OK WOW- Uhhh Since That Little Old Guide Is Now My Most Popular Post, Let's Do That Again Lol

Code: YOU CANT KILL AN IDEA

You get the Silas Birchtree page that’s included in the exclusive B&N Book of Bill, which could help solve the string of riddles in the thisisnotawebsitedotcom.com, which could possibly pertain to the question “what defeated Silas Birchtree?”

Even if it doesn’t work, still pretty cool, right??

Drew these instructions for this one-page zine and I figured I'd post them on their own just in case anyone finds them useful :)

Shout to vocaloid songs with vaguely religious undertones....have to be one of my favorite genders.

Song is Make Me Happy by Mayuko and Sadara

character.ai scares the shit out of me for a lot of reasons. I wrote a whole essay in my English Comp class on why it's bad, not just from a generative ai perspective but from a soical perspective as well. Some people (I won't say all but a scary amount) use it as a replacement for actual human interaction. If you want to roleplay, go out there and make real human connections. This is why online communities exist. I know it might be frightening, but it's worth it!

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

Vent art

This is a test post to figure out how instagram works. If anyone sees this enjoy some bunnies.

How I save time on backgrounds as a full-time webcomic artist

Hi! I make webcomics for a living, and I have to be able to draw a panel extremely fast to keep up with my deadlines. I draw about 50 panels a week, which gives me about 45 minutes per panel if I want any semblance of a healthy work-life balance.

Most webtoon artists save time on backgrounds by using 3d models, which works for them and is great! but personally I hate working in 3d... I went to school for it for a year and hated it so much I completely changed career paths and vowed never to do it again! So, this is how I save time without using any 3d, for those of you out there who don't like it either!

This tactic has also saved me money (3d models are expensive) and it has helped me converting my comic from scroll format into page format for print, because I have much more art to work with than what's actually in the panels. (I'll touch on this later)

So, first, I make my backgrounds huge. my default starting size is 10,000 x 10,000 pixels. My panels are 2,500 pixels wide, so my backgrounds are 4x that, minimum. Because of this, I make them less detailed than I could or that you might expect so it doesn't look weird against my character art when I shrink portions of it down.

I personally find it much easier to add in detail than to make "removing" details look natural at smaller sizes, but you might have different preferences than I do.

I also make sure to keep all of my elements on separate layers so that I can easily remove or replace them, I can move them to simulate different camera angles more easily, and it's simple to adjust the lighting to imply different times of day.

Then I can go ahead and copy/paste them into my episodes. I move the background around until it feels like it's properly fitting how I want.

Once I've done that in every panel, I'll go back through the episode and clean up anything that looks weird, and add in solid blacks (for my art style) Here's a quick before and after of what that looks like!

This makes 90% of my backgrounds take me just a few hours. This is my tactic when I'm working in an environment that an entire scene, or multiple scenes, will take place.

But many panels will inevitably have a location that's used exactly once, and it would waste time and effort to draw a massive background for those. So in 10% of cases, I just draw the single panel background in the episode. I save all of these, just in case I can re-use it later (this happens more often with outdoor locations, but I save them all nonetheless!)

I generally have to draw about 2 big backgrounds per episode, and 3-5 single-panel backgrounds per episode! At the beginning of an arc/book the number is higher, but as the series is continuing and I'm building up an asset library of indoor and outdoor elements to re-use for the book, the number generally goes down and I save more time.

My series involves time travel and mysteries, so there's a lot of new locations in it and we're constantly moving around. If I were working on a series that was more consistent in this aspect, this process would save me even more time!

Like I said earlier, this also saves me a lot of pain and gives me a lot more options as I'm converting from scroll format to print format!

panels that look like this in scroll format...

can look like this in print!

because I drew the background like this, so I didn't need to go through the additional effort to add in the extra detail to expand it outwards at all.

Anyways, I hope this helps someone! As always if it doesn't help, just go ahead and disregard. This is what I do and what works for me, and I feel like I only ever see time-saving tips for comics that involve 3d models and workflows, which don't work for me at all! I know there's more people like me out there, so this is for you!

Enjoy!

Also obligatory "my webcomic" if you want to see this in action or check it out!

Did you know that candles can explode?

Things I learned about candles and candle holders yesterday:

Water only makes candle fire worse because of the candle wax

Glass candle holders cannot handle extreme changes in temperature so if you....I dunno, pour cold water on a glass candle holder that's gotten so hot the flames have almost reached the overhead light fixtures...the glass candle holder is going to explode

Candle wax is extremely hard to get out of cloth

Unintentional science experiments are the most terrifying science experiments.

Fan art for the lost song Medical Wedding by MASA Works Design

When I first heard what has been found of this song, I thought it was so beautiful even if the subject matter was so dark. Gumi sounds like she's screaming in such raw emotional pain. I haven't heard Gumi tuned like that before or since.

I really hope it's found some day.

“Notes on skirts and pants”

Source: miyuli on twitter

since twitter is circling the drain again, guess i'll start porting over bookmarks