Be the Strider

The Black Nerd. A common character type, the nerd will always be very interested in all things nerdy: science, video games, mathematics, etc. In an continued effort to combat stereotypes, the Black Nerd will be lack athleticism, probably being asthmatic (the nerdiest of conditions). The Black Nerd will dress smartly, suspenders and bow ties. They’ll always talk smart too, using proper English with complex words.

Now, I don’t have a problem with a black character being a nerd, indeed black people are a people; we aren’t all the same and we all have varying personalities. The problem I have is that too often we see a distinct disconnect between Blackness and the Black Nerd. The Black Nerd doesn’t listen to hip hop or rap, only classical music. The Black Nerd only has white friends, the only other black characters are into not nerdy stuff. The Black Nerd never ever uses AAVE at any time in any context.

Well @dumbey, seems we’re in similar boats

The kid was picked up by an ambulance 30 minutes later.

Now as an adult working in security I get SO MANY folks- upper-middle aged mostly- coming to me to 'rat out' people they think are faking it.

I was once sent into a bathroom because a client demanded that the "fucker won't get out, so go drag them out"- I was NEVER going to do that, so I did a wellness check instead. You know who it was? A person recently released from the hospital after a car accident. They had a hole in their skull and major hearing loss. They couldn't answer the owner because they couldn't HEAR the owner.

Another time about a homeless man who got around town by kicking the ground from his wheelchair. "You know he doesn't actually need that thing, his legs work fine, it's just for pity points"- Oh, so he's not paralyzed, his wheelchair is performative? Funny story Dale, I actually know that guy, he was backed over by a truck and has chronic pain from his shattered pelvis. But sure, let's make him stand up and walk everywhere so nobody feels too bad for him and tries to help him or something.

"She doesn't need that scooter, I've seen her get out of it."

"Look how fat he is, because he just rides around and refuses to get up."

"She doesn't really need that cane- she comes here without it all the time"

so, ways to get around this:

turn off AI results. they're literally nonsense to us

don't use pinterest because the sources/provenance is often hard to trace

a standard internet search can be okay, but museum collections are the top tier (list of collections below this list)

instead of broad terms like victorian, regency, tudor, renaissance etc. try using the decade you're looking for. if you're not sure of what decade it is but have a vague image in your head, look on the fashion history timeline and just jump around until you find it. but even changing to e.g. 19th century will give better results than victorian

including terms like womenswear/menswear, daywear, formal wear, evening wear, court dress should increase the value of your search too

including "fashion plates" in your search can give you a nice impression of the intended silhouettes of the era. some of these might be a little stylised but will show you what was considered in vogue

for pre-fashion plate eras or things like makeup and styling, you'll have to look at portraiture or manuscripts. these are harder to actually find what you're looking for, but searching museum collections and limiting results to specific date ranges will be your friend

when looking at art, do bear in mind sometimes artists would paint fabric extra flow-y to show off their skills. it might not have been exactly like that in terms of fabric weight or drape. so, a pinch of salt required!

if you find something on image search where the provenance is dubious, reverse image search and you might find a source! i've been able to trace random pinterest images to real sources, but this does take a lot of time and effort and is often not worth the headache

some online resources and museum collections:

fashion history timeline is an invaluable resource if you're trying to get a feel for everything and should be your first port of call. it'll also link to good examples

the met has a vast number of extant examples of clothing, as well as fashion plates

costume institute fashion plates is a subcollection of the met for fashion plates (1800s-1922)

v&a also has many extant garments, fashion plates, and incredible articles on clothing and aesthetics. read the details of the objects because they'll often reveal a lot about the piece

lacma is good for C19th-20th pieces

nypl digital collection for photographs

national portrait gallery or similar for portraiture, or literally any museum in your country that has historical art

national museums scotland can be useful situationally but might be oddly specific

stout style history is a great collection for finding image references for fat people wearing historical clothes. survival bias of a lot of museum pieces tends towards smaller clothing that couldn't be repurposed, but this aims to counter that. it's not sortable, but is still a really nice resource

wikimedia commons is surprisingly handy! and the images, if you should need to link/repost them, are public domain

auction websites sound like a funny one to recommend. some won't have mannequins and some will. just look up historical garment auctions and you'll find some!

oh you like my shirt? well check this out! *reveals anime girl armpit*

Saint Roch, by Francesco Ribalta, c. 1625, Museo de Bellas Artes, Valencia

Now that we're warmed up we can start chipping away at some actual learning material. so, [hypothetical you wants to draw dolls] that means you are going to need to study anatomy. I have personally found that the morpho: anatomy for artists series of books is one of the most convenient sources for this- the actual anatomy itself is somewhat simplified, and if you really want to focus on having really detailed anatomy in terms of like. you want to draw bones and muscles and stuff as accurately as possible, you are probably going to want to look at some medical textbooks and stuff too, but i wouldn't advise starting there unless you are someone that already has an interest in medical stuff. if you do use morpho, i specifically recommend starting with the simplified forms book, and not the more general one, the general one is actually really challenging, and simplified forms will give you something to chew on that is less overwhelming. also, typically morpho books are divided into four segments- head, torso, upper body, lower body- so don't just go through it front to back, go through each section, doing bits and pieces at a time. just do your best to read the little tips it gives you, and copy the images until you think you are getting a better understanding of it. Some people will say that the way you should go through it is to just draw one of the figures over and over until you get it perfect and then move on- do not do this. it is better if you go back to something but get a better variety. you will only frustrate yourself if you try to get it perfect. i have gone through many of the morpho anatomy guides several times over about two years and i still go back to them, and if i had been too focused on getting my studies perfect i just would not have gotten as much studying done. now with that said, other books i like in the morpho series are the hands and feet one, the fat and skin folds one, and the joint forms and muscular function one, but really it's just down to what you think you are struggling with and want to improve and moving from there. now, other things i like to do with these books include what i call a kind of. 'visualization' study? i find something i struggle with is drawing anatomy without a reference available (normal) so i like to also take various forms from this and do something where i will first copy it, then hide the image and try to draw it again as best as i can remember it. doing this is a bit frustrating and i wouldn't recommend putting that into your routine right away, but it's an exercise to keep in mind for later.

now with that said, anatomy books will only tell you so much, and will only give you so much to work with, so i think in addition to these kinds of studies something you are going to want to get into the habit of is picking out the specific things you think you understand the least and then looking up guides manually. fair warning, art youtubers are your enemy. they can give you good tutorials and stuff, but take everything they say with a grain of salt. you will be using youtube art guides, it is kind of an inevitability, and it will help you in some ways, but make sure not to respect them as people, they are dislodged from reality and say shit like "yeah, do it like this and you'll have that all figured out in a week or maybe even a day". The disembodied voice of an art tutorial youtuber mainly just exists to invent new things for you to be self conscious about. ahem. with that said, just looking up, say, hair drawing tutorial on google can help, i also at some point made a pinterest account, which is a website i cannot parse for the most part but it is kind of an invaluable resource for art guides that got screenshotted and reposted there with the added benefit of no one is talking at you. So if, for example, you want to figure out how to draw gothloli dresses to put your dolls in, [oc that i invented that likes dolls], i would just use my website of choice (in this case pinterest), look up 'gothloli dresses', gather some i like, then look up 'dress drawing tutorials', take any breakdowns i think are interesting, maybe 'fabric drawing tutorials', whatever you might need, and put then you can use those as studies.

So, with that all out of the way, there are two things i'm going to recommend integrating into your practice schedule here. the first one i'll quickly mention going over is figure and gesture drawing. this part is really intimidating because it is something you are going to want to time, and whatever times are recommended for a specific interval of figure drawing, early on you are going to be taking way longer than that. im getting ahead of myself, this and this are a couple of sites i use for this, what it basically amounts to is they will have databases of models in various poses, and a timer going that switches it. i generally like to set it to the 30 minute class mode, which will give about 10 poses with a 30 second timer, 5 with a 1 minute timer, 2 with a five minute timer and 1 with a ten minute timer. you will notice that 30 seconds is a really really short timer. that is because this exercise isn't to teach you how to draw people well (that's what anatomy is for). it is mainly an exercise to get you thinking about Where a body is when it is bent or moving in certain ways, and to force you to break the body down into manageable shapes. for the ones with a longer timer, it lets you build more on those basic shapes, and it helps you distinguish the order of the basic building blocks. your 30 second drawings are not really going to look like a person, and you often won't even the get basic shapes down at first, and that's okay. if you are struggling, just try doubling the time at first, but don't start too long- it has to feel a bit rushed, and it has to be faster than anything you can get looking detailed. what i like about this exercise also is it gives you a really strict block of time you have to work with. i don't know, i wouldn't necessarily start with this one right away? it really really frustrated me at first. but i want to have it out there as an option for you.

Now i'm kind of holding out on what is fundamentally the most important type of exercise, but you are really really going to want to start doing copy studies of art you like. What these look like is going to depend on what you want your art to look like. in my case i draw a lot of my inspiration from manga, so a lot of this was just taking manga panels i liked and trying my best to copy it as closely as possible. but you don't have to just pull from professional sources either, basically just any art that crosses your dashboard that you really like and want to take inspiration is something i recommend doing a copy study of. do you have any favourite artists? find some of your favourite art and do a copy study of it. this type of practice has unambiguously been the most important type of study for me. i think like 60% of what i ever learn comes from realizing an artist was doing it by copying them during practice. Oh, while im thinking it, i recommend downloading pureref, it's just a really easy way to organize art references. I have like. hundred of things floating in there that i can grab and when i see something i like and throw it in there. oh, also, something to keep in mind, early on, something that can be a little helpful is tracing studies- this is much more limited, and won't teach you that much about construction, and hasn't been something i have found helpful for a while but tracing something is a good way to figure out something that i specifically had trouble with early on, which is the line weight itself. even if you can copy something as accurately as possible, something you're going to notice is that the lines themselves are going to look wrong to you. there isn't really a lot of helpful advice on this which i found really discouraging early on, especially because the way i grip a pencil in order to be able to hold it without dropping it is kind of. way too hard so a lot of my lines end up way way way too thick and stuff. tracing can help with trying to practice muscle memory for the actual lines, so often early on the loop would go find art i like->trace it->then try to copy it without tracing. this stuff is also useful for building confidence- if you can trace something, it means you can physically make the lines, you just need to be able to copy it. and if you can copy it, it means you can assemble the lines together, you just need to be able to construct your own stuff and figure out how to visualize from practice.

Now, these days, i usually like to make a sort of study guide at the start of the month that looks like this

where i basically just try to keep track of study goals, amount of time ive spent practicing, etc. you will probably not want yours to look like this at first, that is way way way too much. but maybe showing you my schedule can help a bit to get an idea of what you want to do? i need it to be clear i don't do all of this every day also. you can see there in the calendar i am usually doing 1-4 hours of practice a day (though i missed a lot of days because it's been a rough month) and all that would not fit into there. but having a generalized study guide like this is a good way to make things a bit more bite sized and manageable. and most importantly of all, building a routine is more important than amount of time studying. you do not want to start yourself with a goal of like. "i will practice four hours a day". you want to start with "i will try to draw every day, starting with like, 10-20 minutes a day" and then 'try every day' will probably become more like five days of every 7 and that's good and fine. i personally never studied for more than 20 minutes in a day for the first like. five months i started this project. build it up slowly.