#it's not solid advice

[mournfulroses]

George Sand, from a letter to Gustave Flaubert written c. November 1866

[braindamaged007]

[thankstothe]

Some Lines from A Show

[shitpostingkats]

The first rule of yugioh is to get sillay with it.

The second rule of yugioh is to stay sillay like your life depends on it.

[multi-lefaiye]

something about a gameshow where the goal is "get second place" is just so funny. this season is off to an amazing start

[alkalinefrog]

Hey Alka, I had a quick question for you (whenever you have the time to answer or even if you have the time), I've been taking some storyboard classes and with my illustration background, it's been hard to really find a good shorthand for characters to really get that anatomy/gesture looking right without it being too sketchy and unreadable.

How long did it take you to find your storyboard shorthand, and what exercises would you recommend to try to find it? I'm sure it just takes time and practice, I've been doing a lot more studies and gesture drawings (currently following along all the free Glenn Vilppu videos I can find on youtube) but I wanted to ask you as well because I am in love with how fluid your anatomy is, and how clear your storyboards read. And those hands my god you're a wizard!!!

Thanks a bunch, have a wonderful day!

Heya Secret, great to hear from ya! Well, what you don’t see online is how gross the rough stage of my boards can get LMFAO. Most of the boards I post are actually overly cleaned up because I'm just doing them for fun and can afford the time! I'm not really sure how long it took to develop my shorthand, I've never really enjoyed drawing detail to begin with, so when I decided to go into boarding I kinda just leaned into it!

I’ve covered a bunch of gesture drawing exercises already if you scroll through my advice tag, but ***once you have a good foundation*** here's some stuff you can try!

First you'll want to build up an arsenal of anatomy hacks you can always fallback on, particularly for complex parts of the body. The less time you spend on details, the more time you have to focus on the overall pose and storytelling. Aim to find ways to draw with as FEW lines as possible. If I had to make a list to streamline what to practice:

Head shapes - find the most efficient way to draw the front + 3/4 + side view in as few lines as possible (the challenge is still making them look structured with dimension)

Eyes - are SO important for expressions! Unless your project has characters with dot eyes, you're going to need to find a quick way to do the circle and iris in as few lines as possible. Make sure you can convey where they're looking

Hands - fists (you'll be drawing a lot of people holding poles), open palms at various angles, foreshortened fingers pointing at viewer, fingers making grabby motions----protips: 1) half the time all you need is a vague triangle/rectangle plus thumb sticking up and that's a hand 2) if the hand is relaxed, you probably don't need to draw the knuckles. Save some time!

Feet - just learn how to make sure they look like they're standing on the ground, and do some studies of what they look like when you're running. Otherwise you can usually get away with a vague shoe or boot shape (just add toe lines if they're not wearing any)

----everything else you'll practice as you go!

Jump from SUPER rough straight into clean boards to really force yourself to be economic. I've done each of these methods for work before:

Before you start boarding with a character, sketch them a few times with the intention of simplifying their design while keeping them recognizable:

You'd be surprised how little you need to recognize a character:

Depending on the scene, you can adjust how much detail you want to include:

Stay loose/more generalized with action, especially for the "inbetweens" between key poses. Clean up enough to communicate movement and make the character recognizable.

If the character's small on screen in a wide shot, edit out most details and focus on the silhouette

Save the detail work for character acting, when you really want to be specific with their expressions and gestures.

But outside of all that, be bold and fearless!! Everyone has that stage where their boards look like spaghetti! Boarding is like handwriting; you could have really shitty chicken scratch, but if you're writing beautiful poetry, who cares!

god I love drawing hands you don’t even know thank you so much!! Good luck dude!! You’ve more than got this!!

[themultifandomnerd]

What I love about this sequence of pages is that, we get to see Mitsumi in Sousuke’s POV at honestly her most stunning. She’s glowing in the sunset, the wind is caressing her hair, she’s got this soft smile on her face... and Sousuke is so shook that when he gets pinched by that crab he isn’t even processing it because he was so taken aback by that moment.

Furthermore, we don’t immediately see his face when it happens. We just see the back of his head as he goes “Oh, ouch” “I’m good” “Yep” but then we do see his faceー and dude is so red because it’s finally hitting him that he is absolutely gone and probably has been for a while.

Then Mukai, post romance-talk, is like “So how was the crab bro?” and Sousuke is basically like “Huh? What crab?” because he is so shook and you can tell just from that panel that Sousuke’s eyes are on Mitsumi and Mitsumi alone.

[biteable-pink-pixie]

Dick to pussy contact soothes the mental turmoil.

[merakiui]

Just read ur scummy sleazy floyd and omg ,,,, more crumbs mayhaps 🤲🧎‍♀️

>:D the vision for this concept is essentially: you and Floyd fucked in a bathroom at a club once, he's now a contact in your phone, and you keep telling yourself you won't talk to him often. But like all bad habits, Floyd is your worst one yet and it's so difficult to break away. <3 you go from arguing one-sidedly over text to meeting up to fuck. Maybe you always go to his place because you do not want your roommate to catch you with Floyd after you adamantly told them there was nothing between the two of you (your roommate is not fooled; also maybe your roommate is Rook LOL).

Of course this also means there's a high chance you'll run into Floyd's roommate and twin brother (Jade), but at least Jade doesn't pry (too much). Unlike Rook, who wants all of the details because he thinks your relationship with Floyd is a beautifully complicated thing. He's your biggest supporter, a devout fan of the Floyd x Shrimpy ship.

If it's omegaverse, imagine how yummy it would be if you've been fucking Floyd on and off and it gets to a point where you're both so familiar with each other's scents and habits. He wakes up early like he always does to start breakfast, but he makes it just the way you like it only to realize you're not here today. Ooooo he is so in love with you and in classic Floyd fashion he may not even realize it yet.

AAAAA and maybe you're both so used to just fucking, so when Floyd tries to (very awkwardly) ask you to dinner you're like "???? so we fuck and then dinner? Or...????" T_T It's a date. He wants to take you on a date. >_< but Floyd's too scared to step out of the confines of this situationship, so he just shrugs and says, "Yeah, sure. Whatever works for Shrimpy." orz communication is terrible, but you'll both get there one day.

[katyspersonal]

Important things Soulsborne taught us about life:

- No matter where you are or what you're doing, there will always be a poisonous swamp between you and your goal

- If you try help people they just fucking go crazy and die!!!!!!!

- Saying a completely normal thing a bit slowly and adding creepy laugher in the end automatically makes you more charismatic

- The door doesn't open from this side

- The best way to free yourself from unfair system is to eat people until you turn into an abomination

- Don't look where the cheeky bald man asks you to look

- You can still see and navigate perfectly even with a weird thing on your head that obscures all vision apparently

- Actually not even death will end the suffering

- People will try to escape a problem by using what CAUSES this problem and just trying to "be careful" because we indeed live in a society I guess

- There is no such thing as "too" tall/big woman

[lux-scriptum]

Things I’ve found will fix most plot problems:

1. Make it gayer.

2. Fuck with the gender more.

3. If all else fails add (another) cat. Yes, even then.

[charger-lens]

[tswwwit]

do bill and dipper ever talk about their problems or have serious conversations? We don’t see much of them in the fics— talking about the past, trauma, or insecurities, etc

Getting to that point took them quite a while, but yeah!

Dipper will occasionally talk over or bitch about his life with Bill. Opening up about his feelings. His thoughts. Get a little vulnerable, even, around his husband. It takes a bit before he can do it and get Bill to take it seriously, but that's not a fuckup Bill makes twice.

Mind you, he's still Bill about the listening. Which means about 80% of his 'advice' to Dipper is 'you should totally kill that guy', and 15% is basic commiseration couched in teasing terms. The last 5% is such shockingly insightful advice that Dipper has to do a doubletake to make sure he's still talking to the same guy. One of the perks of knowing the human mind as well as Bil does.

Bill sharing his problems, though? Whoof.

There's a guy who could spend all day whining because the last party wasn't fun enough. Bitch about other people! His day! But getting Bill to admit he has deeper feelings is a billion times worse than pulling teeth. With a crowbar.

If Dipper wants insight into Bill's deeper psyche, he's got to augur the subtle signs of it. Puzzle it out, in fact. He's gotten pretty good at guessing what's going on behind that front - but holy hell does his husband not make it easy.

[zootopiathingz]

[note-boom]

The best thing about BSD Lucy Montgomery is that she is trying so hard to live her fairy tale dream, like asking Atsushi to save her from the Guild and all that nonsense.

Instead, she just gets beaten by him once when they're enemies, gets out of the Guild on her own, and has to save that sorry boy's life over and over again.

Like, sorry, Lucy girl...you're not the damsel in distress in this fairy tale. You're the prince charming who had a bit of a villain arc and now is doing good out of sheer spite and stubborness. Better luck next arc?

[manga-and-stuff]

Thoughts on: Ikoku Nikki

I am currently reading Ikoku Nikki by Tomoko Yamashita and I noticed that like a solid quarter of the scenes in this manga do absolutely nothing to drive the plot forward.

It's not even funny banter or world building or whatever, it's literally just mundane little scenes like this:

You could honestly skip all of these scenes, and the plot would still make just as much sense.

But the thing is, I think doing so would make this manga considerably worse.

The manga is about a 15-year-old girl being taken in by her very introverted aunt, after losing her parents in an accident. And these mundane little scenes do an incredible job of grounding the whole story.

For one thing, it fleshes out the characters, it makes them feel real. You can really believe they all have their own lives with their own thoughts and feelings, their own problems and worries which are largely unrelated to the main plot.

It also makes the story feel very realistic. Like, yeah, sorry your parents just died, but you still need to go to school and worry about stuff like fucking lunchboxes. Yes, you just took in your orphaned teenage niece, but you still need to work... and maybe tidy up your room?

Just like in real life, the rest of the world in this manga doesn't care that the main character's world just got turned upside down. The earth just mercilessly keeps on spinning, and the protagonist has to go on living somehow, with all the mundanity and irrelevancy that comes with everyday life.