romantic!soup

Can you tell I love Daphne and Velma

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Absolute beginner adult ballet series (fabulous beginning teacher)

40 piano lessons for beginners (some of the best explanations for piano I’ve ever seen)

Excellent basic crochet video series

Basic knitting (probably the best how to knit video out there)

Pre-Free Figure Skate Levels A-D guides and practice activities (each video builds up with exercises to the actual moves!)

How to draw character faces video (very funny, surprisingly instructive?)

Another drawing character faces video

Literally my favorite art pose hack

Tutorial of how to make a whole ass Stardew Valley esque farming game in Gamemaker Studios 2??

Introduction to flying small aircrafts

French/Dutch/Fishtail braiding

Playing the guitar for beginners (well paced and excellent instructor)

Playing the violin for beginners (really good practical tips mixed in)

Color theory in digital art (not of the children’s hospital variety)

Retake classes you hated but now there’s zero stakes:

Calculus 1 (full semester class)

Learn basic statistics (free textbook)

Introduction to college physics (free textbook)

Introduction to accounting (free textbook)

Learn a language:

Ancient Greek

Latin

Spanish

German

Japanese (grammar guide) (for dummies)

French

You can’t really expect the daughter of a Sikh aristocrat & scholar and a Jewish Hungarian opera singer to lead an ordinary life. Thanks to the confluence of wealth, education, and talent, Amrita Sher-Gil became one of India’s most prominent artists of the 20th century (and apparently India’s most expensive woman artist too). She’s often referred to, at least in the Western world, as the “Indian Frida Kahlo,” though we take issue with the phrasing because it’s just the kind of wording that seems to substitute one female artist for color for another and seeing them as almost interchangeable. Instead, we’re choosing here to remember Amrita Sher-Gil for her own merits.

Amrita with her sister Indira (left), circa 1923. Source: Estate of Umrao Singh Sher-Gil/Photoink via Telegraph

Amrita Sher-Gil was born 104 years ago in Budapest, the elder of two daughters in a wealthy family that encouraged intellectual and artistic education. In 1921, the family moved to India. Very early on, Amrita was exposed to music and the arts, and learned to play instruments and paint. She received her first exposure to classical Italian masters when she was enrolled for one year at a Florentian art school, Santa Annunziata. In 1929, she and her mother headed to Paris, where she trained as a painter, partly at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. She notably studied under Pierre Vaillant and Lucien Simon, and was inspired by such painters as Cézanne and Gauguin. Her early works display the influence of Western painting and art. In 1932, her painting Young Girls earned substantial recognition since she was elected as an Associate of the Grand Salon in Paris in 1933: she was the youngest ever and the only Asian to ever receive this recognition. 

Self-portrait, untitled, 1931

In 1934, she headed back to India, with the intense yearning to rediscover her family’s country, as she felt that this could deeply mark her trajectory as a painter. She set about the lifelong enterprise of rediscovering India artistic traditions, and toured India to that end. This indeed marked a new development in her style as she detached herself from the Western influences and reinterpreted India styles. She hated exoticism and Orintalism in art and thus represented a more authentic vision of the India she was experiencing. She also was known for choosing to mainly depict poor people and women, and portraying them without sentimentalizing or fetishizing them.

Bride’s Toilet, 1937

She married one of her Hungarian cousins, an impoverished doctor named Victor, but was known for her many affairs, both with men and with women. She often painter her female lovers.

She died in 1941, and the causes of her death are still unclear. A failed abortion is the most often suggested cause, but Amrita’s mother did accuse Victor of having poisoned her daughter (either way, many fans pin the blame on the husband). Still, she left a body of work and a legacy on par with the Masters of the Bengal Renaissance. Read more about this extraordinary artist in this Telegraph article (complete with her father’s photographs), in this article about her legacy in India and Pakistan, and in this article about the women she portrayed.

Can you tell I love Daphne and Velma

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ALRIGHT SO my pal @kalreyno wanted help with drawing fat characters and as a fat artist i felt like i could give a bit of helpful insight on that. there’s also been a lot of complaining about “boo hoo fat characters are hard to draw so i can’t include them in my work Ever” goin on lately so if that’s your case then this is for you too!! and also just for anyone who would like help with fat bodies in general, ofc. anyway, let’s get this show on the road!!

let’s start with some common misconceptions. these are the two main attempts at chubby bodies i run into, so i’ll focus on them. 

the Anime Chubby i see everywhere, and it’s just……so wrong in many ways. first of all, there is almost no additional body fat compared to your average thin character - except for where it’s added in “attractive” places (breasts, hips, thighs). the breasts are way too perky, and don’t have the realistic shape fat would give them (though how to draw accurate breasts is another tutorial all on its own lmao). there is still a thigh gap, which usually only happens in very thin people, and bones are still visible on the surface of the skin, which also rarely happens in fat people.

the Michelin Man is better in some ways, but still not that great. it’s a slightly better attempt, but basically all that’s done there is taking a thin character and blowing them up, while giving no thought to fat distribution. the thigh gap is usually still present, and they look a lot more hard than soft - and fat is very soft and pliable.

here’s a chart on how fat usually distributes (if you can’t read my messy writing, “1. next to no fat, 2. moderate amount, 3. most of the fat distribution”). basically, the more muscle an area has, the more prone it is to develop fat, such as the abdomen, thighs, and upper arms. it’s important to note that fat sits on top of muscle, and that it does distribute in different levels, and not evenly across the body as shown in the Michelin Man. 

now, here’s an accurate fat body with all of that kept in mind!! notice how the fat isn’t only kept to aesthetically pleasing areas, and how it sits realistically on the character’s body. their breasts sag a lot more, which happens even in thin people with larger breasts, and the nipples are pointing more downwards than straight out. there is no thigh gap in sight, there are no bones in sight, and most importantly, they have fat rolls, which are very important in drawing a convincing fat character!! as far as i know i’ve never met a single person with no rolls at all, and everyone has them, whether thin or fat - they’re just more prominent and more consistently present in fat people. pay close attention to where they are and how they’re shaped.

here are a couple of drawings showing how fat is affected when sitting vs stretching. as seen in the first, the fat specifically on the stomach is distributed a lot more evenly and stretched out, so it becomes “flatter”. the love handles are still pretty visible, though, as well as the fat on the thighs and arms. the breasts are raised with the shoulders, and the fat on the shoulders and near the neck forms rolls as it’s being pushed together. 

in the second, there is a lot less room for distribution, so the fat is all pushed together. the breasts sag and the stomach forms rolls and spills into the lap. a good analogy for the way fat works is to liken it to a water balloon, and thinking of how its shape would change when resting flat on a surface, hanging off of a ledge, held upright, etc.

here are a few extra tips i find a lot of people miss!

first on the top is the hip/pubic region. the first circle is showing the way the bellybutton is folded in fat people, as opposed to stretched out in thinner people. the second is the stomach fat spilling over onto the pubic region and creating a separation in the two areas, which is something that’s missing in a lot of art. in addition, the pubic mound also gains fat, making it round as seen in the profile drawing i did up there (i’ve heard people refer to it as fupa?). the last in the hip region is the lack of a thigh gap. i can’t stress this enough!!!! if you’re trying to draw a convincing fat character, make sure their thighs are pretty much always touching!! for reference, mine literally don’t separate until my feet are about 2ft from each other.

the bottom right is showing the double chin, which a lot of people are afraid to draw!! fat does distribute itself here too, and there’s nothing wrong with it, so don’t feel like you shouldn’t give fat characters a double chin in your work for fear of it looking like a caricature.

in the bottom middle, it’s showing how fat affects different types of breasts with the presence of more or less breast tissue. 

lastly, at the very right are stretch marks with their usual locations and directions, which i also can’t stress enough!!!!! i sometimes forget to add them honestly, but they’re so important in accurately portraying fat characters, as they literally come from the skin being stretched from fat being gained (and they’re also just rlly neat lookin like why wouldn’t you lmao). some people have less and some people have more, feel free to experiment with them!

the last thing is body types!! there isn’t one single way for a person to be fat, so feel free to experiment with shapes once you’ve learned the basics!! 

so there you have it, a tutorial on how to draw chubs!! now go forth and make some accurate fanart or some rad fat characters, because the world could always use more of both. hmu if you have any questions or concerns, and thanks for reading!!