#like if a character is more sophisticated and fancy I’ll do wax seals or calligraphy or something

[calciferstims]

how do you make stimboards? i wanna start doing them <3

Ok you know what, BET, you’ve unlocked

✨the official calciferstims tutorial✨

No no ok I’m just messing around, but I will try to walk you through my whole process! 😅 I figure you might not be the only one interested so, what the hell. Prepare for rambling, sorry in advance.

obligatory disclaimer that there is no one way to make stimboards, you don’t have to follow my process, I might put too much effort into it or less effort than someone else does, stimboards are just for fun!!! make em’ however you want! These are just tips/how my brain works.

first of all: picking your themes!!

Surprise: They can be anything!!! And heck, a lot of stimboard themes are just ‘purple cleancore’ or ‘food in pink and blue’, and those are pretty self explanatory. But a lot of the boards I happen to make are themed around characters, and it can be a little tricky to pick your themes!

First of all, I would recommend picking a color palette to try and stick to. Let’s pretend I’m making a Loki stimboard so I’ll probably go with green, gold and black.

You can chose any themes to go with those colors!! Like I could do a Loki stimboard with themes of lovecore and soft things or whatever. But if I’m not going off of anything specific, I usually try really hard to pick some cool themes to match the character. (Of course, you don’t need to do this,, it’s just for me I think it’s a lot cooler to have gifs that fit the character/subject rather than just random slime and stuff). So like, idk, maybe for Loki I want knives, snakes, fancy stuff, all that jazz! But again, it doesn’t matter too much, I just like to isolate those things!

Then you can just search for all your gifs and save them 😌 I usually try to dive pretty deep and try plenty of searches until I get a nice collection to chose from. (But then again I get overwhelmed by that sometimes, lmao). Important: please pretty please find your sources directly via tumblr, and try your very best to locate the original gifset or at least check that the links on a stim board actually lead back to the og creator! Google and Pinterest can be very unreliable places to find stims with actual sources - you have a whole organized system of blogs to search from right here. And please save your sources as you are looking - I save them right to my drafts, but you can save them anywhere you want as long as you keep ‘em.

And yeah, it’s really not that complicated but I’m extra so that’s how I go about it 😅

second: putting the darn thing together

Super simple!! The only hard part sometimes can be picking what gifs you want to include (I definitely struggle sometimes, lol. Nine gifs can be so limiting 😭 damn you tumblr!)

Hot Tip™️: ✨pretty arrangements✨

A big thing you might notice is that, in my opinion at least!! Stimboards tend to look a lot nicer if you organize them in a satisfying, even way! Of course you don’t have to do this, just throwing that out there again - but I think it makes a more out-together looking board.

Usually, I’ll kind of group certain gifs together based on color, theme, kind of stim, ect, and then try to arrange the board so that it’s ‘even’ and looks nice to me.

Some examples of what I mean (using colors to show different themes):

Again, not necessary, but a personal preference!

Also important detail I almost forgot to mention: Another thing that I just think makes everything look way nicer.. Try your best to make sure all your gifs are square so you don’t have like, awkward skinny rectangles in there. You can use a website like ezgif.com or something similar to crop gifs and edit them in other ways!

And that’s about it!!

Oh, but one more thing….

INCLUDE THE SOURCES OR I STEAL YOUR KNEECAPS

Ok that’s all ☺️ no but seriously, it’s very easy and takes two seconds. Most people link them with little x’s or emojis or whatever, but you can do it however you want, as long as they’re easily available. For adding links to text/emojis, you can add them by highlighting the text in question and clicking the little link symbol 🔗 that pops up next to the other text editing features. Make sure to double check that all your links are working, finish up however you please, and you’re ready to post!!

That’s all folks! I hope that answered your question nonny, sorry for the long response 😂 This is kinda less for one person and more to take the chance to explain everything for anybody else! And of course I cannot resist being overly thorough. Good luck making your boards anon, I can’t wait to see them!! :) /gen