OKAY I have been meaning to do this for MONTHS but hey, there’s no better time than the present so buckle up, here we go! THESE BOOKS ARE A GODSEND. I am ALWAYS on the lookout for writing aids that ACTUALLY HELP. If you’re like me, and occasionally venture out to buy books on, let’s say, showing vs telling - you will always get the same rehearsed speeches on what that means. -summons pretentious writer’s voice- You’ve got to shoooooow what’s happening in the scene, not teeeeeeell~~ BAH! What you NEVER get, however, is how to do it, or how do it better.

THESE BOOKS ARE THE STUFF OF DREAMS

And they are getting even more strict when it comes to not using invoices for charging for Digital Goods.

Whatever Invoices make you uncomfortable or not, you gotta start using them if you want to keep your PayPal and your money. Changes starting this October 19th.

Honestly I don’t get why so many artists are so overwhelmed by invoices, takes just a few clicks to set up. 

And is not only “oh you have to use invoices because PayPal says so” if you don’t use invoices you’re putting yourself at risk of being scammed by an user abusing the buyer’s protection. 

Since PayPal ain’t got no idea of what those $50 you received were for, but the buyer is saying they didn’t got anything for the money, PayPal will just side with the buyer.

I’m seriously begging ppl, start using invoices. I’m tired of seeing ppl complain their paypal was banned, or is under investigation, or worse, the $100 they got for a very complicated commission, 3 months later get a refund issue. 

just

start

using

invoices

for your own sake. 

Here is how you use invoices because I can’t keep playing devil’d advocate, yes I would love to help you get your PayPal restored but just this last month I had to help three persons, and they were MORE than aware of this issues. 

Just protect yourself. 

Step 1. You login and click here

Step 2. You click create new Invoice. YOU NEVER CLICK REQUEST MONEY, unless you want to risk yourself to get scamer by buyer’s protection exploit and not only lose your money but your paypal account, and any future paypal linked to your irl name. 

Step 3 You follow this steps

1. Invoice for amount only

2. Ask your client for their PayPal email and put in that field

3. Add a vague description of what you’re doing, something like “Character Coloured with Background” is good enough, and if you need more than 1 character you can type in “2″ where it says amount, or just say “2 characters”.

Warning: don’t type in “Naruto rawing Sasuke”. That will get you banned. 

4. Click send. 

Optional steps. Create a template, doesn’t take more than 10 minutes and it will save you a lot of time for future invoices, you can even click on “items” right next to “create invoice” and add a list of services you offer such as “character sketch” “character flats” along with a price, so next time you invoice you just add to the invoice from your list of items and you saved yourself some more time. 

More importantly, you protect yourself from buyer’s protection exploit because if PayPal knows you’re doing digital goods, then you will be allowed that you did in fact created a digital good. 

Keep PayPal happy, as for right now there are no alternatives to this service, and this is the only source of income for many freelancers. 

SO go to the invoice (i think this can be done BEFORE the buyer pays?? Didnt try myself tho, i did it after it was paid), and click on VIEW DETAILS in that first box 

Scroll to the bottom of the page and click ADD TRACKING INFO  (YES COUNTER-INTUITIVE AS BALLLLLS.)

of course HERE IS WHERE YOU'RE GIVEN INSTRUCTIONS ON PROCESSING DIGITAL GOODS. HIDDEN BEHIND A BUTTON YOU WOULDNT PRESS IF YOU WERE, SAY, TRYING TO SELL DIGITAL GOODS. Select Order Processed/Service Rendered

Really nice recipes. Every hour.

When I was in my late teens and early 20s, I kept getting involved with people who would say, “Oh, I’m a bad person” any time I brought up ANYTHING that was the least bit of a disagreement. 

Like, “Please don’t leave my X on the floor” would get, “Oh, I’m a horrible person!”

HERE’S WHY THIS IS A HUGELY PROBLEMATIC BEHAVIOR, and if you think I”m calling you out and you think you’re about to shut down, take a breath, remember that this is about learning, and keep reading.

What is important is what happened after. My boyfriend might say, “Oh, I’m just an awful boyfriend” and instead of him acknowledging the BEHAVIOR and working on fixing it, he’d get me trying to buck him up for the next half hour, telling him he was a good person. The behavior that started it all would not change.

Well, things led to things and I went back home to live for a while, and found that the same exact thing was happening… with my mother.

And then I learned about pattern arguments. Pattern arguments are the ones where you keep having the same nonproductive argument over and over again. They don’t all follow this pattern, but this is a really common one.

The trick?

BREAK THE PATTERN

First you have to know what the pattern is. In this case: 1. Grievance 2. Self deprecation 3. Ego stroking So, with my mother, we started in on one of these, and she said, “I guess I’m just a terrible mother.” And instead of reassuring her, instead of derailing the issue and letting it go… I said, “When you say that, it makes me wonder how terrible a daughter I could be that you would think you were a bad mother. We have this conversation this way over and over, and the problem that I have always gets pushed aside in favor of trying to make you feel better. When you’re willing to have a real conversation about this, I’m happy to talk to you, but I’m bored with this argument, so I’ll see you later if you want to really talk.” And I left the room. Now, my mom is a reasonably self-aware person, and does a lot of hard emotional work, and so she got it, very quickly. 10 minutes later she came out and found me, and we had a real conversation about whatever the hell the issue really was, and we have literally NEVER had that particular pattern argument again in 23 years.  Boyfriend came to visit. I was upset about something, he started in on the “I’m just a shitty boyfriend” thing… and my response? “Yep. You are.” His jaw dropped. He blinked. And I said, “Look, that’s what you do. You say shit like that and it means you don’t have to change your behavior, and I’m tired of the pattern we have where I tell you something isn’t working for me, you tell me you’re terrible, and I spend half an hour making you feel better. I’m tired of it and I”m not doing it anymore. If you’re willing to have an actual conversation about this, and not just the same old argument, I’m game. But this thing we do where you talk yourself down and I butter you up? Is boring. And I’m over it.” We also did not have that argument again. (The relationship finally ended for real a while after, but it ended in a grown-up way, and not with a ridiculous meaningless fight.) When you knock yourself down, the gut instinct for the people around you is to pick you up. But that means you’re not pulling your weight in the relationship. You’re making them do the work and you’re not actually hearing them. So that brings us to another point:

How to deal with criticism

Okay, so if you’re not going to knock yourself down when someone says something negative about you, what DO you do? We don’t actually train people to take criticism well. But it is an art and a skill and NECESSARY to finding emotional stability in the face of a critical world.

I see it as a flow chart, but since the flow chart I made for it ended up in a book that I don’t own the copyright to (not a big deal) I’ll write out the decision tree here instead: 1. Someone offers criticism (constructive or not!)

2. Listen and think about it without immediately trying to defend yourself. You can say, “Okay, I need a moment to take that in and think about it because I want to understand it.” Or something else appropriate to the situation. It is okay to ask for time to think in most circumstances. Most people will appreciate that you are thinking about their words instead of immediately getting defensive or counterattacking. Think about whether what they are saying is valid, might be valid or is not valid. 

3A. If it is valid, then you have a choice. You can try to fix the behavior or you can acknowledge that it is a valid criticism but decide you aren’t likely to fix it. Start by acknowledging the validity of the criticism, and then say what you’re going to do to fix it, or say that it’s valid but it isn’t something you’re willing (or possibly able) to change, or say that it’s a valid criticism and you’ll need to think about possible solutions. They may have a suggestion. Taking it or not is also a choice. 

3B. If you’re not sure it’s valid, but it might be, tell them, “I really need to give this some more thought.” or “Can you tell me more about this? I’m not sure I understand the issue well.”  Or “If you can point me at some reading material or search terms, I’d like to study this before I decide what I’m going to do.” 

3C. If you know it is not a valid criticism, STOP a moment, and look at WHY they are making it. This is where Active Listening can be very helpful. “I hear you saying that X is a problem. I don’t see it that way right now but I’d like to understand better why you do.” Or if you think they don’t have enough information, “I hear you saying X, but my understanding of the issue is Y. Here’s what I know about it if you’re ready to listen.” If they’re just looking for a fight, tell them you’re not interested in fighting, and disentangle yourself. 

4. If the criticism is something you are going to listen to and take action on, tell them what kind of action you’re going to take. If it’s something you’re hearing and thinking about, tell them that. If it’s not something you’re going to do anything about or it’s just wrong, thank them for their input and move on.

Literally never is it going to be helpful to say, “Oh, I’m just a terrible person.” That’s very much like a nonapology-apology in terms of how unhelpful it is to any conversation. It’s kind of worse because it actually expects emotional labor from someone who is already having to bring up something unpleasant with you. Think about what they say Decide whether you’re going to do something about it Do the thing, or tell them you’re not going to do the thing.  Don’t demand emotional labor from other people when you were the one who messed up. 

Its just that it doesn’t matter.

If every single criticism of you ends in an emotional crisis, you become uncriticisable, and its unbelievably difficult to deal with someone when you can ask them to stop doing something, or to fix something.

9 times out of 10 when someone asks you to stop doing something, or fix a behaviour, its not that big a deal, they were a little upset, they said something about it, and a quick apology and not doing it again, or even just making a sincere effort to do it less, and they’ll probably not even think about it again.

A very fast shadow study since some peeps from my last stream seemed interested in how I handle shading~

Best leg exercises - master your muscles.

Tutorial time!

BEFORE ANYTHING: This is how I personally do this. Other artists will have other ways, other styles and other references, so expand your horizon looking up to them too!

BEFORE ANYTHING²: I’ll have to trust you with the basic anatomy understanding!

So LETS GO

Those are human legs doing things human legs do, and that’s on the last one is a suggestion of the bones, aint anatomically correct but i just need y’all to visualize it.

Then:

This is anthropomorphic leggy! Also with bones suggestions! did you see the catch? no? (I used deer legs as references!)

See now? With luck we’re mammals so we sorta have the same bones in different ways, and use it as advantage!

In fantastic anatomy, there’s not much rules because, well, it’s not real so there’s no book teaching you how to properly draw those. like centaurs, they have two toraxic boxes! 4 LUNGS??? 2 STOMACHES? Doesn’t matter, does it? it’s belivable, and it’s what matter!

I repeat: It’s only belivable, and it’s what matter!

Also the muscles will work sorta on the same way (see the blobs). On the satyr ones, the purples are smaller, just as the brigh blue one, since this part is smaller than the thighs and feet, meanwhile it’s usually longer on humans!

It’s more about understanding the shape then drawing the leg over it, because this makes you understand how it was supposed to move even you don’t have a real anatomy satyr leg in front of you, or dunno, octapus merman, go wild my buddy!

This is how i usually doodle them before even getting the anatomy right, usually i just need the idea of the leg before actually starting

and most important:

GET. YO. FRIGGING. REFERENCES.

yES YOU HEARD ME RIGHT. References always. Disney has a lot of stuff free for you to look at, and fantasy is a common theme, there’s thousands of other tutorials and artists that also do this, and it’s good to make sure you saw at least 3 or 4 more, never hurts learning more about what you want to make A++!

With reference, you’re not tied only to deer legs, but dogs, elephants, crocodiles, birds, snakes?, anything! It’s really important!

IT EVEN HIGHLIGHTS THE ULNA BONE  

I recently found out my Intuos 4′s Pen had broken and rather than spend £60-89 for a new one I decided to get a new tablet. Now, I could get the new “Intuos” (which is just the re-branded Bamboo) and i was going to until I found this beast.

This is the Huion  H610, it has almost twice the drawing space of the low-end Intuos and double the pressure levels. The one and only negative is that the pen requires a battery.

Not only that, it is larger than my Intuos 4 which I paid £150 for back in the day. Know how much this cost? £55. The same as the basic Intuos.

I am in LOVE with this thing. Let’s compare this with the lowest of the low end Wacom Intuos line.

                             Intuos          Huion

Active Area:     6 by 3.7 in    10" x 6.25"

Pressure Levels:  1024            2048

Hard Input Res:  2540 LPI      4000 LPI

Express Keys:          4                   8

Not to mention the Intuos is HIDEOUS with buttons that are in incredibly awkward places.

The fact that a £55 matches and exceeds the £150 Intuos 4 I bought years ago speaks worlds. And do you know what the very final nail in the coffin is?

THE DRIVERS. ACTUALLY. WORK.

It’s time Wacom had some real competition in the market, if you’re looking for a new tablet please consider a Huion over a Wacom. I used to be a Wacom fanboy too but now?

Here is the H610 on Amazon UK and Amazon US.

(for @a-for-effort-f-for-execution and @southpauz)

I made this guide in response to this post, but really, there’s no real “tutorial” for painting darker skin or PoC in general. This ended up as more of a guideline and rough idea of my painting process, focusing on how I layer and blend colors to get that sweet sweet glow.

The subject of representation, erasure, white-washing and more in art is a very hot topic for debate which I don’t want to get into. As a Black American artist with particular interests, I can only speak from my point of view. Artists naturally seek to depict the world as they see it. So if, say, you’re an artist who’s also an anime/manga and fantasy fan who desires to portray Black people, that can suddenly become difficult, even if you’re Black yourself, if you weren’t raised with pride for your identity. And if you certainly don’t see yourself in any of the media you consume. Even without the social commentary, it can come down to technique itself; copics and watercolors don’t seem to lend themselves well to depicting darker skintones. Or if they do, examples could be hard to find in your everyday entertainment. It’s hard to find stylized illustrations that aren’t harmful caricatures. Photography often sets up artificial and misleading lightsources, makeup can conceal natural variations in skintone, the list goes on.

Regardless, all art comes from observation, and applying that to your medium of choice, again and again. If you don’t know how to layer colors, start slapping them on a canvas and practice, see how your brushes work and colors interact. The same goes for drawing rounder, flatter noses, kinky curly hair, full lips. It takes practice, dedication, and a lot of love and respect for who you’re drawing.

This is all very difficult to condense into ten images, as this is the result of over 12 years of experience drawing digitally with trial and error. Some of the terms and techniques I mention have to do with color theory and light and shadow. I’m no art teacher, but I do know of a very affordable book that neatly explains and condenses every basic art lesson I’ve had, in a non-pretentious, easy-to-understand way.

Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter by James Gurney

I can also better explain how I paint while actually doing it, so feel free to follow me at picarto. Someday I’ll learn to make speedpaint vids. I’ll also answer any questions here or on my main blog @sichore.

This was all done in Clip Studio with a Wacom Intuos Pro S, but these settings should be applicable to any tablet and software of choice. Tumblr and Clip Studio may have compressed these images horribly, so I apologize for that. The text may be hard to read, so I’ll transcribe and explain below: