✨I really want to get back to doing pose ref-- to aid in being able to dedicate time to that I'm selling a mega pack of the entire Fat Photo Ref Archive for pay what you want (suggestion of $25)! ✨

There's over 1,000 images and I sorted them all for you!!

I love carving questions I am sorry for taking so long to answer this (it has been a week in which several important things broke, including but not limited to my schedule, my tools, and my AC)

Anyway! Carving!! Peach pits!!! Let's go!!!!! This is going to be a long post, you have been warned 😈

I do in fact carve the same peach pits you are thinking of! There is a seed/kernel inside of the pit, which is plantable and also somewhat poisonous. That part is not particularly carveable.

Here's a very rough diagram from one of the very very few Western resources I've found on peach pit carving, contrasted with a picture of an actual carving- you can see the hollow where the kernel goes.

Generally one breaks the kernel up with a knife tip, long pin, sewing needle, awl, whatever works, and very carefully scrapes it out.

I am sadly not lucky enough to be eating the local peaches whenever I want, because they are a bit spensy, but I do hoard the pits from those when I get the chance! They're a little bigger and with different internal proportions than the ones carved in my posts so far. These wrinkly little friends are Nermaguard peach pits, which you can buy as plantable seeds, which is in fact how I got them. I would love to waylay a peach canning plant and make off with a truckload of pits from there, but until then this is the cheapest way I know of to get materials.

The Nermaguard pits are very good for carving as far as pits and seeds go imho, with thick walls and a generally predictable placement of the kernel inside.

(I believe there's other pit carvers who specialize in other pits, and also at least one (1) whole entire Eastern tradition, but I have very little information on that other than the occasional Pinterest picture or news article. Foreign language translations do also make it a bit difficult to tell exactly what type of pit is being carved! I will absolutely make a post gushing about the very small amount I know if someone wants me to. Just know that I am not by any means an expert.)

As for tools, I admit to using power tools, because I am disabled and do not have the stamina or hand strength to do much carving by hand. Before this week I would have told you my main tool was an old Dremel model 770, but that has since given up the ghost and needs refurbishing, so I have a new tool now: a very sexy DEPSTECH Model DC08.

I have to hold it one-handed (which is very much not recommended for many very valid safety reasons! but needs must when the devil drives) so: I have my peach pit in one hand, tool in the other. It's a bit big, so I generally brace the end on my shoulder and then brace my hand on my work table (actually my dining room table). This works very well for me because I have experience managing tiny carving objects and power tools, mostly, but there are definitely times when things I am carving yeet themselves into the void and I have to go hunt them down!

For rotary tool bits I actually use a variety, depending on the scale of the details and the smoothness of the finish I'm aiming for. Roughing out takes a carbide bit, which is often all I need if I'm doing something simple like a basket. Going down the scale in detail I have diamond bits (which come in a better variety of shapes), which I can use for very rough detail on an animal figure or for smoothing out. And for most of the detail for animal figures, I have drill bits!

"Why on earth would you use tiny drill bits," you might ask? They break if you breathe on them too hard, and they're definitely not MEANT for this sort of thing; they're meant for drilling <1mm holes in miniature figures and/or circuit boards.

The answer is mostly that I don't want to use dental tools, and this was the alternative. Also, they come in bulk packs: 10 to a case, and multiple cases at once. Very handy when one of them breaks again halfway through carving a set of details! One case goes from 1 or 1.1mm down to… eh, i think .2mm? I eyeball these things, and they are not well labeled.

After the details are carved comes polishing. I will tell you for free that many very smart people use polishing attachments for their rotary tools.

I am not one of them.

I have a big ziploc bag of little sanding discs that go up to maybe 3000 grit, and also some much bigger sanding discs of 10,000 grit sandpaper. See that gray background in the earlier images? That's them. It makes things very shiny. I love my 10,000 grit sandpaper :)

oh, that's chromatic aberration! i guess you could say its a kind of colour/visual distortion.

it's pretty simple to do, but i usually just use a csp auto action to do it for me to make things go quicker, but i can teach you how to do it manually in most programs.

i'm going to use this silly doodle of me as pompompurin as an example lol

youre gonna wanna merge everything onto a single separate layer first and then we're gonna work with that merged layer. make two copies of that merged layer so you have three of them in total.

the top merged layer will be our red layer, so youre going to want to got to EDIT > Tonal Correction > Level Correction

the level correction graph will pop up. since the top layer will be our red one, select the green level and drag the rightmost arrow on the Output scale all the way to the leftmost side. do the same for the blue level.

the image should be red like this afterwards.

the middle layer is going to be our blue layer so do the same thing we did for the top layer except youre going to reduce the green and red levels instead, and the middle layer should be all blue like this.

for the bottom layer, it will be our green layer. same process as before, reduce the red and blue levels so its all green.

your layers should be looking like this now

from here, you want to set the layer modes of the red and blue layers to Screen, DON'T do the same for the bottom green layer though. you'll notice once you've done that, the image will look normal again!

from here, all you need to do is shift the red layer in one direction, and the blue layer in another, to as much of an extent you want. the further they are from each other, the more drastic the effect will be

and that's how you do it! my other personal tip would be to add a layer of noise set to Overlay or Soft Light at a lowered opacity over the drawing bc it goes well with the aberration, or even sharpen the image.

if you dont want to do all that hard work though and you happen to have clip studio paint, just use an auto action, like this one!:

https://assets.clip-studio.com/en-us/detail?id=1713222

& If that's a little overwhelming, here's some easy beginners plushies: - Manta Ray https://cholyknight.com/2021/05/14/manta-ray-plush/ - Whale https://craftresource.fandom.com/wiki/Whale_Plushie_Sewing_Pattern_(Lacey) - Simple dino: https://welivedhappilyeverafter.com/diy-long-neck-dino/

Pls. And thanku.

*tips hat* Good day.

I'll give the same tip I give to everyone.

LOOK AT ANIMAL.

TURN INTO SHAPES.

CREATURIFY.

because SURPRISE, there's no such thing as "plastic" either. every kind of wood is basically the same on a chemical level, but the only thing every plastic has in common is "some of its molecules are long" and that is NOT a quality that determines how things stick together.

I just ordered some stuff I hope will permanently stick a circuit board to a steel sheet and withstand temperatures up to 150 degrees. by the way circuit boards are made of epoxy-bound woven glass cloth which is cool as hell but what the fuck do you glue that with? can any of the 12 kinds of adhesives I currently own do that? no of course not. if I want to stick two pieces of acrylic together so hard they become watertight to a depth of 3000 metres I have some shit that does that, but it does literally nothing else.

basic properties of different classes of glue:

another site called glue this to that:

some more:

a little different but also useful:

Just because it's digital art, doesn’t mean it has to look fake. Now more than ever, it’s so important to show that what we create is made by a human being ♥️

I made a Room Building tutorial! Lemme know if it helps! 🧡