GUYS SILVER EXIT INTERVIEW IS HERE!!! I Swear I'm Gonna Make Some Art For It Soon Bc He Revealed SO.

have some mercy my dude

EVERYONE SHUT THE FUCK UP

IS. IS THIS THE SAME PERSON

IS MOVIE!MIKE ACTUALLY HENRY'S FUCKING KID

diversity win your spam emails are queer

why

Do you ever get annoyed with people mischaracterizing your more complex characters like Knofe or Silver? Since both of them can be seen as *bad,* but if people pay more attention to the narrative them and other characters are actually a lot better than they seem at first.

Uhhh. Hm. I'd say not really. Everyone's had their bad moments. And sometimes those bad moments are more significant to some than others. That's life.

I'm always interested to see what people take away from the characters and their choices and how they change. In the case of a character who generally changes for the better, not everyone's going to forgive. But being good isn't done for forgiveness, it's done for, well, being good.

But I guess this is more about mischaracterization than criticism, yeah? Characters are complicated. So I'm fine seeing people more drawn to one aspect of a character than another. If that's what someone's takeaway is, then that's their experience. Even on the II writing team itself, characters can be written slightly differently, even if not easily perceivable. I think if I briefly stepped away from the II team and watched a new episode made without me, I'd easily be able to tell if it was written by Adam, Brian, or someone else. I can do that with some shows, too, but I'll quit elaborating for the sake of not sounding nerdy (Steven Universe my beloved, but that becomes easier cause each writer is also storyboarding and they have distinct styles, oh no I'm elaborating).

But yeah! Characters are cool and flexible and that's kinda the point of them in fiction. We like writing a lot of them to be complex, but unlike real people, characters exist in stories to complete a purpose narratively. And that'll dictate characterization to a degree. So, lil nunanced changes are welcome. And more notable changes, too, why not. I guess I'm thinking more from a fanfic lens more-so than a discussion-of-characters lens, but it's all the key tenants of viewer interpretation being valuable, but it's always a plus to see people, on average, having the intended takeaway. And good on you, trying to see a character from every angle!

billjer bc I want to pretend they’re not toxic 💔

(double tap for better quality)

gonna show u guys a little opalescent highlight hack i threw together today

rainbow gradient above your main figure (i usually have all my main figure folders/layers in one big folder, so i can clip gradient maps + adjustments to it!). liquify tool to push the colors around a bit. STAY WITH ME I KNOW IT LOOKS STUPID RN I'M GOING SOMEWHERE WITH THIS

THEN: set it to add/glow (or the equivalent in ur drawing program), lower the opacity a bit, and apply a layer mask. then u can edit the mask with whatever tools you like to create rainbow highlights!!

in this case i'm mostly using the lasso fill tool to chip out little facets, but i've also done some soft airbrushing to bring in larger rainbow swirls in some areas. it's pretty subtle here, but you can see it better when i remove the gradient map that's above everything, since below i'm working in greyscale:

more granular rambling beneath the cut!

u could also just do this with a brush that has color jitter, but what i like about using layer masks for highlight/shading layers is how simple and reversible it makes everything. i can use whatever brushes i want, and erasing/redoing things is super low stakes, which is great when i often approach this stuff with a super trial-and-error approach.

example: have u ever thrown a gradient w multiple colors over an entire piece, set it to multiply etc, and then tried to erase it away to carve out shadows/highlights? it's super frustrating, bc it looks really good, but if u erase something and then change ur mind later, u basically would have to like. recreate the gradient in the area u want to cover up again. that's how i used to do things before figuring out layer masks!! but masking basically creates a version of this with INFINITE undo bc u can erase/re-place the base layer whenever u want.

anyway, back to rambling about this specific method:

i actually have TWO of these layers on this piece (one with the liquified swirls shown above, and another that's just a normal concentric circle gradient with much broader stripes) so i can vary the highlights easily as needed.

since i've basically hidden the rainbow pattern from myself, the colors in each brushstroke i make will kind of be a surprise, which isn't always great -- but easily fixable! for example, if i carve out a highlight and it turns out the rainbow pattern in that area is way too stripey, i can just switch from editing the mask to editing the main layer and blur that spot a bit.

also, this isn't a full explanation of the overall transparency effect in these screencaps! there's other layer stuff happening below the rainbow highlights, but the short version is i have all this character's body parts in different folders, each with their own lineart and background fill, and then the fill opacity is lowered and there's multiply layers clipped to that -- blah blah it's a whole thing. maybe i'll have a whole rundown on this on patreon later. uhhh i think that's it tho! i hope u get something useful out of this extremely specific thing i did lmao

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