§YSTEMREC👁DED

Vampires gets discount rn! 85 usd for fullbody sketch instead of 100, 255 usd for a character card illustration instead of 280 usd

I can also try to take animation commissions too. Info here ( I decided to double that post, because it's not very visible under repost..)

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.

That got your attention. I welcome the pearl-clutching in the notes.

I'm serious, though. The movies we watched as kids had way more sex in them than you remember. Not explicitly, but they had no problem alluding to and implying sex. The Incredibles had a full-on sex montage and a suspected adultery subplot. The Road to El Dorado had a woman proposition a man for casual sex onscreen and fuck him just out of frame. Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas directly referenced prostitution. So did The Hunchback of Notre Dame on top of having a creepy sexual predator for a villain who unambiguously sings about his lust for the leading lady. We all knew Simba and Nala fucked at the end of that one song in The Lion King. Batman: The Animated Series had Harley Quinn dress in lingerie and beg the Joker for sex.

This was mainstream children's media by major studios. None of this was controversial or seen as "grooming." Sex was just a normal thing to tastefully imply because it's a normal part of life. Having two characters discretely fuck offscreen was no different from having a villain fall to his death so you can't see the gore. They obviously wouldn't show it in a children's movie, but everyone who knows what sex or violence is can infer what happened.

I think the fact that this even shocks us is very telling of how insanely prudish and reactionary we have become regarding anything remotely sexual coming anywhere near kids. It used to be perfectly acceptable to do this in children's media, but the current groomer panic has really set us back decades.

I can only think of a handful of recent exceptions to this. The She-Ra remake elegantly pulled off a running gag where a character fucks robots, and Kpop Demon Hunters did not shy away from depicting sexual desire through exaggerated cartoony visuals. Hopefully, the breakout success of the latter sets a precedent for future projects.

Cities and government agencies HATE bad press. This story that was told to me by the journalist that covered this, and he showed us the piece:

There was a traffic light that was set up on the far side of an overpass, but it was improperly hung so you couldn’t see the light until it was too late. There were accidents there EVERY SINGLE DAY and calls to the city did NOTHING.

Someone had the idea to call the local news station and this dude went out to see. As he was interviewing someone, there was a wreck.

Guess what happened after that piece aired?

Suddenly the city had the time to lower the traffic light and the accidents stopped.

Journalists get a bad rep, and while big stations like Fox deserve it, I think more thought should be given to who you’re actually shitting on when you say “I hate journalists.” Because we’re overworked, underpaid, constantly shit on, but we still do the job because we want to help people. All professional, prestigious journalists that I’ve met hate the government and will do whatever they can to get the information and change that’s needed. Being a journalist is a dangerous profession: at every professional convention I’ve been at there’s a fund for the families of journalists that have been killed (there’s a lot!) and a long memoriam roll.

From above.

Let me explain: the rain was so bad and the roof so shitty and the building so old that water was pouring in from ceilings and light sockets. The dorm had drop ceilings, and saturated tiles were plopping out onto the floor covered in mold—this clearly was not the first time this had happened.

My mom called the news after she saw my room and heard the school had no plans to assist students who’d just lost clothes, textbooks, computers, personal belongings, and more. She was as furious as we were.

The school refused to let media into the dorm “for student privacy” and had the president make a statement about how it was just a couple of disgruntled students and everything was fine.

This was before cameraphones, so they assumed that was that.

Their fatal mistake was in forgetting the initial complainant (i.e., ME) WAS A JOURNALISM MAJOR. First year, but that was still enough to know what basic information a news story needed.

My mom smuggled me a camcorder in a basket of laundry. I interviewed people from my floor and the floor above complete with “I consent to be on video for TV purposes” verbal disclaimers, showed the moldy tiles and water dripping out of lights and my own room three inches deep in water. One of my floormates heard what I was doing and called me into her room and said “you should get THAT” and showed me a power strip she needed to unplug because it was sparking and couldn’t unplug because it was in a puddle of water. (We eventually managed to find a pair of rubber gloves to pull the plug out of the very damp wall, but it was a great visual. “Nothing wrong” my ass.)

My mom took the tape to the news station. They used my footage with the president’s statement.

In under 48 hours, the college said that if you’d lost stuff due to the flood, you should contact Res Life for assistance.

In under two weeks they announced plans to build new dorms and retire my building.

Part 1 of big "how to chibi-fy this flower????" guide is here!!! 🥰

These are *peak athletes*. All of them.

Literally. These are Olympic athletes.

Literally peak performance. Human bodies at peak performance. Love it.

I want to add that both women's gymnastics and women's track have gotten far more muscular since these photos were taken. And if you want to say that decreases performance, I DEFY you to watch Simone Biles or Sha'carri Richardson perform.

They literally only compete with themselves. They are on that level.

Or watch Ilona Maher absolutely dominate at rugby. Again, peak performance.

The Technique:

I draw the frames and then I use the liquify tool to push the lines into the next frame and redraw them where I need to. This allows me to keep the lines consistent, but gives me the control of frame by frame animation bc I am still making each frame manually! I also use 3d models as reference to help me with the angles! Super important to use reference while you animate (and with art in general), if youre no good handling 3d models then act it out and record yourself!

The Theory:

i think most people are at least loosely familiar with the 12 principles of animation (if youre not, heres a 2.5 minute video showcasing them!), but may not necessarily know how to employ them. the main 3 i tend to focus on when I animate is rhythm, telegraphing, and inertia so ill cover those there 👍

1. Timing & Rhythm

Timing is how you space out your frames both in how long an individual frame is held for, and also when you drawn an inbetween of two frames you can favour one frame slightly more than the other instead of drawing the exact average of the cels, giving the favoured cel more timing weight.

Left line has the cels evenly spaced out on the timeline, right holds the first cel for longer and the second cel slightly favours the last frame. It creates a more interesting rhythm to the animation! Rhythm is how I think of animation timing. Theres a beat like a song to every animation I make, and creating an interesting beat is what makes an animation fun to watch (for me, anyway):

2. Anticipation / Telegraphing

Before I animate a big change in movement, I like to telegraph that its coming. Usually this is doing a little counter movement in the opposite direction, but thats not the only way to telegraph a motion, e.g. eye movement can telegraph a head turn!

3. Follow-through / Overshoot / Inertia

Unless the movement is mechanical, it wont come to a hard stop and will have some level of bounce or easing out to it. How much "bounce" you add will have a big impact on how the animation feels, but a very subtle bounce will add a natural feeling to the end of a motion.

Secondary animations will use a lot of this, note that the head and the hand have a small amount of continuous motion (primary animation), and then the hair has a lot of bounce and inertia (secondary animation which reacts to the primary animation). Note the different amounts applied to the braid vs the sideburn vs the bangs