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Kickstarter has crossed 600,000 DOLLARS - thank you all! All my TUTORIALS BOOKS will COMPLETELY SELL OUT in the next few days! NOT available ANYWHERE in shops or online, ONLY on KICKSTARTER and ONLY NOW! By the end of the Kickstarter EVERY BOOK will be GONE! Get yours, before they all go, only HERE: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1378058646/how-to-think-when-you-draw-book-6-reprinting-sold-out-books

Lorenzo!

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Uncommon Questions for OCs and their creators:

Send me a # (questions for OCs) or a letter (questions for creators) and I’ll answer

QUESTIONS FOR YOUR OCs

What’s the maximum amount of time your character can sit still with nothing to do?

How easy is it for your character to laugh?

How do they put themselves to bed at night (reading, singing, thinking?)

How easy is it to earn their trust?

How easy is it to earn their mistrust?

Do they consider laws flexible, or immovable?

What triggers nostalgia for them, most often? Do they enjoy that feeling?

What were they told to stop/start doing most often as a child

Do they swear? Do they remember their first swear word?

What lie do they most frequently remember telling? Does it haunt them?

How do they cope with confusion (seek clarification, pretend they understand, etc)?

How do they deal with an itch found in a place they can’t quite reach?

What color do they think they look best in? Do they actually look best in that color?

What animal do they fear most?

How do they speak? Is what they say usually thought of on the spot, or do they rehearse it in their mind first?

What makes their stomach turn?

Are they easily embarrassed?

What embarrasses them?

What is their favorite number?

If they were asked to explain the difference between romantic and platonic or familial love, how would they do so?

Why do they get up in the morning? 

How does jealousy manifest itself in them (they become possessive, they become aloof, etc)? 

How does envy manifest itself in them (they take what they want, they become resentful, etc)? 

 Is sex something that they’re comfortable speaking about? To whom? 

 What are their thoughts on marriage? 

 What is their preferred mode of transportation? 

 What causes them to feel dread? 

 Would they prefer a lie over an unpleasant truth? 

 Do they usually live up to their own ideals? 

 Who do they most regret meeting? 

 Who are they the most glad to have met? 

 Do they have a go-to story in conversation? Or a joke? 

 Could they be considered lazy? 

 How hard is it for them to shake a sense of guilt? 

 How do they treat the things their friends come to them excited about? Are they supportive? 

Do they actively seek romance, or do they wait for it to fall into their lap? 

Do they have a system for remembering names, long lists of numbers, things that need to go in a certain order (like anagrams, putting things to melodies, etc)? 

What memory do they revisit the most often? 

How easy is it for them to ignore flaws in other people? 

How sensitive are they to their own flaws?

How do they feel about children? 

How badly do they want to reach their end goal? 

If someone asked them to explain their sexuality, how would they do so? 

QUESTIONS FOR CREATORS

A) Why are you excited about this character? B) What inspired you to create them? C) Did you have trouble figuring out where they fit in their own story? D) Have they always had the same physical appearance, or have you had to edit how they look? E) Are they someone you would get along with? Would they get along with you? F) What do you feel when you think of your OC (pride, excitement, frustration, etc)? G) What trait of theirs bothers you the most? H) What trait do you admire most? I) Do you prefer to keep them in their canon universe? J) Did you have to manipulate or exclude canon factors to allow them to create their character?

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literally most things that people write off as just ‘textures’ to use in graphics are stolen & unsourced material created by artists or photographers NOT meant to be used as elements in projects without royalty payments. you can say ‘it’s just random tumblr posts they don’t care’ but you wouldn’t want someone to take your work and edit into their work so they can be praised for their beautiful style and creativity even if they just post it on social media w/o profit, would you?? so maybe if you browse pinterest or google images for pictures without finding the original source, you’re using images that you’re not allowed to use without realizing it.

you see it on here a lot especially in (i won’t link anything but i’m sure you know what i mean) those album track ‘aesthetics’ posts, au ‘aesthetic’ posts (you see these less in kpop, but where people use non-royalty free images to kinda craft a visual au), and even just rather typical graphics that have a lot of ‘texture’ elements. and texture packs too!! that’s often where the problem starts; people just collect images (often literal art), compile them in a folder w/o sources, then insist no one can repost those images w/o crediting the person who compiled them. what???

SO may i suggest some of my fave places you can get FREE, ROYALTY-FREE elements that are totally legal to use

creativemarket has 6 free high-quality resources (textures, brushes, fonts, etc), different every week! wow awesome i check it every week

search ‘freebie’ on behance. awesome stuff!!! lots of v nice templates textures and fonts

mockup zone freebies

unsplash: tons of very nice free photographs, not shitty stock photos

pexels: same idea. + they have an adobe plugin so you can get photos without closing your editor damn nice

pixelsquid is a super cool free program (again w a ps plugin that i love) with lottts of super cool hq 3d elements!

as to not make this too long: spoongraphics, lostandtaken (textures galore), pixeden, freebiesbug.

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So a free tool called GLAZE has been developed that allows artists to cloak their artwork so it can't be mimicked by AI art tools.

AI art bros are big mad about it.

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Accents 101

So if you’re a dm like me, you probably want to be relatively skilled in some typical fantasy accents for your game to make things feel that much more real. So i’ve decided to throw together a little master post of “how to” videos on some various accents. This is mostly for my own reference, but if you’d like to save this for yourself too, go right ahead. Feel free to add on to this, as well!

General Accent Tips

How To Learn Any Accent (1)

How To Learn Any Accent (2)

How To Do 12 Different Accents

US/UK/Aussie English Vocabulary Differences

One Woman, 17 British Accents

How To Lose Your Native Accent

How To Learn A Different Accent

Fun Tour of American Accents

Scottish

Scottish In Under 2 Minutes

How to Speak With A Scottish Accent

HOW TO DO A SCOTTISH ACCENT

Speaking Scottish 101

Scottish Slang

Gerard Butler Teaches You Scottish Slang

Scottish Insults

English or “British”

How To Do A British Accent

3 Ways to Sound More British

HOW TO DO A BRITISH ACCENT CONVINCINGLY (1)

HOW TO DO A BRITISH ACCENT CONVINCINGLY (2)

HOW TO DO A BRITISH ACCENT CONVINCINGLY (3)

Henry Cavill and Simon Pegg Teach You English Slang 

French

How To Speak With A French Accent 

How To Do A French Accent In UNDER TWO MINUTES

Tips on how to do a French Accent

French Accent Tip

Irish

How to do an Irish Accent

How To Do An Irish Accent

How To Do An Irish Accent

Guide to Irish Accents

How To Do An Irish Accent In UNDER TWO MINUTES

Russian

How To Speak With A Russian Accent 

How to Do a Russian Accent | Accent Training

How to speak with a Russian Accent

How Russians Speak English

How To Do A Russian Accent 

German

How To Have A German Accent 

How to do a GERMAN ACCENT?

Get the Perfect German ACCENT

Me speaking in 12 GERMAN DIALECTS!

How To Do A German Accent

5 Steps to a perfect German Accent

Canadian

How To Do A Canadian Accent

All aboot Canadian accents

How To Speak Canadian, Without Knowing How!!

Is There A Canadian Accent?

The Canadian English Accent

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like to tell him goodnight

reblog to tuck him in and give him a lil forehead smooch

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i hate that every time i look for color studies and tips to improve my art and make it more dynamic and interesting all that comes up are rudimentary explanations of the color wheel that explain it to me like im in 1st grade and just now discovering my primary colors

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Do you like vintage scientific illustrations?

Do you like not spending huge amounts of money on them?

This website has a huge collection of high quality vintage illustrations that you can download FOR FREE

They got pretty much everything!! Vintage maps, mushrooms, flowers, trees, bugs, birds, corals, fish, palm trees, feathers, tropical fruits, you name it!!

They even got some works of my dude Ernst Haeckel on there!!!!

I could go on and on but I suggest you check it out yourself. Personally, I will be covering my entire apartment with these once copyshops are open again. But even if you don’t want to do that, just browsing all these beautiful illustrations is a great way to spend your time. 

Have fun and stay save!

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Random mansion generator

The Procgen Mansion Generator produces large three-dee dwellings to toy with your imagination, offering various architectural styles and other options. Each mansion even comes with floorplans:

https://boingboing.net/2019/07/12/random-mansion-generator.html

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I can barely contain myself right now

holy shit

HOLY SHIT

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listen, this post is about Martin Blackwood specifically but if you struggle drawing fat characters and would like to improve and learn to actually draw fat people instead of just making characters skinny i have a couple of resources:

Morpho: Anatomy for Artists by Michel Lauricella - You've probably heard of this book and for good reason, it's relatively affordable but there is a drive link to scans you can dm me for if necessary.

fatphotoref - This is an Excellent resource started by a fat queer artist and run by volunteers. It is password protected, you can dm me for it (I'll only share with ppl who post original art on their blogs, I don't want to lead trolls to this site)

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refseek.com

www.worldcat.org/

link.springer.com

http://bioline.org.br/

repec.org

science.gov

pdfdrive.com

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collection of art wisdom

sources: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5

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Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

⁂

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

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I wanna do more of these… >:U

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Thoughts on Character Design & Shapes

A little while ago, @scarffles asked me if I would talk about my character design process, how I utilise shapes/silhouettes, and if my process has changed since I last talked about it roughly 10 years ago on a completely different blog (it has LMAO).

So, here I am to talk about just that!

Truth be told, the silhouette & shapes of my characters are not actually something I think about very early on in the process.

When I design a character, I go through 3 phases—body, face, outfit. The last phase is where I begin to think about shapes, but quite a lot of time goes into the first two.

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Prelude

For me personally, it's very important to me that my characters feel like real people—in both how I write them, and also what they look like.

It's not necessarily about them being realistic (although my art has certainly taken a more realistic slant as of late and that is related)—I mean, a significant chunk of them are demons, they're certainly not realistic I am very much making fantasy characters—but that they feel like.. people.

Like they've lived the lives that they've lived, and it has made them who they are, and like you could just kind of? Meet a person like that, under the right circumstances?

It's like... I don't really ever see myself in media, and the people i love, my friends, my family, there's such a wide variety of people i know that i really am not seeing reflected back? And this void is what makes me want to create in the first place. It's a void that shouldn't be there.

So, if people can see themselves in my art, people like myself, my mother, my friends, those who are so often told they should not exist at all, then I've succeeded at something, i think. It's a philosophy so intrinsic to my design process that it's impossible to talk about my approach without talking about this first, as it underpins every decision that I make!

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Phase 1: Body

So when I design a character i have at least some vague idea of the kind of life that theyve lived and the sort of person that they are. This effects their physique to some extent, i.e. it determines whether or not i make them buff (my characters who sail, for example, have more muscle mass than those that don't), but also importantly it effects how they carry themselves.

A character's body language is one of the very first things I think about—how a character moves, how they interact with the world, to me it's the core of depicting them as a person. We talk a lot about silhouette in character design, an oft forgotten part of this i feel is the character's body language!

As an example here are some of my girlies—physically they have various different physiques, but even those who are similar have different ways of holding themselves.

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Phase 2: Face

A characters face I put a lot of thought into—I try to think of a face that I haven't really drawn before. It's not so much that I'm avoiding "same-face" so much as everyones face is just so wonderfully different, you know? Some faces have sharper features, some are softer, some faces look older and some younger... It's fun to explore the different kind of faces there can be :)

I know it's pretty common to have faceclaims for your characters, but personally i don't really have those—I just think about the different kind of features I've seen and combine them to create new faces... A little bit like making miis, honestly. But with like, real people faces. (Even when my work was more abstracted i was still thinking of real people faces!)

My hot tip: the nose carries in it so much life and character, and shapes the rest of the face! It is into a character's eyes and nose that i put the most thought, personally. A lot of art seems to kind of diminish the nose until its almost not there (including a lot of my own older art), but personally speaking i have a big nose... And every time i draw a new nose it delights another person who has a similar nose :) So I'm doing my best to get better at drawing them 😤

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Phase 3: Outfit

Tip: while figuring out designs especially for outfits and hairstyles, i use the symmetry ruler to save some time while i try new things. I disable snapping when i want to break the symmetry! I like to have a mix of symmetrical and asymmetrical elements in a design.

A fun place to add some asymmetry is in the hair, but symmetrical hairstyles are easier to figure out from different angles... I dont have any specific advice for designing hairstyles i just go buckwild and make it look like theres logic to it after the fact LMAO..

Anyway! Let's actually talk about shapes!

The majority of my characters have multiple outfits—i simply like to dress up my little guys ❤️

but every character starts with one outfit, their hashtag #look if you will, which then influences every other outfit i make them.

My process for designing these outfits is as follows:

1. I first answer this question: what image does this character consciously project?

E.g.: Tempest is a woman who cares a lot about her image and projects an aura of confidence and self assurance, whereas Callisto does not and projects an aura of unimportance and humbleness.

Ergo Tempest's outfit is carefully chosen by herself to create the image she wants to project and is bold and eyecatching, whereas Callisto does not want to draw attention to herself and as such she wears much more subdued clothing.

2. By this point in time i know who this character is or at the very least their concept, and ergo i have a solid idea about what their aesthetic vibe is

E.g. pirate, fruity wizard, goth, etc

So i open up pinterest and i begin to make a fashion board for this character.

I look at a mixture of real world fashions both modern and historical for this, as well as LARP fashion for that specific fantasy flavour. It's a good idea to draw from a wide variety of influences, including those that do not fit the specific vibe you are going for.

Note: I do not look at other fantasy/concept art for this.

The reason is, quite a lot of fantasy art is like a one-time image, and a lot of concept art is very removed from reality, so a lot of the time things only work from one specific angle and don't have any underlying logic to them.

Being that all my characters are created for a comic, I need to be able to draw them from any angle. I am not a costume designer, I do not know how to make clothes. But looking at real life clothing ensures everything I design is at least drawing inspiration from something that can be physically worn, so it gives my outfits some grounding in reality.

The further abstracted your sources get, the less grounded in reality your designs will become—which for me personally and my specific tastes and goals, is not desirable.

3. Look for recurring motifs in what makes up the specific aesthetic vibe you're going for

(e.g. pirates: fancy jackets, loose cotton shirts, sashes and belts),

4. Fashion is all about the shapes you create with the clothes that you wear.

Different fashion trends are all about what shape is currently considered "in"—it's not about "high waisted pants", its about the new shape that the higher waistband creates.

To create fantasy outfits that feel fresh, look at current and past fashion trends and figure out what shape theyre creating—then recreate that using the motifs you found and try use other kinds of clothing not necessarily often used to create this shape.

Tempest's outfit recreates the high waisted shape with a sash tied around her waist. Her loose poet shirt obviously creates the same shape as a loose jumper being tucked in, but I cropped the front of her jacket short and gave it large sleeves to create the same shape.

This is why its good to draw from a variety of influences—it gives you a wider pool of shapes to draw from, and you can then combine them to create something new! I may be designing a pirate character, but the shapes are pulled from modern fashion.

5. When creating another outfit for a character, using a new shape can be used to symbolise a drastic change, while maintaining the same shape but changing the overall value can symbolise a more subtle shift.

For example, a drastic change of shape can be used to supplement a character arc with a more extreme change, or perhaps supplement a situation wherein there is a drastic shift in how a character is acting or the role they are performing even if they as a person have not changed.

On the other hand, maintaining the same shape but changing the value balance of the outfit can indicate a more subtle change—such as a character slowly letting their walls down! Hairstyle too is great for this, such as a character slowly letting down their hair as the story progresses... A pun and a great way to gradually change their shape :)

Or, another way to put it—keeping the same shape will keep the same general vibe, while changing the shape will create an entirely new vibe.

Here's some examples of this in action!

Lavandula is simultaneously a very guarded woman with a very controlled image who does not like to let any of her true self show through, and also a woman who is incredibly transparent and easy to read the second you find the crack in the mask.

She has two very drastically different shapes that she alternates between because she is as a person, very extreme. I wanted her silhouette while wearing her full regalia to be extremely distinct from any other character I have bc she is not in the least bit subtle ❤️

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Charity and Rosalie don't specifically have arcs as their story happened in the past and it isnt relevant to the events of Heart of the Storm as their role in this story is a supportive one, but their past is still reflected/contrasted in their current designs!

Rosalie especially I think is a good example of using a different shape in a different context to show a shift in how she's acting, but not in her actual arc itself. She just shifts roles for a little bit :)

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I hope that was at least a little insightful! In short, i try to reflect reality in my characters physiques and faces, and then it's in their outfits that I then create and play around with shapes.

Other tutorials and thoughts like these that I've written on things like drawing hands, thumbnailing and panelling comics, poses, and a variety of other topics can be found here: https://diosmaden.art/tutorials

And you can also leave me a tip or grab my brushes n other resources from my ko-fi here! https://ko-fi/harrie

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Making a little mental health log on here bc i started anxiety meds about a month ago and things! might be getting better!! and it’s nice to have progress written down

So i don’t know if it Is the anxiety meds working but recently i’ve been feeling myself actually wanting to engage in media and information, like just little things like youtube diy videos, videos on how medieval armour works and is categorized, video game lore videos and learning how colour theory works in-depth and such

But this is huge for me because for the last several years i just. haven’t been able to engage in any type of media at all. I haven’t been reading new books, i haven’t been watching any new shows or even trying to learn new things unless i already knew about it from before and was therefore ‘safe’ or it was something so simple that i couldn’t possibly ‘mess it up’ somehow. Everything looked so intimidating to me and even though a part of my brain still wanted to engage and learn new things there was a mental block that stopped me from going beyond a very shallow skim of something on the surface

I had a really rough time doing academic readings and research at school oops, to the point where i wasn’t doing any of them at all unless they were very short and easy for my (VERY MENTALLY UNWELL) brain to understand

Anyhow. Maybe its just the weather getting better, i’m still only one month in on this medication but. i haven’t felt like this in literal years so i’m a little bit hopeful and a little bit excited

I’m going to make a small list of things i want to engage in, and start from there, slug pace better than no pace. Books still look intimidating but youtube videos sound doable ;v;