#me captioning art on tumblr: here is the whole thought process and here are some headcanons and here is also a meme

[inceptionart]

Alicia @halfofawhole is our artist highlight for today! Read on for her thoughts on art, and you can find all of her artwork here and here!

🎨 When did you start creating art for the Inception fandom, and what is your inspiration?

I will have to fully credit Tenet for bringing me to the Inception fandom—both with their emotional love stories and tender connections, amidst the chaos and mayhem across space and time—it just moves me so much, I can’t help but be inspired to be a part of such a poignant portrayal of the human heart and mind.

During my time in the Tenet fandom, some of my mutuals and I talked a lot about the comparisons between Mal/Cobb and Protagoneil, but it’s not until I had a full Inception rewatch sometime in June 2021 that it hits me just how much they parallel each other, and I love parallels. I started with simple screenshot edits, and then with coloring and fonts, and now I’m creating gifs as well. Thank you Nolan for motivating me to learn Photoshop, so I can finally pour out my feelings for your movies lol.

🎨 Tell us about your creative process, and which part do you enjoy the most about it?

As mentioned, I’m wholly obsessed with visual and textual parallels, and Nolan’s timey wimey movies are such a treasure trove of those. Also, not just with each other but with other media sources as well! I get such a rush whenever my brain is able to catch on an instance of it. So most of the time, it’s really about quickly jotting down the parallel descriptions as soon I’ve thought about it so I won’t forget, their corresponding movie scenes and where they’re located in the movie. After that, it’s a matter of extracting out the screencaps and starting the editing or giffing process.

My favorite part of all this is definitely seeing it all come together at the end, to see the gifs and edits come out exactly how I’ve pictured it in my mind. They are my outlet to capture all the moments that fascinate and resonate with me—kind of an emotional distillation, if you will. I also love listening to music to help me to focus, and most of the time the lyrics will end up as captions for the art itself ahaha

🎨 Link us to your first and latest artwork, and how your style has evolved since then?

Ooo this is a tricky one! All of my early Inception artworks were combined with Tenet and/or Interstellar (the whole thing with parallels asdkfgk), so there’s a lot of them in my Tenet blog here.

But for purely Inception works, my first edit is here (made for the Inception 30-Day Challenge) and my latest one is here (made for the Inception Big Bang 2022, inspired by @rayelovesgreen‘s beautiful story). As for gifs, this is my first one (Sobb!) and this is my latest (elevator Arthur!).

I don’t know if I have any style, but I guess the improvement would be simply not to make the gifs look extremely grainy or twitchy while still keeping within the tumblr gif size limit lol. The edits are much easier to work with, but I love learning how to go from simple coloring to using textures and layer styles.

🎨 What is your absolute favorite piece of art that you've made, and why?

Another tricky one! I love all my artworks for different reasons, they all have their own stories to tell on how they came to be. But I really have to choose, it will be this Inception team name edit (which is also directly inspired from an earlier Nolan movie parallel edit here). It involves a bit of head-cracking to get the name origins/meanings which are most suited to each of the characters, and it’s very fun and satisfying to see them all put together like that.

For gifs, my favorites would be these Ariadne/Beth Harmon and Cobb/Saito parallels. The former is my very first fic-inspired gifset, and the absolute visual and emotional contrast in the latter is just so lovely to me.

🎨 What is something about Inception that you really want to make art for someday, and why?

I’m in constant awe of all those super fancy and shiny gifs and edits out there with all those effects and coloring, and I hope someday I can learn how to make those for my own Inception stuff too! And I also want to make a lot more art for Yusuf, Robert and Ariadne, they deserve all the love!

🎨 Give a shoutout to your favorite Inception artists here!

Oh gosh, so many of you! Definitely Rusty @oceans-foundfamily hitting the feels all the time! Meg @megofnuts with her exquisite, dreamy colors. Mizu @mizunoir for her endlessly glorious, emotional art (I want to commission art from you forever!). Immensely talented Ash @mister-eames (gifs, edits, art... what can’t you do??). Flos @flosculatory and her sublime edits. @rayelovesgreen @of-fluxions and their stunning vids.  @youcantsaymylastname @silverbrume and their adorably tender drawings! Lemon @lemon-yellow, for art with so much depth and love. And shoutout to @iamanonniemouse @stormofsharpthings for writing stories so gorgeous and brilliant that I can always vividly picture them in my mind.

🎨 Anything else you'd like to talk about art and the Inception fandom in general ❤

Where to even start? 😭 It’s the best fandom, hands down. Talent and kindness abound from everyone here, and I definitely owe almost everything, if not all of my art progress here to the Inception fandom. My fellow artists constantly inspire me! And even beyond art itself, this fandom feels like a second home to me apart from real life and I’m just so grateful and thankful for everyone who has made this space such a lovely, welcoming one all the time. Nothing but love for all of you, and thank you for being here. 💖

#inception artist highlight #inceptiversary #inception #halfofawhole

[sepdet]

I posted 3,412 times in 2022

That's 574 more posts than 2021!

146 posts created (4%)

3,266 posts reblogged (96%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@cephalopodvictorious

@ardent-ace

@whetstonefires

@angeloftheeasterngate

@doccywhomst

I tagged 1,957 of my posts in 2022

Only 43% of my posts had no tags

#queue - 87 posts

#us politics - 76 posts

#youtube - 65 posts

#oh tumblr - 50 posts

#dracula daily - 40 posts

#vile puns - 29 posts

#critters - 27 posts

#funny - 27 posts

#cats - 22 posts

#other people's art - 22 posts

Longest Tag: 140 characters

#my therapist didn't understand why i was peeved at that 'the good news is the only vaccinated people in the study who died had comorbidities

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

1,209 notes - Posted July 31, 2022

#4

This woman may have a point, although I fear she overestimates the amount of work Elon Musk does vs what he takes credit for.

See link above for her whole thread, but the parts that jumped out at me:

At first I thought “how terrible, I hate Elon Musk” and then I realized that having to own Twitter is an entirely appropriate punishment for Elon Musk

The world’s richest man would rather be subpoenaed twice a year to testify before Congress about why he used the official @/Twitter account to post 12 Reddit memes calling for the overthrow of the government than just like… having sex in a luxury submarine?

[...]

I considered deleting my account if Elon Musk buys Twitter but honestly that is letting him off easy, we should not leave, we should engage goose mode and keep him as busy as possible dealing with Twitter so he can’t do any of the other bad things he usually does

[Image: screencap from Horrible Goose Game with caption "I think I will cause problems on purpose" /end image]

Like… think about it… if we all make sure that Twitter is as enormous a headache as possible… and his gigantic ego is fully invested in proving he can “fix Twitter…”

We can completely freeze all of his other destructive activities. Goodbye monkey torture hobby!!!

I mean sure he can still just hire people to do the other stuff BUT it is fairly well established with Elon that, once his attention wanders, his projects never move again (see: HyperLoop).

He has the same collection of abandoned craft projects I do, his are just expensive.

Anyway I think maybe the entire cosmic purpose of Twitter all along was to become a massive Elon-distraction device.

He is our Minotaur. We are his labyrinth. All things are processing according to a greater plan.

2,332 notes - Posted April 24, 2022

#3

The Endurance was trapped in Antarctic ice for about a year and finally sank in November 1915:

Famously, Ernest Shackleton used a jury-rigged lifeboat to sail over 700 miles to a whaling station, seek help, return and rescue his entire crew, which imo is a greater feat than reaching the South Pole. The ocean currents circling Antartica are some of the stormiest and coldest in the world. How the heck do you cross that in a small open boat without sinking, starving, or freezing to death?

Anyway, I'm impressed that the Endurance looks to be in pretty good shape considering how much it got crushed by pack ice. And it was just discovered yesterday (March 9)!

5,415 notes - Posted March 9, 2022

#2

19,263 notes - Posted June 10, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

[Description: Tiktok compilation of two dancers in sweats or other gym clothes interpreting various iPhone alert sounds as dance moves synchronized with and vaguely mimicking the sound effects.]

26,166 notes - Posted June 29, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

--------

Well at least #3 is an actual educational post, which I'm proud to have posted before news media, since I just happened to catch the initial tweet rippling across archaeology twitter.

#2 is educational too, actually: there's a good reason why those early reconstructions of pterosaurs look like flying possums.

Here's the director's cut Endurance/Shackleton post in which I recounted their incredible saga with actual photos from the expedition

#tumblr2022 #year in review #my 2022 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review

[aro-arttorneys]

finally i can be that kind of person. happy December 1st :,D

based this on that one instagram post from Hoshino where he goes outside with Marie to draw the roses in the gardens (x). i also have this very self-indulgent headcanon that Krory is usually not comfortable smiling with his mouth open, because, oh, you know,,, but around some people (Allen, Lavi, but also Marie!) he feels at ease and does not mind :,)

full image under the cut

#i cant come to work today it's an international holiday #dgm #d. gray-man #d gray man #arystar krory #d. gray man #sorry hoshino i didnt give him a fancy pencil to draw with :( #but believe me i already had enough trouble drawing the whole thing itself lmao #me captioning art on instagram: look i made this :) #me captioning art on tumblr: here is the whole thought process and here are some headcanons and here is also a meme #and a tag rant but that's ... that's bc instagram doesnt allow for it lol #i based this headcanon on regis from the witcher btw bc i LOVE the idea of like...that kind of trust??

[jengarie]

#showyourprocess !

From planning to posting, share your process for making creative content!

To continue supporting content makers, this tag game is meant to show the entire process of making creative content: this can be for any creation.

RULES — When your work is tagged, show the process of its creation from planning to posting, then tag up to 5 people with a specific link to one of their creative works you’d like to see the process of. Use the tag #showyourprocess so we can find yours!

Thank you, @rinielle for tagging me! She chose the piece above (original post), and oh boy this one was a whole ass rollercoaster ride! Unfortunately, I hadn't turned on the timelapse feature for this but I'll try to go through each part of the process as best as I can!

The photos I'm gonna upload are gonna be a mix of screenshots and literal photos of my screen, because I'm taking some of them from my updates to friends, since a lot of the steps got lost in my painting process.

But before that, let me tag some other amazing creators!

@dragonji: this gif art!

@candicewright: this yibo painting!

@wendashanren: this gifset!

@mylastbraincql: this gif!

I haven't been able to keep track of who's been tagged so apologies if you've already done this! Also, no pressure to do it at all if you would rather not! <3

Planning

Sometimes, I get an idea first and find reference photos to go with that idea. But for this one, I sought out a reference photo first, and built an idea on top of it!

After that, I roughly sketch out the base pose. Usually, this looks very messy, but it doesn't really matter as long as I understand which part goes where!

The idea for the background didn't really come until the creation process because I don't think I really planned this to be a full piece.

Creation

Sketching

Honestly, from this point on, it's more of trial and error.

So, I redid the the initial base pose—made it cleaner and a little bit more detailed. See: the added definition in their arm muscles, the rearrangement of Wei Wuxian's legs, and Lan Wangji's hand on Wei Wuxian's back. If you look at the second photo, I also changed the pose a bit midway—I tend to edit as I go sometimes when I change my mind. (For this, I thought, given the Lan arm strength, it would be better to make Lan Wangji look more at ease carrying Wei Wuxian. This gets covered by the robes anyway though, so it didn't matter much in the end.)

I also started adding details to the base! I usually start with the face and then the hair! I usually go for the clothes next, but I dreaded the robes in this piece so I guess that's why I ended up with a basic idea of what I wanted for the background instead LOL I also figured out how I want the final crop to look like, so I blocked out all the other areas with an extra layer!

Okay, onto the part that killed me like ten times: the robes. There are a lot of interactions between their robes here given their pose, and not to mention they also have layers upon layers on each of them! So, to maintain my sanity and to keep track of which part is which, I color coded them into the most colorful sketch I've ever made.

Another reason why I filled in each layer of robe with a solid block of color, is so that all the lines underneath gets covered. Without all of the colors, the actual outline actually looks like the one on the right. What a nightmare!

I also ignored the crop again for this part, because it's always better to draw past your borders, in case you decide to rotate or tilt or whatever your piece later on. I didn't do the feet anymore though, because that I was sure wouldn't show in the final piece anymore.

After that, I did the sketch one more time and then started adding the base colors. (I didn't have a screenshot of just the base colors, and the final CSP file is a nightmare so I copy pasted the layers into a new canvas to show you guys :') )

By the way, I drew their robes flowing this way, because I wanted it to frame the lower arch of the moon behind them for the composition. It was a little frustrating that I couldn't get Lan Wangji's robes a little higher because of Wei Wuxian's legs but I later filled in the empty space with his forehead ribbon anyway, so it all worked out in the end!

Painting

Because apparently, I was a masochist back then, I merged the base colors all into one layer and started adding shadows to the robes. (These days, I add shadows first and then, merge. It's much easier this way.)

And then, I started painting! Again, I did the face first and then the hair, before finally the robes. This was my first time painting side profiles and honestly it was quite a pain to figure out LOL but !!! I think I did a good job and I'm proud of how it turned out. I again used reference photos for this one but I can't link any because they were just several random Pinterest photos that I didn't save.

Another thing to note is that I use the mesh transform tool a lot, especially on faces. That's largely why Lan Wangji's face looks so different in the latter two!

And then I went with the robes. Somewhere along the way, I realized I didn't like how I planned to do Lan Wangji's sleeves and the flowy part of Wei Wuxian's robes and I... decided, with much dread, to do them over. So I sketched on top of the painted layers and redid the robes, again.

It was at this point that I decided to take a break from this piece because it was honestly very draining! I think it took about three weeks before I decided to open the file again and continue it.

When I did, I just finished painting the rest of the robes and their hands. The blue details on Lan Wangji's outer robes were painted on a separate layer that I put on Multiply. I probably did more adjustments to the face and hair and stuff, because my painting process is honestly a mess :')

Final Adjustments

I added some correction layers on certain areas to fix some of the colors. See: Lan Wangji's sleeve becoming much brighter and paler; Wei Wuxian's legs having less contrast. And then I merged all of the layers (excluding the background) and added a bit of blur. See: Wei Wuxian's ponytail; the entire lower part; the flowing forehead ribbon. My reasoning for this is so that most of the detail (and therefore the flow of the eye) goes to their faces and expressions!

And then, I put a blue Overlay layer on low opacity to make Wangxian blend better with the background, added a bit of shadow on the inside and the lower sections and added the glowing details for the added flair. I initially wanted sparkles and/or stars but they didn't turn out as well as this did. I also upped the contrast by a little for the entire piece!

Aaaand, that's it! In truth, I did a bit more color adjustments to the whole piece, but I was a dummy who forgot to turn them back on before posting so ... oh well.

Posting

Before posting, I upload it either on my spare private Twitter account or on a drafted Tumblr post so I can check the colors on my phone. This is because the colors on different devices can look very different, and I would at the very least want all my pieces to look nice on both of my devices!

And then, once I deem it satisfactory, I just try to think of a caption and post! Some artists wait for a certain time where most of their followers are active, but I didn't have a lot of MDZS followers at this point so it didn't really matter to me.

It still doesn't really; I haven't actually been able to figure out when my MDZS followers are awake even now.

#showyourprocess #mine #whew this was so long oops #but this piece took like #maybe 1.5 weeks sans the break i had to take #so !! #LOL #tag game

[thedreadvampy]

Ok please if you don’t mind saying - who is Stuart semple and what did he do? I’m so confused. Like I recognise the name and I think he might the an artist or something but I have no idea

He is indeed an artist! He’s a English multidisciplinary fine artist best known for his ongoing beef with English sculptor Anish Kapoor over the 2016 exclusive licensing on the process to make Vantablack colour coating, which meant Kapoor was the only artist allowed to use it. Then Stuart Semple made Pinkest Pink pigment and said it was available to everyone but Anish Kapoor, and there was a big blowup which there’s a lot of documentation of - it was very memed.

Since then, Semple has made a bunch more pigments, most of them with the available-to-everyone-but-Anish-Kapoor disclaimer, and the beef periodically flares up, although I will say as time goes on it seems to me to have got increasingly one-sided given that Kapoor has pretty much wandered off.

(I’ve used several of his colours, btw. Pinkest Pink is pretty good. Blackest Black, his attempt to make the blackest possible paint (as opposed to Vantablack which is a nanofibre coating) I was pretty disappointed in, I’ve honestly had better light capture from mid-range art shop paints. His other pigments vary in quality - some I really liked, some I was meh on, but I think Blackest Black is the only one I was actively unimpressed by)

Anyway. Where I come in is much less exciting. 

A few months ago I reblogged a post on Tumblr asking about Semple from a discourse tag (my reblog did not tag or @ anyone), and I made a glib comment where I said (very truthfully) that while I thought he was pretty decent at pigments, both his paintings and his online persona came across pretty adolescent to me.

so it turns out Stuart Semple is an inveterate name searcher (hi Stuart if you’re reading this!) 

(Side note: I actually should have guessed this from 2019 Twitter when he saw and commented on an untagged thread I wrote about him and Kapoor’s beef (which was because I’d seen an article in which Kapoor, a British-Asian man, said that the racist Prevent strategy was liable to drive young British-Asian men into the arms of terrorist groups by making it clear their country hates them reblogged on Semple’s account with a caption claiming Anish Kapoor was pro-terrorism, which, while tongue-in-cheek, isn’t a neutral statement for a white person to make about an Asian person and was a pretty phenomenally bad-faith reading of Kapoor’s actual words) and in my thread I pretty much said that when the story had broken, I, like everybody else, had found it very funny and been firmly on side with Semple’s bit, but I felt that a) after a couple of years it really wasn’t very relevant any more and it had started to feel less like Fighting The Power and more like bullying the amount of Semple’s web presence was devoted to talking about Anish Kapoor; b) that it was a shame that Anish Kapoor was increasingly only known as The Vantablack Guy given that I really like a lot of his work and c) that continuing to frame a Jewish person of colour as the Face of the Artistic Elite was a bit weird given how overwhelmingly white the high-end art world is. but I digress. Semple responded to that thread, I don’t really remember what he said, it wasn’t an acrimonious response but it was a bit Oh I Didn’t Do Anything To Tag You?)

so anyway he found my reblog and commented saying ehhh I don’t remember, something along the lines of not feeling like I was being very kind and that he was trying his best. also I think he said I had accused him of being racist? which again the actual Tumblr post literally just said I thought his art and persona came across as juvenile and I think in the tags? I mentioned that I thought it was time for him to step off the Kapoor beef. 

then he screencapped my post, including my profile picture and username, and posted it on all his socials with a kind of :( people are so mean on Tumblr :( caption and um

idk if you know this about Being A Public Persona With Tens Of Thousands of Followers but. if you post someone’s identity and say ‘I do not like what this person is doing’ it. can get messy fast.

uh I don’t follow Stuart Semple (see the original post I made) but he commented to make sure I knew he’d posted my post on Instagram and “all my followers like your wig :)” which. according to my partner who did go and look at the time, the Instagram comments were largely about how I was an ugly non-passing trans woman aka “man in a wig” which. throw the whole suitcase out. There were a good few days where I got a lot of angry anons, ranging from ‘stop bullying Stuart Semple!!!!!’ to ‘die in a ditch graphically’ to ‘how can you claim to have opinions on art when You Are On Tumblr’ (I have been a freelance illustrator for 7 years and I have a Masters in art and design) to ‘your art sucks and you’re fat and ugly’ and my personal favourite ‘how can u be cis and use she/her pronouns you dumb snowflake’

(within that furore was a whole branch where someone was like ‘sex worker huh bet you’re bad at it’ and I was like ‘yep! that’s why I don’t do it any more! it’s hard work and it involves a lot of self-promotion and customer skills which I don’t like and am not good at!’ and this was a Whole Thing where they kept trying to insult me (much like today’s anon) about my supposed failures as a Slut Who Is Bad At Sex and I kept going like ‘ok but here’s how that just. doesn’t make sense in reference to what sex work actually is so like, ok?’)

and Stuart Semple and I were also having a conversation which, depending on your perspective I would call his attitude either conciliatory or passive-aggressive, there was a lot of ‘me and my followers would never say rude things about you :) keep up the art kiddo :)’ and being charitable I would say he was trying to be nice while being angry, and to avoid escalating (but with the added context I got later about the wig comment, I think that interpretation of his behaviour maybe. has some cracks?) and ultimately he took down the posts, we had a brief conversation about keeping pet reptiles (apparently he has a lizard) and we left it on, if not good terms, at least peaceable ones. 

however I still periodically get messages about it from angry Semple stans. and I’m not sure the argument was resolved, in that I still very much think it’s fair to make criticism, including quite harsh criticism (which I’m not sure ‘adolescent’ is), on art which is put out for public display and enjoyment, and that it isn’t a personal attack to post a criticism of someone’s public-facing work and statements on social media unless you actively target it towards them (for example, @ ing them), and Semple still thinks there’s no difference between a random blog with under a thousand followers criticising a public figure’s work and a public figure with 100k followers on most platforms criticising that blog (out of context - he clipped out the post I was reblogging from and my explanatory tags, and looking at my blog you may notice that 90% of my nuance is in the tags) while giving his followers all the information to find said blog.

(also as multiple people have remarked. if you want to say it’s an unfair criticism to call your online presence immature, being a middle-aged artist who as far as I can tell has a net worth over a million who spends your time name searching yourself in order to get mad at untagged mild criticism from strangers on the internet and share it on all your socials for your followers to join you in Being Big Mad is uhhhhhhh. it uh. it’s not like. not super thin-skinned and immature)

(also also I just googled his net worth and unsurprisingly I can’t find a source on it I’d consider reliable, but I did find multiple articles about him getting in trouble for breach of contract and nonpayment for gallery employees, including two accusations of him writing a big defensive blog post then changing it after a few hours to a very short post saying I LOVE YOU so like idk how true that is but it does seem. consistent with the above interactions.)

[cyansimblr]

Highkey love your style of editing in your 25 day challenge. Do you mind doing a tutorial/going through your thought process when your making these edits?

Awwww thank you so much that’s so sweet of you!! (*´∀`*) I’d love to record a video doing the whole thing while i explain my thought process at the same time in the background but i’m soo broke and can’t get a decent earphones for the life of me so please bear with my screenshots for now anonny~

[ Very long tutorial / explanation below the cut! ]

1. Inspiration Pinterest is my first stop! I go and search “graphic design / graphic designing” and see where it will lead me. Most of the time i mix-match those i liked the most while scrolling, while thinking about how would it look like when posted in tumblr. It actually take me hours just to get a grasp of what i actually wanted to do - especially when it comes to my lookbooks because for some reason, they always look off to me hhh im a slow worker :((

2. Thought process? I honesty do not have one most of the times and i wish i do because going to photoshop mindlessly is just me asking to get hours of my life wasted when i can finish one in just minutes if i had a plan well-thought out.

3. Brain empty Sai goes to Photoshop When i did my lookbook, i actually saw a very similar-looking one and thought that i can easily recreate it and make it look like a fashion magazine spread. Magazines always have that geometric elements slapped on it to ‘accentuate’ the natural curves of the human models. (Organic - Inorganic shapes principle) So i started by adding a huge square, thinking that it should be where the model is placed.

But i was like, “oh no i bet i’d just go slap some grid patterns again huh” and tried to add more shape, this time is smaller until it follow my sims’ form. I also placed my sim already, thinking that maybe i can get more ideas with the subject inside.

He looks so handsome!! When i placed Citron, i indeed got ideas on how to make it look more of a magazine...but it looks so flat. I then added drop shadows, but i don’t want the shadow to have any light direction because it would feel flat on certain angles so i reduced the distance while making the cover bigger. Here’s the setting i used! (You can experiment, or even change the blend mode depending on your color scheme as well.)

From this part, i spent hours trying to figure how to place the texts. I originally planned it to be placed at the left side, hence there’s a free space... but i can’t really feel it. I ended up with this one long rectangle but the space is still too big so i made it two.

Since i can’t rack my brain hard enough yet for text placement ideas, i just skipped it and went searching for Citron’s background. I really reallyyy wanted to just take a picture of the scenery in game but it doesn’t fit the theme that i like at the moment soooo

Thank the heavens for unsplash! I used keywords ‘modern art / texture backgrounds / painting background’ and from there i mindlessly scroll (once again) looking for something stylish?

And tadaaaa! I placed the image and set to clipping mask on Citron’s ‘background square’ and it looks less empty now! ( ´ ω ` ) (A quick tip if you want to just change the color scheme of your textures: You can use Hue/Saturation adjustment layer!)

Time to browse pinterest (again) for magazine ideas! I then ended up with the clean caption at the top. Meanwhile, the huge number behind Citron was something i got while browsing picsart!! Added a drop shadow on it as well so it pops ;w; It looks so great at this point i was crying- I can also share my font folder if someone wants it.

Almost done!! I added a more cutesy wallpaper, (Preferrably stars/clouds/planets) tweaked the color of the wallpaper with hue/saturation adjustment layer, and made sure that the colors are cohesive...

and it’s done! I hope this can help! I can do screen sharing via discord too if anyone wants to, just hit me up. (´｡• ᵕ •｡`) ♡

#tutorial #ask #anon #sai #this took too long #;;w;; im a bad teacher sorry guys

[donnerpartyofone]

remember that time someone got mad at you for ripping off their vhs covers

Come now, anon. Surely you're not interested in my ability to retain information. Of course I remember that. What's your real question? Is it something more like "Why did you used to do that?", or alternatively, "Let's talk about what an asshole you used to be!" I'll tell you about that stuff, there's no need to be so coy.Anybody who was around for the early days of this ~8 year old blog (jesus...) knows that I used to post a lot of old vhs covers, in part or whole. I grew up around a mom & pop video store where the metalhead clerks called me "Igor" for spending so long hunched over the scary, forbidden-feeling horror boxes while my parents checked out LABYRINTH for me for the zillionth time. As an adult, I started incorporating them into my "art", which are like these clutter drawings that swipe from sources like comics and pulp novel covers and stuff. So, when I found out about Tumblr, I was super stoked, because I suddenly had this new outlet for my undying obsession, somewhere I could stockpile useful images to my heart's content.Whatever else I'm guilty of, I have at least never knowingly and deliberately reposted, as opposed to reblogging, another Tumblr's content. I never took something right off my dash to pass off as original content later, and I never lied to anybody if they spoke up. It's still very hard for me to understand why people do that, what comes over them, how it gets them off to just steal shit and lie about it. My crime had more to do with wilfull ignorance. My process was pretty simple: I'd just do a Google image search, and pull whatever I found directly out of there. Sometimes I'd find some specific resource like, for instance, an incredibly primitive-looking Dutch web forum where guys were just showing off their tape collections to one another, and I'd work through that for a while, but mainly, I never even looked at the URLs that the images came from. It could have been ebay, or it could have been Tumblr itself--in fact, we all now know a bunch of it did turn out to be from Tumblr--but this just seemed irrelevant to me at the time. My instinct was that these were prefabricated images that had been around in the world for decades, so I had no imagination for who could be hurt and how, by what I was doing. I didn't even ask myself. Basically, I had a very idiotic sense that it was all just "stuff on the internet". I did not have a sense of like, a human being who had spent years accumulating specific things that they loved and grinding away at the scanner for hundreds of hours to present their collection of rarities to the world. If I had been even slightly more thoughtful about it, I probably would have said that these images were not the original "art" of the person who posted the thing online, even the way a great gif is, and I wasn't interrupting anybody's ability to put food on the table. I hadn't been around long enough to develop the awareness and empathy to "get it". In fact, somebody called me out at one point, and I didn't even totally understand what they were saying. My response was to post their complaint and just cheerfully say "ok everybody, please check out this other person's cool blog!" I didn't even get the deeper (obvious) message, at that time, of "please take this stuff down, or go back and add sources, and stop doing this altogether, it's painful that you just took all my hard work."Another contributing factor in my behavior, though, was a feeling that I think a lot of people have about Tumblr, that it's supposed to look like the inside of your head. I remember that in the beginning, I didn't even like it when OTHER people added a whole bunch of tags and captions and links and stuff to their posts, I felt like it cluttered up this collective stream of intuitive, instinctual, wonderfully mysterious imagery. It brought something of the unwelcome real world into this sanctuary, something dry, stiff, didactic and anal retentive. Mainly I think I just felt like, none of us "owns" these old found images we're posting, in fact most people don't know who produced the original art for a video sleeve, so what's the big deal? At a certain point, I started to turn around on it. One reason had to be that I managed to witlessly snag at least one image that had been scanned by someone I knew and liked from Tumblr. Ironically, I think it turned out that I had taken it from a site where it had been posted by a whole other thief--but the point is, my friend recognized that it was his scan, due to some old sticker residue on the cover. Surely the very thing that I did was the bane of this friend's existence as a real deal collector, but for some reason, he was relatively gentle with me about it. He definitely didn't have to be, I was wrong, but it probably helped me understand the problem better, than just someone telling me bluntly to go fuck myself, from which I had demonstrably learned nothing.I remember I had a few hiccups after that. I had posted a couple of panels from a Simpsons comic that I picked up, and they were immediately spotted by this big important fixture of the independent comics community (who I have come to think of over the years as an unnecessarily combative blowhard in general, but hey, he wasn't wrong about me then!). So I'm like oh shit, ok, and then the next time I posted panels from a comic, I loaded them up with tags--artist, series, whatever occurred to me--and I STILL had some total stranger call me out for not crediting the artist. I'm not sure if this person just saw reblogs that didn't have the tags on them anymore, or whether they were offeneded that I used tags instead of a caption (which people can and will delete, but I digress), or that I hadn't found a source link for the images, since I owned the books. I only know that this person felt that I was somehow interfering with the livelihood of the artist by posting their original work on my blog--or I think that's it anyway, I guess this was more than five years ago. Hopefully they didn't think I was pretending to BE the artist? Anyway, it was around then that I realized there was no way to preserve the dreamlike stream of consciousness character of Tumblr, which I was so precious about. Everything had to be indexed and cited and attributed and crossreferenced and have its provenance verified and everything. Oh well, I said, petulently.This happened to me once, too--somehow, I spotted an original drawing of mine posted to somebody's blog with no credit or anything. Naturally I freaked out and threw a fucking fit, but the person asked forgiveness right away, and explained that they didn't want to reblog something out of my very old archives because apparently that is considered really stalkery by a lot of people. I found it pretty baffling, that anyone would PREFER to have their content reposted rather than reblogged for any reason, and moreover, that people get upset at the idea of someone else looking through their totally public archives. But, apparently that's a real thing, according to this person and others I heard from later. It's probably too bad this didn't happen to me earlier in life though, I might have been more sensitive.It's also too bad this story doesn't end with me having a nervous breakdown from guilt, although I do feel bad enough about it to want to talk about it publicly when prompted. Eventually I just grew out of posting this kind of content, though. It felt like everyone in the world was posting the same thing over and over, and it became extremely rare for me to see vhs art that I hadn't already seen on Tumblr, or in person, or in a book on my shelf, etc. My enthusiasm for this imagery has never waned, I just ran out of reasons to keep posting it. I got more interested in just flexing my ridiculous personality anyway, and that's the way it's been on here for years now. And here you still are, years later, so it must be working.