things everywhere

I mean yes. Yes it did.

It began hemorraghing users, and revenue. Combined with the refusal to get a decent legal adviser on the team and begin adequate licensing negotiations for their North American users either, this was always a matter of time.

The thing is, the way it’s happening in a disgusting mess. A travesty. They’ve given just enough time (a single holiday weekend, when most people will have plans they cannot change, obligations they cannot skip, questionable or no internet access, and a general inability to recover any of this content), that they can say “well, we didn’t close without warning. We warned everyone.”

Except, first of all, a great many people still have not gotten their emails. They were still accepting subscription payments after the closure announcement. They are still allowing uploads right now, with a scant 24 hours until shutdown. Bot crawling to discover the scale of the archival task–not even to begin it, but to figure out how much time and resources it would take–has been destroyed. The export tools don’t work properly, and certainly not for the scale of the task. Even when they do work, the export tools fail to actually export relevant information, such as–for example–the notes and tags on tracklistings that actually explain what the theme and intention of the playlist was. There are, as I keep mentioning, quite literally thousands of original tracks uploaded to 8tracks by fan artists who have since closed shop and deleted their own archives, meaning those tracks exist only on 8tracks, and there is no way to to get copies of them. Not even if you were the original uploader. There are images, illustrations, and entire fictions written in notes and cover art that exist only on 8tracks and nowhere else, and there’s no way to save those things, except to manually copy paste them yourself.

8tracks has made backing up this unique content that does not exist anywhere else impossible, as in genuinely it cannot be done. As in, even the web archive group, the people who run the wayback machine, don’t know what to do.

This is a massive fucking catastrophe, and I think a lot of people don’t understand the scale of the issue.

Because people see a website that lost most of its users in like 2015, and think, “oh well, nothing much there. Just some lists of songs that I can listen to elsewhere.”

But no.

There’s art, fiction, music that is unique to 8tracks, and not only is there not enough time to save it.

There’s not even enough time to find out how much there is that needs to be saved.

It’s easy to look at this closure and laugh it off, especially if you never used 8tracks yourself, but it’s not a small thing.

This is catastrophic destruction of such a massive amount of art that we literally do not and cannot know how much we’re losing.

And it’s all just being treated as a joke.

Inktober Day 1 complete!

My take on today’s prompt: Swift. I’m going to be sticking loosely to the daily themes.

Also sorry for the long absence! School started again and I’ve been feeling dissatisfied with my recent drawings :(((. But I really wanna take a stab at Inktober this year! Hopefully I can make it.

30 years this is why you should take “its never too late to start” with a grain of salt to do art as a hobby?  its never to late to start to make it a career??? ehhhhhif your 20 with debt and it takes 30 years (childhood u have more free time so even longer probs but) to be successfulthen thats not realistic to start a career at 50 and most ppl without a cushy family to fall back on should pick another careerbecause eating and paying the bills is important

I take HUGE issue with this.

Listen.

I have an enormously slow learning curve. I never went to school. I was never art educated. I figured everything out on my own. Art was never an assignment or a job for me, so I never had incentive. I did whatever I wanted. I work at a snail’s pace. I have a full-time job that isn’t art.

So yeah, thirty years? That’s pretty dang good for skills that came entirely by trial and error. I’m proud of that.

But I know (and have tutored) artists who’ve gone from zip to realism in six months. I know artists right now who can show you their art from a year ago, who now HAVE CAREERS, and you won’t believe it’s the same artist.

Top pic is from January this year, bottom pic is from literally yesterday.

In my experience, when artists struggle with this, it’s because they aren’t using enough colors. A lot of beginning artists will pick a skintone and lighten or darken it because they think skintone + white = highlights and skintone + black = shadows. 

This will make things look very dreary and flat because skin doesn’t do that. Skin is translucent and changes color with the light. It’s like an opal.

A good rule of thumb is to pick three distinct colors: one for highlights, midtones, and shadows. A pale yellow, a middle orange, and a deep red. Or something similar.

But I recommend going even further to break yourself of the habit. Use unexpected colors like blue, purple, and green. Use anything but a skintone. If you use outrageous colors, then you’ll stop being intimidated by them.

Here’s an old scribbly drawing where I used Sharpies in bright, bold colors and absolutely no browns or peaches at all:

Are you working in Photoshop? You have a few options.

First, make sure your resolution is 300 dpi. Gradients work better big.

If you have a version of Photoshop later than CS5, then you have the option to turn on dithering in your layer style. Dithering will add noise to a gradient and help get rid of banding. You’ll find it in the layer window, under style, choose gradient overlay, and make sure the dither box is checked.

If you have CS5 or earlier, which is what I work with, then you have to play around a little more…

First, duplicate the gradient layer. Blur it until it looks smooth. Blurring a gradient is a quick and dirty way to soften it.

(I’m doing this on a drawing that’s already finished, which means I have to cut the gradient away from the figure. This is totally fine, but it isn’t always this tidy if you do it this way. So I’ve made two layers—one to blur, and one to cut out the blur again once I’m done.)

(Here, I’ve used the second layer to crop away the blur. And I made the blurred layer darker so you can see it better.)

So sometimes this is enough. You can blur away banding, and it will look great. But sometimes banding is stubborn, and no matter your resolution, it looks like shit, so you have to do your own dithering by adding noise…

Duplicate the gradient again so you have a couple layers to work with.

Now, add a bit of noise. You won’t need much. Keep it monochromatic.

Now, you can blur the noise a little bit to soften it. And turn down the opacity if you want. But that’s it!

If you want the drawing to look more uniform overall, you can put a separate noise layer over everything instead of just the background…

Set the layer to screen, and then blur/lower opacity to make it more subtle…

This technique is good for adding a bit of a vintage effect. Because you’re adding noise to the figure as well. It’s up to you what look you want.

But that’s it! You’re basically just blurring a gradient and adding a bit of noise to it to make it look more uniform.

I kind of like this darker color better dang Tom. 💛

I wanted to give a few examples to illustrate what I was talking about in that reply. “Looks like the person” vs “feels like the person.”

First row: Compare the two Deans. The second is more successful because despite the lack of an entire face (!) it feels more like Dean. Certain features were highlighted that weren’t in the first sketch, which means that those features are what give Dean his “Dean-ness” and recognizability.

3rd row: The first and second Stiles sketch feel like Stiles. This is a progress drawing I never finished, but you can see how adding details in the third drawing started to drown out the “Stiles-ness” of him. The goal in portraits is not to stray too far from the feel of the subject because it means that much more work later. But you still have to draw them. And that can be scary—if you’ve ever drawn something, sometimes you get to a point where it looks good and you don’t want to ruin it. And you know if you start adding more detail, it’ll look worse. 

3rd row: Same thing. It looks less like Dean with more detail. This struggle is totally common! That’s why consistency of detail is really important—consistency keeps things balanced so that a portrait’s identity isn’t lost.

So when you’re doing a portrait, you’re trying to make the portrait look like the person, which doesn’t take much detail actually? You can make the sparest  sketch look like the person. But you’re also trying to make it feel like person. That doesn’t take much detail either, but it takes way more practice. 

The idea is to find the place where the two meet… how much work you need to do to make it look like person and where that point of feels like person is and working so they’re consistent.

Think of something you’re used to seeing a certain way. Like a banana. If you were to paint a banana from the POV of its stem, you could be absolutely technically perfect, but nobody would recognize it because we’re used to picturing bananas from the side, as a curve of yellow.

It’s the same with faces. You can draw a face technically perfect from any angle, in any context, but they may be less recognizable. Just because it’s correct doesn’t mean it’s right, yeah?