Not Doing Great?

@daedelweiss DTIYS!

My goal for this year is to get back into art, and finally use the drawing tablet I got last year. So finding this challenge was a good start. Not entirely happy but this is what I can do right now, gotta say not a bad start. Here is to getting better through practice.

Shorthand Google Reference Guide

I’m gonna type this up while it’s fresh on my mind because some of y’all don’t know how to use Google

SO YOU WANT TO DRAW A woman sitting in the grass.

IF YOU SEARCH: female sitting

Very vogue. Very male gaze. Good for fashion or model pictures, not very good if you’re wanting to draw a natural looking pose on a woman who isn’t a model and whose camera certainly didn’t fucking turn on by itself.

IF YOU SEARCH: female sitting pose

Arguably worse, depending on the use. My experience with “female + pose” searches is that you get a lot of IMVU and The Sims pose sets, and artists making sketch compiliations that… don’t always have great anatomy and are frequently just more stiff model poses. I do use similar searches for pinup sketches, ie, “female sassy pinup pose,” though “posing for pinup photography” and “how to pose for” will give different results if you aren’t finding what you need.

IF YOU SEARCH: woman student relaxing sitting on grass crossed legs

Closer. Still kind of staged looking. Maybe we don’t want her studying. Maybe we just want her relaxing. Still, you start to see how specific keyword searches will really get you results.

IF YOU SEARCH: woman sitting under tree grass relaxing nature summer

Nice. This is only a small handful of the results, but most of them more or less fit my mental image. Mostly stock images, but good for gesture sketches or figuring out a pose. Still… we could go further, and I think I will.

IF YOU SEARCH: woman sitting under tree grass relaxing nature summer senior photography

Jackpot. Senior pictures aren’t always awkward kids in braces. Look at how much more natural a few of these look? Compare that to the “Female sitting” search. Google Search tip #1 is basically “use more and specific keywords.” But just… one more thing I just… can’t get off my mind… what if I… just…

IF YOU SEARCH: black  woman sitting under tree grass relaxing nature summer senior photography

Uh oh. So let me level with you, if you just google “dreadlocks,” expect a lot of white people. I spent over 30 minutes adding keywords to this search, and every page was still white people. Breaking it back down to “black woman sitting on grass” helped but gave me all the boring pose issues of the female sitting search. So basically, Google Search tip #2 is: Google image search is as White as the rest of the damn world. How do we find what we’re looking for now, then?

IF YOU SEARCH: black woman sitting in grass nature tumblr blackout

Beautiful, natural poses. Adding “photography” whitewashed it. Adding “summer” gave me bikini pinups. Searching for POC models using Google image search is infinitely more frustrating than finding a million thin white women, and you’re usually going to be better off supporting POC modeling blogs themselves than fighting with Google all day. Using “tumblr” and “instagram” as keywords may also get you a lot more natural, less Vogue Was Here hits. Pinterest too, on occasion. 

But keep in mind that these are real people–especially using tags like “tumblr” or “blackout.” There’s a difference between referencing a pose or drawing different face shapes, and outright copying someone’s exact likeness without their permission. Maybe also consider liking/reblogging/following them if they’re a model or photographer. Use some common sense. You don’t own images found on google yadda yadda don’t be a dick.

Have fun being better at search engines and learning how to draw stuff!

Best Cat Tweets Of 2016

Via Bored Panda

waiting for people to realize that things like matching idles (kavehtham, eimiko), mirroring (kavehtham, wriolette) and complimentary colors (clorivia, aventio, renheng) are important for establishing a connection between two characters especially when it's a wlw or mlm pairing

you can't rely on implications alone to establish a connection between two characters

things like mirroring and complimentary colors are used to show they match/mirror and compliment each other

I think those things are just as important as implications and shouldn't be dismissed because it shows the characters are connected to each other even in something as simple as their designs

My deaf spider OC, Marisol, isn't impressed by Mr. O'Hara

Because love doesn’t stop at saying “I love you”. Love doesn’t end at telling someone how much you love them. It starts when you think of them every time you weren’t together. Every time you open your eyes in the morning and remember how wonderful your dreams are last night—because you thought of them before you go to sleep. It doesn’t end when two hearts decided to beat as one. It doesn’t stop even if you already said goodbye. In this world, where people think that hate exists too much, love goes on. And it will never end, even if the sun doesn’t rise in the morning—even if the rain doesn’t stop falling. Love should never stop spreading, darling we must let it live on.

ma.c.a // Infinite (via vomitingwords)

storyteller

sometimes I forget that I'm just a teenager writing a webcomic in my spare time, so I shouldn't hold myself to the same standards as, say, a feature film with an entire team of professional writers, or Hiromu Arakawa. Writing flawed stories is okay, and even necessary in order to write better ones :)

(if you want to read aforementioned amateur webcomic...)

How to Plot A Complex Novel in One Day (It WILL take all day)

Now first, I have to say, that the plot you’re able to come up with in one day is not going to be without its flaws, but coming up with it all at once, the entire story unfolds right in front of you and makes you want to keep going with it. So, where to begin? 

What is your premise and basic plot? Pick your plot. I recommend just pulling one from this list. No plots are “original” so making yours interesting and complicated will easily distract from that fact, that and interesting characters. Characters will be something for you to work on another day, because this is plotting day. You’ll want the main plot to be fairly straight forward, because a confusing main plot will doom you if you want subplots. 

Decide who the characters will be. They don’t have to have names at this point. You don’t even need to know who they are other than why they have to be in the story. The more characters there are the more complicated the plot will be. If you intend to have more than one subplot, then you’ll want more characters. Multiple interconnected subplots will give the illusion that the story is very complicated and will give the reader a lot of different things to look at at all times. It also gives you the chance to develop many side characters. The plot I worked out yesterday had 13 characters, all were necessary. Decide their “roles” don’t bother with much else. This seems shallow, but this is plot. Plot is shallow. 

Now, decide what drives each character. Why specifically are they in this story? You can make this up. You don’t even know these characters yet. Just so long as everyone has their own motivations, you’re in the clear. 

What aren’t these characters giving away right off the bat? Give them a secret! It doesn’t have to be something that they are actively lying about or trying to hide, just find something that perhaps ties them into the plot or subplot. This is a moment to dig into subplot. This does not need to be at all connected to their drive to be present in the story.  Decide who is in love with who, what did this person do in the 70’s that’s coming back to bite them today, and what continues to haunt what-his-face to this very day. This is where you start to see the characters take shape. Don’t worry much about who they are or what they look like, just focus on what they’re doing to the story. 

What is going to change these characters? Now this will take some thinking. Everyone wants at least a few of the characters to come out changed by the end of the story, so think, how will they be different as a result of the plot/subplot? It might not be plot that changes them, but if you have a lot of characters, a few changes that are worked into the bones of the plot might help you.

Now list out the major events of the novel with subplot in chronological order. This will be your timeline. Especially list the historical things that you want to exist in backstory. List everything you can think of. Think about where the story is going. At this point, you likely haven’t focused too much on the main plot, yeah, it’s there, but now really focus on the rising actions, how this main plot builds its conflict, then the climactic moment. Make sure you get all of that in there. This might take a few hours. 

Decide where to start writing. This part will take a LOT of thinking. It’s hard! But now that you’ve got the timeline, pick an interesting point to begin at. Something with action. Something relevant. Preferably not at the beginning of your timeline - you want to have huge reveals later on where these important things that happened prior are exposed. This is the point where you think about what information should come out when. This will be a revision of your last list, except instead of being chronological, it exists to build tension. 

Once you’ve gotten the second list done, you’ve got a plot. Does it need work? Probably. But with that said, at this point you probably have no idea who half your characters are. Save that for tomorrow, that too will be a lot of work. 

After you’ve plotted the loose structure of your novel from this, see my next post to work on character! 

intj ravenclaw 5w6 moodboard

view high-quality version here

Saw this somewhere else and felt the need to post it cause no one else ever really tells you this stuff