Lost in the fog

We love Clip, don’t we? Hell yes we love Clip, it’s the greatest.

Until you decide to start dinking around with maybe making some custom brushes for the first time and everything seems pretty straightforward and you get everything set exactly the way you want it and… and, uh… why won’t it change color? Why?? What have you done wrong??¿?

You poke on everything, literally hecking everything, trying to figure out WHY THE DAMN BRUSH STAYS BLACK NO MATTER WHAT, and no easy answers are forthcoming and you’re just about to cry. Which was MY damn life this morning and for way too long this evening. I was trying to make a brush to streamline some of the background stuff in a couple of panels of Red Sector A, and it was almost perfect except WHY COULDN’T I CHANGE THE DAMN COLOR

I gave up, asked Google, and found a video tutorial that answered that question, and while it’s a simple fix that will make loads of sense once you think about the kind of crazy stuff you can do with Clip brushes, it’s probably not what you would have thought.

That’s it. That’s the fix. All you gotta do is, make sure the layer “expression color” thing is set to “Gray.”

And then go on to set your image as a brush tip material and make your brush and that fixes your problem. You can now change your brush’s color like any other normal brush.

Now why the entire damn hell would they make you do that just to be able to change a brush’s color? Remember how I mentioned all the cool stuff Clip brushes can do, like spray rainbow-colored sparkles all over your artwork?

If your brush tip layer’s “Expression Color” is set to “color,” the brush will use your brush tip image as is. Meaning, if it’s a full color clipart of a turducken, it’s gonna spray full-color turduckens everywhere.

Have you seen one of these dipshits? If you post regularly on ao3, chances are YES, but more likely you didn't notice nor suspect it was a bot. Sometimes they start off nice, or even praise you before getting nasty out of nowhere, like so:

But much like Grok, their newest obsession is nazism.

I don't know where they come from, or what purpose this could possibly serve other than suicidebaiting random people in the internet, I guess; but apparently they've started parroting names from real users to send these comments and shifting their general length to go by undetected. Maybe those are scrappers trying to train 'reviewbots' to be sold as part of some scam service promising to give feedback for newbie writers, who the fuck knows.

Here are more examples of the tone and backhanded compliments you can find in these:

-Hand of Sorrow by Within Temptation: “The curse of his powers tormented his life, obeying the crown was a sinister price”/“His soul was tortured by love and by pain, he surely would flee but the oath made him stay”/“He’s torn between his honor and the true love of his life, he prayed for both but was denied.”

-Feathery Wings by Aurelio Voltaire: “A long, long time ago, I fell to this place from another dimension”/“And thrust amongst the beasts, the way they behave, it borders on dementia”/“And after all these years, I can barely take it, I don’t think I can make it”/“Take me away from here, I wanna go home”/“I’m so sick and tired of the taste of tears, the sting of pain, the smell fear, the sounds of crying out…as I stand here at the edge of the world, what do you remember, was it all you wanted?”

-Moon by Jin (BTS): “Though they say I’m beautiful, my sea is all black”/“In a blossoming field with blue skies, the truly beautiful one is you”/ “Suddenly I wonder, are you also looking at me right now? Will you find out about all my painful wounds?”/“Even so, I’ll orbit around you, I’ll stay by your side, I’ll be your light, all for you”

-Broken by Stream of Passion: “Drop the pain on my shoulder, I will carry it far away from home.”/“Bitter words, you don’t mean them, it’s the continued sound of broken promises”/“Broken, broken, we’re broken, we’re burning inside.”/“It’s not the way you are, not the way you are”

-Goodnight Demonslayer by Aurelio Voltaire: “There’s a monster that lives beneath your bed…oh for crying out loud, it’s a futon on the floor, he must be flat as a board”/ “There’s a creature that lurks behind the door? Though I’ve checked there fifteen times, when I leave then he arrives every night”/“Goodnight, demonslayer, goodnight, now it’s time to close your tired eyes”/“There’s devils to slay and dragons to ride, if they see you coming hell they better hide, goodnight, my little slayer, goodnight” (I can imagine him singing this to one of the kids lol)