kivovis

[kivovis]

When I was young my dad offhandedly told me he thought people treated fish with so much casual cruelty because fish can’t scream.

The words branded themselves across my soul.

As an adult I think he may have been joking. He payed no especial attention to any indignities fish suffered in our household but I could never forget. I saw fish in a different light after that.

Fish kept in tiny bowls, breathing their own poisons, dying by inches. Fish kept in cold tanks, casually disposed of. Fish touted as being short lived when they could outlive the better loved family dog if only they could breathe. Fish casually won and discarded in cheap plastic bags, thrown away a week later.

How they would scream, if they could.

[kivovis]

gonna show u guys a little opalescent highlight hack i threw together today

rainbow gradient above your main figure (i usually have all my main figure folders/layers in one big folder, so i can clip gradient maps + adjustments to it!). liquify tool to push the colors around a bit. STAY WITH ME I KNOW IT LOOKS STUPID RN I'M GOING SOMEWHERE WITH THIS

THEN: set it to add/glow (or the equivalent in ur drawing program), lower the opacity a bit, and apply a layer mask. then u can edit the mask with whatever tools you like to create rainbow highlights!!

in this case i'm mostly using the lasso fill tool to chip out little facets, but i've also done some soft airbrushing to bring in larger rainbow swirls in some areas. it's pretty subtle here, but you can see it better when i remove the gradient map that's above everything, since below i'm working in greyscale:

more granular rambling beneath the cut!

u could also just do this with a brush that has color jitter, but what i like about using layer masks for highlight/shading layers is how simple and reversible it makes everything. i can use whatever brushes i want, and erasing/redoing things is super low stakes, which is great when i often approach this stuff with a super trial-and-error approach.

example: have u ever thrown a gradient w multiple colors over an entire piece, set it to multiply etc, and then tried to erase it away to carve out shadows/highlights? it's super frustrating, bc it looks really good, but if u erase something and then change ur mind later, u basically would have to like. recreate the gradient in the area u want to cover up again. that's how i used to do things before figuring out layer masks!! but masking basically creates a version of this with INFINITE undo bc u can erase/re-place the base layer whenever u want.

anyway, back to rambling about this specific method:

i actually have TWO of these layers on this piece (one with the liquified swirls shown above, and another that's just a normal concentric circle gradient with much broader stripes) so i can vary the highlights easily as needed.

since i've basically hidden the rainbow pattern from myself, the colors in each brushstroke i make will kind of be a surprise, which isn't always great -- but easily fixable! for example, if i carve out a highlight and it turns out the rainbow pattern in that area is way too stripey, i can just switch from editing the mask to editing the main layer and blur that spot a bit.

also, this isn't a full explanation of the overall transparency effect in these screencaps! there's other layer stuff happening below the rainbow highlights, but the short version is i have all this character's body parts in different folders, each with their own lineart and background fill, and then the fill opacity is lowered and there's multiply layers clipped to that -- blah blah it's a whole thing. maybe i'll have a whole rundown on this on patreon later. uhhh i think that's it tho! i hope u get something useful out of this extremely specific thing i did lmao

[kivovis]

tumblr removed my header which was literally just this image

[kivovis]

Terminating someone as kind and inoffensive as charlotte is a clear message just like all these other terminations to all the other transfems on this site that you are next. It doesn’t matter if you stay out of drama and are a good friend, just by simply existing you are incurring the wrath of those who don’t want your kind around. Whether this message is more from tumblr staff or people mass reporting behind the scenes it doesn’t matter. You can be pushed out of any space that deems you've made a mistake at the drop of a hat.

[kivovis]

[kivovis]

Staff have done their best to hide this post, OP's blog has been deleted to hide it. Spread this post as much as you can (ideally through screenshots to avoid it being nuked)

[kivovis]

that bird

[kivovis]

Literally nothing will make me more evil than just being sort of overwhelmed by Noises

[kivovis]

a terrifying presence has entered the room

(bloody ver. under the cut)

[kivovis]

beautiful shirt for phil collins fans. bought it immediately

[kivovis]

album art is so important because it tells you what color the songs are

[kivovis]

ah yes, my favorite trope

[kivovis]

Milkshaked on the first day of his election campaign. We love to see it.

[kivovis]

I. Couldn't sleep until I made this

[kivovis]

Gerard P Donelan

[kivovis]

WHAT IF LAIOS ENTERED ALONE?

These keep getting worse n worse lmaooo

[kivovis]

Big news from Tartarus I'm just so proud of him