend you're an overdramatic cartoon character, and try not to worry about your roommates or mother walking in on you doing odd things. (You can also use the video for anatomy reference later, but I usually just capture the vibe and don't try to copy the actual video frame.)

4. Panels & Text

Oh, boy. So, the panels are usually just straight lines (though it's fun to make creative exceptions, like a round panel to mimic looking through a spyglass), but there are some fancy rules that I don't strictly adhere to.

I believe (I have no technical training in this. Take everything I say with a grain of salt) the vertical gaps (between two side-by-side panels) should all be a consistent width and the horizontal gaps (between two panels on top of each other) should be another. The vertical ones? Should be thinner? Because you want the eye to easily glide between them, whereas the horizontal gaps should be a visual barrier to keep you from jumping ahead. Just something I've vaguely noticed.

There are lots of fun "default layouts" you can look up. Or keep it a consistent grid. I think it's fun to sometimes have characters/objects sticking out of panels and overlapping others. This is just a matter of taste, creativity, and inspiration. (Read Witch Hat Atelier... It has some of my favorite paneling...)

You may also notice I have already done the speech bubbles. This is, to me, a crucial step. This helps me catch early if I don't have enough room for all the words. It also lets me plan the art in each panel with the speech bubbles in mind. There's nothing worse than working really hard on a panel, and then you realize there's no room for the bubbles.

I also try to lay them out in a way that guides the eye! Even without art, can people tell where to go next? Better yet, if I want people to look at panels out of order (aka not left to right, in my case), can I use the speech bubble path to make them? Here's just a vague example of what I mean.

As an added bonus, doing speech bubbles early also allows me to be lazy! :) Ignore the comic; I'm not supposed to post it yet oops,, There's a whole lot of drawing to do on each comic page, and I am not wasting my time on stuff that will be covered up. So yes, if I hide my bubbles, there are a lot of unfinished lines trailing off into nothing. (As a bonus, if there's a part of a character you're struggling with—and it won't look weird to do so—you can move speech bubbles to just hide the problem area yayyy)

Making the actual bubbles could be their own whole tutorial, tbh, but there are some general guidelines I use.

Zoom out when you choose your font size. You want to know how it will look to the average reader, so it isn't super teeny tiny or way too big. You generally want to keep the same text size for all your pages/bubbles.

When I draw bubbles, I try to size them about one vertical letter height (and some change) around the words [left side]. This isn't always the case though, because humorously large or funny shaped text bubbles can convey different feelings [right side].

On Procreate, I set my bubble lines to Reference and just drag-and-drop the white fill on a separate layer below the lines. (Remember to turn Reference back off again when you're done, or your fill bucket won't work right when you're drawing.)

To get the white outlines I use to keep the bubbles from cluttering up the art, I literally just Gaussian blur an all-white copy of the lines + fills... and then I copy and merge it 5 times until it's opaque enough. This is a terrible way to do it, but it works for me. :')

5. Lines

This is the part that I can't tell you how to do. I literally just. Draw right over my wacky sketched body forms. Boom. Comic drawn.

I'll make three suggestions:

Don't focus on making every panel perfect. Give a little extra love to big ones or ones you want people to linger on. Otherwise, know that people are typically speeding through the art. It's way more important to focus on storytelling than art technique. In my opinion, a good story that's told well will always be better than a beautiful one told poorly. (Some comics are beautiful AND well-written... Alas, I am just a hobbyist who needs to get the ideas out of my head at top speed.)

Put your background lines on a different layer. Put your foreground lines on a different layer too, if you have those. Basically, I try to keep the main part of each panel (usually a character or object) on my lines layer so I can erase background/foreground/etc lines to ensure clarity/focus.

You can make background lines lighter colors too. I have too many numbers sorry. (1) Background. The stuff that's farthest away. Lightest lines. Few details; more focused on shapes and the suggestion of a background (I'm not good at backgrounds). (2) Midground. Same distance away as the characters are. Lines can be black. (3) Also midground, and also the same distance away. But they're very detailed, so I lighten them so they aren't so distracting. (4) The characters. Black lines for focus. For people who haven't seen the comic, I swear they are just hugging. This is SFW. D:

6. Tones/Colors

Do not. Do NOT ask me. I don't understand colors. I hate working with them, but I try because I want to improve. I hate doing anything beyond the simplest grayscale shading. Please go elsewhere for your coloring/tone advice. This is how my color picker looks 95% of the time. I have pre-set "percentages" of black that I got by lowering the opacity of a black layer and just color picking it. I don't even know the exact percentages I used. Good luck out there. Be better than me.

7. Sharing

This is a bonus step that I didn't mention earlier, but it's actually the most important of all of them.

You need a friend. Or maybe a groupchat or discord. A family member or coworker if you're really close like that. I don't know.

Find SOMEWHERE you can spam wips and be cheered on. Drawing comics takes a while, especially if you're trying to tell longer stories than I'd dare to attempt. If I don't force someone to praise me for every line I draw, I shrivel up and die.

Also if and when you post online, add alt text. I'll admit I'm the first person to complain and drag my feet on this, and I literally use a screenreader myself when my eyes hurt (strong prescription glasses wearer). Comics should be accessible, because stories are fun and everyone should be able to enjoy them.

***

Learning???

And I guess lastly, how do you learn to make comics? Two steps: 1) read them and 2) make them. This is the tragedy of creating things.

1) Reading them: I grew up reading comic strips, western serialized comics, and webcomics. I've always loved graphic novels too. Then in late middle school, I started reading manga (Death Note and Haikyuu were my first two), and now I'm trying to read more webtoons (sorry im so slow bree)!

I also... mass-consume doujinshi, thanks to proxy mailing services and bilingual friends/Google Translate/knowing some Korean. (I have an entire bookshelf of doujin, actually,,)

The thing is, it's not usually enough to just read comics. You also need to be thinking. :/ I notice paneling, comic devices, clever comedic timing, etc. as I go. It's just a lot of studying/learning while also enjoying the story.

2) Making them: You just have to start. :( Even if you think they're "bad." My first comics were actually just drawings placed randomly all over the page, connected by speech bubbles (yay... I was already practicing how to place bubbles to lead the eye around the page...). I was going to post a pic here, but I'm a coward. Backscroll my account and you can find some older ones though.

I also know my art in general improved dramatically when I did ten comics in ten weeks for my friend's fic. Don't do this. It hurt my hands/wrists. But do practice in moderation.

***

If you actually read all that... I hope it made even a modicum of sense. And maybe it was even helpful? Just know at the end of the day, there is literally no right way to draw a comic.

And if you aren't ready to go for it yet, you can start by just adding a couple speech bubbles to your illustrations or doodles! It's a way to add storytelling and dialogue writing to things you may already be making.

Yay. I love comics. :))))

[lucabyte]

Psst. What's your process for Comics? I would like to Know (Because your ISAT comics make me a little bit feral and I would like to learn)

Okay so the cop out answer is: i basically wing it every time since im very very new to making comics and my method is still evolving. but that's not helpful and i like to yap so ill talk through My Method anyway

So first of all: Ideas.

All my ISAT shit is like. extremely dialogue heavy & mostly focused on the same like. 3 topics and philosophical concepts over and over lbr. So mostly when it comes to drafting that I'll just let my brain bash the dolls together until i notice either 1. a fucking banger line (this usually becomes a punchline i then work backwards from when writing it out) or 2. that i keep coming back to the same like 'scene' in my mind.

(I'd love to know. how to make this work for like. OCs??? But I haven't quite cracked that one yet sorry)

For the former though what usually happens there is I write things out on my phone (this happened with the bonnie-centric ones a lot?) or i'll leave a voice note for myself. Or, if i'm at my computer it goes straight into notepad, which is where everything goes before i draw it.

so these are just like. Disgustingly strewn about on my desktop. But this is how i type up the comic scripts, which I do before i put the dialogue in csp because csp's text tool sucks ass, but you can see how these end up having Some Semblance of the final formatting? Some more than others. But they don't have much consistency in how i'm tagging the dialogue LOL. (bonus: one of these i never ended up making. because i come back to the same wells SO FREQUENTLY that it gets embarrasing to retread sometimes) Then I just... screenshot the notepad file and paste it into a csp window LOL.

So I've pulled up three comics just because theyre like, recent ones? (Links to all 3 -> x, x, x) And oh yeah immediately they're rather inconsistent. But this is the level of detail i do in my thumbnails. (Hello Golf Ball Loop) MOST of my long ass comics look like the first one though, and all of them follow the same thought process.

I will take the dialogue, and then just draw a panel that i think works with it. Then move onto the next line, and the next. Basically thinking mostly in speech bubble placement rather than anything? But I'll just keep... going downwards until it is done. You can see the speech bubbles tend to include either nothing or the vaguest indicator of what's inside them.

(The third one here is an outlier because iirc I actually had this very visual idea while drawing something else and went to go quickly draw it out so the text actually went right into CSP bc there was so little of it. But it was still panelled really sequentially for what action I know I wanted in each panel.)

Overall this is probably because of my habits from learning animation? I thumbnail as if im storyboarding, if that makes any sense. Or is any different to how people usually do it, anyway.

My friends who actually read comic books have told me off already for my vile leaning-tower-of-pisa bullshit formatting. I understand their criticisms because genuinely what the fuck am I doing half of the time? I like it though lol. It's a reflection of how stream-of-conciousness my workflow tends to be, but fuck if it means the aspect ratios aren't the wooooorst LOLL

Then i resize the thumbnails to be roughly 1920px wide, aspect ratio be damned. And at this point I usually also have to draw a big grid so that i can align the comic and make it not on a weird tilt. The most thought that goes in here is that I try to avoid making panels too samey in layout from line to line, and try to keep vaguely to making panels the same-ish height but a width of the page either in halves or thirds. Making it so they aren't completely inconsistent sizes does a lot for making things not look too sloppy.

My first sketch over the thumbnail usually is neat enough to be The Final Lines because I'm impatient. EXCEPT when i realise its going to get Fucking Complicated at which point i pull out the CSP models and my beloved cubes. Then i take a billion years to pose a consistent scene (and often realise where I need to cheat angles. Like for loop reaching down to sif's face. That doesn't make sense in 3d space so I had to cheat). This is basically par for the course whenever I want to do a scene where there's Any consistency in character positioning and they aren't just Talking Heads.

THEN. After the sketch (which was done with speech bubble placements in mind back at the thumbnail stage) I will finally put in the speech bubbles. This usually means re-sketching them, then putting the text down and doing all the typesetting (VCR mono looks very ugly in CSP a lot of the time so I fuck with the spacing of individual letters a lot) and THEN redrawing the speech bubbles around them properly.

Sometimes I'll fuck myself over here and have to move stuff but ideally, if I weren't working like some kind of fucking barbarian, I'd do the speech bubbles before finalising the lineart. But I don't on account of going straight from thumbnail to final lines. You'd do this during the sketch stage if you were normal.

then it's finally panel border time. And then when I get to this stage I just make like. another few new layers above everything but the text where i just clean up. Everything that I had neglected while drawing. So any extra white lines or places where i just think things look bad and i want to redraw them entirely. I will also sometimes literally make a flattened copy of an entire panel to just move it around slightly. It's a deeply evil part of the workflow and i apologise for it. But also it's the major benefit to drawing in straight black-and-white with no tones. It means i can just overdraw anything that is unclear in the end.

(and reposting again Links to all 3 -> x, x, x for easy comparison if u want it)

ANYWAY for further reading. I know I've already stated these before somewhere on my blog but for ease of access... The major inspirations for how my comics Look are as follows:

1. tumblr user Floralmarsupial's homestuck comics found [HERE]. She did a LOT of straight up black and white comics that are ingrained deep in my brain at this point. These are always in the back of my head.

2. Leo Fox [LINK] regularly gets really strange and esoteric with overlapping panels and unorthodox layout. I stared at these a lot when i was starting to make the first couple ISAT comics even if i'm not going nearly as abstract as him

3. tumblr user the-hydroxian-artblog's comic Hangin' Out [LINK] has GORGEOUS typesetting and their art in general uses a lot of speech bubbles that convey some really funny shit by just resizing the text in funny ways. Gold standard for emotive typesetting and also their lin weight and b/w illustrations are gorgeous.

4. sonic the hedgehog idw keeps me humble and reminds me to make the speech bubbles fucking SMALLER. if im left to my own devices i make speech bubbles and fonts WAY too big so reading a cleanly formatted professional comic book for children reminds me what i should be aiming for in legibility.

anyway hope this helps? the answer really is "fuck it we ball" tho

[asthedeathoflight]

Okay so I was thinking someone should do something adjacent to this band au by @emilywaters but with Rembrandt as the lighting director but i fear that i may be the only person capable of this considering you know. Thats actually my job. But i have too many wips so you're getting this au in post form. Everything I changed from the original post is due to me writing out this entire post before I successfully tracked it down so like it's not me disagreeing I simply forgor.

I'm not sure what like level of fame they were supposed to be in the original but i need them to be doing stadium shows purely for Rembrandt's sake okay she deserves it theyre touring with an ma3 just believe me.

I think Cleon was originally their lead singer but she had to step down for. Reasons. Idk. So the Warriors are hard up bc their producer is on their ass about getting demos recorded for their next album but none of them really feel good about replacing Cleon.

Mercy is a mistreated burnt out pop idol who's just kind of getting listless at this point because she's basically just a prop for a brand and she can't even give a fuck about her music anymore. She meets Swan at a party and they hit it off and get blackout drunk and Swan wakes up the next day with a recording on her phone of Mercy doing a demo of one of the songs she wrote. She takes it in to their producer like here fine theres a demo are you happy and shes like??? Hello???? This is incredible??? Who is this singer??? And Swan is like hahaha. About that.

The producer reaches out to Mercy's management and theyre like um absolutely not she does not want to join your band she's a solo act but then Mercy gets Swan's number somehow and is like i DO wanna join your band actually but im stuck in this goddamned contract. So then its about them getting their record label to go up against Mercy's and get her out of her contract so she can be their new lead singer.

And also more importantly (to me) is the subplot about the like relatively young and inexperienced lighting girl from their home venue who Cleon insisted on hiring for their first tour and who just kind of stuck around and became part of the group. They tour with a disproportionately nice rig bc Rembrandt is a fucking nerd and none of them can resist her puppy dog eyes about getting shiny new toys. And like yeah she's kind of quiet and doesn't talk much in a group but she can hold her own against the fucking overhires giving her shit at whatever venue and not taking her seriously and she gets stars in her eyes when Ajax asks her about programming so like needless to say Ajax is a little bit obsessed with her. Rembrandt's job is half ordering around men twice her size and age and half real-time computer programming live in front of an audience. Ajax never stood a chance. There are always fans trying to see Ajax after the show and Ajax is always in the booth while Rembrandt talks about the latest patch grand ma pushed out and how she hates everything about it and everyone at that company is trying to ruin her life (she will have adapted and forgotten about this in two days until the next patch which alters her workflow .00001% upon which time she will again believe her career is over and she needs to call them to revert the console)

I think probably their relationship is more of a flashback moment bc obviously The Warriors can't be touring while they're looking for a new singer but I think when they're not on tour Rembrandt lives in Portland and does like weird indie performance art shit and Ajax stays in LA with Swan and the others and the long distance is kind of killing them. Could Ajax stay with Rembrandt in Portland for a few months and fly back down when they're actually recording stuff? Absolutely. Does this idea terrify her existentially for reasons she can neither articulate nor overcome? Also absolutely. But on a more fun note Rembrandt drags Ajax to USITT with her every year which is actually kind of fun for Ajax because in addition to Rembrandt being so excited nobody there is impressed at all by her being famous but they ARE impressed that she knows how DMX works. So. Who's laughing now Swan. The flashcards worked.

[spaciebabie]

any advice 4 when u want to keep drawing 2 improve but u cant get over perfectionism ? like when u just dont care how its gonna turn out, if its bad its bad yknow?

ahh yes lowkey ive struggled with this a lot. not as much now as in the past tho, and honestly its beecuz ive developed a more neutral view on myself/my art in general. its going to take time to get to this state of mind, so dont be too hard on yourself when you find yourself falling into bad habits.

advice under the cut (kind of long winded) ⬇️⬇️⬇️

the first thing ive done to overcome perfectionism is focus less on details and more about overall shape and form. when i sketch im trying to get roughly what i want, and i limit the strokes i do in certain parts of my sketch to like 1-3 depending on what im drawing (im ngl i also am very impatient and have created a workflow that makes it so i am able to start and finish pieces as fast as possible LOLOLOL. shrugs. i just like drawing fast).

a good example would be this thing i just drew:

in all of my sketches i tend to use as few strokes as possible and just get the basic idea down. good for not overly focusing on teeny tiny details and worrying about them later (i also use the same technique for lineart, but just end up connecting the lines. thats another tip i have, if you like your sketches more than your fully lined pieces, just line the same way you sketch! or you could also use your sketch as your lineart :P)

another tip i have is to draw from references, and once again, focus mostly on shape/form/the big picture of your subject before going into details (do you know how many planes there are on the human face....i still dont know howta draw faces properly but im not mad at myself anymore about it, i just open up a reference and try to learn). i also recommend having a drawing session where the goal is to draw awfully. draw something you want to draw, but that you're not sure if you'll draw it right, and draw it. dont try to correct it, acknowledge that what you made isnt perfect, and then draw something else. you're learning! of course its not gonna be perfect. but inevitably, you're going to get frustrated. just remember if its something you really want to go back to, you will be able to revisit it in the future. feel your anger and frustration, but do your best to not direct it inward.

small side tangent about shading- I AM SO SHIT AT SHADING SKFHSAFDJHS. people dont tend to notice (surprising), since ig my shading style is considered "beautiful" or something, but if you looked at it on a technical level, there are mistakes everywhere. i havent really tried to improve it. i dont really care most of the time b/c i just like shading for fun. and especially when im shading my sketches, i already have it in my mind that its not supposed to be perfect. its a sketch. this is where im supposed to make all of my mistakes. once i start making my way to the final product is when i start worrying more about if i did the lighting correctly (even then ik im not good at it im not trying to be a god im just trying to draw things that make me happy).

additionally, i really rec u dont try and fudge a sketch until its better if you're deep in a Perfectionist moment. keep the old sketch and start over on a new sketch taking bits and pieces you liked from the original, and improving on those that you dont (shitty thumbnails are also good if you have a vague idea in mind but need ta figure out howta place subjects in your scene). honestly drawing the same thing/idea over and over gets me a better understanding of my subject each time, so naturally each iteration looks better. it doesnt take me that long to sketch tho, so if sketching takes you forever (sometimes if sketching takes you forever its b/c you're a perfectionist skjfskdjf) just think about how much time you're willing to spend on something. remember☝️ its okay to give up/take a break on something and try again later. sometimes you just needta stop looking at your art and like. look at a tree or something lmfao.

i will also say that im not looking to go into a career in art, im more of a hobbyist. ik school environments dont exactly.....help with perfectionism lol. there are certain expectations put on people who go into the art field that are inescapable. if this is the case for you, i still think what ive discussed before can help you, but i also think that you may need to lean more on the mental tips i have also provided below.

alright! mental health tips in regard to art:

so, i have c-ptsd, and with that comes a lot of self image issues that ive had to work on. my feelings about myself extended to the way i felt about my art. it was shit, it was awful, i cant draw like this other person can so why bother, if its not perfect i shouldnt draw at all, etc. and honestly, something thats helped is affirmations. my affirmations are c-ptsd related, but ive noticed a shift in the way i view myself, and by extent, my art since ive started repeating them to myself daily. and honestly, i think a requirement of overcoming perfectionism is telling yourself that your art doesnt hafta be perfect, A LOT. LOL. LIKE YOU ACTUALLY HAFTA ACTIVELY TELL YOURSELF YOU'RE NOT AWFUL LMAOOOO. its funny, we dont think much about how we naturally are self critical about ourselves, and we dont realize that we are basically repeating negative affirmations about ourselves over and over and thats why we're not improving (mentally).

even when you're not drawing, i think it would benefit some people to have some kind of notification on their phone to remind them to tell themselves that their art doesnt hafta be perfect daily/however often you feel you might need it. and then with that affirmation, practice Shitty Drawing. one of the best tips ive ever gotten for this was from one of my friends monnie. get out your sketchbook or some printer paper, take out a shitty pen, and DRAW. and then any mistakes you make are permanent and you cant just endlessly try and fix them. it forces you ta sit with this uncomfortable feeling that something you made isnt perfect. eventually your brain will realize that when your art isnt perfect, you can still draw and you're ALLOWED to continue to draw even if what you make isnt spectacular. if you dont want to repeat an affirmation daily, try to remember to at least repeat it before you sit down to draw. something along the lines of "my art doesnt hafta be perfect in order for me to want to draw. im allowed to draw even if its not perfect" or something else. it depends on what you most struggle with in regards to your perfectionism. im ngl its probably going to feel cringe at first, but i promise you, it really works if you put it into practice longterm.

shoot for neutrality instead of positivity first. let me tell you thats where i am now and its so much less exhausting drawing lmfaooo. i make something that looks like shit and im just like. i dont fucking careee i dont give a fuccckkkkk

those are my tips :] i hope this was helpful!

[weaselishmcdiesel]

theres a youtube channel profiting off and lying about ai art and it's pissing me off

@/tendofarms on youtube uses ai art in the thumbnails and videos of their animal crossing compilation videos, claims it to be made by them despite also giving credit to a @/lumasi.png on instagram, who claims it's "a comission." this art is also being sold on merch on the channel's etsy account.

They haven't posted a video in 2 months but to see that they've made money through this scheme really pisses me off. Also the fact that they're attempting to decieve people by creating a fake artist on instagram who posts the ai art. They've attempted to say the art is a blend of original art made in photoshop/illustrator as well as the help of ai art. I dont believe this is true and im going to show your asses why

On their first video, they say

"my normal workflow so far has been to paint backgrounds, then get Ai to help with character design, i bring to photoshop to select my favorites, and put together something from my personal painting combined with my favorite Ai characters. Hope this clears things up :D"

The art in question:

and if you have no issues with it, here are MY issues with it

i'll pretend for a second that this person did make the backgroundand ignore the fucking surreal characters. sure. ok so what the fuck are these details. and also how did the ai manage to match your style so well? it doesnt have a backglog of years of YOUR work, does it?

On another video, they say

"a lot of illustrator/photoshop work went into this art. I used Ai to get ideas for composition and generate some character ideas, still some stuff i wish i improved but i think i got it to a decent final stage. Hope you guys enjoy the art and the mix <3333 love!!!"

the art in question with my notes.

The reason this particular post stands out to me is because in the DESCRIPTION of this video, they say the art was made by @lumasi.png on instagram. So when i go to their account and find this art, i see this

so, ok. was it a commission or did tendyfarms make it using a lot of illustrator/photoshop work. and if they ARE two different people.. wow their styles are so similar thats crazy /sarcastic as fuck

I would also like to point out that @/lumasi.png's first post, one that isnt featured in a tendyfarms video, also reeks of ai.

But maybe this isnt a big issue. Their etsy after all only shows that theyve made 16 sales, and their most popular views sit around 100k views, which probably isnt enough to even earn a stable living from, so who cares.

Just. as someone who listens to a lot of music from youtube mixes/compilations, who also makes art, i feel it's really fucking disrespectful to try and claim art as your own in a space where i go to try and relax or find new musical artists. and it's fucking rampant! i have to check each mix to see if using ai for the art, which i can only really see if i click on the video, giving them a small boost in stats. And if they arent using ai art? theyre probably stealing the art directly from an artist and not giving proper credit. Forget about asking the artist for permission, it's not like countless youtubers have explained how thumbnails are The Most important element of a video. Just go ahead and take someone else's work to give yourself some cash.

I know tumblr users hate generative ai already, but i'd just like to give a little attention to what youtube looks like, and to try and ask for more vigilance, more comments calling out the bullshit. I dont see a lot of comments at all on tendofarm's posts! or any mention of ai can be brushed away with "oh i used ai as well as drawing it myself" :/ you didnt buddy. you just didnt do that.

Idk what the right thing to do is, report their etsy? report their youtube? does either company care? maybe you can tell me

but i should probably say dont harass them. as much as i would like to. just try your best not to give retention to videos that shamelessly and ile about ai. Really look at the videos, really scrutinize if you can spare the time to. thanks

also. is it just me or do the cats in lumasi's pfp and this etsy reviewer's photo look the same. not sure what this could mean. up to you

[kiwi]

Hi! I just wanted to ask for some advice or maybe insight on how kiwi overcomes obstacles.

I'm an aspiring artist but I severely lack discipline. Whenever I'm doing a project I end up getting distracted and obsessively starting a new project. Which results in nothing getting finished and too many projects to do.

How do you deal with keeping discipline/focus?

much love!

im gonna be so real with you anon, i wish that i had a good answer for you. i really do. cuz my life would be significantly easier if i knew the perfect answer to self discipline.

as far as i can tell, mastering self discipline is something that most people work on through their whole lives. im still in my early 20s and dealing with a lot of the same organizational struggles i dealt with my whole time in school, so im not sure how much help i could possibly be. but i'll try!

plenty of my projects go unfinished, and i think the main ones that get finished satisfy one or more of the following:

- it's a commission

- i finished it in one sitting

- it's a project im using to procrastinate on something else

^knowing these things about myself, i find that i can finish more projects by weaponizing my procrastination. by working consistently on a commission project over several days, i can "reward" myself by taking breaks to draw other stuff that i can finish in one sitting, which fulfills that center in the brain that's satisfied by completing something. if im exclusively working on projects that take multiple sessions to finish, its easier to feel unsatisfied, like im not getting anywhere.

you could try putting together your own observations about the projects youve finished- are they focused on a subject you really enjoy? are they small, easily digestible projects? are they all similar, or all wildly different? you might be able to come to some conclusions about the best workflow for yourself that way

last i want to point out that i think it's okay to not finish stuff. it's okay to abandon projects, and no matter how disciplined you are, it's alright to let go of ideas you're not that invested in anymore. i think it's kinda great that you're exploring a lot of different ideas and getting so excited about them that you have to drop everything else, and i hope that your path leads you to ideas that grab you.

until then, maybe tone down your expectations for projects, so that you can call them finished much easier and make space in your brain for the next thing! anyway, i hope this was at least somewhat helpful :') good luck

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

tuesday again 11/21/2023

awful lot of cooking content from me, who hates cooking but finds the evenings jittery and boring

listening

Doorbell by Sterling Press, off the spotify weekly recced playlist. i don't know that i like this song. i don't know that it's particularly good. goddamn if it isn't catchy. alt britpop, they hate being compared to blur but mmmm. you do hear it. notes of ska as well. a song to blast in your car when your spring break plans fell through and you're driving to the good target two towns away from your hometown.

i don't think this music video could have existed pre-pandemic-- idk doorbell cams were that ubiquitous or well known, despite heavy advertising from nest.

from an interview:

Speaking about the new release, they said, “We wrote the song in our mates garage using drum samples off YouTube. We spent all night writing it then in the early hours of the morning drove to Maccies to have breakfast and had it on repeat the whole time. We all fell in love with it straight away. These lyrics speak to the importance of authenticity and sincerity in your actions. In a world where appearances and pretences can be misleading, it's a reminder to be true to yourself and to avoid trying to impress others for the sake of it. “I feel like its an experience we all share. We all know someone who goes off to uni or gets a new job and you bump into them on the street and they act as if they have no idea who you are. I guess this song is reflection of our frustrations towards those people.”

they have what i would consider an unusual amount of hype and presence for a band that has exactly three songs out, but they've all been making music together and separately since well before the pandemic so maybe they've just finally broken out? i can't figure out who these kids are related to. i don't think it's a full on industry plant but i do think someone's dad has some money.

a friend once said she hated how eighties songs faded out like a printer running out of ink, and i do not particularly care for how 2020s songs end with the entire band vanishing underwater.

this song is truly not that deep but it is thoroughly stuck in my goddamn head.

listening: special podcast edition

i am not looking for solutions. do not say solutions at me. i am taking through a brain thing and having a weird workflow and brain problem. i have tried other apps with browser support and do not like them, and i cannot have my personal apple id tied to my work computer bc i have and frequently use a work apple id.

i have been listening to podcasts through Spotify ever since mmm november ‘20. it has not been a good experience but juggling the Apple Podcasts app through my phone (distraction minefield) and whatever im listening to or working on with the work computer is a nightmare. ethics of spotify aside, it is a tremendously successful all in one listening platform. i do not have the brainspace to manage my own music library, and support my favorite artists in other ways.

i am not looking for solutions. do not say solutions at me.

however, if you listen to enough podcast episodes, spotify does not seem to believe you when you tell it to unfollow a podcast. it just keeps letting you know hey this has a new episode. this got me stuck on a loop where i was listening to more and more episodes of two very prolific conspiracy theory debunking podcasts to the exclusion of almost everything else. this was not very good for my mental health.

i am not looking for solutions. do not say solutions at me.

despite the real annoyance of finagling a very distracting phone and the work laptop, i have gone back to Apple Podcasts and (after weeding out a variety of podcasts for a variety of reasons) started listening to friends at the table again. not sure why i stopped but i felt a weird amount of guilt around restarting?? the tablefriends neither know nor care. i have finally finished road to palisade and am excited but nervous about starting palisade proper

-

reading

a local religious thrift store has absolutely rancid vibes but does regularly have 6/$1 book sales. there were a couple older trade paperback comics the last time: the first three volumes of ULTIMATE XMEN and a radom What If? superman.

my trouble with the xmen, and i have to read something from it once every two years to remind myself, is that magneto is right. they will never be able to assimilate into white picket fence middle america, or even among the liberal coastal elites or whatever the term du jour was in 1999. the box will always be smaller and you will never be perfect enough. i did not enjoy this enough to continue bc of this fundamental disagreement with most xmen comics.

also it looks like this. magneto’s lair has an arch in the shape of the arch on the front of his helmet and that was pretty baller, but there’s a real. what was they gimmick blog about all the comic book women in contorted spine-breaking poses? it’s like that a lot. WHAT is ororo’s body doing there

-

watching

hey. what the fuck do you mean tomato sauce is that easy. i dislike tomato sauce and almost exclusively eat jar upon jar of aldi brand pesto. im not allergic bc tomatoes aren't tingly but it's just sort of Nothing all the time. what do you mean it can be good???

i don't actually remember why i'm subscribed to mr internet shaquille. perhaps, like so many other food things, it's kali's fault.

-

playing

g/enshinposting.

pulled this horrid little brat. very pleased with myself.

i do not. love. her story quest. it falls into the childrens' media trap of Sometimes It's Okay For Other People To Stomp All Over Your Boundaries If It's For The Good Of The Group! or perhaps this is just a thing i'm particularly twitchy about. either way, annoyed that other characters of this importance have gotten some deeply moving writing and so far furina has...not gotten that.

the next character i am excited about is lolita taylor swift, or geo-aligned lady with big fuckoff sword. from some early maybe-leaks i think she would pair beautifully with my playstyle and my pirate lady with big sword. my playstyle is mostly brute force damage. i hit things as hard as i can until they fall over and i've played the entire game (with some exceptions that required actual thinking about elemental reactions) that way. it pleases me.

re: the conclusion of the annapausis sidequest, genshin does a really good job of teasing out "ok in a world with actual gods, what does spirituality look like/what are the differing views on fate/how do people make sense of an afterlife". mostly this is gnosticism. and sometimes it's a real life occultist secret society (reskinned Rosicrucianism). fascinating writing choices.

-

making

turkey cottage pie with scalloped potatoes, bc i had a five-pound bag of russets that were starting to sprout. im just going to yoink this pic i posted earlier bc it is now half gone and in tupperware form

this is the first time ive ever cooked in a dutch oven and im in love. i thrifted this for $20 some weeks ago but bc the lid has some chips and rust i haven't used it. which is silly, bc the body of the oven is fine. de-rusting and seasoning the lid will wait for a day when i actually need it bc for now we can get by with doubled-over sheet of aluminum foil.

used this recipe: only had a pound of ground turkey and liberally stretched it with potatoes (i think about three and a half pounds out of five) and three pounds out of a cheap frozen veggie mix bag. did not include mushrooms bc i did not like them. threw in some bay leaves bc i have a giant bag of them, i think i almost doubled the wine bc i doubled the recipe, but i do not think i remembered to double the beef stock. i also shook in a liberal amount of italian seasoning bc i have a cheap jar from aldi i want to use up.

the final product was somewhat soupy. i anticipated that slicing the potatoes was going to be the longest part (mostly true, i had to take breaks) and kept them in a big bowl of cold water to stop them browning while i chopped and after i blanched them. i also could have reduced the filling down some more but i am not a patient woman.

not as intended but still yummy, which was a lovely surprise bc usually when i fuck recipes up i fuck them up But Good. plus new technique (dutch oven). if i make this again (likely) i will do instant potatoes on top bc this was a fuck of a lot of chopping for one recipe. thinking about getting one of those stupid little hand smash veggie choppers bc a full food processor is extremely out of budget.

[scourgefrontiers]

so im thinking up a few options for myself:

local art market. it happens every second saturday downtown which is a great frequency i think. however i dont know the type of people attending so i dont know if my merch will sell well or at all, and i dont know if they even allow the type of stuff i sell. so this is an iffy one

finding book authors who need illustrations done. i can def do a childrens book illustration if i needed to but id like to find something within my current art style if possible. i'll have to look around and try and find places where ppl are looking for my type of work

sell at conventions. this one's a little tricky bc 1) i have to invest in my stock which is at LEAST $300 for everything i need, 2) im not guaranteed to get on the list of vendors, and 3) these happen very infrequently and i dont know if i can rely on this for steady income

self publish comics. i had thought of this before and i dont think im Currently fit for doing it bc i tend to burn out soooo easily (thats likely a problem with my workflow honestly. its fixable surely) but im hopefully about to get adderall prescribed to me so maybe it'll work out after all lol. unfortunately this isnt an overnight project either though, and i do need to make money Right Now

get into making either live2d vtuber models or 3d models for both vrchat and/or vtubers. i know i know, i cant charge 8k for my first models, but i can at least make a few hundred on a single model. this would be a new skill to learn but its totally possible. theres tutorials and i also vaguely know how to use blender so i can at least try this. i do have fun doing this stuff anyway. im just a lil worried about the level of detail that goes into live2d models, im not super used to detailed designs just yet but its something ive been wanting to put more time and work into, so..

bite the bullet and start putting more work into social media presence and advertising my commissions. i complain about how rough commission work is all the time yes. but genuinely i do enjoy doing commissions for a living. the ONLY reason i complain is because of the inconsistent/low income, and the only reason for That is because i dont have a huge following to the point of where my slots sell out regularly. im no sakimichan. but if i just put in a little more time and work into building a social media presence im sure things will look up in that regard. i just have to fuckin..do it

so ya. these all have pros and cons and im weighing them desperately LOL. if im being honest? im leaning towards three in particular: the vtuber models, building a better social media presence to up my commission demand, and selling at conventions. i can definitely do all three of course, but i have to figure out how to balance everything while learning to do the new things and get good at them. i have no idea how to wrangle social media. ive tried so many things and i keep falling out of it so so easily, its very hard. but fuck dude if 15 year olds on youtube can have 100k subscribers then what the hell am i doing LOL yknow?

[pinkyjulien]

Hi, i really hope im not bothering you by sending a modding question... i am absolutely brand new to even thinking about modding, and i know theres a big discord out there, but ive mostly heard horror stories coming out of the community so im honestly terrified to even check it out... im just wondering if you have any idea if its feasible to make a mod of Padre's shirt for V? (The one w the sweater over a collared shirt, i feel like ive seen it on other random npcs as well) not asking you to do it or anything, but its one ive never seen in mods so idk if its already been tried by modders and everyone decided "nah this wont work". Again, so sorry if you dont want to be bugged with questions like this, you honestly just feel like one of the most approachable people ive seen in this fandom so far and trying to make any cp77 friends has proven extremely intimidating.

Heya!! It's always ok to ask modding questions, you don't bother at all 🤲

I can't blame you for not wanting to get your feet into big servers, it can get quite overwhelming and frustrating when nobody seems to notice you. Tho I recommend using them as modding-wiki extension! It can be useful to search for solution, plugins and softwares, discord exclusive tutorials, or catch someone's getting help for a similar problem for example. There is no need to be active :3 but no pressure ofc, just know that it's totally ok to join these servers to just lurk

Now for Padre's shirt! I won't be able to do it (not right now at least) so I'll throw infos and direction if anyone else wanna give it a try 🤏

Here's the path to Padre's mesh -

base\characters\garment\gang_valentino\torso\t1_078_shirt__sweater\t1_078_ma_shirt__sweater_old.mesh

Tho we can see its all wonky compared to a regular MA mesh, and that's because this one is specifically fitted for old' Padre (it's even in the mesh file name, _old)

To make a version useable for masc V, we'll need to combine a few meshes available in the same folder!

The main piece: t1_078_ma_shirt__sweater.mesh

The bottom part: t1_078_ma_shirt__sweater_shirt.mesh

The cuffs: t1_078_ma_shirt__sweater_cuffs.mesh

And one of the two available collar: t1_078_ma_shirt__sweater_collar_01.mesh or _collar_02.mesh

All of these should already fit into one another, but if not a lil refit in blender should do the trick!

Then I can only point out to the Modding Wiki and its numerous tutorials for the AXL part (making a standalone clothing mod)

I also recently added my own AXL Workflow in my Tutorial Drive; I'm planning on writing a proper one, for now it's only screenshots from an old private tutorial I made for a friend, some infomartion are outdated (I've learned a lot since then as well) but it can still be useful, hopefully!

Thank you for the ask and for your kind words 🧡 I'm sorry to hear the community hasn't been too welcoming, but there are a lot of good souls willing to help and guide if needed!

A big server that I often recommend is The Cyberpunks; it's a fandom focused server, really chill and friendly, not based entierly on modding but its modding channels are pretty active! I lurk in there, you can catch me in the modding and screenshots area :>

If big servers are out of the picture, I totally recommend trying to get into a smaller server; small bubbles can be more comfortable when the members are well spirited and positive :3

I hope you'll find your place and people you vibe with 🧡 and hope the few info on Padre's shirt can be useful, to you or anyone out there seeing this that might want to give it a try! With a few recolors I'm sure it can be a cute, cozy corpo-ish attire ✨👌

[thursdaysrain]

my experience with blender and unity, together, has been a bit of a nightmare, but separately they haven't been bad. unity i've had issues with but they always felt surmountable, like, no matter what i can work around this problem.

blender i just enjoy, it has this reputation as like a weird badly designed software but maybe that's gone away w/ recent (recent as in.. years ago) ui changes. new features have been great and there isn't much for me to complain about here, but idk what a new user's experience is like. it's hard to tell people who ask me how to get started what to work with, bc everything i learned from is out of date.

the real headache comes from the transition between the two, which has been a real nightmare for me. once i'm all done working on wormgrubber 2.0, i need to put together workflow document to reference whenever i'm working on new 3d assets for unity in the future. it's a big list and it's been a real pain to discover each problem one at a time.

first and foremost it is obvious to me now that blender is not gamedev software. when i started gamedev, i split my time between learning shaders and learning 3d, not touching animation and mostly focusing on making little model display art pieces. i did this for a couple years. rigging was always a huge pain in the ass, weight painting moreso, so i just avoided it for a while. when i brought my first fully rigged piece into unity it was a nightmare, nothing looked right at all. this kind of thing honestly traumatized me, lol. i spent so much time trying to obsessively make perfect rigs bc i was terrified by shapekeys and drivers, horrified to spend hours setting something up only for it to be useless. this was wrongheaded for multiple reasons... there are so many features in blender that are just not relevant to unity and/or don't export through the only 3d format unity uses, fbx. this makes sense if you think about it for a bit, blender has a lot of features for rendering 3d animation and art but a lot of this wouldn't work in a realtime game, it's just too intensive. but! if you spend all your time learning 3D instead of specifically learning "3d for game animation" you come to lean on things like corrective smoothing or other modifiers.

3d is a weird mix of like, destructive and nondestructive workflows. blender will often let you work your way into positions you cant easily recover from without a lot of extra work or discarding work, setups that work fine within blender but absolutely will not export to unity. things like being unable to apply modifiers to models with shapekeys, but needing to apply all shapekeys to properly export a model, etc.

unity does this thing where it has very specific ideas about how things should work and it only tells you what it's doing maybe like 20% of the time. everything else is up to you to figure out the hard way. im not sure yet if this is an fbx problem or not but interpolation settings in blender aren't exported to unity, so it just comes up with its own. unity doesn't play the last frame of an animation. this makes sense for some contexts, because an animation is an interpolation between a start point and an end point, but like, nothing in unity tells you this the case. whenever i search for these things i always find forum posts, not unity documents. and you cant really change it without clumsy code slapped on top bc so much of this is below the closed off part of unity's code.

make games this way, not that way. i used to always think that when i was struggling against unity it was a sign i was designing something poorly, but now i know enough to know it's often because unity is itself struggling under the weight of choices made years ago, or half finished projects with poor documentation. arcane rules and practices i don't know bc i didn't go to college and because the knowledge is typically split across like several different jobs in a normal large studio.

i don't know how you learn this stuff other than trial and error. maybe in a college?? i dont know how other self taught indies deal with it. tutorials on youtube/etc seem to be split between like teaching you isolated tricks or teaching you very specific workflows without telling you exactly why you can't do this or that. blender tutorials are often for non-gamedevs, and unity tutorials are about following unity's design decisions without explaining them.

i know creating tutorials is a lot of effort and it's impossible to be fully comprehensive, but for something as common as 'take blender thing and put it in unity' should be for indie gamedev, i dont get why i havent seen more grumbling about this. i feel like every major snag i've come across (ones mentioned here are only a few of them) i was completely clueless about until i started doing some digging and the only thing to save me is some post from like 2016 on the unity forums.

its been a struggle!!!! i know i'm getting closer to the end of the tunnel but like every time i think it's a straight shot some new pit opens up. still, i'm getting there. my short advice to anyone is to always iterate, if you are trying to make art for games, make some art and put it in gamdev software. see what you like about it, how your desired workflow works with the software, etc. these skills arent separate, they have to be tied together.

[gamesbynuxill]

I weighed my options and decided I will build Nocti's code back up in a new game file.

I know it sounds like a bad idea, but It's been six(?) Years since i started the game and this stupid keyboard issue caused me to burn out so damn hard i needed go do something drastic.

This is also an opportunity to implement script calls into my workflow and i gotta say. Highly recommend giving it a try. Im not good enough to make my own plugins but im starting to Understand things.

After two days all the current effects are reimplemented. My new goal is to get the yellow blue and red orb events and locations polished to a shine, and have the green orb and orange orb for next time.

I think it'd be really funny to release a huge update on April 1st, so unless something catastrophic happens keep your eyes peeled. Also if anyone is interested in bug testing please dm me.

That's all for now!

[sunaleisocial]

A new framework to efficiently screen drugs

New Post has been published on https://sunalei.org/news/a-new-framework-to-efficiently-screen-drugs/

A new framework to efficiently screen drugs

Some of the most widely used drugs today, including penicillin, were discovered through a process called phenotypic screening. Using this method, scientists are essentially throwing drugs at a problem — for example, when attempting to stop bacterial growth or fixing a cellular defect — and then observing what happens next, without necessarily first knowing how the drug works. Perhaps surprisingly, historical data show that this approach is better at yielding approved medicines than those investigations that more narrowly focus on specific molecular targets.

But many scientists believe that properly setting up the problem is the true key to success. Certain microbial infections or genetic disorders caused by single mutations are much simpler to prototype than complex diseases like cancer. These require intricate biological models that are far harder to make or acquire. The result is a bottleneck in the number of drugs that can be tested, and thus the usefulness of phenotypic screening.

Now, a team of scientists led by the Shalek Lab at MIT has developed a promising new way to address the difficulty of applying phenotyping screening to scale. Their method allows researchers to simultaneously apply multiple drugs to a biological problem at once, and then computationally work backward to figure out the individual effects of each. For instance, when the team applied this method to models of pancreatic cancer and human immune cells, they were able to uncover surprising new biological insights, while also minimizing cost and sample requirements by several-fold — solving a few problems in scientific research at once.

Zev Gartner, a professor in pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of California at San Francisco, says this new method has great potential. “I think if there is a strong phenotype one is interested in, this will be a very powerful approach,” Gartner says.

The research was published Oct. 8 in Nature Biotechnology. It was led by Ivy Liu, Walaa Kattan, Benjamin Mead, Conner Kummerlowe, and Alex K. Shalek, the director of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Sciences (IMES) and the Health Innovation Hub at MIT, as well as the J. W. Kieckhefer Professor in IMES and the Department of Chemistry. It was supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

A “crazy” way to increase scale

Technological advances over the past decade have revolutionized our understanding of the inner lives of individual cells, setting the stage for richer phenotypic screens. However, many challenges remain.

For one, biologically representative models like organoids and primary tissues are only available in limited quantities. The most informative tests, like single-cell RNA sequencing, are also expensive, time-consuming, and labor-intensive.

That’s why the team decided to test out the “bold, maybe even crazy idea” to mix everything together, says Liu, a PhD student in the MIT Computational and Systems Biology program. In other words, they chose to combine many perturbations — things like drugs, chemical molecules, or biological compounds made by cells — into one single concoction, and then try to decipher their individual effects afterward.

They began testing their workflow by making different combinations of 316 U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved drugs. “It’s a high bar: basically, the worst-case scenario,” says Liu. “Since every drug is known to have a strong effect, the signals could have been impossible to disentangle.”

These random combinations ranged from three to 80 drugs per pool, each of which was applied to lab-grown cells. The team then tried to understand the effects of the individual drug using a linear computational model.

It was a success. When compared with traditional tests for each individual drug, the new method yielded comparable results, successfully finding the strongest drugs and their respective effects in each pool, at a fraction of the cost, samples, and effort.

Putting it into practice

To test the method’s applicability to address real-world health challenges, the team then approached two problems that were previously unimaginable with past phenotypic screening techniques.

The first test focused on pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), one of the deadliest types of cancer. In PDAC, many types of signals come from the surrounding cells in the tumor’s environment. These signals can influence how the tumor progresses and responds to treatments. So, the team wanted to identify the most important ones.

Using their new method to pool different signals in parallel, they found several surprise candidates. “We never could have predicted some of our hits,” says Shalek. These included two previously overlooked cytokines that actually could predict survival outcomes of patients with PDAC in public cancer data sets.

The second test looked at the effects of 90 drugs on adjusting the immune system’s function. These drugs were applied to fresh human blood cells, which contain a complex mix of different types of immune cells. Using their new method and single-cell RNA-sequencing, the team could not only test a large library of drugs, but also separate the drugs’ effects out for each type of cell. This enabled the team to understand how each drug might work in a more complex tissue, and then select the best one for the job.

“We might say there’s a defect in a T cell, so we’re going to add this drug, but we never think about, well, what does that drug do to all of the other cells in the tissue?” says Shalek. “We now have a way to gather this information, so that we can begin to pick drugs to maximize on-target effects and minimize side effects.”

Together, these experiments also showed Shalek the need to build better tools and datasets for creating hypotheses about potential treatments. “The complexity and lack of predictability for the responses we saw tells me that we likely are not finding the right, or most effective, drugs in many instances,” says Shalek.

Reducing barriers and improving lives

Although the current compression technique can identify the perturbations with the greatest effects, it’s still unable to perfectly resolve the effects of each one. Therefore, the team recommends that it act as a supplement to support additional screening. “Traditional tests that examine the top hits should follow,” Liu says.

Importantly, however, the new compression framework drastically reduces the number of input samples, costs, and labor required to execute a screen. With fewer barriers in play, it marks an exciting advance for understanding complex responses in different cells and building new models for precision medicine.

Shalek says, “This is really an incredible approach that opens up the kinds of things that we can do to find the right targets, or the right drugs, to use to improve lives for patients.”

[keefiswhoiam]

June 13 - 2024 Thursday

10:36pm

4.5/10

This morning I put away my clothes and asked mom to take me to the store for drinks. I had to ask this guy stocking the drinks to please excuse me but he didn't seem to be in a good mood. I got a chocolate twinkie to have with my coffee this morning which was a great idea. When I got home I showered a little too long and then made spicy ramen, spam, and green beans again using leftovers. I really didn't wanna draw today.

For work I warmed up by studying back muscle drawings. Then I worked on 57's commission for 1 hour before quitting early. I was going to quit earlier but DS told me I could DO IT so I at least wanted to do the bare minimum I needed for my finance sheet instead of having to make up for it later.

After I quit early, I took some time to lay in bed with Sporticus to try and identify some of the thoughts and feelings I was having so I could put them to words. I also played some War Thunder and watched this video grilling EPCOT. For lunch I made a tuna melt of sorts using a homemade tortilla.

In the afternoon I didn't stick to traditional work. I started looking up other people's workflows and methods to keep up with different projects and personal life. I got my old robot themed notebook from 2006 and am going to use that to jot down any thought I have about doing something. I can use that as a checklist or transfer those thoughts to more robust systems if need be. I also got out a big box of pens I had collected throughout the years and tested them all to keep the ones that worked. About when I was finishing up, I joined TK and WX in a vc and watched them play Roblox before joining. We talked a lot about WX's recent date and how he's feeling about all of it. I personally don't understand how he's doing this dating culture thing, literally scoring a date a week. It just sounds desperate to me but he seems really sure of himself and solid about who he is and what he wants. Ive come to accept that this kind of thing is okay for some people and exactly how they operate. Its just not my thing.

After they left, I made dinner and started watching Invincible again. I thought about hitting up RS to watch it with me since we watched the first season together awhile back but I just didn't feel like it.

When DS was free I whipped out my new dragonology book and started reading a little bit of it. I also had written down a few topics to discuss since Im always forgetting things throughout the day that I wanna talk about and that was a good idea I think. Towards the end of chillin, we found out this old pedo associate of hers is sort of coming back into the furry community scene which was big news to her. I hate the guy too from what I've seen and it sucks that he might get away with it all and remain present amongst us all. In bed we did our puzzles REAL late.

Up front I have hope in embracing my desire to make systems of all kinds for different things. It seems like an autistic way to behave and maybe because I am and thats been one reason I've denied this urge of mine. I know how often it might get pointed out as weird, the way I act and plan. But finding my voice and expressing my wants/needs means embracing this idea of mine and trying it out. Maybe I'll find that this isn't the best way to handle things but I won't know without trying. I might also find that this IS the best way for me to be my best productive self. And thats an urge to be productive thats coming from my real values, not what society or the people around me expect of me. I want to do things. LOTS of things. And so much committed action needs a lot of organization.

[venomous-qwille]

Heeeeeyyy, I love me a good fucking STUDY

for environments:

shot deck is a massive database of film shots searchable by grading, tod, shot type, characters and content! Studying from films really helps improve your values and composition as the shots are usually very carefully constructed! It helps you find ways to maintain realism while still packing mood and narrative into your work!

master paintings! I recommend the orientalists like Jean Leon Gerome in particular their environments had great compositions and throw around a ton of colour and light! I like the modern artists Craig Mullins and Richard Schmid also, as there is so much impressionist lost detail and simplicity yet the environments feel so real.

The 1960s era disney background artists like eyvind earle are a masterclass in stylisation and simplification and make a wonderful choice for studies. (That being said modern disney visdev artists like Nathan Fowkes are just as fantastic to study for the same reason)

architectural photography can be a great resource too- I love to look for work by urbEX people!

thumbnailing and comp studies- trying to break down a photo into as few values as possible and still have it be readable- this really helps train your brain in the relationship between light exposure and local value.

Im begging you if doing it in colour is too hard to start with just do it in black and white!!!!! Greyscale painting is an essential step in learning to paint and understand lighting scenarios!! Colour is hard!!!

there is no substitute for going outside and doing some plein air painting- really looking first hand at how the light effects different materials and objects, how it bounces around, what edges your eye naturally loses in certain lighting scenarios. Just go outside and draw and try to notice stuff.

for characters:

figure studies!!!! from life if you can but if you cant there are a ton of great resources out there- personally I love croquis cafe and posespace, but if you can afford it (and are interested in intense anatomy study) then scott eaton has a site called bodies in motion which is fantaaaastic. I think by now everyone knows nyx and senshistock, I also use a lot of grafit studio photorefs to study more complicated poses!!

Master studies (again). I particularly like to study the work of John Singer Sargent, Joaquin Sorolla, Edwin Austin Abbey, Alphonse Mucha (his le pater compositions are out of this world), any of the New Rochelle artists (e.g rockwell, tom lovell, those 1950s illustrators REALLY knew their shit).

I literally have a resin skull on my desk that I've used to do quick studies with different lighting, just 10 mins a day back when I was doing it and it levelled up my skill a lot!.

Material studies are essential to leveling up your character painting!!! Look at fur, look at metal, look at the way something embroidered reflects light vs tooled leather!!

gesture studies! Look at a dynamic pose and see how you can exaggerate the motion in away that captures the sense of movement. This is tricky to start with but its really worthwhile especially when you combine it with other exercises. Mixamo is a cool library to look into for this kind of thing as you can pause and rotate the models in the middle of their actions!

breakdown the work of artists you admire- it's ok to study other living artists (and try to reverse engineer how they are making their decisions) it's a very effective learning tool! Really figure out what it is about that persons workflow you like, and how you might incorporate that element into your own. Obviously, dont post studies of living artists work!

The most important thing is that when you do a study you go into it knowing what you want to learn. Dont try to do everything at once! It's ok to focus on the muscle structure and not give a damn about the gesture. It's ok to focus on the texture of the fur and completely ignore the characters face.

The best way to keep doing studies is to find refs you like- things you are interested in and that capture your imagination! Follow your curiosity and remember that just a tiny little bit a day makes a huge difference.

Gunna take a sec to recommend the tutorials of Devin Korwin. He talks about how to study and how to breakdown art fundamentals in a way that is at once both very advanced but also digestible. I highly recommend his pdfs!

What do you all study when you're doing art studies??

[cosmonott]

Work Log no.13

The semester's beginning to wrap up now, so I wanted to use this final worklog to overview the full project and reflect.

For starters, I did complete my goal of 6 animations! If we count the stuff that wasn't for this class or left unfinished, that tally goes up to around 12! (which makes me very happy). I even added some of the pieces I'm especially proud of for my portfolio!

(this is gona be the reflection part)

However, the project went by no means perfectly or smoothly, and while this was disappointing, I did learn about some of my working habits, and I'm excited to try different techniques for future projects.

My main method of spacing out my work for this project was using soft and flexible deadlines instead of intentionally rationing out my work. I divided each project into broad sections that allowed me to change the workload to fit my needs with other classes.

While this did help with my workload for the semester, I don't think this workflow was very productive for me when my goal was to make as many animations as i could. Once my motivation was spent, working on my thesis work became much harder, which eventually led to abandoning using Adobe Animate all together for the later sessions of the project.

I did initially dedicate time to studying in my project plan, but in practice I hardly had the motivation to do so. In the grand scheme of things it was fine, since this project was mostly about producing alot of work, but I still wanted to learn and apply new skills.

I found the time to just sit down and read my resources only once or twice, where I found a very helpful explanation of Animation workflow that I immediately implemented into projects that followed

After this I realized that studying was infact helpful!>!??!? Though i didnt find much more time to read after this point. Moving forward I want to really sit down with my materials and read, likely over the summer!!!

Worklogging became increasingly difficult throughout the semester :(. I feel like having an extra task to complete (setting up a workspace and starting a timer) before being able to start actually working made it feel like more work and made me want to do it less.. However, i see the value that making a worklog has!! and i want to keep trying!!!! dunno if i will continue to use tumblr tho haha :3

this longer writing format felt good for reflecting on progress, but also was easier to lose track of if I fell behind :( but discord was too quick and easy, and i would often forget to stop/start logging or even what I was working on!! Im hoping soon ill find a happy medium, but in terms of new time management strats moving forward im looking into using more analog methods like sticky notes instead of digital.

overall junior thesis was a great learning experience!! (even if i didnt do much studying >w>; )

thank you for reading! :^D