#that ‘sketch’ is straight up just copied and pasted from the original art

[moony-2001]

Hey rq, art theft is super not okay and if you do it, fuck you.

#art #art theft #fuck art theft #what the fuck #epic the musical #I don’t understand why people can’t just have original ideas #I get if you want to reference an artist #but at least give them credit #don’t try to pass it off as your own #like ffs #that ‘sketch’ is straight up just copied and pasted from the original art #if anyone is curious #the original artist is gigizetz #not my art

[tofadeawayagain]

Create for Thra, Day 2: Original Characters (Post 2 of 2)

And now for my “baby gelfs”. I’m very nervous about introducing these to the wider world, so hopefully you all like them :). Once again, these babies are from my Maudra series. I can’t draw, and as such I don’t have any art to share - I hope you enjoy these little word sketches and the short excerpt from a piece I’m working on at the end.

Elidi – Drenchen

Elidi is the eldest daughter of Maudra Naia and Amri. She is the perfect combination of her parents. Her skin is like her mother’s, deep green with a hint of gold. Her eyes are bright blue with gold flecks – in the dark, her pupils get just as large as her father’s, rendering her iris nearly unnoticeable. During the day, her pupils are only slightly larger than a daylighter’s – it’s enough to make her sensitive to light, though, and she often wears clothing with hoods to drape over her head when the three suns are at their highest point. Her hair reaches to the middle of her thighs and is done in the traditional style of the Drenchen maudren with decorated locks and beaded braids. It is silvery-white just like her father’s, except for the streaks of deep Drenchen blue and a lighter Grottan teal. She is petite. She inherits her wings from her father’s side of the family, though they are black, purple, and indigo just like her mother’s. Elidi is cautious – though she is fierce just like her mother, she also has her father’s tendency to investigate her circumstances before charging into them. She doesn’t trust immediately, and she has a knack for reading people’s emotions and seeing through any artifice. Elidi studies vliyaya and healing with her mother and Aunt Eliona in addition to preparing to be the next Drenchen maudra. She is an extroverted introvert and prefers to spend time with family and close friends wherever possible. Although she is good in front of a crowd, being in the spotlight fills her with a nervous energy. Luckily for her, she looks less like she’s nervous and more like she’s on the prowl when she fidgets. The clan knows her to be a competent healer and leader and trusts her in her position as second-in-command to Maudra Naia.

Oria – Drenchen

Oria is Naia and Amri’s second child and is two trine younger than Elidi. She’s only a few inches shorter than her father. She inherited her intensity and her Drenchen wings from her mother, but the rest of her is all Grottan. Oria’s hair is the same silvery-white as her father’s. The humidity in Sog makes her hair slightly wavy, but by mid-day, it is almost always straight and heavy. She keeps it long, though not as long as Elidi’s, and she only keeps a few braids in her hair as a marker of her status. As her father’s star apothecary and alchemy apprentice, Oria can usually be found in the workshop, her hair messy and tied back away from her face, and goggles strapped over her eyes. Her eyes are bright gold, and her gaze is so sharp that she can intimidate people easily. Like her sister, her pupils can expand and contract depending on the ambient light. She doesn’t look much like either one of her parents, but she is a spitting image for Amri’s mother. Though she inherited her wings from Naia’s side of the family, they are a bright teal blue and glistening silver. With high cheekbones and skin that is closer to gray than green, Oria’s unique looks in the swamp of Sog make her stand out – and she loves it. While her older sister is uncomfortable in the spotlight, Oria lives for it. She’s the life of every room, and she wears her emotions on her sleeve. People know where they stand with Oria – she doesn’t wait for the invocation of hard-talk to express her feelings. She loves the water, and if she’s not in the workshop, she’s likely exploring the lakes and waterways of Sog. Oria is likely to get herself into trouble at any opportunity, and she treats rules more like guidelines. She is fiercely competitive with her younger brother, and though she is happy in her chosen career, she longs to see the world – but she can’t leave the swamp. No one can.

Zain – Drenchen

Zain is Naia and Amri’s third child and is only one trine younger than Oria. Zain is mostly deaf (except for low tones like thunder), and he uses the Dousan sign language to communicate. He is a carbon copy of his father, and during his younger years, he even wore the same hairstyle. As a young adult, he changes his style, shaving both sides of his head and keeping the rest secured back in a braided tail or bun. Zain’s skills with healing vliyaya rival those of his oldest sister, and he trains alongside her to become an advanced healer. Like Oria, he is extroverted; however, he keeps his emotions on lockdown. He values his family above all else, and though he is fiercely competitive with Oria, they have an intensely close bond. He also has a close bond with his baby sister, Zenna, and is the one Elidi goes to for advice due to his level head and calm demeanor.

Shiri – Grottan

Shiri is Deet and Rian’s second child. She was born only months before Oria, and they grew up as the best of friends. Shiri is very shy and doesn’t make new friends easily – as such, her circle is very small. Shiri’s childhood is marked by periods during which her mother is overwhelmed by grief at the loss of Shiri’s older brother, Jen. Shiri never gets the chance to know him, but she feels like she is always in his shadow. Though she is raised to follow in her mother’s footsteps as the next Grottan maudra, Shiri isn’t sure she wants to be a maudra at all. She’s got an ear for music, and she’d much rather become a song teller. She learns to play her father’s old lute in her spare time. Shiri’s got Rian’s tan skin and blue coloring, but she has Deet’s messy hair and long ears. Her eyes can adjust to the ambient light, and they are a deep blue color like her father’s. Her hair is a dirty brown with streaks of Stonewood blue, and her wings have the characteristic bright blue and orange coloring common among the Stonewood. She is the same height as her mother, and she’s quiet most of the time – unless she’s singing, that is.

Koa – Sifa

Koa’s parents are both Drenchen; however, they left Sog long ago to join the Sifa. Koa grew up on white sand beaches and on the decks of ships, but he’s always wanted to see the mainland and explore the swamps where his parents grew up. Koa is tall for a Gelfling, and he’s also bulky from his days manning the sails and loading/unloading cargo. He’s got Drenchen locks, but they are covered with Sifan bells and golden trinkets. As a young adult, Koa gets a job working on Elder Onica’s ship, which docks in Sog’s port city of Seaside, only a day’s kayaking distance from the Great Smerth.

Zenna – Drenchen

Zenna is Naia and Amri’s youngest child. Born ten trine after Zain, she is the baby of the family. She looks like her mother, though her eyes are Amri’s dark honey brown. Like her Uncle Gurjin, she is usually unruffled and steady of temperament. Though she isn’t yet sure what she wants to become, she knows she loves the ocean.

 And now, an excerpt from mah girl Elidi’s POV:

“She watches the ripples on the surface above as she drifts in the current. The water is cool along her neck, crisp in a way she isn’t yet used to. She knows the concept of cold, though she’s never felt it herself before. The water isn’t cold, yet, but it has certainly changed.

The rains have not stopped for three days. The waters surrounding Great Smerth have long-since spilled over the edges of the Glenfoot, and the islands Elidi grew up knowing have vanished beneath the surface of the swollen lake. It is almost as if they never existed at all. Like her people, they are hidden away, waiting for the storm to pass.

Has it passed? She looks at the line of crystal embedded in the bluestone on the lakebed. Though the vein went clear three days ago when the suns burned as one, Elidi still hasn’t touched it. She doesn’t think she ever will. She tried once when she was a childling. Her mother had been nearby and tugged her away. Naia had clung to her when they’d surfaced, and she’d shouted at Elidi as she never had before or since. She hadn’t been angry – she’d been terrified. It’s a sound that’s never left her. 

There is a great splash at the edge of the Glenfoot, and Elidi rights herself in the water column as her sister plunges to the very bottom of the lake. Oria’s at her side with two pumps of her wings, and she raises her hand immediately. Elidi presses her palm to Ori’s, and her sister’s anxious voice fills her mind.

They’re waiting for you in Mum’s chamber. They’ve been telling everyone that we need to leave Great Smerth.

Elidi’s brow wrinkles, and she looks past the ripples at the towering heights of her home. Her mother’s balcony is only three levels up. She’s accustomed to seeing her mother standing there, proud and wild. But the balcony is empty, save for the wind and the rain and stray apeknot leaves knocked loose in the deluge.

We’re not leaving Great Smerth. It’s just a bit of rain. Elidi kicks for the surface, and Ori stays with her, hand in hand.

Aunt Pemma is with them. She’s trying to keep them from starting a panic. She thinks we’re fine here in Smerth, but she wants to evacuate New Domrak.

Have they found Deet, yet?

Oria pulls her hand away. Her expression is all the answer Elidi needs, and the two girls continue to the surface surrounded only by the muffled silence of the water.

They glide over the submerged Glenfoot and toward the stairs that lead into the Great Smerth. Elidi plants her feet on the lowest stair and as soon as her head clears the water, her sense of peace is shattered. The glade is louder than she’s ever heard it. People are calling out to one another on the rope and wood pathways strung through the canopy above, and as Gelfling move their belongings out of the residences on the ground floor, the Stone’s Way echoes in a cacophony of anxiety.

She takes a deep, steadying breath, and then she climbs the staircase, exiting the lake and entering the great tree. She keeps her head high, attempting to project a sense of confidence that she doesn’t feel. When will Mother come back? she asks herself. Perhaps they’ll stop panicking when Mother comes back…

Oria remains at her side, only one step behind, all the way to the third floor landing. Elidi can hear the council members bickering all the way in the hall, and she exchanges a frustrated glance with her sister before entering the room.

She stands tall and says nothing until they all look at her and come to a silence. It’s something her mother taught her long ago, and with her short stature, it’s a technique she depends on to gain attention. Her Aunt Pemma gives her a firm nod of approval, and she can feel Oria standing behind her, tall and firm. She’ll hug her sister and her aunt later. For now, she has a job to do.

She catches every eye in the room, then raises a single eyebrow. “Which of you are responsible for all this huff-puff, then?”

#createforthra #the dark crystal #age of resistance #day 2: original characters #original characters #gelfling ocs #gelfling #drenchen #grottan #sifa #drenchgrot #stonegrot #baby gelfs #next generation #maudra #live unbruised #the dark crystal fanfiction

[calocera]

Hi! I just wanted to say I absolutely love your art. Can I ask how/where you find references and how you use them when you draw? I have a hard time finding reference pics and then knowing how to actually use them? I'm sorry if that doesn't make sense lol

np at all! depends on the ref really, for drawing things ive never drawn before i just google drawing tutorials lol; sometimes you cant find any that fit your style so then you just kinda wing it? for other things like bodies and such i usually just pose myself and use that as a ref pic! even if you dont have the same build as the person you are drawing you can still use yourself as a base for the flow of the human form and such. if that still isnt working right for me ill just find refs on google, i know if you want to be very careful about using correctly sourced refs there are sites specifically for royalty free images, you can even change your google search results to be specifically free images.

people can be very weird about how to “correctly” use refs but its really as simple as “use refs how ever you want, but if you are directly tracing from the ref, or lifting unique design elements from the ref (ESP if its someone elses original design) then credit the OP of the ref and do not sell the work.” like ive seen discourse over things like “pose theft” or “color pallet theft” and like thats not a thing i promise. meanwhile if you are tracing/lifting from your own original photos it literally doesnt matter, you can do whatever the fuck you want with those. id actually recommend tracing as a warmup/way to study!

personally the way i use reference images either goes:

A: i pull up the image on my canvas/ next to my canvas and just look back and fourth as i draw

B: i do a sketch over/ silhouette of/ skeleton trace over the ref, and then use just the sketch as a ref (this is a lot more useful to me when im trying to reference a pose or general weight and flow of a body rather than specific tangible features) its actually very helpful to not have the original ref distracting you in this case

heres a few examples of refs i used and their finished products, i really have no advice besides like...if you are worried about being too similar to a ref use multiple refs/ change up prominent features? as far as im concerned your finished product shouldnt look exactly like your ref anyways unless its a study

^^ using my own hands

^^ using faces moreso for an understanding of the angle, lighting, and form rather than copying the peoples exact features

i dont do it because im cheap and lazy, but id also recommend looking into programs that offer assets specifically for tracing over/ referencing! i know most professional art programs utilize them in some way, things like backgrounds in comics or animation are usually either traced over a 3d model or just straight up copy+pasted premade vectors

#i hve no clue if this is helpful but here you go! #as i get more experienced with art i use less and less straight forward refs so apologies for not having many examples #ask

[love101imagines]

Crush culture

(osman | imagine)

Requests: Hey!I have one request for Osman and the artistic S/O! How about Osman actually posing for the S/O? He can buy him/her some paints because someone requested a portrait but he/she is rather used to painting only landscapes so he/she tells Osman they can’t do it? When he says he/she has to he/she suggest that he has to be the model and he doesn’t want to but does it anyway for them? So this is basically an idea about Osman having to pose and the S/O falling for him

Heeyyy, you can write a picture with Osman, where he gets jealous of the reader for spending a lot of time with Sinan, so they argue and Osman finally admits that he likes the reader and it's all very cute.

Hi, about Osman, maybe the second prompt. I love read about him.

Prompt used: 2. I don’t have any money.

Tags: @girl-looking-out-window @trashofsth55 @carollllstarkk

It had all spiraled down when the two of you mixed things. For you, it had been when you were asked to do a certain portrait, and for him it was when he let you tag along with him to Sinan’s house.

He didn’t think much about it until you looked around Sinan’s living room and noticed the paintings.

“They’re so pretty. I’ve never seen a copy of anything from İbrahim Çallı in person.”

Osman expected Sinan to shrug and act uninterested. Instead, he got up from his spot on the couch and made his way to where you were standing in front of two paintings in the wall.

“You recognize the painter just by looking at it?” He asked.

You nodded absentmindedly. “I like to draw.”

And that’s how you ended up talking with Sinan for the whole afternoon as he showed you the other paintings which had belonged to his mother. He told you they belonged to their mother, so you assumed it was nice for him to talk about it with someone else. Osman thought the opposite.

As Kerem and Eda argued about something, Osman kept glancing at the two of you as you showed Sinan your notebook with your drawings. Işik noticed and raised her eyebrows in surprise.

“Why do you keep staring at them?” She asked him and he quickly hushed her.

“I’m not staring. We should figure out what we should do about Burcu and Kemal.” Osman replied getting up from where he was sitting taking the papers left in the floor from the lunch you had just had.

You noticed and started helping him. Once you gathered a few papers, you made your way to the kitchen to throw them on the trash while he heard your voice.

“You also have a china set?”

Osman saw Sinan following you into the kitchen with a small smile, his shoulders not as crouched as before.

“At least he seems happy.” Işik mumbled.

He hadn’t planned this. He had a plan for everything, but he had assumed that you would end up talking with Eda or end up bored and leave to your house. He hadn’t thought about the possibility of you becoming friends with anyone. He knew that you were very sociable, but he didn’t expect you to make Sinan smile.

After a while they got up ready to leave since it was getting dark outside. However, not everybody was leaving yet.

“They are drinking tea and still talking.” Işik said once she returned from the kitchen but she seemed to be saying that directly to Osman who only ate a hazelnut.

Eda chuckled grabbing her bag. “Seems like Burcu and Kemal won’t be the only couple we helped.”

“Nice work setting them up Osman.” Kerem said as he did his best not to roll his eyes.

That’s when you appeared in the room as Eda and Kerem went outside and Işik stayed close to hear in the doorway. You grabbed your bag which made Osman relax a bit.

“You want me to walk you home?” He asked you even though he already knew the answer since he always did.

This time the answer was different.

“It’s fine. You can already go, you don’t need to. I’m staying a bit here.” You spoke with a warm smile and a small blush on your cheeks which he noticed.

“Do you want them or not?” Sinan’s voice came from the kitchen which made you smile more.

“Can you believe he wants to throw into the water a perfect set of chinaware?” You said amazed going to the kitchen. Before you did, you turned to Osman. “Thanks for inviting me.”

He regretted doing that but still couldn’t be sure why. “You wouldn’t stop bothering me.” He said without looking at you as he left closing the door before Işik.

The next day, when you usually waited for Osman at the school’s gate, you were waiting for him talking to Sinan. When he showed up, you were ready for him to greet you and then walk with you to your classroom. However, he just walked past both of you to talk to his groups of nerds. You furrowed your brows but continued talking to Sinan until Işik joined the two of you and you noticed how Sinan looked at her.

“I have English now and I have to go early to ask Osman for the homework. I’ll see you later.” You said before leaving.

Işik turned to Sinan with a smile. “Osman likes (Y/N), I’m sure of it.”

The boy only raised his brows. “He didn’t even greet her when he arrived.”

“That’s because he’s jealous, don’t you get it?”

You walked into you class and went straight to your desk where Osman was counting money and you weren’t surprised.

“I finished the portrait.” You said once you sat down. You expected him to congratule you or something, but you didn’t expect him to only nod still counting.

“Here’s your share and the homework.” He said leaving it on your desk without sparing you a glance.

You were startled by his attitude and were ready to snap at him when you closed your mouth. You started copying down the answers in complete silence as Osman kept thinking about if he was jealous about you being friends with Sinan, or if he was only jealous of you being with someone else. You, on the other hand, keep thinking about how you had fucked things up the day before, when he approached you with a request.

“I have a new job for you.”

You left your bag on the floor as you sat down next to him on your Music class and stared at him with a raised brow.

“What do you need?” You asked leaning back against your chair.

He took out a piece of paper where he wrote down the paintings you had to do and read out loud as a few students sat down and took out their flutes. “A portrait for a birthday gift similar to the painting of Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.”

You gasped. “That one is beautiful. My house is full of Friedrich’s works.”

“Originals?” He asked and you rolled your eyes.

“Of course not, but they are from my grandpa. But sorry, I can’t do it.”

Osman almost dropped his bag before you caught it in time. “You almost dropped it on my foot idiot.” You said kicking him.

“You have to do it.”

“I can’t. I only do landscapes, portraits are different. I’ve never done one with a full body before.” You huffed.

He didn’t quit and continued. “But I need you to. Necdet is onto us and I can’t keep selling homeworks.”

You only sighed already knowing his response to your request. “You’ll have to pose then.”

“Absolutely not.”

You rolled your eyes irritated even though a smirk gave you away. “You only have to stand in front of a window for at least ten minutes while I sketch and you’ll have the painting tomorrow.”

You were sure he was going to turn you down again so you hanged your head over the back of your chair. Once class started, Osman started goofing around with one part of his flute had had separated as you twirled around yours which was completely painted in different patterns. You didn’t expect him to sigh and look over to you.

“Fine, I’ll do it.”

You grinned already thinking about the drawing you would make. “It’s going to be great, I have already practiced doing cliffs with chalk and I’ll do it at night so the landscape looks better. That’s why you should let me sleep now.” You ranted after leaning your head on his shoulder.

He felt his heart speed up as you closed your eyes but he tried, unsuccessfully, to ignore it.

“And to stop you from enjoying this music?”

You bit down your lip to hold back laughter as your classmates played a song with their flutes off-key and Osman glanced at you as you dozed off on his shoulder and he held you so you wouldn’t fall.

When the bell rang, you rubbed your eyes and got out your notebook and chuckled once you noticed him standing next to you not knowing what to do.

“Stand here just like...this. A bit to the left, not yours, my left. Just like that, perfect.”

You sat down on one of the desks with your feet on a chair in front of you as you started to sketch Osman. He stood facing the window and you did your best to draw.

“Why do you sell them?” He asked out of a sudden.

You shrugged even though he couldn’t see you. “I want the money and get it on my own. That way I can buy more art supplies.”

“But you could ask your parents. It’s not like they don’t support you, you told me your grandma was a painter too and your dad paints in his free time. It basically runs in your family.”

You chuckled as you moved on to the shadows. “But I want to do it myself. If we success with this that means that I’m good and could live of this. I can’t imagine doing something else.”

You were sure he was smirking as he ate a hazelnut. “I can’t imagine it either.”

You smiled at yourself feeling weird. You had been spending so much time with Osman the last few months you couldn’t remember what you used to do at class without seating next to him. Before him, you only drew small things during class or slept so you could practice at home, but now you knew you were actually good. Thanks to him.

“Are you finished?” He asked snapping you out of your thoughts.

“Yes, it’s done. I’ll paint it later.” You said getting off the desk where you were sitting. You handed him his jacket and loosened your tie.

“I have to go now, we’re going to talk with the others about what to do to avoid being expelled.”

“Can I come?”

You were sure he had noticed you had a crush on him now. Or at least someone had told him. That had to be the reason he hadn’t talked to you over the week. You acted indifferent and started hanging out with Işik and Sinan, the girl urging you to talk to Osman and the boy agreeing with her less enthusiastically. You tried not to think much about it and now here you were dragged into their plans in Eda’s room waiting for Burcu and Kemal to arrive at her house. You hugged yourself as you sat on a chair in front of her desk and started looking at her books to do something. You wanted to talk to Osman but did your best to ignore him, just like he had all week.

You rubbed your eyes feeling a bit intoxicated since you had downed at least two beers in the concert with Eda and yawned. Getting drunk made you dumber than usual and sleepy.

Işik spoke up. “It’s getting late, you guys. I should go home.” She said standing.

You got up and grabbed your jacket to cover yourself. You were only wearing some ripped mom jeans and a white strapless top similar to Eda’s red one. “I should too, I’m going to fall asleep in any minute.”

“Yeah, this is exciting, but you can tell us what happens tomorrow. I’m out.” Sinan said.

“I’ll take it and give it to her tomorrow.” You said as Işik handed you Burcu’s bag.

“See ya.”

“Bye.” You said rubbing your eyes.

“I’ll head out, too. See you later.” Osman said as you walked outside with Işik and Sinan. He kept talking with Kerem to see if he was going too and you checked to see if you had your keys and money.

“I’m starving. I need something to reduce the alcohol.” You said next to Işik as the four of you started walking down the street.

“You didn’t eat anything?” She asked you as you shocked your head. You shared a look with Sinan, as you had arrived at his house before going to the concert and witnessed something you wished you hadn’t.

“I had a big breakfast and forgot.” You mumbled.

“I don’t know how you are still walking. You drank more than me and are like 5’ 1” feet tall.” Sinan said as you wrapped your jacket around you.

“I’m not thinking about how angry my parents are going to be at me, I’m only thinking about eating baklava or anything.”

“How about işkembe?” Osman said to you for the first time of the week.

“That’s disgusting.” You said grimacing with disgust.

“Dude, you have the worst taste.” Sinan replied making you laugh.

“What? I’m hungry too. Let’s eat.”

“Yes, I’ll pay. My parents already gave me my allowance.” You could see Sinan smirk lightly next to Işik.

“I can’t believe you have an allowance. What are you, 5?” He said to you.

“What are you, poor?” You shot back not noticing how Osman tensed up immediately.

“I can’t eat. It’s already late. My mum will get angry.” Işik pointed out.

“I’ll walk Işik home. You two enjoy your meal.” Sinan said.

“We’ll grab some. See you.” You said and once they started going away, you turned to Osman who was already walking away. He made his way to the other side of the street but you were quick to follow him.

“Are you mad at me?” You said to him before going inside the small food establishment.

He turned around confused but you only stood there with a serious look on your face. As people gathered to enter, he grabbed your hand and pulled you into a nearby alleyway to talk.

“I’m not angry.” He said leaning against the wall behind him.

You scoffed. “You’ve been ignoring me all the past week and I don’t know why.”

He didn’t look at you and you became impatient. “You know what? Let’s just go and eat. I’m tired and just want to sleep.” You said checking your pockets for your money.

“I don’t have any money.”

You didn’t think much of it and started counting how much you had. “It’s fine Osman, I’ll pay for your food.”

“I’m not talking about that.” You gave him a look saying you didn’t understand and he looked at you. “I can pay my food thanks to my work, but I don’t have a family as wealthy as yours, or Kerem’s or Işik’s.”

You stood there surprised but knew that you had to say something. “Why didn’t you say anything before?”

He chuckled dryly and looked down at the floor. “You think I should have said that my dad drives people around and my mom cleans houses?”

You felt everything moving slower than usual, like it was just Osman and you in that dark alley. “That’s nothing to be ashamed of...” You started but he quickly interrupted.

“Of course, like you just didn’t joke that if you didn’t have an allowance you were poor.” He snapped and you felt like someone had thrown cold water to you.

“Osman, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.” You apologized.

He sighed and looked away. You rubbed your eyes and sighed. “It’s that why you haven’t talked to me for the last week?”

You saw him scratch the back of his head while you crossed your arms. “I don’t know why you want to be friends with me.”

Your heart dropped when he said that and he just continued. “You should be friends with Sinan or Kerem. They have more money and probably more in common with you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” You said picking at the skin between your top and your jeans.

He didn’t answer so you stepped forward to make him look at you. “Answer me, Osman. There’s nothing that makes them better than you.”

“I don’t have some fancy paintings at my house or a chandelier like Işik’s and I certainly don’t have any of Friedrich’s works.” He said sarcastically.

“I don’t care.” You said softly looking up at his piercing eyes.

You stood like that until you stepped back and looked at the ground and pursued your lips.

“You haven’t answered my question yet.”

He sighed and rolled his eyes. “You’re very annoying sometimes.”

You smirked. “That’s why you like me so much.”

“Actually, I do like you.”

You almost dropped the money you had between your fingers. “What?” You mumbled.

“Do you like Sinan?” He asked you as you felt your face blush, but not because of Sinan but for his recent declaration.

“Do I like Sinan?” You said raising you brows. You started giggling under his annoyed look but you just couldn’t stop.

“I’m leaving.” He said.

“No, no, please. I’m sorry.” You grabbed his arm to stop him and he looked down at you. “I don’t like Sinan. I like you.” You said unexpectedly shocking yourself.

Osman stood in front of you and you felt a rush of adrenaline go through you. You were still holding his arm and he was too close to you.

“So you like me?” He asked you.

“You said it first.” You smirked as he rolled his eyes with a small smile.

“Whatever. Let’s go to eat.” He said pulling you out of the alleyway moving his arm to hold your hand. “Hey, can I have işkembe? I’ll have it in a tray please. And a baklava too.”

And even though you felt a weird feeling in your stomach, you were sure it wasn’t that it was empty but that it was some shit they say about love and butterflies.

#love 101 #love101 #ask 101 #burcu #eda #kerem #osman #sinan #aşk 101 imagine #aşk101imagine #aşk 101 #aşk101 #ışik

[theredpaladin101]

Voltron Editing Tutorial

Aight so someone asked, and now I’m here. I have made YouTube tutorial videos before here, but I’ll go into more depth on what to do, how to get started, and what I do personally. 

For this, I will be showing you how to make a simple color edit (A request I received of Black Paladin Lance) but I will still describe briefly how you can do Altean/Galra edits (which implies to other edits like outfit changes and more!)

So let’s get started

So lemme get this out of the way - my program is called Clip Studio Paint EX, a $100+ art program with many features, including manga, 3D models, animation, and more. Of course, you can use other programs like Clip Studio Paint Pro and SAI (I have used both before) but this tutorial will follow with EX.

First thing you need to do is figure out what to edit, then get a screenshot. Now, you can either go to Netflix and clip out a screenshot, or find an image on Tumblr/Instagram/other (Note: For the best edit, make sure the image is as clear as possible)

I use Netflix, but I also sometimes go to @voltronreference who posted quite a lot of Voltron screenshots. 

Once you find your image, something you’ll want to do is put the image on a completely new image with the size 1600x900 (or 1600x1000)

Now this part can be tricky. If you use @voltronreference ‘s screenshots, transporting it to another image is easy, as seen below. (To copy and paste, all you need to do is press Ctrl+c then Ctrl+v like usual)

However, if you get a screenshot from Netflix, the image size is probably somewhere in the two hundred. What you’ll need to do is shrink the image before you copy and paste it as seen below. 

Once you have the image how you want, you can start editing! 

Now, this next part is completely up to you! When editing, you have a choice to either only edit what you want to change or the entire thing (Not including Background). I personally edit the entire character so that everything blends together smoothly, but some editors only edit what they change, and that’s completely okay (just make sure everything blends together well).

For edits including changes like Altean/Galra ears or outfit changes, you’ll need to create a new layer above the image. 

If it’s just a color edit, you can completely skip the sketch and jump straight to outlining. 

For Voltron edits, the best tool to use is the Line Tool between 2-4 thickness (3 is the perfect thickness for me almost every time, but sometimes you need thicker/thinner lines) 

Now all you have to do is outline the character as seen below. 

Once you have completely outlined your edit, you can begin coloring. (Note: make sure your colors match your background) If you don’t change the background at all, you keep the same colors except for the ones you’re changing. For the ones you are changing, you can either find another scene with the same background and colors you need (Ex. You need black for Lance’s armor, so find Shiro wearing his armor in the training deck) 

You can either color by hand or use the Select and Fill Tool, as seen below. 

If you use this tool, you’ll need to go back and color in the little nooks the Select Tool couldn’t reach. (Note: Best way to color is by setting each group of colors in different layers (Ex. One layer for hair and eyelashes, another layer for clothes (or three to four layers for clothes, your choice), and a layer for skin) as to avoid constant coloring over and needing to recolor certain areas. My order of layers if Hair, Clothing, then Skin.)

A little fun token for you: Make a separate image for colors for individual characters - the basic colors, as seen below.

Once you got everything colored, you can move onto shading. What you do here is create a completely new layer above all except the outline, and turn it to Multiply. This setting makes the colors darker and colorful depending on the shade color you use. I always use this shade of grey below. 

All you do here is take your Line Tool and outline the shaded areas of your image (Note: You can add your own shades to make it look better, for sometimes Voltron didn’t shade at all/enough) Then use your Select Tool and Fill in your shaded areas (of course go back and fill in the nooks)

Step back and take a look at your edit so far. Does it need a color fix? Any more shading? Once you have everything you like, here comes the fun part (not really) 

Sometimes, the background will still have traces of the character you just colored over, as seen below. 

Going back to the original image layer, all you do it color over the patches with the same color behind it and blur it together to make everything blend better. Once you checked around the entire character for those patches, you’re almost done! 

Going to your Filter Tab: Blur for your shading layer, you will select one of the two options - You will select the first options, which is just Blur, to blur your shading in with the colors better. Or, you will go down to Gaussian Blur and take the strength all the way down to 2.00 - as this gives the least amount of blur, which is the best option in a lot of far away characters. 

Now, keeping the same Blur choices above in mind, you can do one of those with the outline, or not blur it at all. Just go by what you think is the best option to achieve the closest Voltron style as possible. 

And Bingo!! Your edit is complete! 

Now y’all know how to make a Voltron edit (at least how I do it), and even though it looks difficult, if you keeping working on this you’ll be dishing out edits in thirty minutes! 

I hope this helped. If you have any questions or want more details or want to know how to make other edits (Altean/Galra, outfits, character changes, etc.), send in an ask and I’ll explain further. Good luck!

#voltron #voltron legendary defender #voltron edits #voltron edits tutorial #my work

[thewakingcloak]

Building a ProtoDungeon

With the impending release of The Waking Cloak’s first demo, ProtoDungeon: Episode I, I thought it might be fun to write up a list of things I actually did to get this demo off the ground.

Since the demo is pretty small, and limited to a single main mechanic from The Waking Cloak, people might not realize just how much work went into this. The Waking Cloak is not feature complete at all, and so I couldn’t just copy+paste all my code, slap on some art, and call it done. I had to build tons of systems from the ground up, which will then be used in The Waking Cloak (and future ProtoDungeons). For example, The Waking Cloak doesn’t even have working doors!

This is what I started with:

Camera

Decoupled from player so that it wouldn’t break if the player wasn’t in the room (logo room, title room, etc.)

New state to follow the swap energy

Collision

Added “corner rounding”

Added “point collision” checking

Dialogue system

Added the ability for different dialogue box styles

HUD

Added the ability to show/hide it

Added displaying key and chapel seal count

State machine

Pixelated Pope created both versions of the state machine I use. The Waking Cloak was on the old version, and I updated this to the new version (which includes a draw portion for each state, very useful)

That’s it. Might seem like a lot, but let’s compare it to what I built brand new for the ProtoDungeon:

Designed the dungeon

A few weeks of messing with graph paper, sticky notes, and Tiled

Streamlined dungeon creation process

Rough sketches to graph paper to Tiled whitebox to GameMaker whitebox

Previously I just painstakingly built the final version directly in GameMaker, which was slow and difficult to find problems early on

Actually building the rooms in GameMaker

Swap mechanic

New states for player

Energy ball

Swappable object parent

Breakable swap objects (jars)

Non-breakable swap objects (blocks)

Several revisions to speed and mechanics

Originally the player could move around while the swap energy was out, but this proved 1) not all that fun, 2) difficult to keep the player out of trouble, 3) difficult for the player to focus on two things at once, especially while the swap energy was changing direction

The next revision, the player had to hold the spacebar to keep the swap out. This didn’t feel very fun.

The swap energy moved MUCH slower, then tweaked it and made it way too fast. Settled on a compromise for player control: press space and the swap energy goes really fast, hold and it goes slow.

Originally the camera did not follow the swap energy (since that would be weird if the player was moving and couldn’t see what they were doing), but changed this later on after I rethought that (and due to a suggestion from my first playtester).

Two levels: initial, and ability to change direction

Block pushing mechanics (the very first version of ProtoDungeon had this before The Waking Cloak as a prototype, but I also improved how collision, player push animations, and so forth worked)

Trigger/listener/broadcasting system (to hook up buttons and doors, mainly)

Buttons

Doors

Normal

Doors that close after you enter a room

Doors/gates that open when you press a button

Locked doors

Chapel door (requires special chapel seal)

Pits

These were working in the prototype earlier, but I added falling between floors

Cliffs and walls

Including one-way jump/slide down cliffs

Z-height--needed several things from this:

Player needs to be able to go up stairs within a room and be “above” the lower level

Swap energy fired at a lower level will hit walls

Swap energy fired at a higher level will go over walls

Essentially created a parent object that everything inherits from to add a “z” and a “height” variable, and then zones that modify objects’ z when they’re in those zones

Also added optional z-checking to collisions

This will also be nice for when I get to the jumping ProtoDungeon!

Player “teleportation” (stairs, doors, etc.)

Transition manager (for fades, wipes, etc.)

I have one of these in Genogatchi, but it’s not as robust and didn’t use the GUI layer

Added circle transitions

Added white transitions

Much easier transition triggering

Cutscenes

Had this in Genogatchi via FriendlyCosmonaut, but improved on it and added more functions (going to room, properly working with the transition manager, etc.)

Throne movement logic

This was extremely complicated/buggy and I still don’t know why

Swap mirrors

Resetting items when leaving the room and returning--tricky, because we don’t want to reset items if you’ve solved the puzzle

Art

Gosh, I thought I could just take all my art straight from TWC and recolor it, but it was a LIE... only thing that came over was grass/trees/walls/pits/gates and some HUD elements

I had to draw literally everything else from scratch--the player and all her animations (SO MANY ANIMATIONS), blocks, jars, jars falling down pits, three kinds of floors, tables, stools, arrows, arrow launchers, doors, buttons, rugs, swap energy, scrolls, keys, chapel seal (HUD and in-game versions), chapel seal pieces (HUD and in-game versions), bookshelves, dressers, stairs up and down and in-room, the final item, throne, exterior windows, braziers, and more

Of course adding the art to all the rooms took a while, though it helped to have the whitebox

Getting hurt

Arrows, pit

Getting reset in the room when you fell down a pit

Player health system

Writing

Intro

Outro

NPCs

Etc.

Audio

I was surprised at how much there was to do here

Designing and creating the sounds (probably 25 or so of these?) in FamiTracker and Bfxr

Playing them consistently, balancing the volume, not looping/looping, etc.

Game over state

New control system to allow keyboard/controller

Juju’s GameMaker input system, but with a few tweaks--this is 1-player only, and I also needed to fix issues with my crazy joysticks which apparently constantly poll for input setup

Win “cutscene”

Logo

Music

The most intimidating thing I’ve done in gamedev, kept getting in my own head and getting discouraged. Took me about a week, and a lot of scrapped tunes.

Then had to put it in the game and get it looping seamlessly

Improvements to debugging display

Also hid some hotkeys behind the debugger so the player doesn’t mess up their experience

Title screen

Loads and loads and loads and loads and LOADS of bugfixes and tweaks 

I counted 95+ of these on my Trello board, not including tons of bugs I fixed during the process of actually creating each feature, and not including the bugs left at the time of writing

All this took approximately 2-3 months. Not too shabby! And I’m very excited for the next ProtoDungeon, because even though the next dungeon won’t have the swap mechanic, I can build on this foundation  instead of creating everything from scratch! That means I might even be able to include stuff like enemies and a boss, or menu settings. And then who knows what I’ll be able to do in the third and onward ProtoDungeons.

All of this loops back into The Waking Cloak. I’ll be able to get feedback as we progress through the ProtoDungeon and really make The Waking Cloak the best it can be.

That’s all for now. See y’all on the demo release on April 6 (or March 30, if you’re a patron!)

#devlog #devblog #The Waking Cloak #ProtoDungeon #game development #gamedev #indiedev #demo #changelog?

[mashitandsmashit]

America’s Got Talent: Season 14 - Auditions 5

9: Lamont Landers. Okay, I think I‘m reaching my breaking point with Simon’s little “Stop! Redo!” tendencies...again! I mean, last year I threatened to kill puppies, but I didn’t actually have the heart to do it...This time, I think I’m just gonna sort out a deal on Simon’s life with Death...It might cost me my immortal soul, but it will be worth it! But seriously, we didn’t need all this manufactured drama...The guy’s singing was good, unique even! But it just wasn’t worth the trouble of making him find a new song, having him come back later, and even stopping the SECOND song to let him start over! I mean, why bother? The guy seems like quite the arrogant jerk anyway...And if Simon’s offering you a second chance, why the hell would you not want to take it!? Ugh...My brain hurts thinking about this guy any longer...

8: Emanne Beasha. I think she was a very good opera singer for her age, but so were several other girls from previous seasons! And for god’s sake, there are tons of arias to choose from, why don’t some of these opera singers take advantage of that!? This is why they aren’t as popular on AGT anymore...

7: Sideshow Opera. ANOTHER pet peeve I’m developing is acts that say they’re going to do one thing, but then switch partway through to something completely different! “I play piano! BUT WAIT! I’m actually a dancer!” “I play the flute! BUT WAIT! I’m actually a stripper!” You can surprise us about the nature of the act all you want, but stop straight-up lying about it! That being said, this was pretty entertaining! Throwing knives with your feet is pretty new, and the man’s performance (not really the singing, but everything else) added a layer of humor to it...This is looking like potential cannon fodder to me, but for now, I was amused...

6: Trigger Happy. I went ahead and wrote about this on AGT’s TV Tropes page: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Series/AmericasGotTalent It’s under “Never Trust a Trailer”. All I have to say is...Well-played, AGT...Well-played...I guess now we have to wait two more weeks for the REAL Golden Buzzer...I’m gonna be disappointed, aren’t I...? Because I won’t lie, while this is clearly not an act to be taken seriously, I was about ready to accept him, because he entertained me! It reminds me a lot of that SNL sketch with Chris Farley and Patrick Swayze (may they both rest in peace) with this man in the role of the former...All it was missing was “Working for the Weekend”, but the nerdy contortionist that I seem to keep bringing up each week already used that...Also, what’s with all of these chubby dancers coming on the show with no shoes on, stripping down to skimpy bikinis and trying to give themselves the Golden Buzzer!? Is he and Yuriyan Retriever in cahoots!? Either way, he was funny and entertaining...Julie TOTALLY should have given him the GB! (That was...mostly a joke...)

5: IDEGO. So here’s another of those acts that’s more of a cool presentation than a legitimate performance art...Nonetheless, it does have more to offer than Oskar and Gaspar did, and can make for a fun show (especially if it means watching the judges make fools of themselves in a virtual world). But this would work better as a presentation at a science convention or a TED Talks, not really a talent competition...These conflicting feelings make it only fitting to put this entry smack dab in the middle of the list...

4: Lukas & Falco. It’s interesting how one dog with one trainer is suddenly more engaging to watch than a whole family training a bunch of dogs! Hell, once upon a time, pet acts were kinda dead on arrival...But regardless, this was engaging to watch, and had some pretty solid tricks! And I don’t know what’s cuter, the dog, or the guy’s German accent...Okay, the dog, but still...

3: Izzy and Easton. A lot of dance duos have come on the show...Many of them were children...Some were definitely better than others...But this might be the best performance from this type of act I’ve seen to date! And it’s interesting how they’re tackling such a mature subject at such a young age! It’s like they’re an adult duo trapped in kids’ bodies! (Or maybe their parents put them up to it...)

2: Verba. Interesting how the two acts that got previewed for this episode both involved a story of somebody going to war...I guess it’s because Fourth of July is coming up...We’ve seen a lot of acts of this kind by now, and they do tend to always have this kind of story...Though usually it’s the man who dies while at war, not the woman getting stuffed into the proverbial fridge (more TV Tropes lingo). I also liked the solid transitions and the fact that they seemed to switch between creating stuff behind the screen, and in front of it! That’s something new! I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t getting tired of these kinds of acts, but if they can give us something new and unique (which they did), then I say no harm in milking it a little further...

1: Ndlovu Youth Choir. Now, I’m not gonna take away Terry’s Golden Buzzer pick from last week or anything; He clearly got an attachment with them...But if you think DETROIT has it bad...Anyway, yeah, I loved this...The song, the vocals, the dancing, all infectious! I don’t know what it is about big, epic African music, but it seems to make everything better, even a simple video game like “Civilization IV”. That being said, I’ll see a dozen of their shows before paying to see “The Lion King” remake in theaters this summer (though I’ll probably have to rent it sooner or later just to see how much they copied and pasted the original...To be fair, the original ripped off “Kimba the White Lion”.) I look forward to seeing them bless the rains down in Africa again!

Not a bad show...Probably a little better than Week 3...Still frustrating at parts...To be honest, Death was a pretty funny character, though mostly during the packages...I’ll be sure to make connections with him; We could get along on so many things, and put together one HELL of a show! (See what I did there?)

So yeah, I guess we have one more audition in two weeks (after watching a clip-show of previous ones next week). All I can say is, whoever Julie picks as her GB (assuming she picks anyone at all), it BETTER be worth the wait...and fake-outs!

[quicksilversquared]

How To Fake A Marriage Ch. 30

(let’s see if I can get this up before the internet goes again)

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(AO3) (FF.net)

Adrien was concerned.

As winter turned to spring, Marinette had been contacted by more bands (as well as the occasional individual singer) as different rock and alt metal groups discovered that Jagged Stone's album art designer was a talented fashion designer as well. It was good for Marinette, of course- she was going to have one really impressive resume after this- but spring runway was also coming up, and it resulted in one very stressed Marinette as she worked to stay on top of the requests while still keeping up with her work at Madam Rosalie's.

And because Adrien had been wrapped up in his own concerns about finishing the projects, papers, and tests he had for his classes plus getting his applications in and interviewing for summer internships, he had taken far too long to catch on to just how much work Marinette was taking on . It hadn't helped that she had moved her sewing setup back to her apartment after Ben came over for dinner back in February. Since he had been working hard on papers and she hadn't wanted to distract him, she had just kept it over there and spent her evenings after dinner and before bed working in her apartment, unless she was working on album art or doing concept sketches.

He had thought that she maybe was pushing herself so hard because she had a long wait list formed and she didn't want any of the bands dropping her because they had to wait too long for their turn to come up, but that wasn't it.

There weren't any bands that had been wait listed. Marinette had accepted them all (well, all of the ones that agreed to her pricing), and so she had an insanely long list of in-progress commissions that nearly all had deadlines coming up in the coming weeks.

"Bug, you don't have a full time job and a couple commissions on the side," Adrien said in utter disbelief late Sunday evening- or, rather, Sunday night, when Marinette should have already been getting ready for bed, considering how early she was going to have to wake up the next morning to get ready for the Fashion Week runway- as he looked at Marinette's spreadsheet of commissions and the progress and due dates for each one. "This is two full-time jobs plus some, what with the spring runway this week. And you still have spring photoshoots at work after that. How on earth did you even find the time to make the heat pack for Plagg?"

"It got out of hand," Marinette admitted. She looked utterly stressed as she looked at the list of commissions on her computer screen. "I just... they're famous people, you know? Or on their way to getting famous. They're visible. And the styles are something I haven't had the chance to do at Madam Rosalie's place, really, and they have so many fun ideas... I just didn't want to turn anyone down and miss out on that exposure."

"And Plagg?"

Marinette finally smiled, just for a moment. It wasn't even a quarter as bright as her usual smiles. "I did his bag right before bed one night, when I was too tired to do a good enough job on the commissions. It was just a matter of sewing a few straight seams and pinning the fabric right so that the rice wouldn't get under the needle." A pause. "Also, his whining was annoying."

"Most of these people would have been willing to wait a bit for their commissions, I think," Adrien said, trying not to laugh at that last comment. His eyes scanned down the list. It was very organized, he had to admit, with notes on sizes and measurements and themes and links to other sheets with more information. Thankfully there were quite a few that were close to being done, but they also had due dates that were coming up really soon. "How often are you getting contacted? With real requests, I mean. Not individual weirdos that have no idea what it would cost."

Marinette worried her lip as she thought about it. "Every couple weeks, maybe? It's just that there was a whole slew of them after Jagged Stone's album release that I had to put off working on until after Christmas, and there was that article about the outfits I designed for those other groups that got me more attention again, and I'm still working on finishing up everything for those ones. If I just had a break in the requests I would be able to catch up and then be working on commissions at a decent pace and be able to actually enjoy them again, but that's just not happening!"

"Buginette." Adrien rested his hands on Marinette's shoulders and tugged her into a hug. Part of him wanted to get frustrated with her- she should have known better than to take on so much work- but getting frustrated wouldn't help anything. Or anyone. Besides, there were better ways of expressing the same sentiment without being an arse about it, and the last thing Marinette needed right now was any sort of fight. "Love, that's when you tell new people that you're busy. Or if someone you're working with is requesting more pieces, you tell them it's going to have to wait. You put them down on your lovely spreadsheet as on the waiting list, and then contact them once you've caught up and had a little break. You'll do your best work for them then."

Marinette was still not entirely convinced, Adrien could tell. She was scanning her spreadsheet with a worried look on her face.

"You're right," she admitted after several more seconds of silence. She let out a huffy breath. "I just- we always heard in school about how it's hard to break into the fashion industry and that even to get hired by a company can be hard because designers are a dime a dozen, it seems, and I didn't want my chance to slip past me."

Adrien could understand that fear, honestly. He had seen the pile of applications on his father's desk before- and those were the ones that had already made it past several rounds of eliminations. There were a lot of strong candidates, and even people who graduated in the top of their class in university weren't guaranteed to get a position.

Still, Adrien didn't think that Marinette had to worry about that- and no, he wasn't just being biased. Marinette was crazy talented, and she had an impressive resume to back her up, even as young as she was.

Stepping to the side and crouching so that he was looking Marinette in the eye, Adrien put his hands on her shoulders so he could get her full attention. "Bug. Listen to me. You've already broken into the fashion industry. You'll have three years of interning at Rosalie on your resume, plus all of the stuff for Jagged, plus all of this stuff that you have right now. If people are asking after you to the point that you're getting overworked, you are solid in the fashion industry." He gave her shoulders a little shake for emphasis before sliding one hand up to cup her cheek. "But if you overwork yourself like this, you know the quality is going to suffer. It's better to put people on a wait list and work at your own speed than it is to churn out things that aren't original and aren't you and end up falling out of favor because of that. If people want a Marinette Original, they can wait. That's how the fashion industry works."

"I guess." Still, Marinette looked overwhelmed as she looked from Adrien to her spreadsheet. "And I can start putting people on a wait list now, but what about the commissions I already have lined up? I don't know any of the people on here well enough to ask if I could push their due dates back. And it's just so much work, I don't know how I'll get them all done by the deadlines."

Adrien had to think about it for several moments. It didn't take long before a plan started forming in his head.

"How about this- instead of having to cut off by our normal time, I can finish with my homework then or during the day and then come over and help you however I can?" Adrien suggested. "You said you had rivets to put in on some things, right? If you just mark with, like, chalk where you want them pounded in, I could do that. And I can sort out finished pieces into which commissions they belong to, and get shipping labels printed, and stuff like that. I can't sew, obviously, but if you think of anything I can do to help..."

Marinette looked slightly distressed at that. "But Adrien! You have your own stuff to do, with your papers and your midterms and-"

"My papers are largely done, they just need some editing. I'm going to have Ben look at them tomorrow for grammar and spelling and word choice, so I won't have to do that, and then I'll have a few days to go back and make sure that I have everything just the way I want it." Adrien rubbed Marinette's back, working at the tense muscles in her shoulders. "And one of my tests was yesterday, and then I only have two more for midterms. Most of my classes don't really do midterms at this point. They have tests when they want to have tests. I can handle it."

"That would help," Marinette admitted. She sent a slightly rueful look at the pile of finished clothes on her couch. "There's stuff from four or five commissions there and I know they're there- I check off each outfit once I finish it- but I just don't have the time to sort it out."

"Do you have a sheet with descriptions of which outfits are meant to be in each order?"

Marinette pointed to a folder sitting on the low table next to the couch. "Yeah, in there. There should be copies of the designs attached to each one, too."

Adrien headed over to pick up the folder. It was thick, and when he opened it he found a packet for each of Marinette's commissions. There were a dozen of them, all with multiple pieces. That surprised Adrien a bit, considering that none of them had ever worked with Marinette before and she didn't exactly have a site or anything online with photos of her past work. A couple had cover art commissions as well, and from what he could tell, only one of them had that part of their order completely finished- though once again, there were a quite a few that were nearly done, only needing a round of requested revisions.

It was a lot.

Adrien sorted through the pile as the sewing machine whirred furiously in the background. Marinette was right when she had said that there was stuff from several different commissions all mixed together- only instead of four or five commissions, there were eight. Tikki found sticky notes for him to stick to each pile of outfits, and Adrien wrote down the customer's name, what pieces were in each order, and checked off each piece that he had found and put in the pile. What was still needed was written on a different colored sticky note and put on top of the pile.

Slowly but surely, the couch was becoming much more organized.

"This one says that it just needs one more piece before it's complete," Adrien reported after everything was sorted out into neat stacks, flipping through one packet of commission information to double-check. "It looks like a fairly basic tank top, except with some screen printing."

Marinette perked up and the sewing machine's whirring slowed to a stop. "Really?"

"It looks like it, yeah." Adrien handed over the packet. "I've found the two skirts and one completed top. It just needs this one shirt and then it'll be ready to go."

"I think I was waiting to do the screen printing all at once, since I have a bunch to do among all of my commissions and it's more efficient to do it all in one go," Marinette said, scanning the page. "But yeah, I should maybe do that this weekend and I can get a bunch of stuff checked off. Is it supposed to be sunny then?"

Adrien blinked, puzzled- what did the weather have to do with anything?- but checked his phone anyway. Maybe she just needed the sun for the shirts to dry or something. "Yeah, it'll be sunny, for once. At least that's what they think right now. Why?"

"I gotta set the screens in the sun," Marinette explained, which... yeah, honestly, that really didn't explain anything at all. Adrien was still very much confused. "I should have most of the materials for screen printing, but I just have to make the screens themselves. And- oh, if I'm gonna make all of the screens at once, I'll actually need to make more frames. Shoot, and I don't have the time to pick up more materials, and the copy shop is never open when I'm off and it's always packed during lunch and-"

"If you tell me what you need, I can pick up the stuff for the frames and the other materials, and whatever you need from the copy shop, I can run all of those errands," Adrien told her immediately, before she could get too far into one of her panic spirals. "I can go whenever, I just need a list and where to buy stuff. And for the screen printing- do you sew your own shirts for that?"

Marinette shook her head, looking marginally less frantic. "No, I just ordered some pre-sewn ones that I'll print on. Even if it only takes an hour to sew a shirt like that, I have so many orders for them that it would just take forever." Marinette pointed at an unopened box wedged in the corner of the room with a pile of papers sitting on top. A closer look told Adrien that it was the name of each commission, the color and size of the base shirt, and what design was meant to be printed on it. Once again, Marinette had absolutely impeccable organization. "I should check and make sure they're all there, probably, and get them sorted out with their commission sheets, but I don't have the time."

"I can check on that, too," Adrien piped up. He slipped up behind her and hugged her, pressing a kiss to her forehead. "Are you feeling better about everything now?"

"Better," Marinette agreed. She twisted around to kiss him. "Not perfect, because there's still a lot to do and I feel really stupid for letting it get to this point... but I think I might focus on the little stuff this week, all of the easy commissions and finishing up the orders that just have one piece left and finishing the pieces I have mostly completed and then doing album cover revisions. Once I have all of that done, then I think I'll have a better view of what I really have left to do." She glanced over at her laptop and the spreadsheet on it and let out a sigh. "I might end up having to email some of my customers and asking to push back the completion date a little bit. I've been scrambling so much lately that I just keep hopping from one piece to another because I see the due date and just freak out, and start working on one of their pieces, then see the due date for another and switch again."

"That sounds like a plan," Adrien agreed. He straightened up and glanced around the room. There were four in-progress pieces on the mannequins, and what looked like a couple others sitting around on the floor and on Marinette's kitchen counter. Just by standing here he was starting to feel overwhelmed. "Then you can finish orders and get those pieces cleared out of here so you aren't being buried under an avalanche of clothes. It won't feel quite so overwhelming then."

Marinette nodded in agreement, biting her lip as she glanced back at her computer. "Yeah. And I suppose I can bring my tablet along to Fashion Week and work on the cover art stuff between runways, too. I've got some requested changes to finish up and then a couple complete ones to design. Or maybe it's just one complete one left to design, I don't remember." She reached over, scrolling through her list of commissions. Red, yellow and green boxes told her what was finished, what was in-progress, and what was still woefully untouched. There were way too many yellow and red-coded boxes for Adrien's liking, and he was sure that she felt the same. "I still have to go in every day and go to other presentations and runways for inspiration, but there's enough downtime between stuff that I can probably get some work done. And I could bring my sketchbook and work on some of the preliminary sketches that I still have to do once the covers are finished up. And then I could take a day or two off to catch up, too, maybe, after Fashion Week is over. Or maybe not. It depends on what we have to do at work."

Adrien nodded. He couldn't say that he entirely liked the plan- Marinette was going to be working herself to the bone with barely a moment to catch her breath, and that wasn't healthy- but if she overworked herself now, then hopefully she would get enough done that she wouldn't be keeping herself awake stressing over the unfinished commissions with their ever-looming due dates. And with his tests and paper due dates more spread out this semester than ever before and Ben's help in keeping him on top of his coursework, he should be able to help Marinette without falling behind in his own studies.

Besides, even if he hadn't admitted it to himself fully, Adrien was far ahead of schedule on the essays. His early push meant that his 'rough drafts' were more like fully completed papers at this point, and he probably wasn't going to need to do much editing between when he got the graded draft back and when the final copy was due.

Hopefully, at least. Barring some complete disaster.

"Are you almost done with that piece?" Adrien asked as Marinette turned back to the jacket she was working on. "Because I can understand wanting to finish it, but it's late and you have to get up early for Fashion Week. And you actually have to be awake for that."

"I want to get one more seam done, and then it'll be at a good stopping point," Marinette decided after a pause. "And then I'll be over- unless you want me to sleep over here so I don't wake you up when I get up?"

Adrien shook his head. If Marinette slept over in her apartment, then there would be no way of knowing if she had actually slept. He would rather deal with being woken up briefly when Marinette's alarm went off early in the morning than have her make the last-minute decision to stay up even later to finish a piece and not know. "I'd rather sleep next to you like normal. How long do you think you'll be?"

"Five minutes, tops."

"Sounds good." As he turned to leave, Adrien paused. "Oh, and one thing... Marinette?"

Marinette looked over at him, eyes wide. "Yeah?"

"Everything will work out, I promise. We're Ladybug and Chat Noir, after all." He grinned at her, and was pleased to see her smile back. It was a little muted, but it was a start. "Together, we can do anything."

  For the first time in nearly two weeks, Marinette found that she could actually focus entirely on what she was doing at work. She didn't find her mind floating back to the piles of unfinished commissions sitting in her apartment, or fretting over everything she had to do.

Even if she hadn't made nearly as much progress as she wanted to over the weekend- well, she had had ridiculous expectations in the first place. She had done a good bit of work, and now that Adrien had caught on to her problem, he was solidly on her side. He had managed to get the messy pile of commissions sorted out and organized so that she had a better idea of what she had left to do, and together they had come up with a plan for her going forward.

Well, maybe she had come up with most of the plan, but Adrien's presence and willingness to help had settled the jittery nerves in her stomach and cleared her mind so that she could actually focus. The mountain of commissions to finish didn't seem so insurmountable now that she had Chat Noir at her side and a plan in her mind.

And that focus was needed as Marinette helped models change clothes quickly and got them back out onto the runway. The work was fast-paced and needed all of her attention to make sure the right collars were popped and everything was tucked in in the right places and no wrinkles were visible. Once the last model went through and headed out to the runway, a sigh ran through the changing area and there was a distinct drop in tension. Seconds later, though, everyone pulled themselves back together to start steering models back to their area so they could get changed back into their street clothes and all of the outfits could be packed up and sent back to the office.

Once the last of the things from Madam Rosalie's show were packed up, Marinette snagged her bag and followed her coworkers out of backstage and towards the first of the shows that she had wanted to see. As she walked, she pulled out the wrap that Adrien had made for her- best boyfriend ever, honestly- and dug in hungrily.

"Oh, I'm jealous," Sarah said, eying the wrap. "I have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and that's it. I can't cook all that well."

"When did you find the time to put that together, even?" Emily wanted to know, partway through her own turkey sandwich. "I thought you said that you were super-busy with commissions to do, too."

Marinette swallowed her bite and then grinned. "Yeah, I've been swamped," she agreed. "So Adrien has been doing most of the cooking, and he made this for me. He's an absolute godsend."

"D'you think I could bribe him to pack a lunch for me for the rest of the week?" Sarah joked. "I kid, I kid," she added before Marinette had time to think about it. "I should have time to make a proper meal to pack tonight. But that really does look good."

They worked their way through the crowd and into the largest of the runway areas. Once they got into their seats, Marinette wasted no time in polishing off her wrap and pulling out her commissions sketchbook. She wanted to get at least three of her designs cleaned up today, preferably more. Then she could submit all of her sketches to that particular client for approval, and then they would get back to her in probably two to three days, and then she would have to carve out the time to go to the fabric shop and get the materials that she needed, and then-

Her thoughts had started to race again as she tried to feel out a timeline for the commission. Only a sharp jabbing at her side pulled Marinette out of her thoughts, and she looked down to see one of Tikki's eyes peering out of her bag, clearly frowning at her. Marinette let out a breath and tried to calm her racing thoughts.

She was going to try to clean up several sketches today and get them ready to submit for approval. Once she got home, she was going to send the sketches off for approval and finish up the jacket she had been working on and then turn her attention to the mostly-finished pieces. Only once she had her mannequins cleared would she start anything new. If Adrien had any time free, she would have him start to put together the frames for the screen printing.

All she had to do was keep a level head and not start panicking.

As the day wore on, the side of Marinette's hand slowly darkened with smudged graphite. She cleaned up rough sketches while waiting for shows to start, scribbled out ideas to use at Madam Rosalie's during runways, and even got a few new commissions sketches very roughly sketched out. Her hand was starting to ache from being clenched around her pencil for so long by the time she left the Fashion Week grounds and headed home.

"You look productive," Adrien said with a laugh after they pulled apart from their welcome-home kiss and he spotted her grey-smudged hand. "How's your hand doing?"

Marinette wriggled her fingers, trying to loosen them up. "It hurts, but I should still be able to sew with no problem. I might use my quilting gloves, though, just so my hands don't cramp up."

She didn't miss Adrien's concerned glance at her hands, nor the way he immediately reached out to gently massage them. She stepped closer, letting him continue to work at her hands until they were back to feeling relatively normal.

How Marinette had somehow gotten the Absolute Best Boyfriend In The World she didn't know, but she wasn't complaining.

"Let's have dinner first before you do any sewing again," Adrien suggested, steering Marinette towards the table. "I made soup and sandwiches. How was your day?"

Dinner went by all too fast, and then Adrien took care of the dishes while Marinette headed over to her apartment to get pictures of all of her cleaned-up sketches taken and sent before she sat down to finish up the jacket. It would need some snaps and other bling on it later, but she was practically finished with the sewing.

"Is that pile done and ready to sort?"

Marinette glanced up from where she was sewing the pockets in the jacket. Adrien was pointing to a more-or-less neatly stacked pile of jackets and pants and tops on the kitchen counter. She had to think for a moment- why were those pieces over there?- before it clicked.

"Those all need hardware," Marinette explained. "Studs and rivets and snaps and eyelets. It's easiest to do them all at once, I've found, instead of getting all of my tools out and doing one piece at a time." She had marked them all with a marker (dark for the few light pieces, white for the dark ones) with where the studs were meant to go, so she wouldn't have to refer back to the drawings for each one. Like with the screen printing shirts, each one had the commission name on it and the kind of studs (number and size) written on a slip of paper and pinned to the piece.

Technically, it had been Tikki that had been the one to come up with the idea of labeling the pieces like that and it had also been Tikki who wrote up each slip of paper so Marinette didn't have to take the time to do it herself, but Marinette couldn't deny that it was a fantastic idea.

"Aha." Adrien regarded the pile as Marinette turned back to her jacket. "So is that stuff I could potentially do?"

Marinette bit her lip and thought about it. Part of her wanted to say no, because she would have to take the time to teach Adrien how to put things in correctly so that they wouldn't mess up the pieces, but the more reasonable side said yes, please. Adrien was smart and could pick things up quickly, and once he learned how to do the hardware, that would probably be several hours of work off of her shoulders in return for what in all honesty would probably just be a ten-minute demo.

"I'll teach you tomorrow how to do some of the studs," Marinette promised. Those had the fewest tools involved and were the easiest of the hardware pieces to put in. "But for tonight... do you think you could put together some screen printing frames? The wood and the tools are in the hall closet, and there should be an instruction packet there, too."

Adrien nodded and bounded towards the closet. Minutes later, the first frame was halfway assembled on the kitchen floor. Half an hour after that, and several completed frames were lined up next to the fridge as Adrien worked on making several smaller and one larger frame from the remaining wood. Marinette had finished what she could on the jacket and added it to the pile in the kitchen before starting work on a pair of pants.

"Okay, I think it's bedtime," Adrien announced two hours later. Marinette looked over to see him stretching, his t-shirt rising up to expose a thin line of stomach. "Unless you had something else you wanted to get done tonight?"

Marinette blinked and glanced over at the time on her phone. It was definitely later than she had thought. Clearly she had kind of zoned out while sewing. "Oh! Yeah, that's probably a good idea. But, uh..."

She wanted to keep going, in all honesty. She could feel like she was making progress, and she couldn't do that if she went to bed. But Tikki was staring at her from across the room, clearly disapproving of Marinette's desire to just ignore reasonable bedtimes in favor of working.

(Plagg was also there, only he was napping, happily curled up on the heat pad Marinette had made for him. She never got disapproving looks from him.)

"I just wish I had made more visible progress," Marinette admitted. "These pants are almost done, since I had them already started before, and I got the jacket ready for studding but it was already mostly there. And I still have so much to do."

"One day at a time, Bug," Adrien reminded her. He waited until she switched off her sewing machine and then pulled her up off of her chair. "And if you want, I can pick up whatever other materials you need for the screen printing stuff tomorrow. That'll be another thing checked off your list."

Marinette lit up at the reminder. "Yeah! I just need- wait a moment, I need to check something." She hurried to her computer and pulled up the spreadsheet that she had made for all of her screen-printed shirt orders. "I should need six more of the average-sized frames, and the inks, and-" She scrambled for a blank piece of paper and started scribbling down a list, trying to remember what she had and hadn't already bought. Since she had gotten the materials for the first set of commissions, it was just a matter of remembering which ones she hadn't bought stuff for.

Well. It was probably better to overestimate rather than underestimate. Presumably she would get enough orders going forward that she would use everything up long before she had to go back to Paris and if not... well, she had coworkers who could probably use the supplies.

"I think that's all the information you'll need for the fabric ink," Marinette said after several minutes of scribbling. "Any questions, just text me. And I think I should have enough fabric to put on all of the frames, even with six more. And I'll need the pattern transparencies to do the printing at all." She let out a small huff as she eyed the boxes of shirts to be inked. Adrien had sorted them out and thankfully they were all present and in both the correct colors and sizes (though there had been a few terrifying minutes when they thought that she was over a dozen shirts short, before she realized that there was a second box of shirts stashed in the hall closet), but it was yet another pile reminding her of how incredibly far behind she had gotten. When Marinette had initially set the due dates up she had thought that she was being ridiculously generous with the timeline and that the far-out due dates would give her plenty of wriggle room, but now those deadlines were almost here and all she had to show for her work were a million half-finished projects around the room.

"Do you have a flash drive or something with all of the transparency files on it?" Adrien asked, pulling her attention back from her mental berating. "I can run that errand tomorrow, too. I only have two classes to go to and an hour and a half meeting with Ben, so I'll have plenty of time."

Adrien was definitely the Best Boyfriend Ever.

The week continued in a blur of work. Tuesday evening, Adrien finished building the frames and then he and Marinette worked together to get the fabric properly stretched and attached. He had gotten everything that Marinette had asked for during the day, which meant that the screen printing stuff would be all ready to go later in the week. In the evening, Adrien cut lengths of chain for accents on some of the pieces and pressed in studs on a couple of the pieces sitting in the kitchen, which meant that Marinette could sew the liners in and count those pieces as done.

(The best part? Since she had already sewn the liners, putting them in didn't take long at all and Marinette got to feel super-productive as she finished off three jackets in one night. And, making the day even better, they got the news that Alya had gotten past the second round of cuts and her entry had gone on to the proper judges to see.)

During the day, Marinette worked on finishing up requested revisions on album covers in between runway shows, sending them off as she finished and waiting for a confirmation email in return that would allow her to either check the piece off for good or send her back to do a couple more tweaks. Even with all of the stress that she had been under when designing the pieces, Marinette had to admit that she was proud of them. The artwork had turned out wonderfully, and she had managed to push herself with some of the design elements, too. They showed a range of techniques and varied from minimalistic to intricately detailed.

Thursday evening found Marinette still furiously sewing and Adrien pressing in yet more studs in a very decorated jacket. He spent the entire evening working on the piece and Marinette noticed him making a face and shaking out his fingers every so often, especially as it got later.

She felt bad about asking him for his help, she really did- so many studs in a short period of time really made the fingers sore-but he had saved her a solid twenty hours of work so far (two jackets OR two tops OR eight to ten pairs of pants and skirts- her mind started, and Marinette shushed it), and he could ask her for something else to do if he so desired, or even go back to doing his own work.

Speaking of which...

"Are you sure you don't have studying to be doing?" Marinette asked, letting her sewing machine slow to a stop before swinging around to look at Adrien. She wouldn't put it past him to focus too much on her stuff just to be kind, even if he had work of his own. "You've been spending all of your evenings over here. I thought you had papers to write."

"Wrote 'em during the day," Adrien said cheerfully. "And did my studying during the day, too."

"And that's enough?"

"For right now, yes. I don't think I could do it forever, though." He worried his lip, just a bit. She didn't miss it, even though he was clearly trying to hide it so he wouldn't worry her. "And I'll have to take at least one evening to study next week, since I'll have an exam and two papers to finish. And then I have two exams the week before break, and one after."

Marinette nodded. She would probably be done with everything that Adrien could help with by that point anyway. "Take off whatever time you need, really. You've been a huge help." She gestured at the neat piles of clothes stacked and labeled on the couch and at the printing screens, piled neatly on the kitchen counter. "I couldn't have gotten this far without you. I would still be scrambling and panicking myself into a knot." She smiled up at him as he came over to wrap her up in a hug. "I've been able to focus so much better since we came up with the plan to get everything finished."

Adrien just grinned and buried his face in her neck.

"I've managed to get all of my designs finalized and approved," Marinette continued. "And I got revisions done for several album covers and those have been submitted, so I'm waiting to hear back from the last of those. And the one cover that I hadn't gotten a first draft of yet- it's maybe a third of the way done. I'll have to work on that and get it done- well, not this weekend, since I have to finish up a bunch of orders first, but next week at least, so I can get it submitted for critique."

Marinette also sincerely hoped that none of the other people who had had her do revisions needed any more changes. Being able to check all of them off would be a huge relief.

"So how are the studs different than the other hardware you mentioned?" Adrien asked after another minute. He released her from the hug and straightened back up, stretching and twisting to get the aches out of his back. "You said they were easier?"

"Yeah, the others need more than just the one poking tool," Marinette explained. "And they have two pieces that lock together from opposite sides of the fabric. It usually takes a couple tries to get it right." It wasn't that the studs were hard, exactly, just different. There were more steps and more tools, but not that many more. She was sure that Adrien wouldn't have any problems.

"I'm sure I'll pick it up," Adrien assured her. "I might be slower than you at it, but..."

Marinette pulled him back down for a kiss. "That's fine. As long as it gets done, the time doesn't matter. I wouldn't be able to do this without you."

She wasn't even exaggerating. Adrien had been focused on whatever task she gave to him to do, working hard to finish the job. Between the errands he had run, the organizing he had done, his work on the frames, and all of the hardware...

Yeah, it was a lot. It added up quickly.

"Well, then I should get back to work," Adrien told her. "I'm almost done with the jacket, and then it'll be ready for you again."

"No rush," Marinette assured him. She turned back to her machine and started sewing again. The machine hummed, needle a silver blur as it worked its way up the seam, one stitch at a time. "I certainly have enough to do in the meantime."

#Miraculous Ladybug #My writing #How to Fake a Marriage #the internet here is so shaky #Adrien Agreste #Marinette Dupain-Cheng #POSTING BEFORE IT GOES AGAIN

[uniformbravo]

me trying to make a gif part 2 (thrilling finale, buildup ver.)

ok good news and bad news: good news being withheld for Spoilers (not that it’s that hard to guess anyway lol), bad news explained first bc, chronologically, it is first

so yesterday i mentioned in the tags of that post that i had seen that krita has an animation feature so i was gonna try importing the frames into that and then exporting it as a gif. easier said than done, as it turns out

i started by opening the file i made yesterday with 62 layers as the frames and importing that into krita, which worked fine (i didn’t know you could actually open .psd files in clip stuido ((this typo is so fucking stupid it made me laugh so im leaving it)) and krita, so that’s pretty neat, i wonder if it works the other way around too) but i ran into problems when i tried to convert those layers into frames in an animation. because, like, the layout of the program has the layers displayed in one tab, and the animation timeline in another, like so:

(do u like how im using pictures now, i thought of that yesterday after i published the other post and realized hey, visual reference would probably make my plight a lot easier to understand!! so enjoy these educational diagrams from now on)

so my goal was to get the frames from the layers into the timeline, and i still don’t know if i did it right bc lbr krita is not very intuitive at all,,.,, i mean i watched a video tutorial abt how to animate in krita which was v helpful (it’s the one by jesse j james on yt fuckin SHout out) but it was about animating from scratch, not importing an animation you’ve already done elsewhere

so like, the way krita’s animation thing works, from what i could piece together as i bumbled my way around w/ it, is that each layer in the layers tab is a separate timeline in the,,, timeline tab

i want them all to be in the same timeline, not separate ones, and there’s no way to combine them in the timeline tab bc doing that just overwrites whatever layer you’re pasting it down onto, and also if you define the number of frames for that timeline (62 for this project) it just puts the single image of that layer for all of the frames instead of just one of them, so you’d have to go through and delete all the other frames you don’t want it to be, which would be such a fuckin pain

so i found a workaround, which is so tedious that it can’t be the right way to do it, but basically i started w/ layer 1 and defined 62 frames & then emptied frames 2-62, like this

(that blue box is the frame, btw, even tho it says 0, which actually kind of annoys me like why doesn’t it start the first frame on 1????)

from there i went up to layer two and selected that in the timeline, but for some reason the frame doesn’t show up automatically?

& i couldnt fuckin figure out how to make it into like, an Official Timeline Layer or whatever tf bc like, u see on layer 1 how theres that little lightbulb-looking icon on the right? that’s for turning on onion skin which only applies when you actually have frames with things drawn on them, so basically layer 2 in the layers tab has a drawing but in the timeline it doesn’t?

i didn’t find out what the actual reason for this is or how you’re /supposed/ to make the frame appear in the timeline, but what i did was right click on layer 2′s timeline & select “create blank frame” which magically made the frame i want appear

but it’s on top of the layer 1 frame, and i want it to be the frame after. also it’s still in a different timeline. this is the only easy fix in this whole damn process, u can literally just click & drag the frame from layer 2 to layer 1 and put it wherever u want on the timeline

and then u just delete layer 2 and that’s it, frame transferred!! then i just had to do that for 60 more layers and after [unspecified amount of time but it was a fuckin while ok] my timeline looked like this!

(the gaps near the end are held frames, to save me time so i didn’t have to copy a bunch of frames that were exactly the same)

krita is great because as far as i know ur animation can have an unlimited number of frames, at the risk of your own pc’s processing power, which is a definite upside to SOME expensive art programs i know (clip studio, i’m talking abt csp) and u can pick the frame rate too (cough photoshop elements 5.0 even tho u dont technically have an animation feature & it’s a miracle u can even make gifs at all) so once i finally got all the frames situated all nice and in order like on the same timeline, playing it was great! played at the right speed, looped perfectly, it was a dream come true right

well, time to export it as a gif

ha

haha

hoooo oo  o

so u got 2 options for exporting ur animation, u can either hit “export,” which lets u save it as different file types, one of which being gif, or you can hit “render,” which gives you gif and video options

well

i tried export first, bc that seemed like a good idea, but the “””gif””” it made was distinctly not a gif, despite its claim to be one?? this is what i got:

notice: 1. it is not moving, and 2. the black bars to the sides?? those are supposed to be transparent. they’re transparent in the file i made so why didn’t they register as transparent in the export, when gifs have transparency capabilities??

so That was some real live bullshit but i still had the “render” option, right? export was wrong, so rrender must be the correct option to go to that will produce the results i am wanting to see produced in front of me like a silver dinner platter with a correctly functioning gif under the lid, that’s what i want to see and “Render Animation...” is gonna Give me that silver platter righWRONG ok look at this shit rn ok Look

it says GIF it says it RIGHT THERE right??? right?????? then WHY

?????????????

and it also gave me all This bullshit

like did i ask?? did i fucking ask???? i already have all the individual frames why do i need even M o re i mfjgjgk

((rationally ok yea thats v useful for if ur making the animation in krita and want to export the frames to use elsewhere, but like uhhh 1. again, they’re not transparent & 2. i should have the option of saying i don’t want these??? bc *meme voice* i don’t want these)

so in the end i could find NO correct method of exporting animations as a gif in krita bc every ooption that says gif is fuckign LYING to ur face there are NO gifs in krita, aliens made the progam who looked at gifs and went “hmm i thikng this is how a gif works “ and just made jpegs instead but somehow got on the computers good side and got it to lie for them about it being a gif so thats why it says gif on the file still even tho its not a gif illimati confinr

so what is the conclusion to this? well i said there was good news too, and this is the portion where i divulge that sweet nectar (i type dthis 2 seconds ago and @ me what the fuck)

so after wasting a good 2 hours trying to figure out krita i gave up and watched some good old [youtuber name redacted bc what if it shows up in search & ppl see this dumbass post in there but it rhymes with fjackfsepticfeye] to relax into accepting my fate that i’ll never be able to upload my animations to tungle except in poor quality loopless video form, making me into a laughing stock on my own art blog, but THEN i had a stroke of genius, in my Brain

so if u read yesterday’s post u might remember that flipnote studio, the animation program i use on my ds, to animate, has the option to export files as gifs, both animated and sequential (meaning either as one fully animated gif or each individual frame separately), which is super convenient, but as i mentioned yesterday, any time i tried to open the folder with those files on my laptop, it crashed immediately

WELL today i thought “hey, how about instead of opening the folder in the sd card when it’s plugged in, how about i copy that folder from the sd card to my flash drive, and try to open it there, in case it’s the card’s hardware that’s causing the problem, not corrupted files”

so i tried that and it FUCKING WORKED THANK GOD GLORY HALLELUJAH

so now instead of spedning A THOUSAND YEARS trying and failing to force art programs to bend to my will i can just export the animations straight from my ds and drag them onto my computer Just As God Intended oh GOD im so fucking happy

here’s the gif in the end, i’m gonna post it to my art blog too but this is the Green Version bc i animate in green bc of some default settings in flipnote that i got used to, plus it makes me feel like i’m just sketching so nothing really has to be finalized so i’m comfortable while i work, and also it’s just nice ok it’s a Nice Green

(there’s a few frames at the end that are like the extra scraps from while i was working dw i got rid of those in the final version that i’m posting to my art blog later. also i added my blog url to that one too it’s aaaaaall good)

the only downside to this method is that i can’t change the canvas size to be 540px wide to fit with tumbrl s image dimensions but whatever i can just post them in a text post and fix the html to display it at its original size instead of the resizing bullshit tmurbl pulls constantly ugh. anyway it works great on desktop but it’s inevitably gonna look like shit on mobile no matter what i do *Big Ass Shrug*

anyway thats the end of my success story uhh i can’t make the like comment & subscribe joke again bc i already did that in the last post so like bye i guess thanks 4 watchign & have a great day i’ll see u in my next fvideo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYob4uDjEKI&t=0s

(^that’s my outro music)

#this started out so boring like a tutorial (but made by someone who doesn't know what the fuck theyre talking abt) #& then things derail Real Quick #that's why this is the ''buildup ver.'' #retag later #talkin bout stuff #today posts #rieley's wips #(me: i can't mention this youtuber by name in case my post shows up in search #me: *adds a link to the post rendering that effort for naught* #me: *leaves it anyway bc it's funny*) #pls listen to the outro musi c it's rly good & tunmgmldnr wouldnt let me embed the video & idk how to do it thru html & too lazy to look it #up :(

[houseofvans]

ART SCHOOL | Q&A with SABRINA BOSCO

We absolutely love the super surrealistic and symbolic works of New York based artist Sabrina Bosco. Sabrina’s watercolored worlds are filled with symbols and meanings, inspired by Nature, the colorful and psychedelic works fo Heinz Edelmann, tattoo art, and music. We find out more about Sabrina’s awesome art, her art school tip, and what she’s got coming up for the rest of the year! Make the leap. 

Photographs courtesy of the artist and Julie Bosco

Can you tell us a little about yourself and what you do? Hello! My name is Sabrina Bosco, I’m 23 years old and live in New York. I love to create! These days mostly I am watercolor painting, but I also love to write poetry and stitch and sometimes oil paint. And I’m hoping to become a tattoo artist!

How would you describe your works to someone? I would describe it as super symbolic, semi-tattoo style surrealism art that reflects the world inside my mind. There’s symbolism in all the lines, colors, images, shaped, atc. and there’s no wrong way to interpret it. I have my own personal meanings for everything I draw, but whatever people take from it is also completely true.

Was drawing a hobby turned career? or something you knew from the start? It was a hobby turned career. I drew a lot as a kid and a little bit in high school, but never took it super seriously. It was more like a painting every couple of months. I didn’t really have a plan when I graduated from college, so I went into panic mode to find what I’d be doing with my life and decided I was going to become a geologist since I loved to be outside. I even bought textbooks and researched about it for hours. 

Then I had this existential crisis type thing where it really hit me I have one life to live and my geology plan was completely ridiculous and unrealistic for me. That’s when I really jumped into painting, and since then my art has been this continuation of me figuring out my mind and my life. At first my goal was botanical art, and I thought I could make illustrations for books or something. For me, that was way too limiting, and I naturally started adding new elements and turning everything into symbolism. So, although it began as a hobby, it had a goal of becoming a career while also not existing solely to become a career. 

I’m lucky it’s heading towards a career path.

Who were some of your early influences? My biggest influence is the illustrator for The Beatles Yellow Submarine art, Heinz Edelmann. His psychedelic colorful worlds are what made me attracted to the colors and patterns I use, and the format of my paintings being “worldly”.The art and music of the 60’s in general were my biggest influences. Surrealism oil painter, Vladimir Kush, is a huge influence on any surrealism elements in my art. Artists I discovered on Instagram inspired me a lot to push my art further, there are soooo many and it’s easy to be inspired on there. Diego Delfino’s beautiful women inspired me to draw women. They’re all super beautifully posed and inspired by the women of the 30’s, which led to me referencing my ladies from ladies from the 30’s when I first started learning how to draw them. Kane Trubenbacher was also one of my biggest influences, which seems weird because our styles are basically opposite, but the way he configures elements together inspired me tremendously and led to a turning point in my art style.

What type of materials did you start out using and what materials do you love to use now? I started out using Winsor and Newton watercolor, which is a thicker paint you add water to. It’s okay to begin with, but now I use Ecoline watercolor and it’s way easier to work with. I’ve been using that for the past 3 years now. As for paper, I began with hot press watercolor paper because I was trying to make botanical art, but now I use Fabriano Studio 140lb cold press paper and I’ve been using that for about 3 years also.

When you’re creating a new drawing, how do you begin your process? Most of the time it begins with whatever I’m feeling, or thinking being manifested into an image. Sometimes it’s a thought theme I’ve been having, whether I keep thinking about themes like dreams, memory, death etc. and sometimes it’s just how I’m feeling, which could be super happy and excited about life or overwhelmed with anxiety and whatever else is going in my head. 

Any kind of thought or feeling I have I morph into symbols that exist in nature or whatever I think suits it best, and it kind of branches off from the original theme into more connecting themes. Making the actual picture, it always begins different. 

My main goal is always to use different ideas in every painting, so I think beginning every painting differently is kind of a natural thing that happens when I try to accomplish that. Sometimes I begin with an idea I had the night before when I was about to sleep and other times I just start sketching on the paper. I also will sketch on graph paper and keep layering my ideas using a light box or a window to trace. I could probably use flowers growing out of a melting eyeball to symbolize five different things, but I’ll try to use an idea I’ve never used before to challenge myself artistic wise and broaden my perspective on the symbolism that surrounds us in nature.

What type of things are you inspired by and how do they found themselves reflected in your work? I’m mostly inspired by nature. Rainbows, mountains, water, the sun, the moon etc. all exist without any war or hate or intention rather than to be. They surround us in the physical world, but also reflect the conscious mind symbolically and I try to translate that in my art. All my women represent mother nature, and her consciousness that transcends to living beings (humans and animals). I believe nature is a natural teacher, and it’s our choice to view it as just objects around us, or to learn from it. When you begin to study and interpret nature, you begin to open new realms of thought (and lack of thought) and expand your conscious mind. That’s been the only way for me to learn about my true self and all the truths that surround me, and there’s nothing more inspiring for me than the truth. 

Music also inspires me a lot. You can get the same vibe from a song that you find in a painting, and I find when I’m really into a certain band, it’s vibe will reflect off my painting. Whether it’s a more serious, sad vibe or a psychedelic, energic vibe. Right now, The Voidz are my main music inspiration. The foundation of my art is strongly inspired by bands like The Beatles, The Doors, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. Tattoo art is also super inspirational. 

Even though my paintings aren’t intended to be tattoos, I’ve been told its tattoo like, and I think that naturally happened from just looking at so much tattoo art and being in love with it. Every now and then I’ll make a flash sheet, and when I sketch out ideas, it usually looks like a bunch of flash. I usually have an easier time making flash sheets than actual paintings. People in general inspire me. Sometimes a painting will be based on a person I met or saw. Even though everything I draw comes from the secret world inside my head, the secret world inside everyone else head is something that fascinates me and is something that will sneak into my drawings whenever I meet someone interesting.  

There’s a lot of surrealistic type of landscapes and worlds in your drawings from melting rainbows to lots and lots of eyeballs. What can you tell us about these worlds? They’re all part of the same world that exists in my mind, I like to “walk” through my mind and draw what I see. This world is mine because it’s my perspective, but it connects with every other conscious mind’s world. I could never draw theirs even though it’s the same world, because I could never fully understand their perspective of it. The worlds I create are always positive, even if they were born from any negative feelings or thoughts, they transform negative energy into positive energy. In this way they’re kind of healing places to create for myself, and hopefully also for anyone who visits them. Mostly these worlds are super personal, but they are based off the truth I know everyone can connect to in their own personal way if they’re willing to look deeper and find themselves in these worlds.

Where did you learn your knowledge of art or making art? Art School or Self taught? It was self-taught, but watching my sister paint and seeing what other artists use and how they paint, helped me a lot. Most of it was trial and error. I always liked drawing weird and symbolic things, so a lot of my beginning stuff is a big mess of ideas and constant experimenting. When you paint every day, even if no one is there to tell you what to do, you will eventually find your own personal art language and art will begin to make sense to you.

What’s something you can pass along art tip wise that you either learned in school or on the job so-to-speak? My biggest art tip would be to remember there are no rules to art. The only rules are the ones you make yourself. There’s no right way to make a line, or a color, or a face, or anything. That’s the most important rule I can think of, when you stop worrying about if what you’re doing is right or wrong, you start to realize how limitless creating can be. I mean, of course if you are going to do realism or use specific techniques you’re going to need to follow certain rules. But when trying to develop your own style, go with whatever works for you. 

Another tip I’d give is to not compare yourself to other artists. It’s good to be inspired, maybe using similar colors and a similar technique. But if you find yourself trying to be an extension of another artist, or straight up copying what they are doing, you’ll never find out what kind of artist you truly are.

What are your favorite Vans? All the yellow submarine edition ones were my favorite!

What advice would you give someone thinking about art as a career? If you are passionate about art and it’s the only life you can see yourself living, then do it. Art careers are different for everyone, and I don’t even technically have an art career yet, but I’m on my way. Be prepared to dedicate yourself and most of your time to your art. It’s a journey that involves only you. Don’t care what people say who tell you it’s not a good idea if you feel in your heart it’s how you want to live your life.

Anything you’d like to mention coming up the rest of the year? I’m making shirts and prints! Also I’m hoping to get a tattoo apprenticeship this year! Other than that, I’m just continuing to paint my mind and share it with people in hopes it can inspire them in whatever way they need it in their life😊

FOLLOW SABRINA | Website | Shop

#Art #Vans #Vans Art #Vans Girls #Sabrina Bosco #Drawing #illustration #inteview #creativity

[memedokies]

(almost) every anon ask since fall 2016

if u havent noticed i am BAD at answering asks so here’s a Big Dump of most of the asks i’ve gotten in the past few months

ps; i’ve excluded pokemon suggestions bc i plan on getting to them at some point

Hihihi!!! What brushes do you use in fire alpaca??  i dont do much in firealpaca (esp not lately lol) but when i did use it a lot i just used the fill bucket and the standard/default brush to fill in gaps n such lol! i dont really draw in it, i used flash/adobe animate for the lineart and just fill in color in firealpaca :3

when did you start animating?   uhh when i was around 11 or 12 when i started digital art i guess? i just used photoshop for the longest time then got flash when i was like 15 or so

 How did you get flash?  i got the creative cloud dealie, its technically required for my school :—-0 

 hello!! what are you majoring in in vcu?? im thinking about going there for college  im in communication arts! omg cool lmk if u come here ill tell u where to get the best bubble tea

 how many fps do you use for your wiggly animations? i work at 24 fps in flash on twos but just end up using photoshop’s 0 second frame delay/ “no delay”?

 Hey love your animations! What do you animate with?  adobe animate 2017! (previously flash) 

You mentioned a YouTube channel but I can’t seem to find a link to it? Do you post processes on there? https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCovvoZxlQjFaIA7A3w_94Zw theres not much atm but i plan on posting a lot more, including process/speedpaints! 

i really like your art style gosh darn!!! everythings so fluid and stylized and nice aaa (also ur animations are goals) do u have any tips for someone still developing their artstyle????  WAH TYSM!!!!! compile art you already like and incorporate aspects from their styles into yours, BUT dont limit urself to one style! if u like something then try it out! do straight up copies (as PRACTICE, DONT CLAIM IT as your own ofc) of stuff you like to see how they work and what you’re clicking with. spending time on fundamentals is MEGA helpful so keep going back to that too! USE REFERENCES!!! draw …from ur soul…what makes u ..FEEL good

 how do you make that burn effect on your lineart? it makes it your pieces look sharper and even more interesting, it’s super cool!!  when i used to use flash for lineart and firealpaca for coloring a lot, setting the lineart layer on BURN with the coloring layer seeping a lil past the lineart would get this effect automatically 

(like on the whiskers. u can see it gets a brighter brown(?) and the warmer yellow on the ears)

but since then i’ve been using sai+photoshop more so i just do it manually! i’ll use this funny pic of me and my cat as an example lol

^i select the lineart/everything i want the funky color around

^slam that INCREMENT button a couple times

^make a new layer under the lineart

^fill that puppo with ur preferred color! something brighter works best, or even straight up white

that’ll give you something like this

then i open it in photoshop

and i mess with the pink line layer’s blending mode..color burn usually does the trick but depending on the Look you’re going for, saturation, multiply and overlay have some similar effects that look cool. 

i also usually get rid of the outermost edge of pink line that’s visible around the lineart, just so it looks a little cleaner? to do that you just select around your lineart, increment/expand selection, and delete/erase in the selection of the pink line layer

uhh yeah! lmk if anyone needs clarification on this, i have some other #TIPS on makin ur art look crusty and funky so…lemme know if you’re interested :—3

What do you use to animate? And, a more specific question, how do you make transparent animated gifs? adobe animate 2017! (previously flash) i export my animation from flash as a png sequence then open it in photoshop, where the background will be transparent and save it as a gif from there nyaaa

if anyone needs more clarification lmk and i’ll make a proper walkthrough :-0

 Hello!! Ur art is rlly pretty and so inspirational and nice to look at!! 💗💗 I was wonderin’ if ya had any tips on choosing shapes for characters? Like, when you draw shapes for a certain character, it looks rlly like it fits with the character’s personality n stuff!! ( e.g: Your Love Live! drawings!! The characters look so good in your style.) I’ve always admired how u did that n was hoping for some tips maybe?? Anyways, have a good day!!💛💖💟💜💝💞💖 HOOGA!! TYSM!!! and YEA you basically guessed it, i mainly just think about the character’s personality and translate that into a shape or Pheeling… 

especially for anime characters i look at the Very Subtle differences in the character’s original design..or possibly canon implications…for example kotori has slightly different eyes (it also says on her wiki page she has soft droopy eyes!) so i make sure to incorporate that Detãile

 anime wiki pages that have details like that is nice, for love live they have cute lil “charm points” which is really cool n helpful! listening to how a character is described in their world can give clues to what differentiates them which you can make more clear in your design

taking into account each characters context is good too, what they do/hobby/personality and how that could affect their appearance/posture/attitude

 YEAH its really fun to figure out certain characteristics and make it evident in their appearance! or. idk thats just what i do lol. hopefully this helps!

Have you ever seen the anime jojos bizarre adventure? alas i have not..i have some friends whom are into it so i’ll prob end up watching it sometime lol

sorry if this is obvious but!! are you the creator of Fork and Knife: Food Fighters?? your gif of fork is super cute btw!! yes i am!! wah tysm!!

Hey my little sister found your animation on an online art gallery and she really loved it! omg cool, thanks so much!!

Your style is so lovely!! OHG thanks!

your blog is so precious i love it a lot! your art is so cute too ^u^ waa thanks!!

Your art and animations art really cool! Keep up the good work! You are amazing!! aahg thank you!! :’333

 your art is fuckening amazing hh broe…tysm

 Oh my gee, I used to follow you on Deviant Art, and now here I am, finding you on accident. You’re still as talented as ever. =w= b hUIOpugh deviantart, my homeland..my origin.. thank you!!!

- O mg I love your art! 💕💕💕 thank you!! heart emojis!!! 💖💖💖

- your art and animations give me so much inspiration, thank you! everything about your style is so fun and it cheers me up omg this validates my top tier goal in life, im so glad!! thank you SO much!

Your style is so charming and adorable ;__; thank you!!

ur art is so gross in the best way possible this is the biggest compliment ive gotten thank u so much. i love making gross squishy awful drawings

IM SO HAPPY I FOUND YOU!!!! IVE BEEN LOOKING FOR YOU FOR AGES!!!!!!!!! I LIVE FOR YOUR BEAUTIFUL ART!!!!!!!!! THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!! BHOLY CRAP THANK YOU!!!

 your art style is very cute ! 🌱 oohg thanks!! thanks for the little sprout emoji, i love her

GOOD ART!!!! good art good art good art EVERYWHERE I LOVE IT!!!!!!!!!!!!! OHHGG THANK YUO

how do ya draw such cutely its driving me nuts Nuts NUTS !!! I LOVE SPARKLES AND BRIGHT COLORS AND FUNNY ANIMALS..its my lifeblood..thank u.. 

You’re a really rad artist! I’m Glad there’s some cool artists that are local! Have a good time at VCU! oh wow thanks!! 

Ur shapes r so good thanks i LOVE a nice wholesome shape!

I rlly like ur art style my dude thanks!! 

hi! just wanted to let u know that you’re wonderful and i wish u well in everything u do this is making me bVERY HAPPY THANK YOU SO MUCH!!

 Im love You!! IM L OVE YIOU

that meowth boy is so good. i love him as he is my son THANK YUO i too, love meowth a Lot

 I love how your art is basically lines and curves, it’s very cute oo thanks! 

i love your art style so much!! it’s so zesty? i cant think of a better word to describe but its like. zesty & refreshing & rly rly cool !!! THATS A BEAUTIFUL ADJECTIVE I LOVE IT thank u so much!!!

You seem like you would watch Osomatsu-san. I could see you drawin dem bois in you hella rad art style. osomatsu was the wildest ride of my life. tho i dont think i could physically be able to sit down and draw them seriously ever… 

 Pls make more angry cat comics theyr so halarious plllls 👀 more are on the way!!!!!!

Have you done a meet the artist i sketched one when the meme was still poppin..is it too late lol? maybe i’ll still do it

#asks

[cloudscope]

The Life and Creativity of A Great Bethesda Artist

This article has been copied to this blog for backup purpose.

Date of Access: 04-May-2019

Author: Jonah Lobe

Orijinal Link: https://kotaku.com/the-life-and-creativity-of-a-great-bethesda-artist-1740993491

I couldn’t stop smiling one day in late 2005 as I was led through the darkened basement of Bethesda Softworks toward the little corner unit that was to be my cube. My geek barometer was pinging off the charts. I could scarcely believe that I was there.

The place looked like a laser-tag facility; the ceilings were high and black, the walls gray with accents of Zenimax Red. We strode past the programmers, the fishbowl meeting rooms, the designers and world artists, until we reached the final row: Character Art. There, in the far reaches of the office, was a cubicle bearing the name “Jonah Lobe.” I sat down, giddy and a bit stunned, and began day one of what would become a seven-year career at Bethesda.

But this story isn’t about that career. It’s about the man in the cube behind me, a man named Adam Adamowicz.

Although he worked in the farthest, darkest corner of Bethesda Softworks, Adam’s influence stretched across the length and breadth of the studio. What Adam taught me and so many others at Bethesda - about creativity and work ethic - has stayed with us ever since.

I’ve wanted to share my memories of Adam with you, the developers and players in the gaming world alike, for many years. With Fallout 4 around the corner, I think now is the time.

Adam Adamowicz was a concept artist. When I first started, he was the only concept artist at Bethesda, a company that builds landscapes and nations alike. His cube was small, and it felt even smaller because of the relatively large man who worked within it. The walls were tacked with ever-growing layers of sketches and illustrations.

In this temple to computer art, I couldn’t believe that Adam worked in traditional media. He used pencils, pens, markers, colored pencils and paint. What impressed me more than anything was the abundance of creativity on those walls.

Adam’s ideas, wrought fast and bold, practically burst off the paper. He was a living treasure trove of inspiration. He conjured people, beasts, landscapes, outfits and weapons. His creations were often complemented by fascinating and funny margin notes, like “apocalypse sandals,” or “vomits entrails for external digestion” or “’It’s just a space helmet, Jimmy!’”

Adam Adamowicz was a strange and colorful man. Physically, he was unexceptional—tall and strong-looking, handsome, with broad shoulders, pale blue eyes and a receding blond hairline. He stuck to faded T-shirts and jeans, eschewing branding or fashion statements of any kind. And yet, despite this mild appearance, he was crazy. Not really crazy, of course, but his eyes sparkled with demented humor, and the things that came out of his mouth were an unpredictable, mad-lib mix-up of the colorful and morbid. “That Mole-Rat wants to hollow out your body and use it for a toboggan,” he’d say, or “He’s like a voodoo mix of Boris Karloff and disco crabmonculus.” How do you respond to that?

In 2006, while the rest of us were finishing up with the 2007 Oblivion expansion Shivering Isles, Adam began work on Fallout 3, and what followed was one of the most expansive and incredible brain-dumps of concept art I’ve ever seen. I was a character artist. My job was to extrapolate 2D drawings into 3D video game characters. I specialized in monsters. For any given monster, Adam supplied me with between three and 30 drawings, ranging from gestural pen work to detailed, full-color illustrations. From this wealth of material, I created monsters like the Deathclaws, Feral Ghouls, Radscorpions, and Mirelurks that were more novel and inspired than I could have possibly conceived on my own.

As I worked to translate Adam’s concepts into three-dimensional models, I showed him my works-in-progress. I wanted his artistic feedback, of course, but mostly, I wanted his approval. His responses surprised me. He was always positive and brimming with nice things to say, and yet I wasn’t always certain he loved what I had done. That bothered me at first, but as the years went by, I came to understand that it was not so much the faithful reproduction of his work that moved Adam, but my riffing on his idea. If he could see that his work inspired me, Adam was happy.

To Adam, concept art was not so much about aesthetics, but ideas. He treated his art like a series of drills. He put as much source material into his brain as he could, and then output as many concepts as possible. His goal was never to create a body of polished art. His products were always rough-hewn and raw. He mixed-and-matched ideas at an astonishing rate and never concerned himself with what might be considered acceptable. Who else would think to strap a model Enola Gay airplane to the top of a mini-nuke, or slap a cheese-grater to a Supermutant’s helmet? Adam didn’t care. Adam was fearless. Over the years, he created 10 times the number of concepts that we could ever use. He worked and he worked and he worked. And for what?

Oh, nothing much. Just that little thing called Fallout 3.

And then, a few years later, Skyrim.

Because my job at Bethesda was my first in the industry, it took me a while to understand that Adam was one of the best. His work provided us with the visual backbone for these unstoppable blockbusters. But if their critical and commercial success affected him at all, he never let it show. Adam was grateful for his job at the “monster factory.” He doodled through team meetings and yelled out “beer tickets!” on paycheck days. He was humble and he was gracious. He never complained, he never acted entitled, and he never took rejection personally.

And the most important lesson? Adam considered himself a student, through and through; always learning, always improving. His cube was filled with books: huge tomes of anatomy, ‘50s technology, architecture, and style. His appetite was voracious. He absorbed everything, and what he absorbed filtered through the quirky labyrinth of his mind to spill out—garbled and rearranged—onto the page.

How did he do it?

I asked Adam once about his routine, and he described to me a surprisingly regular and disciplined way of life. In the mornings, on the bus to work, he sketched his fellow passengers, sights he passed, and any number of crazy ideas that came into his head. Once at work, he’d refill his coffee mug (his relationship to coffee bordered on religious), sit at his desk and get straight into it. Despite being one of the most popular guys at Bethesda, he ate lunch at his desk on most days, eager to get back to work. He worked all day, powered by banter and coffee, and then, on the bus ride home, he’d draw some more. Afterwards, he’d visit the gym (exercise was important to him), make himself dinner, pop open a bottle of wine and absorb himself in more personal art projects, painting and sculpting.

“Have no fear of perfection,” said Dali, “You’ll never reach it.” Adam took that lesson to heart. He had no fear of the blank page; he did not fear failure. He wanted to learn. He wanted to grow. Unbelievably, over the course of his time at Bethesda, he got better and better.

And then, one day in the fall of 2011, a few years after the development team had moved up to the sun-drenched upper levels of the building, I passed Adam in the hall outside of the art pit. We stopped to chat, as we often did, and when I asked how things were going, he complained that his shoulder hurt. Negativity was unusual for him, but as I watched him grimace and rotate his arm, it never occurred to me that I should be worried. Adam was a big guy, after all, forty-three years old and active. What was a sore shoulder to a guy like that?

A few weeks later, however, Adam left work for health reasons. Weeks went by, then months. I kept popping in to the art pit, anxious to see him again, to welcome him back. But the lights around his desk stayed off, his chair remained empty, and the little rubber-toy nun on his wall—”Squeeze nun for service”—stared back at me, silent and unsqueezed. The word I kept hearing around the office was “cancer.”

A few months later, he was dead.

We didn’t touch his desk. I’m not sure if there was even a discussion about it (though I suspect our head of game development, Todd Howard, had something to do with it). We just left it alone, like a holy place, somewhere to worship at the feet of creativity.

Time stretched by, and his room remained wallpapered with his art; incredible as always, bursting with color and inspiration—except now, nothing was changed or added. The lights stayed off. The only difference was that his fish tank of plant-growth had become a choked mess, one which no one bothered to clean up, since it was agreed that this was probably what he would have wanted anyway.

I left Bethesda in the fall of 2012

By then, Skyrim had shot to the top of the charts, and Fallout 4 was on its way. Professionally, I felt like the boy at the fair who’d just won the giant stuffed panda, and I wanted to leave on a high note. My soon-to-be-wife was in her third year of law school in New York City. I wanted to be with her, and I had dreams of becoming an author. I wanted to grow in ways I’d never known before, to immerse myself in the act of creation, and to build a world, by myself, from scratch.

So what does that mean, exactly, to be creative?

It’s been three years now since I left Bethesda, and I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on that question. Creativity is such an elusive trait, one difficult to foster. How does one reach into one’s mind – limited, as it is, by finite experience and memory—and bring forth anything original? Adam did that all the time. What was it that made him different?

Steve Jobs once said that “Creativity is just connecting things.” While I doubt Adam was a fan of Apple—I’m not even certain he owned a cell-phone— I can’t help but think that this is an apt description of what Adam did. Flipping through his work, I was always struck by the bubbling confluence of subjects, a fearless fusion of influences. He developed his artwork using a range of tools: pens, markers, colored pastels. His creations were a collection of distinct and disparate ideas. When designing an original gun, for instance, Adam didn’t focus his research on the study of other guns, but on tesla coils, industrial power tools, or lab equipment. When designing outfits, Adam employed chew toys and oven mitts, radios and asbestos padding. The results were messy, ridiculous, and utterly original.

Adam’s creative process went beyond mere design. It was Adam who taught me that characters were more affecting with unexpected nuance: the horrifying is more horrible when infused with comedy; the disgusting all the more stomach-churning when mixed with beauty. The Draugr were not simple mummies, but noble warriors rendered in beef jerky. The feral ghouls were both repellant and pitiful. The Deathclaws were cheetahs, long and lean and starving. And Fallout 4’s Supermutants are not lantern-jawed hulks, but long-bodied infant-men with muscles that sag like taffy. Understanding this confluence of appearance and emotion helped me realize designs more original than anything I could have otherwise produced on my own. I have learned that it’s because of these unexpected details that we remember these creatures.

Fallout 4 is around the corner.

The last Bethesda game I played on which I hadn’t already worked long months was Morrowind. I’ve got monsters in this game—the Supermutants, for instance, and, of course, the Deathclaw—but the product will in every other way be new to me. My former teammates who have been working themselves to the bone for years on this game are very, very excited. Fallout 4 is a labor of love. And even after death, Adam’s fingerprints are all over it. He authored hundreds of original concepts for this newest game. He labored, as relentlessly as ever—for the game, for the team, and for you. He worked on it from his hospital bed. He worked until the end.

I have a painting of Adam’s in my office, one his mother sent me after he passed. A woman’s face; her skin like ivory, her hair raven-black. She carries a staff of gold, one that bears an eerie resemblance to the Dragon Priest staffs, and she is draped in a cloak of crimson flowers. Adam painted her on a sheet of cardboard, which a friend and I transported to the loading dock and sprayed with so much sealant that it’s become some sort of toxic polymer alloy. I look at it often.

When someone dies, they leave pieces of themselves behind. What we choose to do with those pieces becomes, in part, their legacy. I intend to honor Adam’s legacy.

So I exercise. I write for four hours every day. Afterwards, I draw, or paint, or model, or maybe I write some more. We eat dinner late in our house. I sleep, and tomorrow, I’ll do it again. I try not to fear the blank page. I try to endure the failures. I will learn, and I will grow, because I am a student, and I will always be a student.

My book is almost done. I’ll be searching for publishers soon, and I’m steeling myself for the inevitable rejections. It’s a grind, by turns demoralizing and exhilarating. When I’m tired, I take a break. I stand, and I stretch, and I stare at the painting of the ivory-faced woman. Her hair hangs in loose black tendrils, and her pale blue eyes are focused just above me and to the right, at some point I cannot see. If I turn and follow her gaze, I would see a digital print of my own work tacked to the wall just behind. I look for a moment, then scan the others beside it. They look drab. And yet, I can see that they’re better than I could have done a few years ago.

So I eat lunch at my desk, and then I get back to work.

Jonah Lobe is a writer and illustrator living in Brooklyn, NY. You can find him on Twitter at@jonahlobe, or down at your local coffee shop, furiously editing his novel, or on TwitchTV, where he hosts an illustration/gamedev stream weekdays at 4PM EST.

[jakeboleygraphicsfmp]

‘Designer Maker User’ Workshop

Context:

In response to our visit to The Design Museum in Kensington, in this workshop, I was looking at how I could develop and simplify my observational drawings in relation to artist Micheal Craig-Martin.

Michael Craig-Martin

About:

Micheal Craig-Martin, born 28th August 1941 is an Irish-born contemporary conceptual artist and painter. He grew up in America and studied fine art in Columbia before moving to London where he has been working since 1966.

Style:

He started his early work producing box-like constructions during the 1960s moving onto sculpture concepts using ordinary household objects. In the late 1970s, he started to create line drawings of everyday objects creating an ever-expanding vocabulary of artworks over the years. The style he generated from these line drawings was very refined and clean by which he only included very limited detail of the key lines to make the objects clearly recognisable. He developed his line drawings to create huge wall pieces in which he would project his drawing onto a wall and use black tape to mask the lines. By using tape, he created this perfectly straight, solid line work at a huge scale without the long-winded process of drawing. 

Not only did he just create line drawings of singular household objects, but he also developed these further by collaborating several objects together. The way in which he would do this is by placing them side by side or using the technique of overlapping to create more appealing artworks with a bit more going on. Within these busier outcomes, he still managed to retain his simplicity and elegance. He did this by using projection to his advantage by which he would create each line drawing separately and then lay them over one another on the projector. By doing this, it allowed him to manipulate the layout of his compositions directly until he was happy with the placement of objects. With his layout, he would then use the process of hand applying black crepe tape along the projected lines to create his intricate line work. In some of his overlapping outcomes, it is evident he has masked over every line making them look like they are simply placed on top of each other. However, he moved past this by making important decisions about the line work he should keep and get rid of to make the objects look like they are interlocking or behind one another.

In the late 1990s, his focus shifted decisively to painting using vivid, expressive colour within his bold outlines. The colour he uses within his objects are often completely irrelevant to their actual colour and instead, he uses vivid colour to give the objects a ‘pop’ and make them more visually exciting. In 2016 Michael Craig-Martin brought together all his works from 1981 to 2015. This included his era-defining representations of once familiar yet obsolete technology; laptops, games consoles, black-and-white televisions and incandescent lightbulbs that highlighted the increasing transience of technological innovation. He showcased this array of work as an exhibition called Transcience at the Serpentine Galleries in London communicating the impact that electronic technology has had on the way we consume and communicate. 

Quote:

“If things are too similar, the dialogue is not very interesting. If you put in contrast, big and small, abstract and representational, you set up the possibility of a discourse”

This is an interesting quote I found by Micheal Craig-Martin which discusses the idea of creating something that communicates messages or meanings. He simply mentions that if things are too similar then there are not very interesting and by giving them a different approach can make them more successful. In the quote, he is communicating that if a drawing is too alike the original observation then it becomes boring because the art is just seen as that object. Therefore, by adding contrast; big and small, abstract and representational it makes it something more than the original object due to it possibly communicating different messages as well as expressing different emotions/feelings. Within his own work, Craig-Martin does this really well by creating perfectly represented objects which he contrasts with his choice of colour and positioning making them much more interesting. He also contrasts with the idea of perfect representation by removing the context (shadows, tone, expression) and yet so much remains. If he was to keep the context of the objects and colour them in their original tonal colours then the outcomes would be alot less effective due to them being too realistic and similar to the object. By changing the approach of the objects, the difference becomes attractive and is noticeable which makes them alot more eye-catching.

Aims/objectives:

Produce an A3 poster of an object or objects as a vectorised file.

Develop sketches into digital artworks.

Reflect Michael Craig-Martins use of restricted detail and key lines.

Tools:

Analogue:

Scanner

Pencil

Fineliner

Tracing paper

Lightbox

Digital: Illustrator

Pen tool

Direct selection tool

Stroke and fill panel

Tasks: 

Task 1- Sketch objects

After researching Michael Craig-Martin and familiarising myself with his work, I was particularly inspired by his ‘Transcience’ exhibition. When thinking about reflecting his style, I wanted to do this by creating something technology based to also communicate the progression of technology. Craig-Martin did this very well, selecting electrical technologies whereas I want to look at technology in general. Having visited The Design Museum, I had collected a variety of images and sketches of technology-based objects which I could potentially develop into a digital recreation. 

Considering the techniques that made Craig-Martins work so successful such as overlapping, I started to think about how I could overlap objects or maybe show an evolution of how far technology has come. When looking through my photo’s from the museum, I was drawn to an image displaying the inside components of a smartphone broken down into 4 parts. Focusing on technology I thought this would be a good idea to capture, by displaying the components I would be able to show how a smartphone is broken down which I found quite fascinating due to the complication and delicateness. 

To begin my re-creation I started by printing out my photo and simplifying it. To do this I used tracing paper and a fineliner pen to key in main details, creating an outlined copy which was going to be used to make up my final vectorised file. To indicated Micheal Craig-Martin style I made sure I used a ruler to make straight, clean lines and restricted all tonal values.

Task 2- Simplifying sketches and vectorising

Now I had a simplified sketch it was time to translate it into a digital file in which I started by scanning my sketch and opening it in Photoshop. In Photoshop I used levels to make some simple corrections to improve the quality of the scan. Opening my scan in illustrator it was time to vectorise which I did via image trace and adjusted the threshold to strengthen the quality of line work. 

When image tracing my sketch, I faced some problems. These consisted of the line work becoming very poor and unrefined. Trying to reflect the tightness of Craig-Martins work, I was unhappy and decided that using my sketch as a template, pen tool was going to be the best way to keep my re-creation clean and crisp. Going ahead with this idea, I used the pen tool and outlined shapes to re-create my sketch. This process was alot more time consuming, however, it left me with much higher quality line work which I could easily adjust the thickness of. To ensure all this line work was fully vectorised and ready for the colour I used the pathfinder tool to ‘divide all the outlines into singular shapes which I could fill individually.

 Task 3- Adding colour

Finally, it was time to add colour to give it the finishing touches. Considering Craig-Martin’s use of colour, I thought about how I could colour it in a similar way make the outcome more expressive. Rather than using normal colour which represents the components I used bright, slightly pastel looking colours to make it more appealing. Instead of using lots of different colour, I restricted my self to four main colours which I used consistently through all 4 broken down components of the phone. 

Task 4- Reflect

I think my outcome is very successful in terms of reflecting Michael Craig-Martin’s unique style. In terms of the quote I discussed, I think I did a good job of using colour to contrast with the original representation and make it more visually appealing. By using vibrant colours which are not associated with the smartphone helps brings it to life and I also think by being bright it reflects the power of the electrical components within the smartphone. I also think the use of colour enhances a modern effect which ties in with the generation of smartphone and indicates how far they have developed throughout the years.

[wordsablaze]

Seven: Three Words To Conclude

A Month Of Kaider Just some fairly long daily drabbles for the life of AU Cinder and Kai… A Kaider tale. Enjoy!

Cinder sighs as they strap themselves into the rollercoaster.

She wouldn’t have come to the theme park in the first place if Kai hadn’t begged her over and over again as well as making the puppy-dog eyes he knows she can never resist.

“Hey, Cinder, you okay?” Kai asks softly.

She would have replied, she really would have, but they jolt forwards and suddenly speed up. She bites her tongue and grabs Kai’s hand, lacing their fingers and squeezing as hard as she can.

He makes a slightly pained sound but cheers with everyone else as they descend into the loop, almost equally matching her grip.

She keeps her eyes shut for most of the ride, opening them only when they slow down for a bit.

“Why did we slow down?” she whispers.

The wild, excited look in Kai’s eyes and his crazily cute smile is worth the funny feeling in her stomach.

She’s seen it many times before, since he’s such an easily excited person, but there’s something about being on the top of a roller-coaster that really heightens excitement.

“We’re about to go down again. You can close your eyes if you want.” Kai has to shout, his voice rougher than it usually is because of all the cheering.

“It’s okay.” Cinder takes a breath and keeps her eyes locked onto Kai as they rush downwards, both of them grinning in exhilaration.

She keeps her eyes open for the rest of it, a small making its way onto her face by the time they slow to a complete stop. As they stumble past everyone else and Kai buys a couple of photos she doesn’t get a chance to see, she links her arm with Kai’s, not caring about who else can see them.

“See? I told you it’d be fun,” Kai says smugly, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.

“Alright, alright.” Cinder rolls her eyes but the smile on her face gives her agreement away.

“Would you like to go again?” Kai asks.

“Are you mad?”

He looks so dejectedly confused that she shoves him lightly. “We have so many more to try!”

His mirthful laugh is the most pleasing sound she’s heard all week as he kisses her cheek softly. “Thank you for coming.”

“I had nothing better to do,” she shrugs, pausing for a few seconds. “And I may have just really wanted to come.”

Kai smiles at her. “You’re the best.”

“If you say so.”

So they go and find more rides to try out, each one better than the last, Cinder’s nerves diminishing as she spends more time with Kai.

She can’t put her finger on it but there’s something about Kai that makes her brain go haywire. There’s just something about the fact that Kai chooses to spend time with her instead of all the other girls who would probably literally kill to take her place.

The two of them grin as they see an artist making caricatures and Kai catches the mournful look on Cinder’s face, knowing she doesn’t have any money to spend but will never ask for him to pay.

“Come on, let’s get one done!” he suggests, already pulling her over.

She hesitates, “Kai, I-”

“Oh hush, I don’t mind. This is what my birthday money is for anyway.”

Cinder goes to interrupt him again but Kai just pulls her along with him, and their linked arms makes it hard for her to stop.

“She’s available, come on.” Kai smiles.

So Cinder just smiles back and the two of them sit relatively still as the artist draws them. They keep glancing at each other and smiling but the artist doesn’t seem to mind, fondly shaking her head at them as if she’s used to people doing this, which she probably is.

“Did you want two copies?” She asks as Kai pays her.

Cinder starts to shake her head but the artist smiles and adds, “I can photocopy it if you want. It won’t cost you as much as the original.”

Kai beams. “Yes please.”

Cinder gives him an incredulous look but the sketch is already being photocopied so they can both have their own copy of it as a souvenir - a souvenir that’s much more meaningful than a water bottle or a hat.

They end up with a large art folder that the artist gives to them as a bonus because she thinks they’re too cute to be real, Cinder insisting she has to carry it round to pay him back. And she does, taking it all around the park and placing it beside her when they crash at the end of the day.

The two of them end up sitting under the largest tree they can find to avoid the sun’s glare and cool down after running all over the place. Kai stays as upright as possible but Cinder just slumps, too tired to care about her posture - not that she ever does anyway.

Kai smiles as he stretches his legs. “Do you want to see the rollercoaster photos?”

“Sure,” Cinder agrees, leaning her head on his collarbone and feeling the steady rhythm of his heartbeat.

They flick through all the photos, laughing at some and fondly grinning at others. But there’s one that she simply adores: the first roller-coaster’s photo.

The two of them have one hand clasped together and the other in the air. They’re both grinning and her hair is a wild mess, similar to Kai’s, but that’s not what Cinder loves about it. She loves that they’re gazing at each other with pure joy in their eyes, a picture of love and perfection.

She looks up to find Kai staring at her with the same affectionate look in his eyes, and can’t help the blood rushing to her face.

“I…” Cinder stops, unsure of herself.

Kai laced their fingers together and kisses her cheek softly. “I love you.”

And, although a picture is supposed to say a thousand words, she’s more than content with three.

The three words that send the butterflies on the flowers beside them straight to her stomach. The three words that cause the smile on her face to widen beyond what should be biologically possible. The three words that she’d never had directed towards her until now.

Just like that, all the pain she’d ever felt from watching other people exchange those words disappears, replaced by a soft explosion of warmth inside her heart.

Cinder shuts her eyes and wraps her arms around Kai, pure happiness running through her blood.

like/reblog but don’t repost, thanks!

#angst #cinder #fanfic #fanfiction #fluff #friendship #kai #kaider #marissa meyer #my writing #romance #school au #the lunar chronicles #tlc #multi-chaptered

[imysphotography3]

PAPER VISION

For today’s lesson, we looked at three different artists that use a variation of materials to make sculptures, landscapes and geometric compositions. We looked at the works of Nick Meeuws, Carl Kleiner and Thomas Demand.

NICK MEEUWS

Nick Meeuws uses multiple pieces of paper and card to create his 3D photographs. He mainly bases his work on nature. We looked at one photograph in particular, this was a landscape, desert scene with animals and hills.

He made this by cutting out bits of paper and card, each piece getting smaller every time, this creates the 3D effect. As for the sunlight, he used a lamp and positioned it on the left-hand side. This illustrates that it could be a sunrise or a sunset.

He also does other work where he uses objects to create patterns. This one shown above, we see that he has used multiple bits of wood with different shapes on each and a light shone through them, this creates a crazy yet pretty photograph.

The disciplines that Nick follows is that he incorporates paper into his work. He creates different shapes, in all sorts of sizes.

Website - https://www.behance.net/gallery/3537703/SAVANNA-PAPER-PROJECT

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CARL KLEINER

Carl Kleiner produces more abstract compositions, in which he takes inspiration from mathematics and makes art in a simple, but creative way. Today we looked at a few of his works and discussed the materials he uses to make such an effective photograph. Linked below is a step by step of how he creates his work.

He creates these backgrounds for Google and phone backgrounds.

behind the scenes - http://www.carlkleiner.com/behind-the-scenes/google-collages/

This one stood out the most for me as I was drawn to the colours he used. The greys and greens really compliment each other and I think they go well together.

Carl also creates perfectly layed out objects or food, this creates a sense of aesthetic and peace. He mainly makes these collages for company’s, the image above was done for Ikea.

There are some disciplines that Carl follows. These are using basic sharp edged shapes, this makes his work very interesting and unique. By using a variation of materials, he has multiple textures within his work.

Website - http://www.carlkleiner.com/commission/google-collages/

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THOMAS DEMAND

Thomas demand bases his work around historical events. He uses wood and plastic to create the events that occurred in these rooms.

Here is the recreation of the 1944 assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler, demand addresses questions of public and private memory. 

Thomas does most of his work based around world historical events. This gets a message across as these are very important, more to some than others.

The disciplines that Thomas practised are incorporating basic shapes such as squares, rectangles and circles. He always chooses well-known and effective events that have happened.

Website - http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20140915-inside-saddam-husseins-kitchen

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We also looked at the characteristics and conventions of minimalism and how the artists were aware of minimalism when making their 3D structures.

What are the characteristics of minimalism?

The characteristics of minimalism include repetition (lines and squares). Earlier works were mainly done in monochrome or as few colours as possible or using colours that compliment each other. Many minimalist works are also very sharp and clear (crisp edges and precise transitions between areas of colour. 

TASK - practical

We each then had a task, in groups, to recreate the photograph that was given to us into a minimalist paper construction. We could use various materials such as coloured paper, paint, matchsticks (without the light) etc. We all had to make our work as similar as possible to the original image but, we had to make it 3D in our own way. 

MATERIALS USED

Black card

Blue and yellow paper

Matchsticks

Pen / pencil

Grey & black crayons

Blu-tac

In our group, we got given this photograph (shown below). First of all we planned out some ideas of what we could do to make it 3D. We then made a quick sketch of the outlines and different parts. We then got materials that we needed and did each part in steps. 

This was the photograph that we achieved. The shadow casted by the pieces of black card look very intense and clean. We raised the bits of card at different levels so that it would create levels, this also makes it stand out. For the grey part at the bottom, we used black and grey crayons and we put a strip of black card below. As for the backgrounds, we used yellow paper so that when we edit them, the yellow will become white. The same goes for the blue however, the blue will come out grey. For the triangle at the top, we used black card and made it 3D so that it would make the illusion of it coming out.

I am very impressed with the result of the photograph. To achieve this, I used Photoshop. First of all, I cropped and straightened the image so that there weren’t any bumpy lines and it makes the photograph have neater edges. As for the dots, they were a bit all over the place and not in line so, I used the spot healing brush to remove the dots and then used the clone stamp to essentially copy and paste the same dot over and over again. To make sure the lines were all in line, I used a ruler to mark out the areas needed. I further used the clone stamp to make the diagonal line at the top straighter. Finally, I changed the brightness, contrast and the levels slightly to enhance the darker and lighter details.

How did your research help your approach to this task?

Knowing that most minimalist works are quite simple but time consuming, we knew we didn’t have to go over the top with making everything look 3D but, by picking out particular parts, to make them really stand out. Research also helped in what to use, quite a lot of minimalist work is done with easy materials such as, card, paint, plain background and a  light (if needed).

What problems did you encounter when applying these techniques, and how did you overcome them?

One problem was making things stick together. For example, sticking the matchsticks to the bits of card. We tried tape but it didn’t quite work so we ended up using blu-tac.

How did you ensure that you worked effectively as a team?

We each had a task to do, so that everyone was included and we could get our work done quicker. We also discussed about each step, to see if any of us had any other ideas or to see if it would work.

Strengths? What could be improved? How could you develop these techniques further in the future?

I am very happy with how the final piece turned out because it follows our original image. For improvements, I would make sure that our lines are straighter and make sure the dots were equally spaced, rather than just placed randomly. I can apply this to future when creating stuff, I need to make sure that everything looks somewhat straight. 

9/01/19