The Shyan Creative Community

Thruple. Foursome. Moresome. So much love to go around

Happy 1K Follower Celebration (Part 1)!!

To help celebrate reaching this milestone, I wanted to give back by doing a series of tutorials/edit-with-me videos. This first one covers how I make my moodboards in Photoshop, from finding photos all of the way to uploading it to Tumblr. The theme that won for this tutorial is Bellarke! I’ll be doing follow up moodboards for the other entries, but thank you so much to those who filled out my survey!

Timestamps for the different sections:

finding photos – 0:19

setting up your file – 2:02

placing your photos – 3:04

editing/coloring – 4:49

exporting – 7:26

uploading to tumblr – 8:19

Since I know not everyone pays for Photoshop or has past versions downloaded, I’m more than happy to help answer questions about how any of this process could translate to a different platform or app! 

Thanks again for all of your support since I created this blog! If you practice or experiment with making any moodboards, please make sure to send them my way so I can see them 🖤

Tag list (feel free to let me know if you’d like to be tagged in the next two – gif sets and color correcting):

Thruple. Foursome. Moresome. So much love to go around

Sickfics, breakups, anxieties. All will be resolved with affection

Being older now and having an art job it’s…kind of essential. 

So: a quick primer for those of you who are like ‘ok but how do i actually go about doing this warmup thing.’ 

1) you may be tempted to do ‘a warmup drawing’ which is just a drawing that will take longer than it needed to and probably be frustrating and kind of bad because you didn’t warm up first. It’s tempting but always a trick your brain is playing on you! Do not trust! 

2) warmups will vary based on what feels good to you/what task you’re about to do/what motor skills you want to practice. That being said, some good standbys:

a) circles. Just a whole page of circles on whatever drawing surface you’re going to be using, whether that’s your tablet or your sketchbook or a drawing pad on an easel. For these circles you should make sure that you’re drawing from your shoulder and not your wrist. In fact, you want to be drawing from your shoulder rather than your wrist most of the time! forever! your wrist is delicate please preserve it! 

In order to ensure that you’re drawing from your shoulder, when you’re holding your pencil or whatever drawing tool you’re using, the only part of your hand that should be touching the drawing surface is part of the last two fingers–some people prefer the finger tips, but I tend to favor the first knuckles. Either way, the fingers should really be ghosting over the surface, providing guidance rather than support. 

I usually start with big circles and then go to smaller circles and lines of ellipses, and then try to fit circles and ellipses inside other shapes i’ve already drawn as a precision exercise, but i don’t do that unless i’m feeling loose

b) spirals! i don’t always do spirals, but if i’m stiff and the circles just aren’t cutting it, spirals are a good fall back. I start from the center and work outward, going both clockwise and counterclockwise until i feel comfortable with the whole range of motion. Some people really care about getting perfect spirals but for me it’s all about making sure i’m comfortable with how i’m moving so who really even cares about how the spirals look. Not me! 

c) lines! straight lines! in parallel! i do a mix of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal. These are often more from the elbow than the shoulder, especially if I’m working on a smaller surface. For this exercise, I recommend holding the drawing tool perpendicular with the surface

d) connect the dots. This is a precision and accuracy exercise and takes two forms. The first is to draw two dots and then draw a straight line between them. The second is to draw three dots and draw the curve that connects them. This sounds a lot simpler than it is in practice. Take time to ghost over the line you plan to draw before actually committing to your line. (I don’t always remember where I picked up my warm up exercises, but I’m pretty sure I got this one from Scott Robertson. His how to draw and how to render books are very technical but also accessible and worth checking out)

e) cubes, spheres, cones, and cylinders. These help get your brain into a more volumetric space. I draw multiples of each, rotating the forms around, and I’ll often take the time to do some rough shading on at least a few of them

f) spidermans! This one is really good if you’re going to be storyboarding or working on dynamic poses. Just fill a page full of spidermans doing all sorts of acrobatics. 

g) beans. I don’t do beans too much anymore, but I know a lot of people like it so I’m mentioning it here. Fill an area with different size bean shapes without lifting your pencil off the paper. 

h) short medium and long line repetition. draw a short, medium, and long line on your page, and then draw directly on top of them 8 to 12 times, doing your best to exactly trace what you’ve already drawing. Repeat with a wavy line. I’m bad at this one, which means I probably need to do it more. 

And there are lots more options too! Hit up youtube to see what other people recommend, put together your own go-to list, mix it up when you’re getting bored, etc. 

This is a long list, I know, but I usually don’t take more than 10 to 15 minutes to warm up, and I can warm up one handed while I’m drinking coffee, so, multitasking hurrah. 

Sometimes I’ll advance to a precision warmup and find that I haven’t loosened up enough yet; it’s totally ok to go back to an earlier exercise! Also, all of this has the added benefit of kind of ritualistically getting you into the drawing mode so even if I’m not feeling it before I start, by the time I’ve gotten to the end I’m usually Ready For Drawin’. Brain hacks. 

https://youtu.be/NBE-RTFkXDk

Sickfics, breakups, anxieties. All will be resolved with affection

I'm going to try it.

Sickfics, breakups, anxieties. All will be resolved with affection

sunny. freeing. celebration summer love or forever

for the @shyan-creative-community monthly challenge: summer

Video description: an AO3 tutorial, narrated by a female voice and posted on tiktok.

The screen shows an AO3 news post titled Hidden search operators cheatsheet.

"Do you ever forget the title and author of a fic, but you remember the summary?"

The video scrolls down the page and highlights one bullet point on the cheatsheet.

summary: string for works with a particular word or phrase (in quotation marks) in the summary

"You can actually search for that."

The screen changes to show a closeup of the Search box embedded in the coloured bar at the top of the AO3 homepage. Inside the box are the words summary: love

"So you can search here using a keyword. Pro-tip, the word "love" is going to get you a million results."

The search changes to summary: conferences

"But the other day, I posted a fic with the word conferences in the summary, and I think that's probably pretty rare, so let's see."

The user presses the search button and the results page populates. The user zooms in to show 322 Found.

"Okay, 322 found. Out of 7 million, that's not bad!"

The screen returns to the search box. This time the text inside the box reads summary: "conferences kind of suck"

"But I used the phrase conferences kind of suck, so if I search for that and put that phrase in quotation marks-"

The user presses the search button again and the results page populates. This time there is one 1 story found.

"Look! It's the only result."

The screen changes to show the page containing all 32177 Works in the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. fandom.

"And the thing is, if I know the fandom that it's in, or the ship, or anything else, I can filter-"

The user taps on the Filter button to open up the sidebar. The screen changes to a zoomed in view of the lower portion of the sidebar with the Search Within Results box at the centre of the screen. An emoji of a hand points to it. Inside the box is the text summary: conferences

"And I can use that same search operator in the Search Within Results box" Note: This is instead of doing it in the search box at the top of the page.

The user presses the Sort & Filter button and the results page populates showing 2 works found within the fandom.

When writing a story, your prose can often feel jumbled.

Muddled.

Disconnected.

Like it just doesn’t flow.

And for a long time, I never knew a clear, tangible tactic for fixing that problem, except by feel or by trial and error. Then I learned a simple, but effective trick for improving flow:

Go from the known to the unknown: use the last few words of one sentence to set up the information that’s about to appear at the beginning of the next one.

Here’s what I mean:

Think of it like crossing a stream, hopping from rock to rock — each rock acts as both a landing spot and a launching point. Writing and revising your sentences to serve a similar purpose can go a long way in improving the flow of your prose.

Let’s start by taking a look at a paragraph (prepared by yours truly) that doesn’t do this, resulting in a somewhat bumpy flow:

Vincent Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” had always inexplicably drawn Henry in. The painting was framed as a poster on his wall, and he often stared into its dizzying swirls of blue and yellow, and its fiery cypress tree — marveling at the chaos that entrenched the village scene. Henry had always hoped that Vincent was able to find some peace in expelling this vision from his mind and onto the canvas.

Feels a bit disconnected, doesn’t it? It’s still readable, but there isn’t much of a continuity of ideas bridging the sentences — no connective tissue to smooth out your journey through the prose. 

Now let’s look at the same paragraph again, but with some simple rearranging done to ensure that the information that ends each sentence also kicks off the next one (I put these hand-offs in bold):

Henry had always felt inexplicably drawn to Vincent Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night.” The painting was framed as a poster on his wall, and he often stared into its dizzying swirls of blue and yellow, and its fiery cypress tree — marveling at the chaos that entrenched the village scene. With such a vision expelled from the mind and onto the canvas, Henry had always hoped that Vincent was able to find some peace.

Now that reads a little better, doesn’t it? You’ll notice I didn’t even change up my word choice. Sometimes you’ll have to swap out words or change the order of your sentences, but even just rearranging information can often add a lot connectivity.

This obviously won’t be possible in every sentence and paragraph, but it’s a great rule of thumb when you want to smooth out your prose. I hope this proves as helpful to you all as it has been for me!

Good luck, and good writing, everybody.

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sunny. freeing. celebration summer love or forever