I get quite a few questions about where I find my stock images that are used in live previews so here’s a list of my favourite (all can be found on the resources page). Most of these are free to use on personal and commercial projects but double check the licenses before use.
i feel bad for people who use sai but dont know about stabilizer, transparent brushes and clipping groups
this is where you find stabilizer:
i personally prefer to use S-4 for default drawing and S-7 when i need to draw really long smooth lines. this is what it does:
this is where you find transparent brush:
when you enable it, you can use your currently selected brush as eraser. this is what it does:
this is where you find clipping group:
you have to have at least two layers, the base layer and the one for the colors. when you draw on the layer with little red bar on side, the stuff you put on the layer appears only on top of the things you have on the base layer. the effect is p much same as preserving opacity except you dont change anything about the base layer and you can still use layer textures and effects. this is what it does:
reblog this to save a life
THANK YOU SO MUCH
i dont use Sai but i know most of you guys do so!!
“We Wear Culture” is a collaboration between Google and more than 180 museums, schools, fashion institutions, and other organizations from all parts of the globe. It’s part of Google’s Arts & Culture platform, which is digitizing the world’s cultural treasures, and functions as a searchable guide to a collective archive of some 30,000 fashion pieces that puts “three millennia of fashion at your fingertips,” Google says.
But it isn’t just a database. Google has worked with curators to create more than 450 exhibits on different topics—say, how the cheongsam changed the way Chinese women dress—making the site an endlessly entertaining, educational portal filled with stunning imagery touching on everything from modern Japanese streetwear to the clothes worn at the court of Versailles.
i can already tell this has made writing for historical fandoms – the worst part of which, for me, is absofuckinglutely hands-down the clothing – much easier.
I know discourse is the word of choice in fandom nowadays but I kind of wish we would have stuck with “fandom wank” because it carries the implication that the anger involved culminated into effectively nothing and that the act was wholeheartedly masturbatory in nature rather than for any greater cause.
I saw this post about an hour after I saw a post that said, essentially, “There should be a word for that thing where [exactly describes ‘squeeing’].”
I feel like the time has come to produce something like this:
Squee: The noise you make when something is so good that all you can really do is squeak or squeal. A high pitched sound of delight, often accomanied by hugging yourself or others.
Squick: A fic/art/concept/topic that is repellent to you, so you reject association with it and instead retreat to your personal comfortable spaces- all the while remembering that someone else’s comfort is not your own.
YKINMKATO: Also called “kink tomato.” Abbreviation meaning “your kink is not my kink, and that’s okay.” Used to explain why you are rejecting art or fic brought to you by someone else. A solid mantra to recall instead of sending flames in people’s comments
Flames: The comment equivalent of anon hate.
AMV: “animated music video” or “anime music video.” Often, this is stylized to fit a specific fandom, such as a “PMV” (pony music video) in my little pony. May also be referred to as a lyricstuck.
Filk: Combination of the words “film” and “folk,” this is a music genre, to which “fan songs” and “fan parody covers” belong. If you don’t really understand what this means, take a quick listen to American Pie, then compare Weird Al Yankovic’s Saga Begins
BNF: Big name fan. You know that one person who is just so fuckign popular in your fandom? Their art is always on your dash, everyone knows their fics? Being spoken to directly by them is basically being noticed by everyone ever’s senpai? That’s what these people are called.
DL:DR; Not unliked the teal deer (tl;dr, or “too long, didn’t read”), DLDR means “don’t like? Don’t read!” It’s a reminder that you are under no obligation, ever, to expose yourself to uncomfortable (or, squicky), or potentially harmful (or, triggering), material. Not ever. If you don’t actively like something? It’s not worth your time. Skip it.
Gen: or “genfic” “genart” etc. Fan works which contain no or very little romantic content. Often these are styled after the canon material, and may be called “episodic” ro “slice of life” in addition.
Lemon: Work containing strong pornographic elements
Lime, or Citrus: Work containing mild or implicit pornographic elements
Sockpuppeting: The surprisingly common scenario of someone making a bunch of fake accounts/sideblogs to send themselves reviews or hate, to try to increase views or drama surrounding a work. The accounts they make are called Sockpuppets.
WAFF: Warm and fluffy feelings. A genre of fic that exists just to be therapeutically sweet. Nowadays, usually just called “fluffy.”
Schmoop: Take WAFF and somehow make it even more syrupy. You’ll know it when you see it.
Whump: Imagine if you will, a hurt-comfort fic. The comfort might be considered WAFF. The hurt? That’s the whump.
Wapanese: When white autors pepper their anime fanfic with random, tonally inappropriate japanese words.
Anthropomorfic: Nowadays we just call these “humanstuck” or “humanized AU.”
Wank: Wildly disproportionate drama that crops up because someone wrote/drew/did something that someone else didn’t like. Seriously, I cannot begin to express the fiascos that have come about from all this. Just… Just go look at this.
Plot bunny: Story ideas that you probably won’t ever actually deal with, but that multiply entirely out of control, creating huge worlds in your head that you’re probably not going to write. But hey! You might! And until then they make great sideblogs/askblogs/tumblr posts.
Casefic: Fanfics that try to create an episode-like feel for procedural and crime dramas, moster of the week shows, etc.
Jossed: When popular fan theories and fanon are addressed in the canon of a series, and whoops, turns out we were all very, very wrong.
Kripked: When popular fan theories and fanon are addressed in the canon of a show and, hot damn, we fucking called it.
Secret Masters: The people who run the websites/ communities/etc that we all do our fanning on. Less relevant now that we have things like tumblr, but when everyone had to run their own archival and social sites for each fandom, it was more important to pay our respects to the strange and powerful beings that brought us all together and gave us our fannish homes. Think the staff of AO3, for example.
Bashing: When a writer purposefully writes a specific character as a horrible, horrible person so that they can throw them out of the storyline, usually to allow their OTP to get together without trouble. Distinct from fridging in that it doesn’t require the character to die, but rather to be such a screaming harpy that they get rightfully removed from the main characters’ lives for being an abusive hell beast. Generally, a type of character hate. Be wary of people who bash women, queer people, and POC with consistency: they are not safe to be around.
‘Squick’ also has an alternate horrible meaning for Harry Potter fans who were in fandom a while back. Dear god.
Also:
Purple prose: Fic that is excessively flowery and complicated. Basically the “me, an intellectual” meme. If it has the phrase “cerulean orbs” you know it’s purple prose.
Beige prose: The opposite of purple prose. Basically, the plainest (and, if done wrongly, the most boring) type of prose.
R&R: Read & review. Back from when fic comments were called “reviews” and there was no such fucking thing as the kudos button.
*wipes a tear away* I feel so vintage.
Know your history children.
important history lesson
*stares out. breaks fourth wall*
Lemons.
For all you young’uns out there.
Also, I’ve seen people tag a ship-focused fic both M/M and Gen on AO3. Just because it also features friendships doesn’t make it Gen! If the main focus is a romantic relationship, do the Gen readers (which is not me, but they do exist) a favor and don’t tag it Gen.
^^^^^^^ THIS. filters are only useful if things are tagged correctly and i can’t search for non-ship fic when everything is tagged for both ship AND gen 😦
please for the love of god tag responsibly and don’t make people who are looking for non-romance fic suffer
I miss proper gen, and the expectation of it in specific places. I wish that was still a tag that followed specific conventions
I actually had a look at that fandom wank link, and it reminded me of another term that’s gone a bit by the wayside:
TOSsed: when an online community was kicked off a platform for (real or alleged) violations of the Terms of Service. This was not infrequently the result of complaints about queer content specifically.
Never forget why we needed an archive of our own, folks.
Reblogging for artsy people that follow me. Also a lovely name for a program.
I WAS JUST WANTING TO DRAW SOMETHING WITH MY NEW TABLET BUT I COULDN’T BECAUSE I DIDN’T HAVE A PROGRAM TUMBLR IS READING MY MIND!!!!
I’m really fond of this program so far. It may be a bit over-simplified – I’ve had trouble figuring out some really basic things – but it responds really well to my tablet, which is the most important thing.
It launches fast. Works well on Windows AND Mac. It’s perfect for fast or derp doodles and screencaps. It has guides which are awesome for helping with drawing perspective and uniform direction lines It even shows you pretty artwork in its dialogue window at startup for inspiration. IT’S AWESOME.
For those who don’t know:
THE ALPACA HAS LEVELED UP
-Has an Animation Mode (OnionSkin mode) using the layers as frames -Reference Window -Advanced Brush settings and editing -New Filters such as “Invert”, “Extracting Lines”, “Cloud”, and “Sand” -More snap tools, including a 3D perspective function
And the younger sister software, Medibang Paint Pro, is a more robust version that’s usable on not just Computers, but Android and iOS systems as well
-You can save your preferences, workspace, brushes, palettes, and materials if you have a Medibang.com account, and you can export/import them across different computers if need be. -Medibang is a lot like Pixiv or DeviantART, except you can become a published illustrator and/or Comics/Manga artist, regardless of where you’re from in the world -Medibang allows you to upload directly to their site as long as you have an internet connection -You can collaborate with others on illustrations or comic projects using the cloud saving system -Free brushes, screen tones, and background images available for download from the cloud, for use in your artwork
75-99% of the population score a zero on the Beck Depression Inventory.
I can never get over that. 0. How. I mean, good? *sigh*
When clients tell me that 0 is bullshit, I read out the answers that would add up to a score of zero. “I do not feel like a failure.“ “I don’t feel disappointed in myself.“ “I have not noticed any recent change in my interest in sex.“ “I don’t feel particularly guilty”
It feels so far away, and yet, it’s so normal for so many people.
I prefer the PHQ-9 generally, especially for people with chronic depression, but keep copies of the BDI around specifically because it has examples of the kinds of statements a non-depressed person would endorse.
OK well the fine was code for “There is no immediate emergency” thing describes my family perfectly. My (legally disabled) mom will occasionally go so far as “oh, not so good” when she’s having a particularly bad pain day, but always with an apologetic “but that’s just how things go, don’t worry about me” tone to it.
This is also why I have no idea what my family mental health history would be if anybody actually got diagnosed. Or talked about any of this.
Doujinshi are Japanese fan comics; most of the time, they are derivative works of popular anime/manga/video game series. Creating doujinshi is a popular pastime in Japan; in fact, some famous manga authors/groups (such as Clamp, Gainax, and Kiyohiko Azuma) began their careers by creating doujinshi. A common misconception is that all doujinshi are pornographic, but in reality there are many non-explicit doujinshi.
Although doujinshi is readily accessible in Japan, it’s much harder to get a hold of for those of us who live outside of it. But hope isn’t lost; you just need to familiarize yourself with proxy websites and be willing to spend money on international shipping. I decided to create this guide to help people who want to collect doujinshi but don’t know how to get started. Before I begin, I just want to say that the websites I’m recommending are from my own personal experiences. I’m sure that I’m missing a lot of great websites, so if you know of any, feel free to add onto this post!
There are several websites one can buy doujinshi from, and an even bigger number of proxy websites to use to buy them. I started collecting doujinshi in mid-2013, but only bought them via eBay until around March of 2014, when I finally branched into Japanese websites. Aside from eBay, there are three websites I’ve bought nearly all of my doujinshi from.
Hi! I figured out a shortcut for perspective with the pen tool (and a quick instruction on how to draw straight lines) in Photoshop.
As happy as I am to see people gain the confidence to try out backgrounds, I should mention that it takes more than a trick to draw good BGs. I urge you all to try to learn it properly through research and draw from observation. Thomas Romain has a good batch of incredibly detailed, in-depth look into perspective on his twitter. I also learned at lot from Perspective! For Comic Book Artist by David Chelsea, it really is a must have for all types of BG work. Work hard and good luck!