Paper Is A Catalyst...And Wacoms Are A Must

To expand on this a little bit: Ryoko Kui takes the tools of character design seriously, and uses them with forethought and consideration to set her characters apart, give them personality and specificity, and thinks very carefully about what each piece of design communicates and how it interacts with all the other design in her story.

Body shape, face shape, noses, eyes, brows, hair, proportion, fashion, ears, posture, roundness and angularity, broadness and slenderness, posture... Kui clearly thinks about ALL of it, and incorporates all of it.

And this is part of what gives her story such a profound sense of taking place within a world, a whole world inhabited by thousands of people each of whom are as full and unique and distinct as every other one. You look at a group of her characters and none of them feel like Copy Pasted NPC Placeholder #3457, they each feel as though there is a life there, an individuality, even if they are never actually deeply explored in the story.

Compare and contrast with something like Genshin Impact's style of character design:

Now, I don't bring this up just to sh** on Genshin - its character design style is adapted very effectively to the kind of story and world it is trying to build, which is to say a gacha story where every part of a character is formulated towards the singular goal of appeal. It's a world inhabited by nothing but main characters, essentially, and it is a laser-focused power fantasy structured around constantly pursuing the high of maximum damage numbers pumped out by maximally cool and badass battle moves executed with maximal grace by physically perfect avatars who provide the player with maximal aesthetic pleasure.

But because of that, its character design style is under severe pressure to regress to the mean - i.e. skinny bodies, young bodies, beauty ideals, and a minimal amount of physical difference. This style of character design tends to focus all of its effort in colorful, detailed and attention-grabbing fashion and hair styles, and generally avoids "alienating" design features like, well, literally anything that could be conceptualized by anyone as "ugly." Big strong noses, for example, or larger ears, or wrinkles, scarring, skin folds and so on. Fatness functionally does not exist in Genshin Impact's character roster for this reason, and it's part of the reason why the franchise struggles so notably to design characters of color - the concept of "beauty" is deeply bound up in systemic biases of class, race, gender and nationalism, and since Genshin's character design ethos is "make every character as broadly beautiful as possible" it has to keep hitting the same limited set of beats over and over and over again, and it reinforces the biases it inherits with its inability to step outside of them.

So Genshin Impact characters have a tendency, for me at least, to all kinda blur together into a brightly colored cavalcade of lowest-common-denominator ambulatory clothing racks, characters whose bodies exist for the primary purpose of transporting a highly elaborate costume around.

Kui by contrast very very actively seeks out elements of physical difference, and incorporates them into her design process - she seems to delight in inventing as many nose shapes as possible, as many different kinds of eyes as she can think of, and the result is that she has a character roster which is recognizable even if you change or remove very important parts of their basic design.

Where Genshin Impact (and that style of character design) would severely struggle to make characters recognizable without their costumes, because the characters in large part are their costumes, Kui's design style makes characters extremely recognizable not only in and out of costume, but even if the fundamental nature of their bodies change across species, and it makes her characters of the same race and species eminently recognizable from one another, even while sharing many physical traits and aesthetic features.

AU where Katara finds unknown man on the shore, not far from the Northern Water tribe village. No one is speaking truth, bending is forbidden and Katara questions many things that seemed certain.

[pls ignore zuko's scar on the wrong side in the first panel, I'm just stupid and forgot to flip back the image, as always]

it’s fun to run it’s fun to play, it’s fun to make things out of clay it’s fun to fill your car with gas

horsey

I ended up using the glass not used in the horse to make this as my first Real stained glass thing, finished may 17th:

May 19th:

and now this is what I’ve been picking at on and off when i have the time to do so since:

(this was finished in March 2023,)

Anyways happy birthday to me having a mania fueled sleep deprivation and pots episode in the craft store.

and some more i can’t be fucked to figure out when they were made:

There’s this one scene in this one fanfiction…. Chapter 7.

(source)

Unsplash -  photography, illustration, & art

Pixabay - same as unsplash

Pexels - stock photos and videos

Getty Images - photography & illustration

Veceezy - vectors and clipart

Gumroad - photoshop brushes (and more)

StockSnap.io - stock photos

Canva - needs login but has lots of templates

Library of Congress - historical posters and photos

NASA - you guessed it

Creative Commons - all kinds of stuff, homie

Even Adobe has some free images

There are so many ways to make moodboards, bookcovers, and icons without plagiarizing! As artists, authors, and other creatives, we need to be especially careful not to use someone else’s work and pass it off as our own. 

I've been resource gathering for YEARS so now I am going to share my dragons hoard

Floorplanner. Design and furnish a house for you to use for having a consistent background in your comic or anything! Free, you need an account, easy to use, and you can save multiple houses.

Comparing Heights. Input the heights of characters to see what the different is between them. Great for keeping consistency. Free.

Magma. Draw online with friends in real time. Great for practice or hanging out. Free, paid plan available, account preferred.

Smithsonian Open Access. Loads of free images. Free.

SketchDaily. Lots of pose references, massive library, is set on a timer so you can practice quick figure drawing. Free.

SculptGL. A sculpting tool which I am yet to master, but you should be able to make whatever 3d object you like with it. free.

Pexels. Free stock images. And the search engine is actually pretty good at pulling up what you want.

Figurosity. Great pose references, diverse body types, lots of "how to draw" videos directly on the site, the models are 3d and you can rotate the angle, but you can't make custom poses or edit body proportions. Free, account option, paid plans available.

Line of Action. More drawing references, this one also has a focus on expressions, hands/feet, animals, landscapes. Free.

Animal Photo. You pose a 3d skull model and select an animal species, and they give you a bunch of photo references for that animal at that angle. Super handy. Free.