The Warrior Puffin

12ft – Hate paywalls? Try this site out.

My Fridge Food – No idea what to make? Tell this site what ingredients you have on hand and it will give you recipes to cook.

Project Gutenberg – Always ends up on these type of lists and for very good reason. All works that are copyright free in one place.

Ninite – New PC? Install all of your programs in one go with no bloat or unnecessary crap.

Unchecky – Tired of software trying to install additional unwanted programs? This will stop it completely by unchecking the necessary boxes when you install.

Sci-Hub – Research papers galore! Check here before shelling out money. And if it’s not here, try the next link in our list.

LibGen – Lots of free PDFs relate primarily to the sciences.

Zotero – A free and easy to use program to collect, organize, cite and share research.

Car Complaints – Buying a used car? Check out what other owners of the same model have to say about it first.

CamelCamelCamel – Check the historical prices of items on Amazon and set alerts for when prices drop.

Have I Been Pawned – Still the king when it comes to checking if your online accounts have been released in a data breach. Also able to sign up for email alerts if you’ve ever a victim of a breach.

Radio Garden – Think Google Earth but wherever you zoom, you get the radio station of that place.

Just The Recipe – Paste in the url and get just the recipe as a result. No life story or adverts.

Tineye – An Amazing reverse image search tool.

My 90s TV – Simulates 90’s TV using YouTube videos. Also has My80sTV, My70sTV, My60sTV and for the younger ones out there, My00sTV. Lose yourself in nostalgia.

Foto Forensics – Free image analysis tools.

Old Games Download – A repository of games from the 90’s and early 2000’s. Get your fix of nostalgia here.

Online OCR – Convert pictures of text into actual text and output it in the format you need.

Remove Background – An amazingly quick and accurate way to remove backgrounds from your pictures.

Twoseven – Allows you to sync videos from providers such as Netflix, Youtube, Disney+ etc and watch them with your friends. Ad free and also has the ability to do real time video and text chat.

Terms of Service, Didn’t Read – Get a quick summary of Terms of service plus a privacy rating.

Coolors – Struggling to get a good combination of colors? This site will generate color palettes for you.

This To That – Need to glue two things together? This’ll help.

Photopea – A free online alternative to Adobe Photoshop. Does everything in your browser.

BitWarden – Free open source password manager.

Atlas Obscura – Travelling to a new place? Find out the hidden treasures you should go to with Atlas Obscura.

ID Ransomware – Ever get ransomware on your computer? Use this to see if the virus infecting your pc has been cracked yet or not. Potentially saving you money. You can also sign up for email notifications if your particular problem hasn’t been cracked yet.

Way Back Machine – The Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites and loads more.

Rome2Rio – Directions from anywhere to anywhere by bus, train, plane, car and ferry.

Splitter – Seperate different audio tracks audio. Allowing you to split out music from the words for example.

myNoise – Gives you beautiful noises to match your mood. Increase your productivity, calm down and need help sleeping? All here for you.

DeepL – Best language translation tool on the web.

via indiarosecrawford

Frog Paints a Water Lily Pond 🪷🎨🐸

my brain: 45 years ago this person could've made a public access television show that ran for half a decade on the strength of this concept with the right framing device and it would've been paid for with federal arts grants and maybe even national syndication rights. now they're begging for a single minute of engagement on tiktok in the hopes that maybe someday the abstract metrics of digital media platforms will translate into a tangible career

me: yeah me: cute frog though

Starts here

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More:

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Willow made a habit of staying late. She’d sit in the back, reading or repairing costumes until close when she could have Hunter all to herself. Sometimes Luz stayed to close with him and the three of them would chat but Luz always found a reason to leave them alone. Despite her best efforts and her patience, Willow could never stay longer than Hunter. She longed to walk him home, see him in a setting other than behind the bar, but he always found an excuse to linger. She didn’t press him about it but found it impossible to see him anywhere but work. 

Luz said he was just shy, but Willow saw a different side of Hunter. He was hardly timid, no, he was cautious. He was thorough and prepared and determined. Beyond that he was smart and funny and dorky. He was such a dork she could hardly stand it. He was handsome, but that was obvious. He was different around her, like he was nervous and calm at the same time. She suspected his heart raced when they were near just as hers did. She had been burned before, but he didn’t know that. Neither of them spoke much about their past and it wasn’t because they didn’t trust each other, but it was nice to have someone know the version of herself she liked the most.

 So maybe there was something in his past that made him hesitant to return her advances (they were returned, but she had to lay it on thick sometimes for him to register them as flirting).

But she really liked him, so she’d take what she could.

Skintones for POC companions in Dragon Age

Whitewashing is a huge problem in every fandom, and DA is no exception. All of the characters above are whitewashed and have their skin lightened on a daily basis. 

There is no excuse when someone whitewashes a character. Take your appropriate swatches if you must, and make sure you are staying true to the characters actual skin tone. Use these colours if you’d like - they were more meant to prove a point. You are certainly welcome to use them as a base.

Stop whitewashing POC. Stop lightening skin, stop slimming down features, and stop blaming whitewashing on lighting. You know better than that. You can do better than that.

Do not take swatches from the lightest part of the face - all the light colours shown here are meant for highlighting purposes. They are the highlights of the face, to be used to display light bouncing off the surface of one’s skin.

Skintones are HARD to replicate accurately. Especially if you haven’t put a lot of study into it. Color theory takes a long time to learn and most fan artists haven’t spent that kind of time trying to master it. Hell, even most professionals can’t do it perfectly. Most aren’t intentionally whitewashing. In fact, most are probably swatching from game stills to make sure they don’t whitewash and yet they still get called out for it. Why? For several reasons. 1) Photoshop tends to desaturate swatched colors. Darker skintones are pigmented therefore usually more saturated, therefore if the artist doesn’t realize this is happening they don’t realize the color has changed so they don’t consciously boost the saturation or shift the value. 2) Monitor discrepancy. For example my Dorian pic is significantly lighter on my pc than on my phone. Different monitor settings have a tendency to change color. Some of us like bright displays and some of us can’t handle that kind of light. Mine is turned down therefore sometimes when I paint things look TOO dark when in reality they’re not so what the artist sees on their computer and what you see on yours might be different. Digital art makes it hard to get colors perfect across the board. But lighting does factor in a great deal.

The examples shown in the post above are all shown in similar lighting, but what happens when an artist wants a non-neutral light? Maybe they want a super bright sunlight or cool toned white light. What then?

I took a few POC models in xna lara and lined them up. Notice how the skintones change. (In reality they’d shift a little more than this because xna lara is terrible at lighting) The “flat neutral” is the most accurate with their base textures.

Can I just point out how light Fenris actually is in comparison to everyone else? Yet people get absolutely pissed if you paint him lighter than Zevran who is actually several shades darker.  And if I had painted Fenris ANY of the colors in any one of those pictures I would have gotten called out for whitewashing. In fact when I painted him (and as a rule in general) I took him at least two or three tones down from his actual color and boosted his saturation and still had a few comments about it.

Now, this is all relative, but I’m just trying to illustrate why this is a complicated matter and why you can still follow all the rules and still get called out on whitewashing. The lighting and color scheme WILL completely shift color.

To better illustrate this, may I invite professor Idris Elba.

Same man, four skintone shifts. Four different lighting scenarios. Different swatches. 

This is a problem because when finding references we think “Which screen should I should I try to match? Well, let’s say my lighting is similar to the second picture. Okay, great, I have my reference and I’ve swatched and compensated for the discrepancy. Fantastic, but WAIT, I still get called out because he’s not as dark as he is in 3 or 4 even though he wouldn’t be because my lighting isn’t neutral or dark, and the ambient color is different. I think “well fuck, I did the best I could and I matched my reference.” But the person criticizing thinks “he’s darker than that so you didn’t make him dark enough” and while, yes, that point is valid, it’s also not applicable in this particular situation.So you do another picture, this time in darker lighting, replicated picture number 3. Another person says “he’s more the color of number 4, you made him too light and too red.” Eventually you just don’t know how to approach without criticism anymore and what happens? A lot of artist then give up on learning dark skin tones. Which is the complete opposite of what we want, isn’t it? That’s not progress.

In closing…while I’m sure there are some people out there intentionally whitewashing and they SHOULD be fucking called out for it because I can’t think of many things that piss me off more than that I absolutely have to point out that probably a ton of artists who get constant hate about this are probably just victims of lack of color theory knowledge and swatching from screens without realizing how inaccurate it can be sometimes. And that may be giving some of them too much leeway, but is that better or worst than automatically assuming the worst? This is why a lot of professionals tell you that it’s better to mix colors yourself,but can I reiterate again that SKINTONES ARE FUCKING HARD AS A BOG FISHER’S BALLS!  Most of those artists are already kicking themselves because they don’t know how to do everything perfectly, tearing them down over something as complicated as this only makes them feel like absolute shit. Educate them, by all means, but make sure your information covers all, not just one aspect.This kind of thing takes years and years to learn, (I don’t even know it well and I’ve been doing it for more than 10 years) it’s unrealistic to expect a set of swatches to have much effect when color and light come into play. 

An actual artist: “Uh… no?”

“Mom has been texting me for the last twenty minutes. She wants me to come home. It’s a four hour drive, when the roads are clear, and from what I hear everybody is trying to get somewhere right now. There’s no telling if I’d even-”

“Everybody else has left. All the other kids were picked up, the other staff left. They gave me all the keys. I promised to stay and wait for as long as- well. Even if some of the parents show up, I guess some of them won’t, so I’m just waiting. Until.”

[Clears throat.]

“A couple of people came after everybody left. Peter, one of Aidan’s fathers, gave me three hundred dollars for staying. What am I going to do with money? It’s- anyway. I kind of get it. He wanted to give me something.”

[Audio ends]

[Audio starts]

“They’re all between 2 and 4.” Sniff. “They’re so little. Too little to really- maybe if they were older, I’d have to tell them something. But um. I’m just- trying to stay calm and keep them happy and occupied. I think that’s the best thing, right now.”

[Heaving breaths.]

“I normally use this recorder to help me remember stuff. It’s just, uh, habit to talk to it. I don’t know. They’re napping, right now. I’ve got the baby monitor, they know that if they talk into it, I’ll come, so-”

[Sobbing.]

[Audio ends]

[Audio starts]

“Mom keeps texting, so I blocked her. I sent her a text telling her goodbye, first, but. I do. But these kids need me.”

[Sniff.]

“I tried calling their parents again, but I can’t get anybody. It’s just busy signals. I called the firefighter station, 911. I can’t get through to anybody.”

[Shaky breath.]

“I went out into the yard. Um, I think they can play. It’s nice out, and you can’t really see it yet. Little bit of a glimmer, if they ask I’ll just tell them it’s a plane, but it’s nice out and we’ve got hours before-”

[Murmuring child’s voice, indistinguishable.]

[Audio ends]

Tiny griffons for all of your animal companion or obscure-mob-attacking-the-party-in-the-forest needs.

For the past two years, my friends and I have been working on the production of a short film called “Lucía desde el espacio” (Lucia from space) a beautiful short-film that talks about a deep-rooted issue in Mexican society: violence against women. 

The story, however, focuses on this through a lens of pain, love, and innocence. It’s sad and touching and a story that needs to be told. 

Two weeks ago, after two weeks of pre-production and scrapping for every penny we could get, we finally shot the short-film. It was an amazing and exhausting experience. 

(there was a point, when shooting a specific scene, where half the crew was moved to tears)

I am dying to share this project with you (subtitles will definitely be added) but before that, I need your help!

We only have 19 days left in our Kickstarter campaign to finance post-production. This includes sound-mixing, musicalization and inscription fees to send the film to festivals where it can be screened to a wider audience.

Any little bit you could donate would make a huge difference for us. Consider, with coin exchange rates, any dollars or euros you could donate —no matter how seemingly small— are a big step forward for us!

If you really can’t help support the project, at least a reblog or share would be of huge help. Time is of the essence and the more people we can reach, the better. 

Also, under the cut are some pictures of the production. We are all young, passionate and in love with this film. With your help, we can make walk the last stretch to make this story justice!

Well, I finally finished the whole M9 in Art/Pastiche series.  I thought you might be interested in seeing the side to side with some of my inspirations. A quick rundown-

Caleb- Van Gogh Beau- Roy Lichtenstein Molly- Byzantine Mosaics Jester- Klimt Matt- Hans Holbein Yasha- 15th Century Illuminated Manuscripts/Gerard Horenbout Fjord- Adventure Pulp Covers Nott- Playing Card Design Caduceus- Mucha

In case anyone was curious- Caleb was the easiest, Jester was the hardest, I’m most pleased with Matt, I’m least pleased with Nott, and Molly took the longest.

(source)

Unsplash -  photography, illustration, and art

Pixabay - same as unsplash

Pexels - stock photos and videos

Stockvault.net - stock photos

Veceezy - vectors and clipart

Getdrawings - simplistic images and drawing tutorials

Gumroad - photoshop brushes (and more)

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 infringing copyright! 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. 

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