lemonsssss

Quick question

Truth is, the NFL obvious benefits from football being popular but football gives 99.9% of the people who play it the degenerative brain injury called CTE (chronic traumatic encephalitis) and there isn't really a way to fix that short of dramatically and fundamentally restructuring the entire sport to the point of it no longer really being recognizable as American Football so they spend a lot of money burying former players and doctors whistleblowing about CTE while also spending stupid amounts of money developing "high quality gear" and convincing the public and the players that this special gear protects them when it doesn't, so players keep playing rough thus entertaining and the public stays quiet while hundreds of young, often poor and non-white men are used for profit while being afflicted by profound, horrific brain and body damage all the fucking time until it kills them.

But yeah, that seems fair I guess

Quick question

Truth is, the NFL obvious benefits from football being popular but football gives 99.9% of the people who play it the degenerative brain injury called CTE (chronic traumatic encephalitis) and there isn't really a way to fix that short of dramatically and fundamentally restructuring the entire sport to the point of it no longer really being recognizable as American Football so they spend a lot of money burying former players and doctors whistleblowing about CTE while also spending stupid amounts of money developing "high quality gear" and convincing the public and the players that this special gear protects them when it doesn't, so players keep playing rough thus entertaining and the public stays quiet while hundreds of young, often poor and non-white men are used for profit while being afflicted by profound, horrific brain and body damage all the fucking time until it kills them.

But yeah, that seems fair I guess

Quick question

1. The FBI's Famous Cases & Criminals archive (fbi.gov/history/famous-cases) has detailed breakdowns of real fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, and confidence operations. The language they use is clinical and precise, which is perfect for getting the procedural details right.

2. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network publishes annual reports on the most common fraud tactics in the US. Great for understanding how modern scams actually work and what makes people fall for them.

3. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum has a free digital collection of forgery case studies. If your character forges documents or art, this is gold.

4. Court Listener (courtlistener.com) is a free legal database where you can read actual court transcripts from fraud trials. Want to know how a real con artist talks under oath? This is where you find out.

5. The Internet Archive's collection of old newspaper crime sections. Search for "confidence man" or "swindle" in papers from the 1920s through 1960s and you'll find incredible real stories that would feel too dramatic for fiction.

Bonus: The Psychology of Fraud section on the Association for Psychological Science website has accessible articles about why people trust, how deception works cognitively, and what makes someone a convincing liar. Essential reading if you want your con artist characters to feel psychologically real.

shattering a glass and cutting hand while trying to clean it up

getting disoriented and lost

a heavy storm forces them to seek shelter in an unexpected place

quite literally bumping into an old friend

requiring a change of clothes after spilling a drink

a blackout plunges the city into darkness

infected with a mystery illness that refuses to go away

a night out goes off the rails

finding and following a curious animal/creature

finding a mystery object

getting mugged or an important item stolen by a random pickpocket

an animal companion chooses them as their human friend

if youre only planning on posting your art online, them please save it as .png ;this is also better for transparencies as well

BUT

please, if youre planning of printing your art, NEVER use png. it makes the quality of the image pretty shitty. use jpeg or pdf instead. and always set your work at 300dpi to get a better printing quality - this means, the images are crisper and sharper and theres no slight blurriness. i had a talk with my friend who is currently taking design, and pdf is much better to use when youre working with a bigger publishing company because it still has the layers intact, but if youre only planning on printing your stuff at staples or at some small publishing store, the jpeg is the way to go.

This is all utter bullshit.

I’m sorry but if your qualification is working on the school yearbook, you have no qualifications. Do not pretend otherwise. As a former professional photo manipulator for advertising brochures, I can say that you’re not comparing apples to oranges here - if anything, you’re comparing fruit to farmyard machinery:

JPEG is a lossy format. It is suitable for web imagery because it sacrifices detail for reduced file sizes, but in doing so it introduces artifacts that weren’t in the original; if you load a JPEG for editing, then save it as a different JPEG, then you’re adding more artifacts formed from those first artifacts. Do this often enough and you end up with a horrid glitchy mess that looks like a puddle’s reflection after a stone’s been thrown in. You’ve seen those memes that have 3 or 4 different “found at” tags along the bottom, that look like fingerpainted copies of the original? That’s why.

PNG is a lossless format that comes in two primary flavours, PNG-8 and PNG-24, which use 8 and 24 bit colour respectively. 8-bit colour is what you have in GIFs, a limit of just 256 different colours in a predetermined palette, usually automatically chosen by your software when saving. These files will look the same as GIFs, potentially with large patches of solid colour instead of the usual gradual shading seen in 24-bit imagery. This is usually better for small banners or pixel art, as it can yield smaller filesizes than GIF format. (There is an animated version called MNG but it has very little web support, hence the continued use of GIFs.)

PNG-24 is great for larger images where detail is as important as colour depth, as well as printable RGB images and (if supported by the client) full colour images with gradient transparencies. It most certainly does not make “the quality of the image pretty shitty,” as it preserves every nuance. File sizes can be smaller than JPEG for small images, or significantly larger for large images.

PDF is a container file, whatever you put into it will be pretty much preserved as it was, so you gain nothing but lose nothing.

TIFF is what you need to be using for archival or print-quality imagery. It has support for multiple layers, multiple colour channels (RGB as well as CMYK, which is essential for accurate print rendering), and everything is preserved exactly as it was seen on-screen when being composed. There are compressed versions available, they use similar methods to PNG in order to maintain detail without sacrifice; next to whatever your graphics program uses natively, this is the most interchangeable format available for professional use.

DPI is important only when used in combination with image dimensions; in and of itself it serves no purpose. If you make a brilliantly detailed 640x480 image & set it to 300dpi, you’ll receive a brilliantly detailed 2 inch x 1.6 inch print. This is great if you want to make a postage stamp, but not if you’re creating an A4 flyer! Determine the image’s dimension then set the DPI accordingly; 72dpi isn’t hideous especially for text-heavy work (it’s ~3 pixels per millimeter), and 150dpi can be suitable for many images. Unless you’re interested in photo realism, 300dpi is usually overkill - for our hypothetical A4 flyer, you’d need a file of 2490x3510 pixels for edge to edge printing, with a correspondingly high memory requirement and filesize even if using a compressed format.

Keeping the layers intact is utterly unimportant for print work unless you want to use a separated colour print method that requires multiple passes to lay down each ink. If you send a file with all the layers, masks, etc. off for printing you’re liable to get it sent back unactioned, as they won’t want to take responsibility for choosing the wrong elements for printing. Save your work with everything intact, then save a flattened copy especially for printing purposes - this is one of the reasons Save Copy As… is a common option in graphics manipulation software.

As a designer who’s worked a few years for a newspaper, I cannot begin to tell you how much OP’s post (edit: response, technically) made me cringe. I would have killed to get a photo as a TIFF for once instead of having to tear apart PDFs only to find a 50x100px 72dpi shitty JPEG inside for the 5 millionth time…

[ID in alt text]

"Tutorial" on how to draw an OC with dwarfism (well, some of it).

Boring tired disclaimer: 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. Which happens to be true for everything in general.

You are heavily encouraged to do your own research because this does not contain everything you should know before making a character with any type of dwarfism.

Consider supporting me on ko-fi if you find this to be helpful.

The tutorials u put out have really helped me realize just how MUCH ableism is typically embedded in learning to draw. I think this would have been so helpful for me when I was earlier in learning art and under all the pressure from outside sources/internally to make my drawings look “right” (which is just someone who isn’t visibly disabled or w/ visible differences).

((Reblog or Halloween won’t be celebrated. If you reblog this in 50 seconds, you’ll have the best Halloween and be blessed by the spoopy skeleton gods.))

A mouth-watering fuck-ton of hand angle references.

read old plays. I'm not kidding. Read a play written pre-2000. Old Irish plays are my personal favourite because the dialogue is usually high context and hilarious

don't let the characters EVER say the plot out loud to each other. Allow the characters to say as little as possible to convey the plot to the reader/viewer; let visual language and context inform the rest. Readers are SUPPOSED to interpret, they are supposed to use their brains, for the love of god, LET THEM

"varying character voice" is not just about their accent or their social class, which are the two aspects I most often see varied in modern work. It more importantly means "how much would this character say, and what words would they choose to say it." Motive should always inform what a character reveals and how they reveal it. The most important part of a character's voice is the subtext within that voice - that's where their true characterisation is really hiding.

I fully agree, Pink/Rose did bad things but she has changed for the better.

“She abandoned Spinel” yeah, that was terrible but she probably abandoned her because she wanted to try and mature since Spinel was pretty much a toy, also we never heard Pink/Rose’s thoughts about it as she began fighting for gem rights. For all we know, she could have wanted to go back for her but physically couldn’t or just assumed the other Diamonds collected her. She probably never thought Spinel will literally be in that garden standing still for years

“She let Steven have deal with her issues” she thought the war was over. Literally her and the other Crystal gem’s biggest problem after the war was dealing with Corrupted Gems. The only reason why the Diamond and other homeworld gems got involved was because of the cluster, which the Crystal gems had zero knowledge off.

“But she hurt the Diamond’s feeling after her ‘death’” she literally didn’t think the Diamonds cared enough about her. Especially after emotionally and physically hurting her for years. Yes, they cared and love her but that still doesn’t justify what they did to her

“She acts like a child” not like other gems act like children or immature in the series (Amethyst or the group of Rubies being the biggest examples). And keep in mind, she did matured a bit

“What she did to Pink Pearl—“ it was an accident. Build up frustration will lead you to explode, which she did, but always in private but Pink Pearl was to close at the time. Obviously she didn’t mean to and she was punished by having Pink Pearl taken away and replaced by our Pearl. She learned her lesson and didn’t do that around Pearl.

Her biggest flaws is that she doesn’t know her importance to other people and not thinking fully ahead. Which is part of the reason she did what she did.

If you take every clip of her and view it in chronological order instead, you get a horrible person changing into someone who was willing to value others

used a reference for everything

thinner line art (you think thats thin? go thinner….)

sketch, then do a cleaner sketch, THEN start finalizing

THUMBNAILS

color research, picking a set palette or light/dark for each work

you like that pose? redo it one more time

USE A DAMN REFERENCE

do not rely on stylization as an excuse for anatomy

draw the goddamn background you coward

just draw the hand- a bad hand is better than a hidden hand

the rule of thirds WORKS

take a considerable break between sketch and lines/paint

know that art takes longer as you get better at it

draw the seams on clothes

stop aiming for accuracy and focus on fluidity and motion, accuracy will come with practice of those two concepts

just…do the chiaroscuro. just DO IT. no excuses it always works

stop making excuses, make yourself an art schedule/set weekly(or daily) art goals and just DO IT.

Great dialogue can come from radical emotional honesty. But in most real conversations, people

dodge questions

answer indirectly

lie (badly)

change the subject

crack jokes to avoid serious answers

lie (convincingly)

say half of what they mean

tell the truth but get so anxious/angry/defensive others now think they're lying

If your dialogue feels unnatural, it might be because everyone is saying exactly what they think, or articulating their thoughts too well. Try letting characters hide things instead.