#so this is just a fun tips thing

[docholligay]

What do you say to the people that question the utility of a watch, since you've got your phone?

If you have difficulty with attention, having a way to check the time without getting pulled into your phone is invaluable. Also, it's easier for me to 'understand' time visually rather than digitally, with the way my brain is wired. I wear a watch probably 80% of the time because it helps me so much with time blindness and attention.

So I like to have nice looking ones! I only have a few because I do spend money on them, so I'd like to have another one, and I think this is classy looking in the way a lot of fandom jewlery isn't always. You wouldn't know what you were looking at unless you knew.

[valensolo12]

Been playing Pillars of Eternity all week and decided to try to keep a journal of interesting moments, since it turned out to be pretty fun when i did it with fallout 1. It's a much longer game so this is gonna take a while but here are my favorite pages!

also a family photo of the party so far :) Durance is the weird uncle

[yhwcomeback]

FIRST ONE DOWN, 30 MORE TO GO

[deoidesign]

Hi, how did you learn to draw Steve's physique?

Ohh what a complicated thing to answer...

When it comes to how I learned to draw anything, it's hard to say anything too specific since it's always a culmination of many years of assorted study and practice... but I can try to do my best to explain some of the biggest things that helped me learn, some tips I keep in mind, and maybe at least some places to start/delve further.

(just a little disclaimer it's not like my drawings here are going to be 100% medically accurate.. they're just to illustrate concepts!)

The main thing about learning various physiques is understanding anatomy. Which feels obvious, but I don't mean proportions; these are important, but perhaps more important is understanding the skeleton and how it moves and learning where muscles connect to bones and where fat grows on the body. When you understand how these function on a more mechanical level, depicting form and movement in a way that feels natural comes in tow.

For instance, understanding things like the pronation and supination of the radius and ulna, as well as the fact that muscles can ONLY contract or relax, will help you understand a bit better which muscles will be flexed and which will not while someone moves. It's inherent to the positioning based on the structural makeup of the body... It's not like you NEED to memorize all the muscles and bones, of course, but understanding and gaining at least a passive familiarity with the concepts really helps.

In tandem with this concept is the way parts of the body flow into eachother. Muscles ALWAYS come in groups because they can only contract. Whatever muscle is there to lift something, there is a muscle on the other side to pull that bone back down. What this results in is a series of straight edges next to curves, which gives us a lot of really lovely "s curves" and dents and folds and so on and so forth just naturally occurring.

I would suggest at least learning the "bony landmarks", which are bones (usually) visible on the surface of the body. things like the iliac crest, the great trochanter, the 7th vertabrae, the acromion process... These can be used to help you understand the parts of the body as angles and relationships, rather than trying to remember lengths and sizes, which vary immensely... (since you asked about steve, he can be our model... also study these on your own don't just take my word for it haha, these are the ones I personally keep in mind)

I've done the same thing with body hair... learning where it grows and in which directions... It helps me make up variations without needing reference, because I have a set of rules I can follow.

The biggest thing that helped me understand all this on a much deeper level was my ecorche course. I sculpted this guy. We started by sculpting the entire skeleton to understand the bones, and then we added muscles on top. Not every single muscle, of course, but the "artistic muscles" AKA the ones which directly affect the surface of the body. Doing this let us see where muscles connect, because we would make a shape, put it on the bone where it actually goes, and then you get to see how other muscles overlap that.

This helped me, perhaps, more than anything else. But I also didn't just start with this course, I had been drawing for years before I even took it. I had been in school for years before I took it. Not that I think it wouldn't be helpful to someone just starting out, but I do think that the more you know going in, the better an in-depth course like this will help you and stick with you. Classes are also expensive, though so I'm not really like... recommending you pay potentially thousands of dollars to take one... But it did help me a lot, personally.

I also, of course, have done many figure, gesture, and master studies...

These just help you quickly gain a stronger understanding of generalized anatomy, and gives you real life examples of and practice with of how people move and balance.

What all this does when combined, is gives me a very solid ability to depict movement and form in a way that feels relatively natural from my subconscious without the need for reference.

The rest of how I've learned to draw his physique is honestly mostly just stylization. I understand the body, and this is how I am depicting it for his level of musculature.

And as I move into depicting him in other ways, either moving in comics or in animation, realistically rendered, or extra stylized, these concepts inform every step of that process for me! When he keeps the same/similar relationships between parts, he gets to still look like himself.

It ALSO really helps when putting clothes on, because the way cloth falls and bunches and lifts is all directly related to the form it is on... So the more you understand that form, the more you can depict clothing and movement in a way that feels natural.

This is all, of course, true when I draw anyone, you asked about Steve so I'm trying to mostly show with him! But because I'm just drawing from raw information of general anatomy rather than trying to study one body type at a time, it allows a lot more "give," I think!

Like, here's most of the cast from TTA so far... actually, they're not as varied as I thought they were nevermind LMAO ignore this part

But, it also makes monster and alien design much easier! It's a lot easier to come up with non-human anatomy when I understand human anatomy, because I can manipulate the knowledge I have...

There is infinite more to study in the world of anatomy... The complexity of the human body goes extremely deep. For our purposes as artists, we need only depict a fraction of it, but more information rarely hurts the process.

I'm sure there's something in here that's wrong on a technical level, I'm mostly going off of memory. But that's kind of my point - I understand enough generally and conceptually that when I am missing something and need to find reference for it, I understand what I'm looking at. It's much easier than trying to learn AND draw at the same time.

I hope even one thing in here helped you! Sorry it's so long.

[themeeplord]

Hey Meep, Meepster, Meeperoni how do you draw scales?

I love your scales, both the prominent and far away ones. I especially love the scales on your cryptid boys.

So how do you do it?! When I try to draw scales it looks like a gravel road and just overall bad. Please share your wisdom, I beg.

In my head this turned into a bigger question than you might have intended pfjfjf, I tried my best to stay relativity simple with my answer!

Let me show you how you can think when figuring out big scales.

First I try to keep it simple and not sketch in all the scales until I've gotten the pose down.

When I start planning out scales I start with figuring out the direction of the scales and the big shapes (I usually do this in my head, but drawing it can be very useful)

Once I'm happy with the shapes and directions I start adding the scales one at a time, all overlapping each other like they're huge fish scales.

Scales don't always have to follow the same 'start at the head and run down the body' idea, you can do the opposite and get some very neat looking shapes. You can mix it up too. Here's some examples!

There are a lot of different kinds of scales and animals often have more than one kind. Some even do look like gravel!

I suggest looking at real life animals and fictional creatures for inspiration and reference. It takes a long while to learn how and where to use specific scales, but it'll be easier if you're willing to spend some time looking at and studying scales and the anatomy around them.

Some examples of animals with scales~ (names in alt text)

[pyrosomatic-metamorphosis]

rough art tips to learn and then break at your leisure.

the distance between your eyes is roughly one eye. the corners of your mouth dont extend past the middle of each eye. ears are roughly in the middle of the tip of the nose and the eyebrow. the eyes are in the very centre of the head. the neck is just a Little slimmer than the width of the head (varies with fat distribution, but fat tends to build up under the chin). hair is easier to draw when you plot out the hairline and then where it parts. leaving appropriate distance on the side of the face (cheekbone area and back to ear) contributes to making characters look more realistic/hot as hell. i dont know specific tips for that so use reference. an amazing reference/study site is lineofaction.com . if you think of the face in planes it makes it easier to construct (look up tutorials). if you draw a spiral like a tornado it can help you figure out awkward perspective for extended limbs (look up foreshortening coil technique). tangent lines are when two lines intersect and cause visual confusion (when it looks like a line that defines an arm is part of the line that defines a building, for example) and avoiding them makes your art way easier to comprehend. quick trick to good composition: choose a focal point (where you want your viewer to focus), detail that area the most, and make sure various elements of the piece are pointing to that focal point. you can use colours to contrast hue, saturation, and brightness and make certain elements of your drawing stand out. drawing in greyscale can help you figure out values. using black in a piece isn't illegal but you should know what you're doing when you do use it- it desaturates a piece and if used as a shading colour can desaturate and dull whatever youre shading too. if you use almost-black lineart and then add black to darken the very darkest areas it will do a lot to add some nice depth. the tip of your thumb ends just above the start of your index finger- your thumb also has two knuckles and all your other fingers have three. if you see an artist doing something you like (the way they draw noses or eyes or hair or anything else) you can try to copy that and see if you want to incorporate it in your style <- this is ENCOURAGED and how a lot of us learned and developed our styles. there are ways to add wrinkles to faces and bodies without making the character look a million years old, you just have to keep experimenting with it. The smile wrinkles around your muzzle dont connect to your mouth or to your nose; there should be a small space in between smile or nose and the wrinkle line. eyes when viewed in profile are like < aka a little triangle shape. think of the pupil like a disk and apply foreshortening to it (it looks like a line when seen from the side instead of a full round dot). subtle gradients can add a LOT to a piece. texture can also add a LOT. look up Tommy Arnold's work (his murderbot pieces are some of my FAVOURITE) and zoom in. find those random little circles he added and try to figure out why he added them there. light bounces. there's lots of way light bounces. sometimes it even spreads through the skin. i do not know these light tricks yet but i want you to know that they exist. draw a circle to indicate hand placement, draw a straight line between that circle and the shoulder, and then (normally at a right angle) draw a straight line on top of that line to find the placement of the elbow. elbows are normally placed Just above the hip when standing and your arm is at rest. there are no bad colour combos if you're brave enough about it, just fuck with the saturation and brightness until it works. keep playing. try new things. add your own tips to this post if you want or even expand on some ive mentioned here. good luck go ham etc

[naturecalls111]

I wrote this on twitter but I thought I'd put it here too, since I occasionally get asks on how I draw/any tips I might have. On twitter I also made the caveat that I don't feel I'm qualified to give anyone tips, LOL, but I was drawing today for an assignment and felt like this is worth noting to any beginner artists who have a tendency of clinging onto sketches that they feel like they finally got right! (A.K.A, a habit I still have years later HA!) This isn't so much of a tutorial as expressing my thought process in this discovery of how to draw more dynamic pieces. I found it to be satisfying on my end, seeing it unravel, so hopefully it can help someone who may be struggling with the same thing I am.

MAKING MORE DYNAMIC PIECES, A PERSONAL STUDY!:

I wasn't upset by this drawing, but I could tell there was something stagnant about it so I ended up pushing it and redrawing it a million times to see if I could somehow make it look more dynamic.

Here's one part of the timelapse - I'm clearly adamant on trying to make this pose/composition work but while the sketch itself may look better, the stagnation hasn't changed. Perhaps this works for some people, but anyone seeking a dynamic visual will be able to spot that this simply isn't working as anything more than a semi-decent anatomy study attempting to be applied.

I changed the position of both arms, I tried to play around with the angle of the head, I tried to just the hips forward more so that the spine had increased curvature, but the main issue, really, was that the initial composition lacked the dynamism in general. It prioritised dramaticism over dynamism. Both can exist in the same piece - it did not, in this one.

This was the new sketch I started with. Less rigid base to go off of. Just getting down the general shape I wanted to score - make the spine and tail take a sort of mid-whip path, shoulders hunched, hips cant forwards, as if he's curling in on himself. I think for a dynamic piece, it's more helpful that your initial sketch uses the body as a general marker as opposed to something to do lineart over (granted, I don't really do lineart anyway, my sketch is usually the extent of my "lineart", but since this is just looking at creating a more dynamic composition, I think it still applies!)

Here it's the same principle. For the left image (the legs) I've established where the knee of the right leg goes, and where the hip that precedes the left leg will sit. These are just base anatomical structures that help me figure out 1. Whether or not the mere idea of this composition will work, and 2. where I have to stop once I start drawing. For me, having some sort of limitation for the body helps me stay within range of proportionate anatomy (not that I particularly care for the anatomy to be realistic, just proportionate to the style I'm drawing in)

On the right image is also the same principle. Establishing the movement of the arm, the elbow/arm bend, and the hand. (If you see the full sketch before the two above, I established the hand in that one too - it really is helpful figuring out the placement of the hand ahead of time.) If it looks atrocious afterwards I always have the lasso tool/eraser to save me.

The new attempt brings me to this. While preference in art is subjective, I do think I'd be staying in SOME realm of objectivity when I say this is more dynamic than my initial sketch, LOL. Of course, lighting/rendering choices help push the composition a little more, but this achieves what I couldn't do with that first sketch. I had a general idea, but it's important to know when to let go of something that clearly isn't working.

Would love for anyone to add their own tips or ideas to this post - I'm not particularly known for dynamic pieces so I'm always looking to learn. This was a really valuable study for me so I wanted to share it, but everyone has their own method and what works for me may not work for the next person!

There's a few other asks that asked me for tips on general anatomy, and more specifically legs (oh dear god, I'M going to need to study for that before writing out any sort of resource guide for that, lol) that I hope to get around to doing in the near future. Thank you for your guys' vote of confidence, haha! ❤️

[satans-knitwear]

Some very fine titty decor 🧐

Treat me ~ Tip me ~ More of me

[uniquezombiedestiny]

disease of the body, disease of the mind

[fumifooms]

You’re the resident chilchuck expert, so I was wondering about it there’s any canon evidence that he did smoke or drink alcohol when the kids were younger. I always thought it was something he picked up due to the strain of long jobs, when the kids were already older, but you seem to think differently and I was wondering if there was anything in canon that made you think that way!

Now that you mention it I guess it’s true there’s no evidence he did. Smoking we literally only know he does at all because of one post-canon panel where he has a pipe, so no, maybe this stick-looking thing in the panel below too though, I’m not familiar with medieval blunts eh. We’ve only gotten one panel of him and his daughters interacting when he was younger so that’s not too insightful on that end, and every time we see him young and freckled it’s in a job context so again not really where we’d expect him to be drinking. The earliest proof (/heavy implication since we don’t see inside his cup I guess) is 3 years before canon when Laios hired him, where he’s at a bar, classily placed in front of all the bottles ✨

Yes alcohol is almost certainly a way through which he copes especially with stress, so if we go with the theory he started around when work got stressful, well… Chilchuck started working as a dungeon diver ~10 years ago so when he was ~19, making Mei, Fler and Puck ~6 and ~4 respectively, so from that draw the ���stressful enough to start drinking’ line wherever. We don’t know what he did before that with any certainty, and it could be he did odd jobs, lived off mostly mutual aid and community work, or just focused on only raising the girls. Half-foots tend to be poor and I see a lot of that in Chilchuck specifically so I don’t think he could have afforded to not have some paying work though.

Alright, so then why do I think he did drink when the girls were younger?

I give a more complete rundown of the info we do have on his alcoholism & his family with panels and references + all the speculation I make from it here. But the most targeted and objective answer I can give is:

Of course there’s just very very little we know of Chilchuck’s life with his family, and I think that’s by design too. I think the details being up in the air is to allow more nuance of the topic, like, will trying to reconcile go well, is their relationship salvageable? We don’t know, because we don’t know. So the message of giving hope a chance even if it’s a long shot, that things could truly go either way, is more relevant, impactful and meta in that way. How long was he usually away for work travels into dungeons here and there? How did he act with them? All we can really do is "it’s likely that", it’s a game of which way we think it’s more implied. There’s no right and wrong answer, it’s all Marcille-like larping the events out.

My main reason for thinking he did is that his father died from overdrinking and Chilchuck is very aware of that. He mentions his death casually in the extra about their stance in alcohol and in his Adventurer’s Bible profile, etc. He acts towards the alcohol presumably the same way his father did: with abandon, uncaring for the health effects, probably happily too considering Chil says "dying doing something you love is a good way to go". Very nonchalant. So you see what I’m saying here right, wether he started early or late, his view of alcoholism is very influenced by what he saw of his father growing up, it’s something he’s always been aware of and saw in a mostly positive light, something that was inherited you could say. It’s something that was normalized to him from a young age. Regardless or where it goes from there I do think this part is pretty inarguable. If he views it positively and we know that in the present alcohol is his favorite food that he loveees, why would he have held out on it? Personally that all makes me think he started drinking very young, especially since I don’t think they limited alcohol to age as much as modern standards (and I mean, teen drinking is obviously still a thing). And here you could argue, maybe his father only started being more alcoholic later when Chilchuck moved out, or something! And to that there’s nothing I can say except I think that’s a strained theory, and that Chil might even have largely cut contact with his family after moving out (since he and siblings are listed as almost strangers and he doesn’t seem to have much emotional attachment to his parents, but also we know he rents out his place to "a relative"), but it’s true we have no evidence. "I’ve picked up the same unhealthy substance abuse as my father haha! No big deal right haha" repeated several times to me just reeks of intergenerational trauma, & the alcoholism gene as they call it. Like effortless sliding into drinking as if it’s second nature, it’s natural after all, it’s normal after all, it just makes sense, it makes you feel good and that’s what matters.

BUT from my interpretation then we have a whole other layer: Alcohol is of course not all bad always. I think he’s always liked alcohol and drank it on occasion and it brought him joy etc etc, but I think here the implication in the question is, how much effect did his drinking have on the family relations and how early? And that isn’t so much about when him drinking started but when the alcoholism started. Addiction is defined by a habitual need, that has negative effects from filling that need (physical, psychological, social, etc) and negative effects from withdrawal. If Chilchuck drinks to cope and he can’t not cope without it, that’s addiction, if it affects his relationships, if it’s a need he has, it’s addiction. Addiction can be very insidious or look very casual, and how much people around the person are affected by it is case by case. Cheerful drunks can be sooo annoying and uncomfortable though let me tell you. Drunks are drunks. And this sounds harsh, but even if people around them don’t mind drunks it’ll still have some effects here and there, living with one can be such a challenge, ily drunks good luck with everything much like Chilchuck you deserve good things 🫡　

Ok so with the dad thing and the "ok well maybe he’s always drunk casually but it grew worse with time around when he started working as a dungeon diver" precision made, the other bit of info we have that can inform this is that Chilchuck is on a harsh diet and that alcohol is a hunger suppressant. We know Chilchuck "used to be fine not eating for two days", that literally on screen to quench his hunger so it doesn’t keep him awake he goes to drink water, drinking is his instinct to hunger. Again alcohol is a hunger suppressant and if you want info on that the internet has a lot of research and anecdotes about it. He diets to be light enough to not trigger traps, so it’s something he’d have started after dungeon diving most likely. Between the stress and the diet, yes it’s extremely likely he started going harder on alcohol after he started working in dungeons. There’s arguments on wether two days without eating is less bad for half-foots than humans, but apart from smaller portions there’s nothing that indicates half-foots should get less than 3 meals a day. They need less food but that’s because their bodies are smaller: the need is proportional to the body, not smaller than others’ races, the % of need is similar even if the kg amount of food isn’t. There’s also a popular headcanon with support basis that half-foots run hot and have a faster heartrate and whatnot, and that points towards a faster metabolism rather than a slower one: a bigger need for eating rather than a smaller one. He has the same bmi, 18, as Mickbell, but perhaps because Chil is much taller he’s less intensely visibly underweight with ribs showing than Mick during the bath extra, it’s most apparent when he becomes tallman.

Alcohol is something so important and omnipresent in his character that I have trouble believing it’s something that was part of only a small fraction of his life. It’s his immediate go-to, his no-brainer solution to a good time, I’ve sort of always assumed especially after looking at his family that it’s something he discovered decently young. Like he just acts like someone who’s always had alcohol to fall back on and started young idk. Alcohol is one of his 5 keywords. Alcoholism is very ingrained into his world view and life, his "it doesn’t matter" stance his ‘work hard play hard’ mentality his idea that the world is harsh so you get relief where you can, so it just makes sense to me that it’s always been in his life, if not actively then at least looming.

So yes, in summary, my take: Alcohol was always something he wholly enjoyed to an unwise level, but it could have been considered casual until he started working into dungeons and his need for it on a regular basis intensified. Alcohol has always had positive association to him as far as we see, so when it started being a problem he didn’t see it as such. To quote him, "I drink anytime I get the opportunity to". Why always? Approval of father’s alcoholism. Why alcoholism at all? Diet + stress & coping mechanism & emotional stunting + relationship issues, and she decided she had enough after they went out for drinks.

Conclusion

Chilchuck having drunk from a young age makes sense to me and it’s the strongest narrative angle I see on the table, but that’s objectively a me opinion, yes! There’s no evidence, moreso there’s canon basis and supporting info, but it’s all very left up to interpretation. I’ve made my own interpretations of things from the scraps we see, like everyone else making Chilwife and daughters content. Wether you have a stance on the topic or prefer to leave it vague in your takes, it’ll be a matter of what you think makes most sense, or what you’d rather believe I suppose (which is literally fine)

There’s a lot of subjectivity in even just setting up causal links like you probably noticed during this and I was careful with my word choices, because we’re just extrapolating from what we see and unless Kui states it explicitly from a reliable mouth all we can do is have informed opinions on most things. This particular interpretation is influenced by other details I’ve come to form about my interpretation of Chilchuck too, the more psychological and emotional sides of him and the timeline and how his marriage even happened, unplanned pregnancy imo. Like I hope you see what I mean, this wasn’t supposed to be a speculation post just a quick simple answer but there’s sort of just no other and concise but complete way with the subjectivity nuance to put "maybe it could be yes because of this but maybe it could be no because of this" haha

Edit: Wait the phrasing on this… Interesting. "In recent years"— This does imply that if not just his alcohol consumption increasing then the diversity and quality of it did, so either he indeed did start drinking more (not necessarily meaning he didn’t drink before) assumedly because of his wife leaving, or he started drinking other/more different kinds of alcohol maybe due to the union he formed + his experience gave him greater salary than he had previously (and no wife and family to provide money for), a mix of both perhaps.

[alluralater]

something about watching a bad kiss take place makes me want to fucking scream. like what is going ON??

[hella1975]

just think this time tomorrow ill be publicly indecent in a spoons somewhere. i am so strong

[uygfiug]

how do you people study through extreme exhaustion? bc thats what always gets me during the exams & i cannot keep doing this forever

[bonetrousledbones]

You are so right about blood. That art goes so hard

tbh the main reason i will always deliberately go against canon on whether or not monsters have blood (and by extension why nearly all my skeleton guys have anatomically inaccurate runny bone marrow) is bc any other alternatives will just never have the same impact. just dust or weird runny magic ain't gross enough we gotta have that classic deep red Ooze

[bruciemilf]

Hey guys guess who has an infected tooth and is DYING of pain lmao

[lupins-hehim-pussy]

I think I accidentally made Wriothesley AuDHD. fuck