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Nothing to be embarrassed for! Unfortunately there's not much reference for black hair in the Arcana, so we all have to guess. I'd highly recommend looking at @kianamaiart and Simkray's hair brushes for other examples of stylising black hair (if anyone has examples of black hair in angular art styles, please share!!)

Anyway, I hope this helps!

Dreads and braids are both segmented styles which makes their basic construction similar, however dreads are stiffer and hang less than braids, which are quite heavy

She usually pulls her hair back so I only have to pay attention to the hairline, but I draw each dread as a somewhat stiff tube. Where it connects to the scalp I feather in short, fine lines for the edges/thin hair that's attached to the skin.

To show the twisted texture of dreads, I add curved lines along each one. For me, this is a good balance of detail for the style (though I can still get tired of lineart -_-)

Then, as a final detail, I give Abosede imperfect ends, topping most dreads off with a thin twist. This is optional as some dreads don't have this.

Then finally, for colour. I take reference for how they render ropes and add a series of light lines along each dread. Dreads don't reflect much light, so these are pretty faint.

For some braided hairstyles, you just replace the tubes I use for dreads with a simple plait pattern (as seen in Lucio's masquerade outfit). If you're aiming for cornrows, instead of the segments, draw the tubes along the scalp with sharp ends. Then fill them with a plait pattern. For extra detail, you can hatch lines in between the cornrows where the hair is pulled into the braid.

Braids have stronger highlights than dreads, and I tend to dot them in the centre of each part.

here's the link:

scientists wasting budget and time to see if ants count their steps

the idea to put ants on stilts

there had to be a guy who made ant stilts and put them on the ants

Can mantids wear and see in 3D glasses? YES

THEY PUT LITTLE GLASSES ON MANTIDS

Do honey bees suffer from sleep deprivation? YES

Here is the BEE INSOMNIATOR.

They put MAGNETS ON BEES  and WIGGLED THEM TO KEEP THEM AWAKE

How do scales help snakes move?

Well they put SNAKES IN LITTLE SHIRTS to find out!

SHRIMPS ON A TREADMILL

>somebody clearly was like “Oh well ants probably count their steps” and that was just like… a thought that came into their head.

Not just any ants–desert ants!  See, most ants lay down scent trails to find their way around.  But in the desert the damn ground blows away constantly.  So how do desert ants find their way around?  Maybe they count.

>scientists wasting budget and time to see if ants count their steps

Okay but like.  Ants can count.  Ants have teeny teeny tiny brains and they can count.  Do you know how teeny an ant brain is?  Because I have spent time dissecting them out and let me tell you it is one of the most ridiculous occupations I have ever engaged in.  They are like period sized.  <–these things here at either end–>. 

And the really cool thing about finding out that a teeny tiny brain can do a thing, is that the brains are simple enough that we actually might have a shot at figuring out precisely how they efficiently encode the ability to count.  And then we can apply that to things like math and computers and living human brains, which we aren’t allowed to dissect very much because reasons.

Also, this was an awesomely clever experiment because do you want to know the budget for gluing stilts on ants to see what happens?  Really small.  Like ant brains.

>there had to be a guy who made ant stilts and put them on the ants

Their names were Matthias Wittlinger, Rudiger Wehner, and Harald Wolf, and the stilts were boar hairs!  Also there was a second part of the experiment where they trimmed the ant legs to make them take shorter steps, but no one ever talks about that part because it’s less cute and more morbid. :O  (It’s… slightly less morbid when you know this kind of thing happens naturally to ants with age and high temperatures.  Life is hard for ants.  But they are excellent at counting.)

>Science.

This one is also SO IMPORTANT TO ME because it came up a while back when people were complaining about National Science Foundation funding and trying to cut budgets for research.  (It was a whole big republican thing, look it up).  And one of the examples was “egghhhh, scientists are wasting our money building treadmills for shrimp” with, I guess, the assumption that scientists do things for shits and giggles and to film sweet youtube videos, and that any project funded by a government agency hasn’t gone through an intense screening process to demonstrate scientific & public merit.

Alright, so I haven’t even looked up the paper and I can tell you off the top of my head that treadmills are a great way to measure:

activity

fitness

endurance

strength(?)

speed

ability to evade predators

which are traits that we very often want to measure in a diversity of organisms.

Here are some important questions you could address with shrimp treadmills:

How is pollution affecting shrimp fitness?

Does X nutrient make shrimps healthier/faster/more active, with consequences for shrimp farming and effects of shrimps on the ecosystem?

How does shrimp activity level correlate with other interesting behaviors (risk-taking, aggression, ) and how are these genetically encoded and linked?

Are faster shrimp more likely to survive/spread into new locations/perform well in shrimp farms or whatever they grow shrimp in?

Okay, so those are just what I brainstormed right now.  I don’t actually know what the hot questions in shrimp are.

Now I’ll look up the actual study by  Dr. David Scholnik. So:

He spent $50 making his treadmills from scrap parts.

Treadmills allow the measuring of behaviors shrimp don’t normally exhibit in the lab (sans predators, lots of space, etc.).

His ultimate research goal is to increase food safety (this means year to year certainty that human populations will have enough food to eat.)  Our aquatic food resources are hella vulnerable right now due to overfishing, pollution, ecosystem disturbances, invasive species, etc. 

His study is part of a larger project looking at how shrimp’s immune systems respond to ocean warming and pollution. (a/n: BAM! got it in one)

Hello, artist. Nice art you have there. You know what would make it better? Crabs.

But crabs are hard to draw, you say. I agree. That’s why I teamed up with @jopabinia, @JaviPaleobio and @Werner_deGier to make this cheat sheet so you too, can #InsertAnInvert into your artwork with confidence.

—

#InsertAnInvert is a series of invertebrate drawing guides done in collaboration with actual experts (like, literal Dr. Crabs and Dr. Cephalopods and all that) so if you could give them a follow on twitter that’d be swell.

Just in case you forget this exists.

You can browse the most popular ones or search for certain colors, themes, and even specific hex codes!

When you find one you like, you can download a wallpaper swatch of it and also select the specific colors it uses to look at more palettes that use those same ones.

Figure Drawing for All It’s Worth (Andrew Loomis, 1943)

Drawing Nature (Stanley Maltzman, 1995)

The Animator’s Survival Kit (Richard Williams, 2001)

Framed Ink: Drawing and Composition for Visual Storytellers (Marcos Mateu-Mestre, 2010)