A small list of random ass sites I’ve found useful when writing:
Fragrantica: perfume enthusiast site that has a long list of scents. v helpful when you’re writing your guilty pleasure abo fics
Just One Cookbook: recipe site that centers on Japanese cuisine. Lots of different recipes to browse, plenty of inspiration so you’re not just “ramen and sushi”
McCormick Science Institute: yes this is a real thing. the site shows off research on spices and gives the history on them. be historically accurate or just indulge in mindless fascination. boost your restaurant au with it
Cocktail Flow: a site with a variety of cocktails that’s pretty easy to navigate and offers photos of the drinks. You can sort by themes, strengths, type and base. My only real annoyance with this site is that the drinks are sometimes sorted into ~masculine~ and ~feminine~ but ehhhh. It’s great otherwise.
Tie-A-Tie: a site centered around ties, obviously. I stumbled upon it while researching tie fabrics but there’s a lot more to look at. It offers insight into dress code for events, tells you how to tie your ties, and has a section on the often forgotten about tie accessories
Even more:
Types of High Heels: A page describing twenty five different types of high heels. It gives a description and pictures. Shake it up from just “stilettos and kitten heels”
Random Job Generator: Exactly as it says. The site offer more generators like characters, plots, or town names.
gravitality asked: I have two questions! First: have you ever thought of doing a tarot card suit for your characters? I think it'd work really well for them! And two: help me how do I draw legs
Hi!! I’ve absolutely been thinking about that, yeah, in fact I recently talked about that to my boyfriend just recently. It’ll likely happen after october! And to answer your second question! I made a thing on legs that i hope you’ll find useful!!
So. I’ve already explained basics on legs here, but I don’t think it hurts to go through some extra details to help you understand legs some more.
The very basic thing is to imagine legs as teardrops. Again, this has already been covered in said tutorial above, but I figured it’s still good to mention even the most basic thing that I know of. I still highly recommend you check it out to get in more detail and to see some other examples and practices that you do. But basically, think of legs in the shapes of teardrops, when it comes to shape. If you need a simple stick-figure to connect the legs in the first place, make sure that they bend at the knees a bit so that the legs don’t come off as stiff and unnatural.
As you can see, this method works perfectly for realistic legs as it does for stylistic ones. Remember to use these as a guideline, never to be the exact base of the legs you will be drawing. If you draw traditionally, remember not to draw these guides too hard, or they will be hard to erase/do freestyle!
But how do you actually draw out the legs without drawing them perfectly straight, as shown to the left? The trick is to add volume to them, and how you do that can be winged to your own liking. The idea is to think in curves. As no leg is perfectly straight. You may make these curves minimal if you don’t want them to be curvy, but keep in mind, still, that not even your own bones are perfectly straight, so it is highly recommended that you make them bend, at least a little.
It all depends on how you draw them as well. Say you put your legs together, as shown in this picture, what happens to the fat and muscle? Naturally, they press together, much like how thighs squish on the surface when you sit down (I’m sure most people know what I’m talking about). Make sure this shows in your art! This is very important to keep in mind, because it makes it all look more natural and believable. Try to cross your legs or stand up and sit down again for real-life examples!
The same applies for stretching your legs, more or less, except they appear to become more ‘hollow’ and slimmer. They become less soft to the touch, too, and might show. Try stretching your legs and feel where the muscles tense and where it feels ‘hollow’. This is very helpful with your art.
Many leg tutorials talk about legs without mentioning the behind. It requires a tutorial on it’s own, in all honesty, but this is the most simplest way to draw it connecting to the legs. Remember that it comes in many different shapes, and this is just a super basic guide! Two circles overlapping, while following the line and flow of the legs. Remember the muscle/fat as mentioned above!
Okay, so we got the basics of leg shapes figured out? What if you want o draw them in a certain pose, or with a certain silhouette, but perhaps do not have the reference for it? Or you want to blend your style into it? The key is to not shy away from doodling the form. Make mess, draw lightly and don’t care about the anatomy. That way you’ll get everything down without it appearing stiff. You can clean up the sketch later, always, and if you can, use a reference after you have drawn your pose, to correct your drawing.
Remember that the hips do a lot to the pose of the legs! Make sure they are in flow with your legs, so that it can look more natural. Remembers that hips ‘rotate’ with the spine.
I’ve talked about this method before when it comes to posing, and the same applies for the legs. One way to make legs appear ‘steady’ is to picture them standing in a line, and one of those legs need not to stray from the lines too much, making it steady. If you want a dynamic pose despite the steady pose, you can always have the other leg stray from the line, since it only matters that one leg is steady. This method can create good, casual poses without making them appear boring. (also notice how the teardrop shapes are used here, despite the highly stylized legs)
Do you want a highly dynamic pose, or them to appear unsteady, then skip the line entirely and make both legs aim away from it completely. As you can see, the legs appear more moving, in action, as if they’re fighting, falling, or dancing. As you can imagine, this is not a pose that one could stay steady on, suggesting that it’s taken mid-movement. More about posing and this ‘line’ method is talked about in this tutorial.
Hope this helped you, if you have any questions let me know, and if you’d like to check out all my tutorials they can be found here!
I’ve been getting quite a few asks about the process for the patterns in my stylized artworks, so I decided to put together a couple of tips regarding them.
Firstly, what you need are
— CUSTOM BRUSHES —
Most of the patterns I use are custom brushes I made, such as those:
For the longest time I was convinced making brushes must be super extra complicated. I was super extra wrong. All you need to start is a transparent canvas (2500px x 2500px max):
This will be your brush tip. When you’re satisfied how it looks, click Ctrl+A to select the whole canvas and go to ‘define brush preset’ under the edit menu
You will be asked to name your new glorious creation. Choose something that describes it well, so you can easily find it between all the ‘asfsfgdgd’ brushes you’ve created to be only used once
This is it. Look at it, you have just created a photoshop brush. First time i did I felt like I was cheated my whole life. IT’S SO EASY WHY HASN’T ANYONE TOLD ME
Time to edit the Good Boi to be more random, so it can be used as a Cool Fancy Pattern. Go into brush settings and change whatever you’d like. Here’s a list of what I do for patterns:
- under Shape Dynamics, I increase Size Jitter and Angle jitter by 5%-15%
- under Brush Tip Shape, I increase spacing by a shitload. Sometimes it’s like 150%, the point is to get the initial brush tip we painted to be visible.
- If I want it to look random and noisy, I enable the Dual Brush option, which acts like another brush was put on top of the one we’ve created. You can adjust all of the Dual Brush options (Size, Spacing, Scatter, Count) as you wish to get a very nice random brush to smear on your backgrounds
The result is as above. You can follow the same steps to create whatever brush you need: evenly spaced dots that look like you painted them by hand, geometric pattern to fill the background, a line of perfectly drawn XDs and so on.
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE
— PATHS —
But what if you want to get lots of circles made of tiny dots? Or you need rows of triangles for your cool background? Photoshop can do all of that for you, thanks to the magic of paths.
Typically, paths window can be found right next to Layers:
Draw whatever path you want, the Shape Tool has quite a bit of options. Remember, paths are completely different from brush strokes and they won’t show up in the navigator. To move a path around, click A to enable path selection tool. You can use Ctrl+T to transform it, and if you move a path while pressing Alt it will be duplicated.
Now, pick a brush you wish really was in place of that path you’ve drawn and go to layers, then choose the layer you want it to be drawn on. Then, click this tiny circle under the Paths window:
Then witness the magic of photoshop doing the drawing for you while you wonder how tf have you managed to forget about this option for the past 2 years
You can combine special brushes and paths for all sorts of cool effects. I mostly use them in backgrounds for my cards, but you can do whatever you want with them.
I hope that answers the questions for all of the people who were sending me inquires about the patterns. If you have any questions regarding this or any other Photoshop matter feel free to message me, I’m always up for complaining about how great and terrible Photoshop is C’:
Don’t buy Angelus pain’t on Amazon, it’s like $6.99 an ounce. Buy it direct from their online store the poster above linked, the single ounce bottles are $2.95 there. Also, a little goes a long way, unless you have something HUGE to paint, you can probably do it with a small bottle. I barely dented the one I got doing all the black on this;
a bunch of people have asked me questions regarding my linework, so i figured i’d make a more complete reference instead of a brief explanation. all of this, of course, is based off of my own personal experience - everyone has a different way of doing things, and my way is certainly not perfect! i just wanted to share my process for those who were interested.
thank you for your support and asks! you are all really wonderful.
Thedan Script - used extensively by Gardnerian Witches Runic Alphabets - they served for divinatory and ritual purposes, as well as the more practical use; there are three main types of Runes; Germanic, Scandinavian/Norse, and Anglo-Saxon and they each have any number of variations, depending on the region from which they originate Celtic and Pictish - early Celts and their priests, the Druids, had their own form of alphabet known as “Ogam Bethluisnion”, which was an extremely simple alphabet used more for carving into wood and stone, than for general writing, while Pictish artwork was later adopted by the Celts, especially throughout Ireland Ceremonial Magick Alphabets - ”Passing the River”, ”Malachim” and ”Celestial” alphabets were used almost exclusively by ceremonial magicians
Reblogging for future reference, I love learning how to write in these alphabets.
I’ve said this to my non-techie friends countless times. It’s no secret that being able to code makes you a better job applicant, and a better entrepreneur. Hell, one techie taught a homeless man to code and now that man is making his first mobile application.
(note: yes I realize that 3/5 of those links were Google projects)
But most folks are intimidated by coding. And it does seem intimidating at first. But peel away the obscurity and the difficulty, and you start to learn that coding, at least at its basic level, is a very manageable, learnable skill.
There are a lot of resources out there to teach you. I’ve found a couple to be particularly successful. Here’s my list of resources for learning to code, sorted by difficulty:
Novice
Never written a line of code before? No worries. Just visit one of these fine resources and follow their high-level tutorials. You won’t get into the nitty-gritty, but don’t worry about it for now:
w3 Tutorials (start at HTML on the left sidebar and work your way down)
Intermediate
Now that you’ve gone through a handful of basic tutorials, it’s time to learn the fundamentals of actual, real-life coding problems. I’ve found these resources to be solid:
If you’re here, you’re capable of building things. You know the primitives. You know the logic control statements. You’re ready to start making real stuff take shape. Here are some different types of resources to turn you from someone who knows how to code, into a full-fledged programmer.
Programming problems
Sometimes, the challenges in programming aren’t how to make a language do a task, but just how to do the task in general. Like how to find an item in a very large, sorted list, without checking each element. Here are some resources for those types of problems
If you learned Python, Django is an amazing platform for creating quick-and-easy web applications. I’d highly suggest the tutorial - it’s one of the best I’ve ever used, and you have a web app up and running in less than an hour.
I’ve never used Rails, but it’s a very popular and powerful framework for creating web applications using Ruby. I’d suggest going through their guide to start getting down-and-dirty with Rails development.
If you know PHP, there’s an ocean of good stuff out there for you to learn how to make a full-fledged web application. Frameworks do a lot of work for you, and provide quick and easy guides to get up and running. I’d suggest the following:
If there’s one point I wanted to get across, it’s that it is easier than ever to learn to code. There are resources on every corner of the internet for potential programmers, and the benefits of learning even just the basics are monumental.
If you know of any additional, great resources that aren’t listed here, please feel free to tweet them to me @boomeyer.
Best of luck!
I’d also like to add some more specialized resources!
SpriteKit (2D) and SceneKit (3D) which are built into the official compiler to create iOS apps (see iOS apps for more resources)
also all of the above game engines (cross-platform)
Game console development:
Game Maker Studio (with a paid subscription)
Unity
Unreal
CryEngine
Note that games can also be created on more general platforms like iOS and Android apps, but the resources listed above are specialized for game development.
iOS apps:
In order to develop iOS apps, you’ll need to purchase an iOS developer program membership for $99 a year, which requires an Apple account. Here are some general resources:
Xcode (the official IDE for iOS apps; can be installed on OS X)
Xcode also has SpriteKit, SceneKit, and Metal built in, all of which are incredibly useful for creating apps that require elaborate graphics, particularly games.
Also, in order to publish iOS apps, you’ll have to juggle certificates, app ids, and provisioning profiles. This process can be convoluted at times so here are some resources:
Blender (can also be used to create games; Python script; free and open-source; can be installed on Windows, OS X, and Linux)
Maya (specialized script; free trial, free 3-year student subscription, and paid subscription versions; can be installed on Windows, OS X, and Linux to an extent)
3ds Max (Python script; free trial, free 3-year student subscription, and paid subscription versions; can be installed on Windows and OS X)
RenderMan (specialized script; free for non-commercial/educational use and pay-per-license for commercial use; can be installed on Windows, OS X, and Linux)
Misc. resources:
Stack Overflow is an ask-and-answer community for programmers. It’s amazing and will save your life. Sign up and don’t be afraid to ask for help.
Github offers a student pack (here) if you create an account and prove you’re a student. This gives you free access to a bunch of great programming resources for free for a certain period of time, such as Unreal Engine. Also, Github in general is a site that you can host your code on. Other users can see it, and “fork” it to make a copy of your code and modify it.
Parse is a backend service that allows you to store data in databases it hosts on its own servers. It lets you use push notifications, create users, store and retrieve data, etc. It’s compatible with iOS apps, Android apps, Windows apps, Xamarin, React, Unity, OS X, Windows, JavaScript, PHP, .net, Arduino, and Embedded C. It’s free up to a certain limit that depends on the services you use.
Cloud9, Codebox, and Squad are online IDEs that allow for real-time collaboration and support a variety of languages, so they’re useful for team projects.
And some general advice:
Your program will not work right away, 99% of the time. That’s okay. Do your best to figure out where the error is. Here is some advice on debugging (written for PHP but the methods can be generalized).
If you’re stuck, Google. Google like there’s no tomorrow.
Ask questions on a community like Stack Overflow.
For that matter, browse relevant Stack Overflow questions. You can probably find some solutions there.
Don’t be afraid to copy and paste.
Take breaks sometimes if you’re getting burned out. But don’t stay away from your projects for too long or you’ll lose track of its status.
Backup your code. On the cloud, on a USB drive, wherever. If your IDE has a backing up feature like snapshots, use it whenever you hit a milestone.
If your project is big, split it up into milestones and set goals. Don’t tackle everything at once.
Like the OP said, coding isn’t just for professionals and “geeks” anymore. Anyone can learn it if you really try, and with the rapidly expanding tech industry, learning coding can really broaden your opportunities.
If any of the links are broken, or you have a question or some information/resources to add, you can contact me through the askbox or the OP through his Twitter (as mentioned in his post).
If you’re interested, try some of these out and best of luck!
Great work expanding on my humble list to include a much fuller collection of resources for learning how to code! Cheers!
