Personal Lube

Yesssssssssssssss someone finally asked it!!!

I’ve been waiting for the perfect opportunity to explain this and show everybody my inverted pyramid :D :D :D

I present, The Inverted Pyramid of Revising a Book

Now I’ll explain each section of the inverted pyramid:

THE FIRST DRAFT

This should be self-explanatory. You write the first draft. For novels, 75-150,000+ words of the world inside your head.

PLOT, CONTENT, SCENES, AND MAJOR CHARACTERS

Go back and fix it all up. Did you tell the story you wanted to tell? Did you include scenes and events that add up to the conclusion you present?

Are there any unnecessary scenes you could delete, or scenes that are redundant to other scenes? Get rid of them. If this means entire chapters have to go, wave bye-bye.

Do your main characters have believable back stories and arcs, and do they act appropriately in character at all times?

Is there any point in time when your characters do something that they literally WOULD NOT DO? Change that up.

WORLD-BUILDING, CHARACTERIZATION, HONING IN PLOT POINTS

Now pay attention to the deeper aspects of the story. Delve into the world your characters live in. Do they react appropriately? Does any part of society influence them more than others?

What does your world look like? Delve into the setting. The cultures, the technology, the history.

Work with your secondary characters and how they interact with your main characters. What role do they serve overall? Does the main character’s journey affect them at all, or vice versa?

Tighten up plot points. Stay concise if possible.

SENTENCE STRUCTURE, FLOW AND PACING OF SCENES

Now that the major parts of your story have been patted down, you can begin focusing on the technical stuff. Start broad.

Do you have redundant sentences? Do you start multiple sentences the same way?

Throw in short sentences.

Drop the pronoun from the beginning of a sentence every now and then.

Use commas instead of ‘and’ if you find you use ‘and’ a lot.

Does the flow of sentences and paragraphs fit with the tone of the scene?

Chop sentences apart. Use quick, sharp words.

Or combine sentences and flowery language and soft words.

BETA READER CRITIQUES AND SUGGESTIONS

Now that you’ve really patted this thing down, find people willing to read your work (hopefully for free).

Ask them to point out inconsistencies. Are they confused by anything?

Beta readers can tell you when things are boring or exciting. They’ll laugh. They’ll fangirl. They’ll beg you for more chapters.

Your brain is soft from so much revising. Beta readers are fresh, and will pick out things you’ve glossed over from seeing it so many times.

Shake things up and host a video chat for you and your betas! It’s a great way to make friends :)

PUNCTUATION AND MISSING WORDS

NOWWWWW you’ve finished all the major revisions and your story makes sense!!! All that’s left to do is get the broom and sweep it up (or the vacuum cleaner, or generate a black hole from the Large Hadron Collider to suck out all the errors because that’s super-effective**).

This is the nitty gritty stuff, and I highly recommend either forcing yourself to read really, really slow, or better yet, read your book out loud, start to finish.

You’ll trip up over misplaced commas and periods.

You’ll literally hear when a sentence is awkward.

Your brain will get confused when there’s a missing word.

Fill in the gaps, hammer down the boards, tidy up the place like you’ve got guests coming over.

THE FINAL DRAFT

OMG

OMG

OMG

OMG IT’S FINISHED AND YOU CAN SHARE IT WITH THE WORLD AND BUY PHYSICAL COPIES THAT YOU CAN HOLD AND SMELL AND RUB ALL OVER YOUR FACE AND DRAW IN AND DOG-EAR AND TOTE AROUND TO SHOW PEOPLE AND SIGN AUTOGRAPHS AND BECOME YOUR OWN LITTLE CELEBRITY!!!

Email the newspaper (I’ve appeared multiple times).

Email the local TV station (I’ve appeared on live TV).

Email book talk radio shows (I’ve had a Q&A for an hour on live radio).

……..Marketing is hard.

I hope that helps!

We live in a pretty great digital age and we have access to a ton of amazing tools that artists in past generations couldn’t even dream of, but a lot of people look at a cool trick and only learn half of the process of using it.

Here’s the missing part of this tutorial:

How do you populate your backgrounds?

Well, here’s the answer:

If the focus is the environment, you must show a person in relation to that environment.

The examples above are great because they show how to use the software itself, but each one just kind of “plops” the character in front of their finished product with no regard of the person’s relation to their environment.

How do you fix this?

Well, here’s the simplest solution:

This is a popular trick used by professional storyboard and comic artists alike when they’re quickly planning compositions. It’s simple and it requires you to do some planning before you sit down to crank out that polished, final version of your work, but it will be the difference between a background and an environment.

From Blacksad (artist: Juanjo Guarnido)

From Hellboy (Mike Mignola)

Even if your draftsmanship isn’t that great (like mine), people can be more immersed in the story you tell if you just make it feel like there is a world that exists completely separate from the one in which they currently reside – not just making a backdrop the characters stand in front of.

I’m a 3d artist and have been exploring the possibilities of using 3d as reference for 2d poses. I want to add a couple of tips and things!

Sketchup is very useful for environment references, and I assume it’s reasonably easy to learn. If you’re interested in going above and beyond, I highly recommend learning a proper 3d modeling program to help with art, especially because you can very easily populate a scene or location with characters!

Using 3ds Max I can pretty quickly construct an environment for reference. But going beyond that, I can also pose a pretty simple ‘CAT’ armature (known in 3d as a rig) straight into the scene, which can be totally customized, from various limbs, tails, wings, whatever, to proportions, and also can be modeled onto and expanded upon (for an example, you could 3d sculpt a head reference for your character and then attach it to the CAT rig, so you have a reference for complex face angles!)

The armature can also be posed incredibly easily. I know programs exist for stuff like this - Manga Studio, Design Doll - but posing characters in these programs is always an exercise in frustration and very fiddly imo. A simple 3d rig is impossibly easy to pose.

By creating an environment and dropping my character rig into it, I have an excellent point of reference when it comes to drawing the scene!

Not only that, but I can also view the scene from whatever angle I could ever want or need, including the character and their pose/position relative to the environment.

We can even quickly and easily expand this scene to include more characters!

Found some hands tutorial by me

senshi stock

croquis cafe

line-of-action.com

quickposes.com

posemaniacs

clip studio paint models

pexels.com

sketchdaily

eggazyoutatsu atarichan drawer