This is a bookmark/reference/read-later blog for tumblr user etosaurus. I'm going through my drafts and reblogging things I want to save on here where they can be more organized, which is why I may be reblogging your old posts. Sorry!
Since this is a blog for my use and not meant to be followed by others, trigger warnings and other such tags will not be used. Browse/follow at your own risk.
DISCLAIMER: Since things I put on here are things I usually intend to research later, I do not 100% endorse any opinions on this blog. I may reblog things I disagree with or which are incorrect so that I can read up on them later. Please do not hold me accountable for anything I put on here. This is for my own use and interest, not a public platform.
#sewing dinosaur please share your wisdom #i want nothing more than to make a waistcoat #but i tried once and it was super difficult #do you know any patterns or tutorials for beginners?
I have made videos on sewing several of the things in this picture! Here's a link to my youtube channel.
Though I'm not sure if I'd call them beginner friendly. I go over every technique VERY thoroughly, but I mostly do 18th century or 18th century inspired stuff, which includes a lot of hand sewing and completely different tailoring techniques from what you'll find in modern waistcoats.
The first of the 3 leaf boleros I make in this one is pretty simple though, so that ought to be fairly beginner friendly. (The light green one)
You could make a super basic waistcoat with the same sewing and turning method and just add some buttons & holes. (I have tutorials for covered buttons and buttonholes too if you want to do those by hand.)
OH also! That brown monster print waistcoat in the closet picture is a print I designed that's available on Spoonflower.
That one's got more machine sewing than the brocade one in the first video, but I haven't made a video about that method yet. My most recent leaf one is machine sewn and turned, but hasn't got any pockets.
Edit: Forgot to mention my sewing blog is @vincentbriggs
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I already posted this here but I wanted to make it into a post of its own. There are a lot of things that can go wrong in non-hierarchical decision making. This post will be focusing on what coordinators (assigned or informal) can do that can undermine the non-hierachical nature of the group and can put more power in the hands of the coordinator.
Within groups genuinely committed to non-hierarchy, everybody needs to be committed to maintaining a space where it is always socially acceptable to say ‘I think you’re having too much power over this decision making process’ and we all gotta teach each other how to recognize dynamics like that.
Some examples of what to look for:
One person is coordinator for a long time and takes offense at the idea of someone else taking over. Someone taking over would not be seen as a normal rotation of tasks but as a judgement on the coordinator.
Alternatively: a group of close friends rotate key positions and nobody else in the group ever holds a key role.
The coordinator proposes what must be done, instead of letting the group come up with ideas together. The thing the coordinator wants to do ends up being the thing the group decides to do a lot of the time.
Some people talk far more in meetings than others and the coordinator does not take steps to restore the balance and create space for the quieter members to speak.
If the coordinator is sick, the meeting does not happen or no key decisions are made. If anyone else is sick, the meeting carries on as usual.
Meeting dates and times are set by the coordinator alone or by a small group who inform the others.
Access tools such as keys to the meeting space, access to the back account and passwords of the groups email-addresses, website and social media accounts, are not shared with the whole group.
Important skills, knowledge and networks are not shared. Group members with a less central position can not take over key tasks because they have not been allowed to learn how to do them or build the connections to organize them.
The key decision makers all live in the same house or hang out together a lot, other members find that the plan is already 90% done by the time the actual meeting takes place and they can’t really go in a different direction anymore.
Members that challenge the coordinator(s) are ‘accidentally’ not invited to meetings or meetings are always planned on a day when they have other obligations.
Meetings in which the coordinator(s) does not get their way are dragged on until members get too tired and agree to the coordinators proposal to get out of the meeting.
Members that challenge the coordinator(s) are told they’d have a bigger part in decision making if they’d do more work, attend more meetings, etc. A few members use the fact that they have a lot of time and a lot of energy to dominate groups and efuse to change their decision making process and meeting schedule to better incorporate members who have a demanding job, or young kids, or who are often low on energy or who can’t travel much, etc. This often ends up putting marginalized people on the side lines, as they often have a lot more stuff on their plate to deal with, and it especially impacts disabled people who can not conform to abled ideas about productivity. At worst, people who can’t keep up with the grueling pace set by the high-energy abled folks face to choice to either burn out or get out.
This is an incomplete list. Feel free to add your own.
None of this means that non-hierarchical decision making can not work. I would argue that it is the only decision making that really works. But we have to keep working at it and recognizing when it's not functioning as intended and we have to be ready to accept the idea that our decision making process needs to be improved upon.
I kinda curious what would you suggest for the solution to some of these. The one that jumps out to me is "If the coordinator is sick, the meeting does not happen or no key decisions are made".
Because I see that something that has happened with me (as coordinator) with a bike co-op. Through COVID's 2020 and 2021.... and a little of 2022 I ended up being the only one to organize monthly community meetings and I stopped doing that when I noticed I would get burned out I started not doing it more and more often... hoping someone would do it... and that only happened once... and there hasn't been one in a year now.
It could be virtual, or in person, or hybrid, and we have easily resources (and space) for any of that, but nobody is doing it. And the co-op is going to stop existing within a few years if that doesn't change.
And I know some folks want there to be them. But nobody is organizing it.
First off, I'd ask yourself the question: is the only problem 'no one else takes initiative' or does more of the above apply to me? (or other stuff that concentrates power in the hands of the coordinator). People often won't feel motivated to get involved if they've felt disempowered for a while, or don't know how to do stuff.
If you've accidentally concentrated power, just not calling meetings and waiting for others to do it isn't going to fix it. Some stuff that might:
Explicitly address the problem. Own up to the fact that you allowed yourself to become to central to the co-op. State your desire to change that and ask for feedback on how to do that. Not sharing your concerns with the group is just one more way of concentrating the decision making process in your own head, so start with transparency.
Share any direct sources of power/access with everyone. Keys, passwords, admin-status of the app group, etc. This also includes vital information like how the program to edit the website works and contact details of important allies of the co-op.
Rotate the facilitator role at meetings. Maybe in this stage you're still doing the work of finding a date and time for the meeting and making sure the meeting happens, but during the meeting you take a back seat and let others lead the conversation.
Eventually, state (during a meeting) that you want to stop being the one to set up meetings and suggest rotating that task too. So at the end of every meeting you together pick a new date together and assign a person responsible for organizing that meeting. Maybe that's also next-times facilitator.
Accept imperfection. Maybe someone in the group will be flacky about setting up a new date and you'll have to step in once or twice to stop the group from grinding to a halt. That's okay. Disentangling yourself from the center of organizing takes time.
Option: after you've started rotating facilitator role, get a little flacky yourself. Miss a meeting that has already been planned and see if the rest of the collective still do the meeting. Give 'em a chance to really make decisions without you. If they put off a decision because you weren't there, ask if they would have done that for any other collective member?
Important: recognize and resist tendencies from people inside or outside the group to treat you as an authority. Someone want the co-op to do a workshop next month? They can't get an answer directly from you, they'll have to message/email the group directly, who will talk about it at the next meeting. Yeah, that's slower, but you're working on making yourself non-essential.
The key thing here is that dismantling your power (and with it, the passivity of a group who is used to you taking the lead on everything) comes first, and doing less work comes second. Move from leading the group to serving the group, then gradually do less of that.
I probably overlooked tons of things and I'm no expert, but these are my thoughts for now. Hope this helps.
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(note: image above is not what is shown in the walkthrough. It is an example piece)
Ingredients:
Art program that has layers and selection tools
Patience (hubris or stubbornness is fine too)
(recommended) photo references of gemstones and/or prisms
(Optional but very helpful) Knowledge on how to use Reference layers and anti-overflow in Clip studio Paint
For this tutorial i am going to use clip studio’s “anti-overflow” feature. This post is not going to explain how to use that specific setting but you should be able to find guides on how to use it on clip studio’s official website or on youtube.
Please Note: The result of this technique will not 100% represent real life gemstones. These are more simplified but should still make an impression of the brilliance and appeal of gems, crystals and diamonds.
If you don’t work in CSP: the best workaround is to use the polygonal lasso selection tool for the same purpose.
This ended up being a long post so I am putting it under the readmore:
First off; Basic idea on how the light refracts inside a solid transparent object:
Wether it is acrylic, glass, water or crystal, the way light pass through more or less should behave the same as long as it is solid and not hollow inside. Pay attention to how the darkest parts of the stone goes along the inner edges, leaving a ”mid tone” sort of in the center. However, this might vary depending on the light setting. But it is a generally good rule-of-thumb to follow if you’re drawing something not based on a photo. Another thing to pay attention to here is how the placement of the highlight will lit up the inside of the gem in a parallel line. It also shows through on the cast shadow.
Light refraction on a cube:
I have already made two posts on this, so definitely go through them:
CUBE BREAKDOWN POST HERE
But a rough summary from those two links would be: Every side/facet of a gem or a cube etc refracts the light individually and not as one entity (that would make it look hollow and not solid). Think of it like how each piece in a broken mirror individually reflect your face back to you. Like a weird patchwork!
Putting this into practice:
For this tutorial I’m going to be nice to myself and not try to draw perfectly accurate gemstones. Instead I’m gonna draw them with a more ”natural” looking set of facets. Which actually isnt as common in real world as video games makes us think. Some crystals have geometric shapes naturally, but a lot of other stones are not as fancy. Anyway, im taking artistic liberty on these example stones because the technique I’m going to use will work for these just fine.
So, in clip studio paint, I first draw the stones on a vector layer. I give them facets for the front side. Then I duplicate the layer, remove the front facets and replace them with the facets on the back of the stone. The third image here shows both layers visible on top of each other. I now put these into a layer folder and mark the folder as ”reference”.
Now, on a layer below the lineart folder, fill with your base tone. Then make a layer on top (if you can clip it to the base tone, do that), this layer is where you decide where the highlight will be placed. In some cases the highlight is only lighting up one single facet - it really depends on the design of the stone. You can also blend and soften the highlight here if it looks good for you, just make sure not every facet is highlighted. The highlight layer should be on top of all the other layers clipped to the base tone layer.
Now it is time for the juicy juicy stuff! Turn on both lineart layers so they’re both visible. I hid the hilight layer here because it was in the way, but might not be needed in your case. Make a layer clipped to the base tone and paint in the darkest tone. This is where anti-overflow helps me out, because when i run my brush over all these crossed lines it will make the stroke pop in and out for each facet. If you dont use CSP, this is where you can use the lasso tool and select every second facet. It will take a bit more time but it should work similarly.
After the darkest tones I then make a layer for the inside light that the highlight has lit up. Here i keep it inside the darkest tone but this might vary depending on the light setting. If it looks good to me, then that’s what i stick to.
The way I approach rendering the facets here is like the grid in the example images above, every shade and tone appear more or less in each facet but the amount is relative to their position. So a gradient wouldnt have a smooth transition; it would be slightly scewed in each square on this example grid. Essentially like how some bathroom window glass panes look like.
Now it’s time to hide the lineart layer folder and check if the gemstones look decent to you. If not, then you can look up some reference photos and analyze where the values group together the most; be careful not to focus too much on the photos 500 million sparkles. Squint your eyes or blur the reference and try to see how the overall values behae.
I, personally, am satisfied with these rocks so I slap on a gradient map (you can manually color in them too if that’s your thing) and call it a day. The lit up inside of a gemstone tend to have a brighter and more saturated color than the mid tone.
Other Examples with this technique:
If you look up ”gemstone types” you can often find images displaying various facet types from more than just front view. These can serve as useful base templates for practicing this rendering technique. The backside of a gemstone is called the “pavillion” and is really useful to have at hand when it comes to painting the inner refractions. You can probably also use 3D models and convert the wireframe into lineart. But that is slightly out of my pool of knowledge.
Applying this knowledge without using a base lineart layer is of course possible. In this painting I followed a simplified summary of how the facets sparkle: Keep the highlight shape to match the front facet design, and all the inner refractions should be more scattered and split up but face a direction towards the center of the gem. Now don’t you think this sort of makes the gems look like eyes? That’s right! You can, and absolutely should, apply this on eyes to create the most sparkly anime eyes ever.
Now, refracted light that lands on the surface surrounding gemstones varies depending on the material - and if the gem is inside a metal frame it usually doesnt create this much refraction around it. But I want to have fun so i decided to break this rule in the name of pretty sparkles. :)
Since it's been a while since I sang the praises of my favorite book 'Anarchy Works' by Peter Gelderloos: here's a reminder that there is an easy to read anarchism book out there organized around frequently asked questions and it's online for free with the authors consent. I'll copy-paste them all just to showcase how great it is:
Introduction
Anarchy Would Never Work
What exactly is anarchism?
A note on inspiration
The tricky topic of representation
Recommended Reading
1. Human Nature
Aren’t people naturally selfish?
Aren’t people naturally competitive?
Haven’t humans always been patriarchal?
Aren’t people naturally warlike?
Aren’t domination and authority natural?
A broader sense of self
Recommended Reading
2. Decisions
How will decisions be made?
How will decisions be enforced?
Who will settle disputes?
Meeting in the streets
Recommended Reading
3. Economy
Without wages, what is the incentive to work?
Don’t people need bosses and experts?
Who will take out the trash?
Who will take care of the elderly and disabled?
How will people get healthcare?
What about education?
What about technology?
How will exchange work?
What about people who don’t want to give up a consumerist lifestyle?
What about building and organizing large, spread-out infrastructure?
How will cities work?
What about drought, famine, or other catastrophes?
Meeting our needs without keeping count
Recommended Reading
4. Environment
What’s to stop someone from destroying the environment?
What about global environmental problems, like climate change?
The only way to save the planet
Recommended Reading
5. Crime
Who will protect us without police?
What about gangs and bullies?
What’s to stop someone from killing people?
What about rape, domestic violence, and other forms of harm?
Beyond individual justice
Recommended Reading
6. Revolution
How could people organized horizontally possibly overcome the state?
How do we know revolutionaries won’t become new authorities?
How will communities decide to organize themselves at first?
How will reparations for past oppressions be worked out?
How will a common, anti-authoritarian, ecological ethos come about?
A revolution that is many revolutions
Recommended Reading
7. Neighboring Societies
Could an anarchist society defend itself from an authoritarian neighbor?
What will we do about societies that remain patriarchal or racist?
What will prevent constant warfare and feuding?
Networks not borders
Recommended Reading
8. The Future
Won’t the state just reemerge over time?
What about other problems we can’t foresee?
Making Anarchy Work
Recommended Reading
It Works When We Make It Work
There, all you gotta do is click the question and read! Or start at the beginning and read the whole book if you want the best reading experience. It’s one of my favorite books. It doesn’t cover everything but it’s a great place to start.
Advanced guide to getting in the loop. Supplementary to "Civilization Essentials." If a movie is on this list, then it has one of these: -Po
Not all these movies are necessarily good, but the ones that gave me small pop culture epiphanies. It made me realize that 30%-40% of the jokes from modern sitcoms are references/parodies- and these movies are their source material.
^^ This is also true for socializing. So many people I thought were naturally funny were just doing movie bits.
[I actually do have a job, I am just a big fan of lists and graphs and flow charts etc.]
🍖 How to Build a Culture Without Just Inventing Spices and Necklaces
(a worldbuilding roast. with love.)
So. You’re building a fantasy world, and you’ve just invented:
→ Three types of ceremonial jewelry
→ A spice that tastes like cinnamon if it were bitter and cursed
→ A holiday where everyone wears gold and screams at dawn
Cute. But that’s not culture. That’s aesthetics.
And if your worldbuilding is all outfits, dances, and spice blends with vaguely mystical names, your story’s probably going to feel like a cosplay convention held inside a Pinterest board.
Here’s how to fix that—aka: how to build a real, functioning culture that shapes your story, not just its vibes.
─────── ✦ ───────
🔗 Culture Is Built on Power, Not Just Style
Ask yourself:
→ Who’s in charge, and why?
→ Who has land? Who doesn’t?
→ What’s considered taboo, sacred, or punishable by death?
Culture is shaped by who gets to make the rules and who gets crushed by them. That’s where things like religion, family structure, class divisions, gender roles, and social expectations actually come from.
Start there. Not at the embroidery.
─────── ✦ ───────
2.🪓 Culture Comes From Conflict
Did this society evolve peacefully? Was it colonized? Did it colonize? Was it rebuilt after a war? Is it still in one?
→ What was destroyed and mythologized?
→ What do the survivors still whisper about?
→ What do children get taught in school that’s… suspiciously sanitized?
No culture is neutral. Every tradition has a history, and that history should taste like blood, loss, or propaganda.
─────── ✦ ───────
3.🧠 Belief Systems > Customs Lists
Sure, rituals and holidays are cool. But what do people believe about:
→ Death?
→ Love?
→ Time?
→ The natural world?
→ Justice?
Example: A society that believes time is cyclical vs. one that sees time as linear will approach everything—from prison sentences to grief—completely differently.
You don’t need to invent 80 gods. You need to know what those gods mean to the people who pray to them.
─────── ✦ ───────
4.🫀 Culture Controls Behavior (Quietly)
Culture shows up in:
→ What people apologize for
→ What insults cut deepest
→ What people are embarrassed about
→ What’s praised publicly vs. what’s hidden privately
For instance:
→ A culture obsessed with stoicism won’t say “I love you.” They’ll say “Have you eaten?”
→ A culture built on legacy might prioritize ancestor veneration, archival writing, name inheritance.
This stuff? Way more immersive than giving everyone matching earrings.
─────── ✦ ───────
5. 🏠 Culture = Daily Life, Not Just Festivals
Sure, your MC might attend a funeral where people paint their faces blue. But what about:
→ Breakfast routines?
→ How people greet each other on the street?
→ Who cooks, and who eats first?
→ What’s considered “clean” or “proper”?
→ How is parenting handled? Divorce?
Culture is what happens between plot points. It should shape your character’s assumptions, language, fears, and habits—whether or not a festival is going on.
─────── ✦ ───────
6. 💬 Let Your Characters Disagree With Their Own Culture
A culture isn’t a monolith.
Even in deeply traditional societies, people:
→ Rebel
→ Question
→ Break rules
→ Misinterpret laws
→ Mock sacred things
→ Act hypocritically
→ Weaponize or resist what’s expected
Let your characters wrestle with the culture around them. That’s where realism (and tension) lives.
─────── ✦ ───────
7.🧼 Beware the “Pretty = Good” Trap
Worldbuilding gets boring fast when:
→ The protagonist’s homeland is beautiful and pure
→ The enemy’s culture is dark and “barbaric”
→ Every detail just reinforces who the reader should like
You can—and should—challenge the aesthetic hierarchy.
→ Let ugly things be beloved.
→ Let beautiful things be corrupt.
→ Let your MC romanticize their culture and then get disillusioned by it later.
─────── ✦ ───────
📍 TL;DR (but like, spicy):
→ Culture is not food and jewelry.
→ Culture is power, fear, memory, contradiction.
→ Stop inventing spices until you know who starved last winter.
→ Let your world feel lived in, not curated.
The best cultural worldbuilding doesn’t look like a list.
It feels like a system. A pressure. A presence your characters can’t escape—even if they try.
Now go. Build something real. (You can add spices later.)
—rin t.
// writing advice for worldbuilders with rage and range
// thewriteadviceforwriters
Sometimes the problem isn’t your plot. It’s your first 5 pages. Fix it here → 🖤 Free eBook: 5 Opening Pages Mistakes to Stop Making:
✦ A free (and actually helpful) guide to leveling up your first 10 pages ✦If you're unsure whether your opening is ✨doing enough✨ to hook re
🕯️ download the pack & write something cursed:
A gothic prompt pack for writers who love cursed universities, secret societies, and scholarly rot.✎ Write the Darkness ✎A 75-prompt horror
use overdrive, libby, hoopla, cloudlibrary, and kanopy instead of amazon and audible.
use firefox instead of chrome or opera (both are made with chromium, which blocks functionality for ad-blockers. firefox isn't based on chromium).
use mega or proton drive instead of google drive.
get rid of bloatware
use libreoffice instead of microsoft office suite
use vetted sites on r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH for free movies, books, games, etc.
use trakt or letterboxd instead of imdb.
use storygraph instead of goodreads.
use darkpatterns to find mobile game with no ads or microtransactions
use ground news to read unbiased news and find blind spots in news stories.
use mediahuman or cobalt to download music, or support your favorite artists directly through bandcamp
make youtube bearable by using mtube, newpipe, or the unhook extension on chrome, firefox, or microsoft edge
use search for a cause or ecosia to support the environment instead of google
use thriftbooks to buy new or used books (they also have manga, textbooks, home goods, CDs, DVDs, and blurays)
use flashpoint to play archived online flash games
find books, movies, games, etc. on the internet archive! for starters, here's a bunch of David Attenborough documentaries and all of the Animorphs books
burn your music onto cds
use pdf24 (available online or as a desktop app) instead of adobe
use unroll.me to clean your email inboxes
use thunderbird, mailfence, countermail, edison mail, tuta, or proton mail instead of gmail
remove bloatware on windows PC, macOS, and iOS X
remove bloatware on samsung X
use pixelfed instead of instagram or meta
use NCH suite for free software like a file converter, image editor, video editors, pdf editor, etc.
feel free to add more alternatives, resources or advice in the reblogs or replies, and i'll add them to the main post <3
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To the people in the tags asking "What's Nobilis," please allow me to share my favorite piece of game-related ephemera ever, the mini-pamphlet giving a quick in-game overview of the world, as compiled by "The Power of Helpful Documentation" (and released around the time the Great White Book was released...)
I've been resource gathering for YEARS so now I am going to share my dragons hoard
Floorplanner. Design and furnish a house for you to use for having a consistent background in your comic or anything! Free, you need an account, easy to use, and you can save multiple houses.
Comparing Heights. Input the heights of characters to see what the different is between them. Great for keeping consistency. Free.
Magma. Draw online with friends in real time. Great for practice or hanging out. Free, paid plan available, account preferred.
Smithsonian Open Access. Loads of free images. Free.
SketchDaily. Lots of pose references, massive library, is set on a timer so you can practice quick figure drawing. Free.
SculptGL. A sculpting tool which I am yet to master, but you should be able to make whatever 3d object you like with it. free.
Pexels. Free stock images. And the search engine is actually pretty good at pulling up what you want.
Figurosity. Great pose references, diverse body types, lots of "how to draw" videos directly on the site, the models are 3d and you can rotate the angle, but you can't make custom poses or edit body proportions. Free, account option, paid plans available.
Line of Action. More drawing references, this one also has a focus on expressions, hands/feet, animals, landscapes. Free.
Animal Photo. You pose a 3d skull model and select an animal species, and they give you a bunch of photo references for that animal at that angle. Super handy. Free.
Height Weight Chart. You ever see an OC listed as having a certain weight but then they look Wildly different than the number suggests? Well here's a site to avoid that! It shows real people at different weights and heights to give you a better idea of what these abstract numbers all look like. Free to use.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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Anya is LIVE right now
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I love how Neopets draws water (ie. water PB pets) but when I try to copy them it always looks weird, do you have any advice on replicating it?
ooh, let me see- i've only ever tried to replicate it once, with the Water Centibyte:
my favorite water pets are the Kyrii and the Zafara, so those two were the ones I referenced most heavily when I was designing this!
I apologize in advance for not necessarily knowing how best to describe this, but in short, I think I'd recommend
laying down a base gradient for darker areas that you can then add hand-painted caustic detail over on a different layer
make extremities that you'd want to be clearly visible lighter/higher contrast (The Zafara and Kyrii both have lighter colored hands and feet, light colored tails and hair, and faces where you can make out the eyes and facial expression due to having contrasting areas of light and dark next to each other. I find it helpful sometimes to squint at what I'm working on to see if I can still roughly make out its shape, vs everything turning into a same colored blob)
consider keeping thinner pieces of a design like 'sheets' of hair lighter, and maybe visibly darker spots where you'd realistically 'see through' the sheet of water
Honestly I mostly was winging it + heavily referencing those two pets, but looking at irl photos of pools and ocean waves would probably be a good idea too- you can sort of build up a sense memory for how light interacts with water, that can make it easier to stylize or 'cheat' it.
If you want my long attempt to remember wtf my process was for the Centibyte in particular, i've put it under the cut :)
Water is a color that's pretty reliant on gradients, and where the shading and detail work on top of that base gradient really make it shine. Both of my reference pets have their darkest area around their neck and shoulders, and get lighter towards their extremities, so the first thing I did (after making my lineart edits to the hair to get the splashy effect, and recoloring the eyes to match the Kyrii and Zafara) was lay down some base gradients.
I believe i used the gradient tool first to establish main dark-to-light gradient from the head to the feet, and then later went in with a lasso tool to add smaller gradients to the ends of the arms, and probably used the soft brush to add that lighter marking to the face and to make the feet even lighter. (The belly marking I add later will cover up that jaggedy spot on the belly, so it didn't matter that it looks weird)
After that, I added simple gradients to the shell and belly markings too:
I have these on separate layers already, so it was relatively simple to lock the layers and throw more gradients over them.
After that I seem to have started to add stylized water caustic effects!
Note that I'm extremely inexperienced at painting or rendering water, so I was just sort of eyeballing how it looked on the two pets I was referencing, in addition to considering what looked good to me. I used a couple different low opacity multiply layers to do the darker markings on the body and the belly, and a 100% opaque normal layer to paint the lighter markings onto the feet (which also have a gradient on them, so that they'd match the gradient they were being drawn on top of)
After that I... seem to have just gone buckwild and started painting shit with the opaque hard brush.
I mimicked the hands on the Zafara being a less green shade of blue, and sort of gradiated that color out manually by painting on the lighter colors with a few blobby splashes and caustic patterns to make them feel blended. (I don't think anything I painted on these layers has an actual gradient, soft shading, or lowered opacity). I also added lighter outlines and a few bright white highlights to the arms, to give them that shiny jelly-like effect.
For the belly, I also just kind of went wild painting more caustic patterns- my main goal was feeling acceptably "watery" while also keeping the basic shape of the belly marking distinct from the background. The lighter blue marking in the middle of the belly (and at the bottom of it) is supposed to be underlighting that's reflecting back up.
For the lighter splashy 'hair' parts of the design, I tried to focus on getting the basic background colors in before worrying too much about where the highlights would go, knowing I could do those on a different layer afterwards. I tried to use the darkest blues at the spots where the curved hair shapes overlap each other, and also copied the head colors for the parts of the mohawk that would be thin and overlap the darker shell of the head.
I decided to sort of transition that darker shell part out 'early' instead of following it all the way through to that back antenna, so that the hair would stand out from the shell, and also because the antenna gets further away in perspective as it extends past the head.
Then I threw on a shadow layer for the shell, and then (confusingly) I made another layer on top where I added highlights AND obscured the last two segments of the tail and the knees with gradient layers. I think I felt that they didn't feel 'water' enough?
I added highlights and additional caustics for those elements on another layer afterward, with another opaque layer:
Then we have the spots and stripes markings + area specific colored lineart:
Aaaand some causticy-wavey lighting for the hair + blending of the head antennas into their hair, because it felt very abrupt for Water:
For the 'hair' highlights, I used a mix of pure white and very light blue- I probably could have made my life easier by doing a gradient on these areas, but for whatever reason I hand painted them. You'll notice in close ups that it can look a little sloppy, but if it looks decent at the size you intend the piece to be viewed at, this doesn't really matter.
And that's the finished piece! (identical to the one above, i just hid the refs)
No idea if this will be helpful, but I hope its at the very least interesting!! I viewed a lot of the more difficult Centibyte colors as challenges and puzzles to solve- its fun trying to reverse engineer very specific aesthetics I'd never tried to tackle before. I wish you luck and hope you have fun in the future with your watery neopets endeavors!!!
Tutorial on drawing characters/OCs who have some sort of facial paralysis. It doesn't cover all possible variants because I was using mirror as my main reference lawl
Keep in mind that this is an introductory drawing tutorial and has some generalizations in it, so not every “X is Z” statement will be true for Actual People 👍
Consider supporting me on ko-fi if you find this to be helpful.
for future reference @etosforfuturereference - Tumblr Blog | Tumlook
