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not-xpr-art · 3 years

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Art Advice #4 - A Beginner’s Guide to Digital Art

Hi all!

This weeks entry into my Art Advice tag, where I offer various advice for artists of any skill level, is about digital art! Now, I am by no means an expert at digital (I’ve been doing it for nearly 8 years at this point and that is almost entirely self taught), but I have picked up a few pointers in that time which will hopefully help anyone just starting out!

(this blogpost is a little over 2000 words long btw)

A Beginner’s Guide to Digital Art

I know that the world of digital art has changed drastically in the 8 odd years since I started, but I’d still say that some of the options I started out with will be just as good for anyone who’s starting out now!

As always, I’ll be splitting this into sections to make it easier for you to navigate this post!

Part 1 - Equipment/Hardware

There are a lot of drawing tablet options on the market at the moment, and I’m not going to pretend that I know anything about half of them lol. But I think for a beginner, don’t worry about going for the most expensive option, even if the reviews are really good or your favourite artist uses it, especially if it is way above your budget!

An important thing to know is that there are two types of tablet. One is the plug-in kind. These are essentially a pad which you plug into your laptop or computer and draw on that whilst looking at the screen (they basically work the same way as a plug in mouse works). The other kind is the screen variety, which is a lot more like what most of us know as ‘tablets’ nowadays. And you draw directly onto the screen.

(a plug-in vs on screen tablet, both from Wacom)

Now, as for choosing between these, it is honestly a personal choice. But I’d say if you’re just wanting to try digital and you’re on a budget, a plug-in tablet can be really useful since it gets you used to the mechanics of what digital is like, and they are often significantly cheaper than the screen alternatives. I would say that plug-in tablets are a big learning curve, especially if you’re used to doing traditional stuff, but I do know a lot of professional artists who still use this kind of tablet when doing their work, so if it’s something you can get used to I would definitely consider it! Also, they’re often a lot more portable than some screen tablets! The first one I had was a Huion (a model so old that I can’t even find a link to it now lol), and I also know that Wacom are a well known brand that do some decent plug-in tablet. I’d recommend you do your own research on other brands and options, though!

Screen tablets are often a lot more expensive, but if you’re used to traditional art, they are a lot easier to get a handle of! But I know if you already have something like an iPad, or other general use tablets, then they offer apps that you can use to draw on (as well as things like the Apple pen, or other stylus’). The big difference between using these general tablets and ones specifically designed for drawing is pretty much purely a personal choice. I personally prefer the bigger screen of my XP-Pen tablet, along with a special screen protector that removes the shininess of the tablet screen and makes it feel more like ‘paper’ over when I used a general use tablet it draw. But if you already have an iPad, or something similar, then it’s honestly a really great starting point!

I think it’s important for me to mention that you don’t need fancy equipment to be an artist. The incredible Elicia Donze has revealed countless times how she has very basic equipment but still manages to produce the most stunning artworks! All you really need is some kind of drawing apparatus and a lot of patience lol! Getting good at any kind of art takes a lot of time and effort, but I would definitely say it’s worth it when you’re able to look back at your progress!

Part 2 - Software/Drawing Programs

Much like with the hardware discussion, choosing which program to use is entirely down to personal preference. I personally have never really liked Photoshop purely because it’s really complicated, but I know so many artists swear by it.

I think the main aspect to consider when you’re starting out is whether you want to pay for a program. Software like Photoshop, Clip Studio Paint and Procreate are some of the popular ones I hear about a lot of people using, but all require you to purchase or subscribe to them. So if you’re young or on a very tight budget, I’d honestly recommend the free alternative versions of these, such as Krita (Krita is quite a large program, but it has a lot of really awesome features and is very similar to Photoshop!), Gimp (this one is similar to Krita, but has slightly less options, I’d honestly recommend Gimp for anyone who does photo editing though!) or FireAlpaca (this is the one I use, by the way and it’s a pretty simple program, but has a lot of fantastic features and is perfect for how I work!). These don’t have as many features as some of the paid alternatives, but I honestly think all you really need to start digital art is some kind of ‘canvas’ and set of brushes!

Another great free program for beginners I’d recommend is MyPaint, which is great for doodling and just getting used to how digital art feels in comparison to traditional! It also has a bunch of ‘traditional style’ brushes, to make it look like charcoal or watercolour (which I’m sure the paid alternatives have too, but it’s always better when it’s free, I find lol...)

(this is an example of a drawing I did on MyPaint using the ‘charcoal’ effect brush!)

Most of the sites are pretty self explanatory, with sections dedicated to different brushes (I’ll go into the types of brushes later on in this post btw!), adjusting brush size, shape and opacity, a colour wheel, etc. You also have a section dedicated to ‘layers’ (another thing I’ll go into more detail later), and various ‘filters’ and editing options and effects you can add to your work to make it more interesting!

I’d really just recommend playing around with programs until you find your one!

Part 3 - The Pros of Digital Art!

I realise this section should probably earlier in this blog post lol, but I kinda wanted to go into what digital art can achieve in comparison to traditional art, and how beginner artists can utilise this!

I definitely didn’t take advantage of certain aspects of digital art when I first got into it, and they’re things that would have definitely made my life a whole lot easier lol!

Digital art allows you to tweak drawings as you do them. So if you accidentally drew the eye too far to the right, then you can easily move it to the right place. (I usually do this by selecting whichever area is wrong, cutting it out and then pasting it into a new area... And yes, there is probably a better and quick way of doing this but...I haven’t found that way yet lol...). And I honestly think that this has allowed me to look a lot more at a reference image in order to figure out where I’ve gone wrong with a drawing! Whereas with traditional art, I usually spend so long trying to get an eye right, that even if it’s slightly in the wrong place, I don’t want to completely redo that section. Digital allows you to completely rub out sections without leaving indents, which is honestly such a saving grace!

Another pro of digital is the Undo/Ctrl Z function! This means you can easily go back to before you made a major mistake with just a click of Ctrl Z... Though I have to say that this function has honestly ruined traditional art for me... Oh what wouldn’t I give for a real life Ctrl Z... But yeah, this is a great part of digital art and definitely something you will grow to love lol!

Another great thing about digital is that it allows you to flip and turn a canvas as you’re drawing on it. I spent a lot of time trying to turn my tablet around in order to draw certain parts of a piece before I realised you can turn the canvas itself without having to move yourself or your tablet!

Layers are another part of digital that can be super useful, and I have to be honest but I don’t really use them a lot. I know a lot of artists create layers for every section of their artworks (so, one for the linework, one for colouring, a separate one for the background, etc etc...). And there’s something really great about being able to paint without worrying about smudging into a previous section of the painting. This works well for my work since I do a lot of bright backgrounds. I also often create a lot of ‘versions’ of my works, so it’s useful to be able to change the background without affecting the main figure of the piece! (I have to say that I often work in one big layer when I’m doing paintings, just because I like how it feels more like ‘traditional’ art that way, but layers are such a brilliant tool, and definitely something you should play around with!)

The eyedropper tool is another one that is really useful! Although I never colour pick from my reference photos, I know some artists find this useful when they were just starting out (especially if you’re not sure what colour to make shadows or how to mix skin tones, etc etc). The eyedropper basically means you don’t need to mix your colours every time

Part 4 - Just some other things I wish I had known about when I was starting out lol...

This last section is just dedicated to a few things that I would have liked to have known when I was just starting out all those years ago.

First one is fluffy/textured brushes!

I spent most of my art life from 2013 until 2016 using ‘round’ brushes which are notoriously hard to blend with, so I’d recommend either downloading some fluffy/textured brushes (DeviantArt was where I got mine from a few years back, but there are probably other places you can get them for free too!) to your program of choice, since most of the programs I’ve used haven’t had fluffy/textured brushes as pre-set.

I may make another post about how I blend in my artworks if that’s something people would be interested in?

(this is an example of textured brush blending vs round brush blending... I usually opt for round brushes for rougher blending styles and the textured brushes for more smooth and ‘realistic’ blending... for a lot of pieces, though, I use both brushes (the round brushes are good for details!) in the same way that you use different sized brushes for real paintings!)

The next thing I wish I’d discovered earlier is the Brush Stabiliser option. Some programs may do this automatically, but the one I use (FireAlpaca) requires you to manually change the amount of stabilising you have on your brush. This is particularly useful if you want to draw neat lines or straight lines (the stabiliser essentially slows down the ‘ink’ as you’re drawing). I only recently started using the stabiliser, and although I still like having it mostly turned ‘off’ for doing sketchy work, it does make doing line work a lot easier, and also gives pieces a more polished look!

Next advice is to explore all the options you can in whatever program you use!

I feel like with certain programs, you can get overwhelmed by choice and you end up just using a few of the functions. But I’d really recommend just playing around with these programs, trying all the filters and editing options to get used to how the program works. You can often find interesting ways to adjust your artworks this way! In a way I’d recommend this way of working more than finding tutorials made by other people... Unless there’s a specific function you want to learn how to do, just having fun with digital art is a major part of it’s appeal to me!

There are probably a lot of other options I could go into, but this is already over 2000 words long, so I’ll leave it here for now lol! (I may do a part 2 though so... keep a look out for that!)

As always, if you have any questions to things I’ve said here, or are just looking for more advice, don’t hesitate to message me!

And if you like my work on here (art & blog posts) feel free to support me on my Ko-Fi! <3

#art advice #digital art #art advice for beginners #digital art for beginners #artist advice #digital art tips #artists on tumblr #just want to say again that i am not an expert at this at ALL lol #i just want to offer some really basic advice to anyone interested in starting out with digital!

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calyxestra · 3 years

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What software do you use to draw? You inspired me to draw more witcher although I don't share it on tumblr. May I have the permission to use your drawings for references? It's quite hard for me to capture his face at times in game

Hello again, and thank you for your ask!

Short answers:

I use GIMP and ArtRage; and yes, you may, thank you for asking!

Long answers under cut:

(1) What software do you use to draw?

I use GIMP and ArtRage. I started using GIMP (it’s free!) in earnest in August 2019. Then I bought ArtRage in July 2020 after trying out the free trial and, I think, have only just started to get the hang of it. So if you look through my blog archives, prior to late June 2020, everything digital is done in GIMP. My drawings are a mix of GIMP and ArtRage from then on out, with ArtRage being predominant right now. (I do have an “ArtRage” tag, but it doesn’t include all the things I drew in ArtRage, only the ones I think look particularly nice for whatever reason.) Sometimes I have also used both programs to work on a single drawing, whether substantially in both (example) or just for touch-ups in one (example).

They’re good for different things. ArtRage is good at imitating traditional processes of 2D art, with its canvas textures, brush customization and the way it can mix colors very naturally. You can rotate the canvas freely (not just at right angles) and tack up multiple reference images within the same window (example: WIP post showing ArtRage interface + final product), so it feels more like when you draw traditionally.

GIMP is, from what I can tell, basically supposed to be like Photoshop. It’s great at image editing, something that ArtRage is not specialized in. Layer modes can do a lot, depending on your style of digital drawing (example - 19 layers; example - 14 layers, 6 visible). GIMP is also good for drawing digitally straight in the program. The MyPaint brush set does a decent job at imitating different traditional media, too. Also, GIMP can export GIFs!

After getting used to ArtRage (a bit of a learning curve after being used to GIMP), I’d say that you can generally adapt your style to the strengths and limitations of the software, so other factors can be considered in your pick of software (e.g. compatibility with other programs, whether you can work in CMYK vs. RGB). Both GIMP and ArtRage can support a wide range of artistic styles. Whichever software you pick - you may pick a software I don’t know about! - I hope you have a lot of fun with it!

(2) May I have the permission to use your drawings for references?

Yes! I very much appreciate you asking. Personally, I draw almost exclusively with a reference in front of me, so I hope you don’t mind me giving some reference tips specific to Witcher 3. I have my own folders of references for Geralt and Regis that I built up while playing the game, and I find that cutscenes are the best time to try and grab a shot of a face. Geralt appears in, well, all the cutscenes (except during the Ciri flashbacks) so it’s relatively easy to get good shots of him throughout all of Witcher 3.

For Regis, a lot of his cutscenes in Blood and Wine take place in dim lighting or indoors, so he is a little difficult to get a really good look at. (Dettlaff is even worse - all his cutscenes are in dim lighting except for the flashback one, and that one is distorted!) The bootblack scenes (near beginning of story and end of story (optional) in Blood and Wine) where Regis goes with you contain opportunities to get a shot of Regis in bright daylight, depending on your in-game clock.

Aside from getting in-game shots, you can also look at concept art and character sheets from the game artists (for Regis, for example, see Marcin Blaszczak’s art on ArtStation: link).

#asks #doragonfruit #about my art

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rnmbb · 4 years

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is a big bang?

A Big Bang/Mini-Bang is a writing challenge that prompts authors and artists to work together to create a story and work of art that go together. In this case, our fandom is the Roswell New Mexico tv show, and our goal is 5000 words or more!

How do I sign up?

When sign-ups start, there will be a Google Form link posted for you to sign-up as an Author or an Artist or Beta

What if I need to drop out?

Yes! Sometimes life gets in the way or a story just doesn’t happen, and we understand that! However, there is a cutoff point, and if you do not let the mods know before this date, you can be banned from the next round. Even if it is after this cutoff date that you need to drop out please let us know so that we can discuss options. We can’t help if we don’t know there is a problem! Dropping all contact with mods after the cutoff date is grounds for an automatic ban, as we can’t help at that point. Please get in contact with us, so that we can arrange for art if needed!

I need help/support!

Once you sign-up, you will be sent a link to the Discord Server for the Big Bang. Feel free to talk about your story here with other authors, ask questions, look for a beta, ask for advice, freak out, or any general story discussions.

Membership is open to all who want to join the big bang or are thinking about it! Watch the blog for the link post

I don’t want to join a discord server/have never used discord before

We are making this a mandatory requirement this year. Communication is critical for the big bang to be successful, and a discord server is the best way for mods to ensure they can communicate with all participants. If you’re new to discord, the mods will help you with an introduction and navigation resources to the server.

Writing Requirements

What type of requirements are there for a fic?

Your fic must be at least 5,000 words long and, preferably, beta-read before the posting date. It must focus on or revolve around the characters from the TV show Roswell, New Mexico. You are not required to write a certain ship or a ship at all. Your fic also has to be completed at the time of posting. All chapters must be posted on the day of posting.

I've already been writing an RNM story - can I use that?

The purpose of this Bang is to unveil a brand-new, completed piece on your posting date, however we are okay with you finishing your piece as long as you have not posted more than 2,000 words and do not post any more until your posting date. Since this Bang has a minimum word count of 5,000 words we are asking that no more than 2,000 words be posted prior to signing up, so that at least 80% of the fic is new.

Can I write a sequel to a previous story?

Yes, but the sequel needs to be able to stand on its own. Please make sure to link to the first story so readers can read that as well.

I want to gift my big bang to someone, can I?

Big Bangs are not gift stories or exchanges, so your big bang must stand as itself.

What genres are allowed?

All genres are allowed as well as crossovers, as long as Roswell New Mexico characters are the main characters of the story.

I've got two ideas in my head - can I write both?

Yes, you can, as long as you think you'll be able to finish both stories by the deadline (if you submit two stories we will do our best to make sure there is a good amount of time in between the posting of each fic).

Can I write the story with someone else?

Yes, you may co-author your big bang if you want to. The word minimum however for co-authored works is 7,000.

What an artist summary?

An artist summary is written by authors to give a summary of the fic in a holistic manner. It will include all the main ships, main plot twists, trigger warnings, and any relevant tags for the artist to make an educated choice on making art for the work. The artist summaries are anonymous and only 500 words or less.

What should my outline look like?

A fic outline is an overview of your story. You will need to list major scenes of the story all the way from the beginning to the resolution. The outline needs to show how you plan on finish the story so the mods and artists can anticipate the story.

Can I have an extension?

We will be granting extensions on a case-by-case basis for rough drafts as long as your final fic or art is in by the due date. We would hope, however, that you use the checkpoints and all your available writing time to its fullest.

If you think at any time you need an extension (whether fic or art) contact the mods right away so we can begin working it out with you.

What do I do if I am not sure I will finish my story but still want to try?

If, by the time rough drafts are due, you aren't sure if you will be done with your story and don't want to risk having an artist claim it only to have to drop out you can switch to the Unofficial track. This will mean your story won't be put in the claims post but if you can finish it by the time final drafts are due we will arrange an artist for you and you will post with everyone else.

Artist Requirements

What are the requirements for art?

Each story an artist claims is required to have at least one art of quality for each story they claim. If an artist decides to claim 3 stories, they will be required to create one piece of art for each story, so at minimum, 3 pieces of art.

You’re creating something for a work that is at least 5k/10k in length, so we want the art to match that effort! Here are the suggested guidelines:

Traditional/Digital art: Cleaned lineart, on unlined paper, that is at least 500x500 pixels is the minimum. Additional sketchier/rougher pieces are welcomed so long as one piece of art is at the cleaned lineart stage!

Manips: Clean renders and non-blurry images that do not contain watermarks should be used for photo manipulation.

Banners or Icons or Wallpaper: 5 icons, of at least 100x100 pixels. 3 banners. 1 wallpaper. More is of course always welcomed!

Picspam or Gifsets: At least 6 images, but more images, or multiple sets are welcome!

Vids: At least two minutes long, or a full song!

Fanmixes: At least 10 songs and include cover art (this can be a manip!).

What is an Art Claim?

Art claims is the process through which artists and authors are paired for the big bang. Artists will have 3 days to review summary information provided by all the authors participating in the event. The claims process is anonymous, which means the artists have no idea who wrote which fic. On claims day, artists submit their top 5 choices and are matched with their first available fic. When matches are confirmed, the mods will email each team to introduce partners to each other.

How do I make a claim?

On claims day, artists will receive a form to submit their choices.

What happens if the number of authors doesn't match up with the number of artists or mixers?

We will do several rounds of claiming so that EVERY fic has an artist. In the event that fics outnumber artists, we will allow artists to make a second claim. If it's the other way, we may open up the fics so that more than one artist is assigned to the same fic. Either way, everyone who wants to participate will get to participate.

Can I post my art to my blog or another site to show my friends in advance?

No, we ask that you don't preview your art to anyone before the assigned posting date. You are allowed to show it to a few friends or an art beta, to get advice or feedback before the posting date, but please don't post it for the general public until your assigned posting date.

Where can I upload my graphics?

You are free to post your graphics on your platform of choice, as long as there is a link to the art in the fic.

How will I get my graphics to my author?

We will provide you with contact information once you are committed to an author. From there you can contact them to find out more about their interests, or simply send them the links to your final mix/gifsets/art.

We would like to encourage you to be in contact with them and to share what you make for them.

Schedule

What's a check-in?

Check-ins are something to give you a feel on where a typical author should be at in their writing process. There are multiple points of communication with the mods team to share your progress, ask questions, and share any comments you need to.

ALL CHECK-INS ARE MANDATORY! This is the best way for mods to track the progress of works and ensure works will be posted on time.

Why do artists get a check-in?

The artist check-in will be mandatory. This is mostly to make sure that artists have been in contact with their authors and that they are on track. It will help us determine which stories will need pinch hitters earlier.

Posting Requirements

What types of requirements are there for me to post my fic?

You must include a header with all the regular information (title, rating, wordcount, pairing, etc.) on it. This includes warnings. Not all of our readers like the same thing, so you are required to warn them. Besides that, you must include any secondary fandom you're writing in.

Do I post my story to this community or do the mods post it?

Anywhere you wish, so long as it is also in the RNM Big Bang AO3 Collection. Posting it there is how we will count your work as completed*.

*Artists will not be required to post to AO3, though it is highly encouraged. (AO3 isn’t great for hosting some types of art, like picspam or gif sets, we understand that!) If you are not posting your art to AO3, you must make sure the link to where you art is posted is provided to the author and linked within the author notes or story.

Can I post it to my blog a few days early to show my friends?

No, the first time you show your fic for this big bang must be on your reveal day. If you post in advance please lock the post for your eyes only.

If you have any other questions, please reach out to the mods team!

#rnmbb #roswell new mexico #faq #admin post #rnm big bang

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bolbianddolanhouse · 3 years

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Book 3 FAQ!

Need to catch up? Heres all the previous FAQs 1 * 2 Heres the master post of all three books 1 * 2 * 3

Wow...you would think that with the whole pandemic that I’d get these chapters out faster. But alas this year got the best of me too. I’ve been a lil vulnerable in the tags with y’all and the check-in messages really touched me. So thank you very much to everyone that has checked up on me and enjoyed the chapters! I appreciate all of you :3 So lets roll out the questions!

Q: Who is Iwata based off? A: Iwata is based off my self-insert, which is also me. I know that sounds a lil narcissistic but it’s that real life reference that you’re a spitting image of your parent. Iwata was designed to look and act very similar to his mother based off that. What made him a little more original and not a copy of my self-insert is the tropes I added. I mirrored the trope of that of the relationship between Steven and his mom in Steven Universe; where he adored, then hated but then came to terms that he is not his mom but someone better. A whole journey of self-discovery and self-worth.

Q: The representation is amazing! How did you come up with these queer characters? A: Glad you liked them! Like I’ve said in previous FAQs and in the tags, all these characters were dreamt and I just build upon them in writing. So yes, most of my characters were created queer in my dreams but I make them more in depth by setting up how they discovered they’re queer. I did a bit of research on coming out stories and self-discovery epiphanies to have these characters more relatable so a fellow queer reader feels seen in a way. There’s already too much hetero works out there, I just want to gay it up in a respectful way.

Q: The culture mixing is really good and consistent, how do you do it? A: For starters, I am latina. But the culture mixing stems from my knowledge about other cultures through language. I’ve been studying Japanese for almost a decade now and Chinese for about 4 years, so it’s no surprise that I’m referencing them in my work. Maybe what I depict isn’t what other half-Japanese half-Latinx families do, but it’s what I’d do if I started such a family. Plus there’s some overlap within those cultures and it makes it easy to put into writing.

Q: So. much. drama! Why is this book more dramatic than the previous two? A: Book 3 is were main on-going plot gets picked up more and shows signs of resolution. In book 2, it was to focus on not only Lili and the family dynamic but to remind the reader that life moved on with little resolve for the self-insert character. Iwata has a HUGE role in the resolution but in his own special way. And I’m not saying the answer is love...but it’s leaning there.

Q: You reference specific food and snacks in this AU/ what are your favorite Cheetos? A: Like I said, I’m latina! Of course I write in the food of my home culture. Mainly the home cooked meals my mom would make for me and my siblings. It might not seem like much to the reader, but those simple meals add to the narrative of being home and traditions that help them embrace their mixed heritage. The reference of Cheetos are all over this AU because they’re my favorite hot chip. Naturally, my favorite Cheetos are the Hot con Límon with chamoy.

Q: Love that there’s no canon character deaths in this book so far, but are there any major deaths planned? A: Just one but it’s not a tragic, hero fallen type death. It’s a natural death but it’s gonna be a tear jerker. That death won’t come until the WAY end of this AU, so I’m not gonna spoil anything yet.

Q: Can’t believe you predicted Dabi’s true identity. A: It was obvious tho. I didn’t really predict anything canon if you’re an anime only for BNHA. In this AU (without spoiling too much) there’s no Endeavor redemption and Dabi doesn’t cause that big drama on live TV. So if you’re an Endeavor hater like me, you’re gonna love what I have in store for them in the next book!

Q: I love Tenya being a dad and loving husband in this AU! Will we see more dad moments? A: Glad you like those snippets of dad Tenya! I love writing them for my own indulgence since there isn’t enough love for this character in the fandom. Plus I see a whole lot of consistent readers are Iida-stans and that makes me want to write more married fluff whenever I can.

Q: Beizu is best boi/Who is Beizu based off of? A: Beizu is the genius trope in this book. I made his character a more chill version of his mom but with that ‘who is my dad’ trope. Beizu is part of a trio that’s to mirror the agent trio of Ita, Jin and Mimi. The third member is yet to be revealed but they’re a BIG plot device in the coming book. But Beizu is one of my favorite OCs, maybe I’ll do a ranking of my OCs when everyone is introduced.

Q: The villains and Hawks plot has me SHOOK! What’s going to happen to hero society when this case gets solved? A: Without spoiling it, the truth is going to expose the corrupt higher ups in hero society. The kids in the household has a part in taking down hero society as well but in their own, special way. Iwata has the biggest part in closing the case (but it’s spoiler if I say how), Lili and twins help tearing down minor things like education systems and laws. I will say though, the case gets resolved after the trio retires because Ita gets to return to America and found an heir to the company before they could draw to a conclusion. Which is a happy ending at the end of the storyline, no major deaths!

Q: Confirmed weddings? A: Yes :) because Lili and Iwata deserve good things and love. The twins have it easy in the coming book. Lili’s comes first and Iwata’s comes later than expected (can’t say why yet, gotta keep reading :3). I guess I can say that all of them get married but Lili’s and Iwata’s are the only queer ones. All the spouses that marry into the family take the Iida name, so Lili and Hanaka don’t change family names when they get married! Y’all already know those wedding chapters are gonna be lavish and take up most of the chapter, you’ll love them.

Q: But are the kids Joji stans? A: Oh jeez...they are the same way we like 80′s music. It’s pleasant to listen to but kinda cringe when you see your parents dance to it. I don’t really portray it, but the family digital library has all of Joji’s music in a playlist called ‘Sad hours Soundtrack’. If you ask Mr Muffins 2.0 who last listened to the playlist, they’ll snitch who and how many times it has been looped. That’s how Tenya knows who needs cheering up.

Q: I love the little references to their childhood, what else can you tell us about their pre-book childhood? A: As I said a few times in the tags, I cut a ton of stuff that isn’t relevant to the plot. Most of it was their childhood and how they manifested their quirks. Lili really liked to scream before she learned to talk, a very fast learner and at 3 years old got her engine quirk and later that year showed signs of a second quirk. Iwata was very quiet child, hardly cried or gets upset but latched on to mom a lot. His first words were in Spanish but struggled a bit with Japanese before entering kinder. Tensei was born first, then Hanaka followed 10 minutes later. Hanaka’s fire quirk manifested after the first breast feeding when she was getting burped by mom in the hospital. Mom likes to believe Tensei came out first to warn everybody that Hanaka can breathe fire. Tensei didn’t manifest his metal quirk until the age of 7, making him a very late bloomer. Though very different in personalities, Hanaka and Tensei get along and get very creative when it’s playtime. Up until the age of 5, mom would place Hanaka in kindling to get the BBQ grill or bonfire started. Hanaka has been known to randomly burst into flames as a baby, so Tensei had to sleep in a different crib for his safety. Tensei spent more time reading as a child because everyone was focused on managing Hanaka’s flames, thus making him a very studious boy.

Q: Not an AU question, but how are you doing?/ We don’t mind waiting for the chapters! Please take your time. A: I’ve been getting check ins and validation in my asks for the inconsistent schedule. Too many things came at me this year, both good and bad. I was doing well in speech and debate that I went to nationals and prepared myself for some serious competition, leaving no time to do chapters. Then I fell in and out of depressive episodes during lockdown where I’m from. In the summer my grandmother passed away from the virus in Mexico, then my beloved dog Mr Muffins passed away of old age. Those deaths hurt me and my family the most that I was having a hard time trying to cope plus trying to be responsible by adhering to CDC guidelines (I’m in the immune-comprised group). In my want to get over my grief, I trained and received my certificate in ordained ministry (yea I know that’s not the best first step, but I just needed to feel like I’ve achieved something being cooped up at home). I’ve very grateful that theres some readers that see the tags and check up on me. All your kind words gives me a little strength to write and finish every chapter at my pace.

Q: More art please? A: Yes :3 I have one coming up real soon! After the end of this book is where I’ll be releasing some art as a sort of place holder.

Q: Is the the estate drama eluding to the ending? A: Yup! And it will show up every now and then in the next book.

Q: This is a really good self insert AU! There’s complexity to your character and others...how do you write these interactions/relationships really close to actual ones? A: Thanks for the complement :3 When I first started this AU, I was in the middle of my semester of a creative writing course. Near the end of book 2 was when I finished the course work for it and by then you could see the progression in writing. ALSO, I’m a communications major as well! Writing these relationships and other social things were things that I remembered learning in my interpersonal communications class. I was a bit on fence on whether or not to start this AU because I didn’t think my writing skill was at all that good. With some encouragement from my classmates and friends, I pushed myself to write this whole AU out. I don’t plan on stopping until I finish the storyline, plus I hate leaving things unfinished.

And that wraps up this FAQ! Hopefully I got everyone’s questions since most were check-ins for me. But expect the last chapter for book 3 in the next few days. After Book 3, I’m going on a lil hiatus until the end of February. I have so many life events happening in the upcoming weeks that I’m gonna need time to recharge before resuming this AU. Y’all know I bounce back as promised, in the meantime, I have some art things queued to remind y’all that Book 4 is in the works. Only 2 more books to go! Thanks again for reading and I’ll talk you y’all again later in the tags~

-Love, Palma-sama

P.S. Heres the end of Book 3 for your connivence :3 other links are at the top of this post!

#mha #bnha #self insert au #not canon #FAQ 3 #Book 3 #ask me anything

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moviemagistrate · 3 years

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ONCE UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD review

ONCE UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD is my favorite movie of the 2010’s.

I’ll give you a minute to put your recently-blown mind back together.

So why do I love this movie so much? The overall response to Quentin Tarantino’s supposedly penultimate opus has been very positive if not rapturous, but I’ve seen some surprisingly lukewarm and even negative reviews, with people criticizing it for being slow, meandering, lacking in depth or *shudder* boring. Obviously the quality of any movie is subjective, as I’m quick to remind anyone who hates Michael Bay movies, but I honestly don’t understand people who dislike OUATIH. Maybe it’s a matter of expectations, because I didn’t know how to feel about the film for much of the first time I watched it either.

The year is 1969, a time of great political and cultural change in the country and in the entertainment industry. The star-driven films of yesteryear are giving way to grittier, artsier, more auteur-driven works as we primarily follow Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), former star of a popular cowboy show whose failed attempt to start an A-list movie career has left him relying on guest spots as TV villains-of-the-week to stay afloat. This is wonderfully laid out in the opening scene where he meets casting director Marvin Schwarz (Al Pacino, easily his best role since JACK & JILL), who lays out Rick’s lowering hierarchical status (“Who’s gonna kick the shit out of you next week? How about Batman & Robin? PING. POW”), while offering him an opportunity to be a leading-man again in Italian pictures.

Tagging along is Rick’s best, and maybe only, friend Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), Rick’s go-with-the-flow stunt-double who in the slowdown of Rick’s career has effectively become his driver and gofer, as well as Rick’s sole source of emotional support. Rick is also neighbors with Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), the beautiful young actress and wife of then-superstar director Roman Polanski (whose inclusion in the film is minimal and handled tastefully), as she lives out her idyllic life, beloved by those around her like the ray of sunshine she was in real life. Her gated, hillside home looms over Rick’s, as he ponders aloud about how even meeting her the right way could resurrect his career.

For almost two-and-a-half hours, we follow these three characters as they just live out their lives, Rick nursing hangovers and having emotional breakdowns in front of his 8-year-old co-star on set while contemplating his future, Cliff going where the wind blows him while taking care of his adorable and highly-trained dog, and Sharon as she drives around Old Hollywood, spends time with her friends, and sneaks into a matinee showing of one of her movies, her eyes and infectious smile beaming with pride when the audience laughs at her comedic timing and cheers her martial-arts prowess.

I think it’s safe to say it’s not the film any of us were expecting from Quentin Tarantino. Having only made loud, gory, over-the-top genre pastiches for the last 15 years, you’d expect from the trailers for this to be about an actor and his sexy stunt-double getting mixed up with the Manson family before teaming up with Bruce Lee to save Sharon Tate from her horrific real-life fate, mixed with the filmmaker’s usual self-indulgent homages to films of yesteryear. While some of this is true to some extent, it’s surprisingly a much more relaxed, easygoing dramedy that follows a trio of funny, charismatic people as they just…exist, as people living in the moment instead of relics.

OUATIH is much more concerned with atmosphere, character, and capturing the feeling of a bygone era than the traditional narrative structure. It’s more effective than pretty much every nostalgia trip movie I've ever seen because you can feel Tarantino's affection for this era of his childhood bleed through every character, car, song, radio advertisement, TV show, background poster, etc. It’s through this meticulous level of detail and willingness to just hang out with these characters and take in this world that he reconstructed, Tarantino successfully resurrects the era in all its 35mm glory, but with the knowing twinge of real-world melancholy.

I guess the reason I love it so much is because the love that Tarantino has for everything and everyone in it is so tangible that it’s infectious. Watching OUATIH I honestly felt like I understood him better as both a filmmaker and as a person. He shows a level of restraint and maturity I haven’t seen since JACKIE BROWN. Even most of his trademark foot fetishizing is tasteful and subdued (I say “most” because I recall at least three close-ups of actresses’ feet that definitely made him a bit sweaty behind the camera). He’s a weird, shameless nerd with a big ego, but he’s 100% sincere about expressing his love for film and its rich history. And it’s this love, and the skill and style with which it’s expressed, that just put a big smile on my face each of the 6 (SIX) times that I’ve seen it since it came out.

Tarantino offers a tantalizing contrast between reality and fantasy. Throughout the film, as the characters of Hollywood live in their own idyllic world, relaxing in pools or driving around in bitchin’ cars, we also see the disquieting eeriness and griminess of the Manson family. The soundtrack and accompanying old-timey commercials for tanning butter or Mug Root Beer that plays through a lot of the film is a joy to listen to, but we also hear news bulletins of the war in Vietnam or the aftermath of the Bobby Kennedy assassination. You could argue this is just to set the scene for the era, but it feels too deliberate, because even after that joyously fantastical ending, we remember that it was just a fairy tale and real life didn’t turn out as pleasantly. Tarantino’s ability to make his world and characters so meticulously detailed and lived-in works to great effect in instilling a bittersweet melancholy to this film in a way I was really taken aback by. It feels like a window into his soul, someone who yearns for the fantasy of the world he grew up in but remembering that not all good things last and not everything in your nostalgic past was good to begin with.

One beautiful, spellbinding scene is Rick and Cliff coming back from their excursion into the world of Italian filmmaking. In this montage, we see Rick, Cliff and Rick’s new Italian wife arriving at the airport and driving home before unpacking their baggage, interspersed with Sharon Tate welcoming a guest at her home and having lunch, before cutting to a series of shots of famous LA landmarks like Grauman's Chinese Theatre, Taco Bell, and Der Wienerschnitzel all meticulously resurrected in their retro glory as they light up the night. “Baby, baby, baby you’re out of time”, sings Mick Jagger as we’re watching multiple stories about people who are each embodying those words: Rick’s career, his friendship with Cliff, Sharon Tate, and Hollywood itself.

Tarantino himself feels like one of the last mainstream auteur filmmakers, as well as one of the last and biggest proponents of shooting large-budget movies on film (even Scorsese’s embraced digital now, the fantastically-talented traitor). And with the rise of streaming services, one can’t help but feel like the movie-going experience itself is also becoming obsolete, especially recently, what with theaters going to war with distributors over fucking TROLLS: WORLD TOUR, not to mention that global pandemic we’ve been having lately all but killing general audiences’ enthusiasm for the movie theater experience (Christopher Nolan’s TENET certainly didn’t help). If all these things, both real and fictional, are indeed out of time, then at least with Tarantino’s penultimate film they get one hell of a bittersweet sendoff, a great time that’s more of an Irish wake than a funeral, and it’s a film I have no issue calling a truly introspective, late-career masterpiece.

And that’s without mentioning uniformly incredible cast. Leo DiCaprio, an actor I normally don’t care too much for, gives the best and funniest performance of his career as a dependent prima donna actor clinging to his remaining fame. Brad Pitt earns the hell out of his Oscar as an embodiment of old-school masculinity and charisma with an amazing set of abs (and everything else) whose outward coolness masks his mysterious past and complete badass-ness. Margot Robbie shines in her depiction of Tate, a beacon of warmth and likability who in many ways symbolized the love and carefree attitudes of the swingin’ 60’s. I’ve heard people criticize her character for not having a lot of dialogue, but to me it feels like they’re ignoring the visual storytelling, which just gives way to them assuming the film is sexist just because the female lead isn’t constantly monologuing. Every member of the supporting cast is memorable with their own quirks and great lines, no matter their screentime.

And of course, it wouldn’t be a Tarantino joint without some truly hilarious and shocking violence, and without going into spoiler territory, the last 20 minutes delivers on this promise to such a degree that I feel comfortable calling it the best thing he’s ever done. Some may decry the climax as unnecessary or over-the-top, but the way it leads to an alternate world while subtly acknowledging what happened in the real one is cathartic beyond belief. And if you’re paying attention, every scene in the movie has been quietly building towards this finale, which to me takes away any potential of feeling meandering in the story. If you saw the movie and didn’t much care for it, I recommend giving it another watch. Having the context ahead of time makes it feel so much more rewarding, and even on the fifth watch I’m noticing clever, subtle set-ups I missed beforehand.

It’s also just super cozy and really easy to watch. The two hours and 45 minutes fly by. I could watch a 4-hour version of this.

Quentin, if you’re reading this, please don’t let your last movie be Star Trek.

#tarantino #feet #hippies #brad pitt

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mysticsparklewings · 4 years

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Draw This In Your Style!

Draw/Recreate This In Your Style, post the original art alongside it (on platforms that support it, elsewhere you can just link back to the original instead), and either tag it with #dtiySparkle or tag me, MysticSparkleWings (xxMysticWingsxx on Twitter) directly and I'll retweet/share/etc. it! No deadline, just create at your own pace!

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You know, I constantly go back and forth on "celebrate milestones!" vs. "don't be that person that won't shut up about how many followers they have and the numbers and etc." Mostly because I usually find it annoying from other artists, even if I don't find the artist themselves annoying. It's complicated. I know it's important and in many cases helps grow a following further, but it also just gets exhausting, you know? Both to see it and to try to do it.

Still, I've been wanting to make a "Draw This In Your Style" (DTIYS) for a while now, but it didn't seem like the kind of thing to just do on a whim. It felt like there should be a reason for at least the first one, provided it went well enough to make me want to do more. I noticed a few weeks ago that I was approaching 1,000 followers on Twitter* and I saw an opportunity, knowing that 1. It would take me a while to finish the artwork (go big or go home, yes?) and 2. It would take a few days for the numbers to stabilize so that I would actually hold steady at 1,000+ and not be 1,000 one minute and 998 the next. (Followers go up and down like a see-saw over there)

*Thanks exclusively to Art Shares. I'm very sure I'd still have less than 100 if it weren't for those--and please don't be fooled by that number. 1,000 isn't teeny tiny, but in-depth interaction from a handful of people will always mean more to me than zero or minimal-at-best interaction from thousands/millions/etc, and frankly, my interaction over on Twitter is basically non-existent compared to the interaction I get here on dA, which precisely is why I prioritize dA over all other social media. It means more to me; it feels infinitely less passive.

But...I kinda didn't want that to be the only reason for the DTIYS. It just seemed...I don't know, cliche? Not right, somehow. Fortunately, the Twitter milestone happens to coincidence with I think I've finally stabilized around 300 followers on Instagram (after being stuck between 250 and 290 for months, consistently going up and down 2-3 people at a time), and I've also garnered over 400 watchers right here on dA.

The Twitter milestone is technically the biggest, but honestly, the dA one means a lot more to me. I thank each and everyone one of you, my fellow deviants, for thinking my art is worth the watch.

And I especially thank those of you--I'm sure you know who you are, I won't name names just in case anyone's not comfortable with that--that consistently fav and/or comment on my work. Your support and encouragement are why I keep doing this, despite the frustrations I may have along the way and aside from an innate need to create.

Speaking of which, if you're a loyal Sparkler I think now I'll get to the part you might know me best for; the long description of the artistic process!

Like I mentioned before, I noticed the milestone stuff a few weeks ago and thought now would be as good a time as any to get started on a DTIYS, so I started trying to brainstorm something that would be both fun for me to make and fun for others to recreate. I was having a little trouble on this front, so I took a trip to Pinterest and re-visited some boards I use to save potential draw ideas/inspiration on.

I was thinking I wanted to include a fairy since I've been wanting to get back into drawing them more regularly and fairies-via-Winx-Club is where I got my start here on dA and indirectly into getting more serious about my art in general. I was also thinking something with galaxies since those are usually fun to make and are a good way to make an otherwise plain or simple piece more interesting. I didn't want this to be too terribly complicated if I expected other people to draw it, but I also didn't want it to be too boring. And, of course, I was hoping for something I could lean into my mixed-media prowess with.

All that turned out to be quite the balancing act, but after some scrolling, I had some ideas and ended up with a sketch of a fairy in a teacup, with place-holder wings and a place-holder rose on the cup. The wings I knew would be easier to do the lines digitally (even if the final art was traditional, which I was planning on), and the rose I wanted to be slightly more sophisticated than my typical stencil-made roses, which I thought would also be easier to experiment with digitally. I was right on that front, thanks to some of the public domain images on PixaBay.

Beyond that, my original idea was fairly different from what you see here; I was thinking black hair, a fairly vampiric look, for the fairy, more typical butterfly wings, a red rose on the cup, and then an abstract galaxy wash, more watercolor-y and less saturated, for the background. And to be fair, that's still an interesting idea that I might return to at some point, but even as I worked on and finished the digital linework (fully planning to print them and then do what I wished with them traditionally, as has become a norm for me) something in the back of my mind told me that vision wasn't the right one; Not for this project, anyway.

Fortunately, I was a busy enough bee in between working on the lines for this that I partially had to step away from it to meet other time constraints and I could afford to step away from it and have some time to ponder what I wanted to do.

In my pondering, I kept coming back to the galaxy/constellation thing I've been experimenting with lately (Exhibits A, B, and C ). I hesitated at first since I knew for sure I didn't want to do the whole drawing that way and I wasn't entirely sure how to decided what to do with what.

Of course, after thinking about it a bit more, I decided I'd take a risk in doing the background and wings in the constellation style, and then somehow do the rest in a more traditional way. I'd have some more time to think about that while I was re-tooling the wings digitally for said constellation style, after having discovered that made life so much easier during my previous experiments with it.

I'd know from the beginning that I wanted to do metallic accents (most likely silver) on the cup and saucer, which in this case meant I'd need to use either watercolor or heavy-duty mixed media paper for them, and I definitely had to use watercolor paper for the wings/background. The mixed media will work for the galaxy technique, but the colors don't blend quite as nicely and I was concerned about how that might affect the overall look here.

Still, I didn't want to watercolor the fairy herself at least, which left me with a choice of alcohol markers or colored pencils. I was thinking pencils for the hair for texture, markers for the skin for the lack thereof. But I typically don't like using alcohol markers on watercolor paper. The additional texture feels too rough on the nib and it's almost like I can feel the paper soaking up extra ink.

I also thought that doing the background and the fairy on the same piece of paper was asking for a very big watercolor-y mess, so between that and the paper concerns, that led me eventually to deciding to split them up.

And somehow in there, the idea occurred to me that I could get a bit adventurous (read: crafty) and actually separate the various parts of the fairy and cup out a bit and not only solve my paper problem, but also makes things a little more interesting.

After yet more pondering (if you can say nothing else about my art, you cannot say it isn't well-pondered by the time it's finished!) I settled on having the layers as follows:

background/wings (watercolor paper)

back part of the saucer (mixed media paper)

the fairy (with her arm and bit of hair carefully plopped over the next layer; mixed media)

the cup (mixed media)

the front of the saucer (mixed media)

Or at least that was the plan, and if I discovered problems in this plan then I could adjust as necessary.

So I got to work on the background, which was fairly straight-forward. I layered on paint and blended to essentially my heart's content, and then let it dry overnight since it was getting late by the time I finished it, or rather the first layer. I came back to it the next day and layered on some more paint to fix some blending issues and darken the whole thing up some more.

While that second layer dried, I got to making the lines for the additional layers and cutting them out--uncolored for the time being, as I figured the layering would need to factor into that a bit--and setting how exactly they'd fit together. The only modifications to my plans I had to make, which I, fortunately, had the foresight to do while I was cutting, was to leave two little bumps at the "bottom" of the fairy (where her body meets the cup) so that she could sit probably as both in the cup but also with her hair and arm hanging over it. The little bumps were a sort of "grounding" behind the cup to hold the rest of her in place while the other pieces were wedged on top.

I hope that makes sense, it's a little hard to explain without seeing it for yourself.

Anyway. I'd also had the foresight to transfer an outline of the fairy and cup lines onto the background before I started painting, which helped with making sure everything was placed...semi-correctly...on the final piece.

I say semi correctly because despite my best efforts when I went to glue everything together it looked right in-person, but the digital scan would later reveal to me that in fact, the layered bits had all shifted slightly to the left and curved inward a bit more, like a right parathesis: ) But I'll come back to that in a minute.

Once I was convinced my layering gambit was going to work out, then I started toying with colors and ideas for the layers themselves. The clearest idea I had out of the gate was to do the rose in a galaxy style too, rather than just plain watercolor like I'd originally planned (teal for the leaf though because green wouldn't have fit with the rest of the palette and blue would've blended too well); either way, I figured it wouldn't pose much of a problem on the mixed media paper since it's such a small area. The biggest challenge would be the stars, but even then you could say the same thing: It's such a small area that star dispersion with a pen really wasn't that big of a challenge to make look convincingly like random star placement.

I went back and forth a bit on the other colors, but I ultimately decided that I liked the idea of soft purple skin and dark(ish) blue hair, maybe soft pink lips and a little blush, for the fairy herself. And I also decided to do a little warm-gray shading on the cup with markers, as opposed to just leaving it white.

The lips turned out so nicely I was tempted to try doing the blush with the same markers, but I have very mixed luck with marker blush (sometimes it blends nicely, other times I get a nice line despite my efforts), and so I decided to play it safe and do it later with pencils instead. Fortunately, the rest of the skin and the cup (both done with Copics specifically as that's where I most easily found the colors I needed) went nice and smoothly, as is the nature of markers on this mixed media paper. (Seriously; Strathmore 400 series Mixed Media works wonders with alcohol markers for layering and blending!!)

The hair was a little more complicated because of the color I was hoping for, but that didn't matter too much because half-way through I decided to change things up a bit and I added little bits of pink and purple into the mix, intentionally following the rest of the galaxy-ness of what I was doing. It's not much, but I think it was the right choice.

While I waited to make sure the cup was good and dry, I went to splatter town on the now-dry background, as was necessary for the galaxy look, and then used my phone to shine some extra light on the paper so I could see my lines and dots for the wings. And after giving the white gel pen a moment to dry, I then went back in with my PanPastel, as is custom, to make the wings glow. I have also now learned that a blending stump/tortillon is good for blending out the pastel in a tight space, while a dry paper towel or tissue works to semi-remove it if it goes on a bit too thick.

Everything, after drying, was then assembled and attached to the background with some handy-dandy tacky glue which was fortunately fairly quick-drying for liquid glue, stuck fairly well without me having to add a whole lot of it, and also not a sloppy glue mess everywhere.

I did have to carefully go back over some of my lines for the cup and hair after everything was assembled because I forgot to do so over the metallic paint and pencil wax before assembly, but it also worked out okay since a couple of corners for the hair got snipped a little short, so I could sort-of fix it by extended the corner on the paper underneath. (In hindsight this works a lot better in-person; on the undoctored scan the placement looks pretty off or incomplete)

And of course, with everything assembled, that brings me back to what I was saying about the scan earlier.

Like mentioned, everything had shifted a bit during placement and gluing, and I could more clearly see the lines I had missed in that process on the scan. Unfortunately for me, while in-person everything looks relativity fine, on the (undoctored) scan this shifting made the balance feel way off, at least to me. The fairy and cup were too far to the left, meanwhile, the ring wing stuck out too far on the bottom.

I fiddled and fiddled and fiddled with the scan, using the content-aware move tool half a dozen different ways before I conceded it just wasn't going to do what I wanted, and then my next-best idea was the extend the background to the left a bit. In doing that, I discovered the warp tool worked to my advantage for that, and so I decided I'd trying fiddling with it and see where it got me.

It's still not perfect, but it's better than it was. In the end, I used the warp tool to tweak the angle of each part of the wings and that made up for some of the balance problems without also compromising any of the lines (which was the biggest reason why the content-aware tool wasn't working; it kept messing up the lines or other parts of the drawing in the process). At the very least, I was able to do enough that it only really bothers me now when I start looking for the off-balance-ness.

I also ended up doing some minor touches, mostly just smoothing out certain lines and small tweaks, but once the balance problem was finally somewhat solved it was pretty much done. (Aside from, of course, me then also adding the words on top so people know what this is at only a moment's glance.)

The end result, both scan and traditional. I'm really happy with. The piece is plenty interesting to look at, but it's also not too complicated, especially when you break down the individual parts that make it up. (Literally and more figuratively.)

Thus, I can only hope others find it interesting-but-not-too-complicated enough to try their hand at recreating it. Even if no one takes me up on my "Draw This In Your Sparkle Style Challenge though, I enjoyed making this all the same and I'm really proud to share the art itself with you guys.

Hopefully though at least a few people will take a stab at it and I can focus on that and not explode from impatience in regards to various not-really-art-related things I'm currently waiting on.

____

Artwork © me, MysticSparkleWings

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#drawthisinyourstyle #dtiysparkle

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eddtober · 6 years

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Eddtober Masterpost: About, Rules, Boundries and Prompt Lists.

I hadn’t done anything about it until now due to no response - however the wonderful @ldhenzel suggested that I do it this way for mobile users.

About Eddtober

Eddtober is a list of prompts made in an effort to encourage the Eddsworld Fandom to spread their wings of creativity beyond the norms that they are used to, during the month of October.

It is all without harming others or causing drama, a neutral ground for all fans of Eddsworld to come and have fun, no matter what side of a discourse they’re in.

It hopes to promote inspiration beyond the usual angsty and over-dramatised content, to revive a spirit in Eddsworld that hasn’t been seen in many years, and to stretch the invitation to all who can create.

Eddtober calls not only the artists who have a talent for drawing, painting and so forth, but also: the authors (fanfics, journalists, essayists, diarists, poets, ramblers), the cosplayers, the video-makers (animators, video essays, memers, youtubers) and all those who want to be inspired with unconventional creativity.

Eddtober’s motto for the fandom it came from is this: To come forth, be inspired and break from the old and the mold!

With that out the way, buckle up. This post is gonna be a long one under the cut.

RULES

Base Rules need to be set so everyone can participate in Eddtober safely and in a fun way. Please read them carefully!

Always tag it with #eddtober. Gore and related NSFW is allowed in the challenge, but please tag it as #Eddtober gore, etc. Also, no shortenings or reimaginings of those tags, so the minors on this site don’t find it on accident. Though many of us may be over 18, please keep these things in mind.

Be Sensitive and Respectful to Others. I know many of us here in this fandom can take easy offence to certain types of art, so please consider and think on your creative piece before you post.

Credit Where Due. This should be blatantly obvious right now, but please, please don’t steal other’s creative fanwork or post it without credit. Always have permission from the creator to post something of their’s, and always have their username when you post it, not just ‘credit to the artist’. If you do not follow this, actions will be taken for your consequences.

Keep yourself chill. You can do one prompt for Eddtober, some of the prompts or all of them - up to you! It’s understandable if life gets in the way. The goal of Eddtober is not to do every prompt, but to be inspired to create fan-content in a way you usually wouldn’t have.

Spread the word. This is less of a rule and more of a personal request from Admin Panda, but since she doesn’t have many social media accounts you’d expect, spreading word of Eddtober would mean a LOT, so they can join in the fun too!

Sharing is caring. Reblogging and sharing from your fellow creators doing Eddtober would be great to give them a motivation and confidence boost!

Go Beyond the Boundries of Your Imagination. The whole purpose of Eddtober is to promote new, fresh things to come up in the Eddsworld fandom and break a cycle of the same old that’s been there for a while. Take a leap, spread your wings, do your best, and go have fun.

BOUNDRIES

Most of this list will be related to Rule Two of Eddtober:

Be Sensitive and Respectful to Others.

Quote:

‘I know many of us here in this fandom can take easy offence to certain types of art, so please consider and think on your creative piece before you post.‘

Whilst Eddtober is a fun, neutral place to spread our creative wings, there are boundries that need to be taken in order to keep everyone safe. Which means certain parts that are usually seen as ‘common’ within the Eddsworld Fandom will not be acceptable in the challenge.

Edd Gould’s death. Admin Panda wishes to make it clear that creative pieces that draws clear lines to Edd’s passing IS NOT okay. This includes Edd in hospital for cancer, Angel Edd or any AU that depicts him as a divine being of any sort (including Blessworld) unless Tom, Matt and/or Tord are also similar divine beings in the AU. Here at Eddtober, Edd's life is something to be celebrated, not his death. While Admin Panda isn’t 100% offended by this, many others are and it should be more recognised as such.

Sinsworld. Believe it or not, the sinsworld tag was specifically made back in the day to keep the porn out of the main. But due to a certain in-fandom event, this intended action has been long-lost. Because of all of these events, any sinsworld (porn, lewds and related NSFW) that’s Sinspired by the Eddtober prompts WILL NOT be accepted into the event by any means. This is because many in this fandom are minors/underage and more who are 18+ are repulsed to porn and such (Admin Panda is part of the latter group). So please, it is fine to be sexually inspired by the prompts, PLEASE keep your Sinsworld content away from the Eddtober tag - don’t put both tags into that post, essentially.

Abusive/Self-Harm Creative Content. No. Just. No. Death or pain like this isn’t allowed to be depicted in the challenge and should never be romanticised or supported. Eddtober aims to be a safe and uplifting space for all creative people, no matter what their space is at the moment.

More sensitivities and boundries will be added onto this list as Admin Panda recieves questions and requests for this area through the askbox here.

PROMPT LIST

Quick reminder: when this list says ‘create something for’, it’s not just referring to fanart - it refers to any medium, digital, traditional or unconventional, that can be used. The challenge here is to be creative as possible, not to stay conventional.

The List features Admin Panda’s Commentary. Some useless, some useful.

Create something for Edd. (Not his real-life counterpart, but the character. That needed some clearing up based on 2017’s results.)

Create something for Tom.

Create something for Matt

Create something for any pre-legacy season episode, except WTFuture. (You can do WTFuture if you want, but seeing that much of this fandom is currently made of people who came in after The End… It’d be worth having a crack at pre-legacy episodes.)

Create something for the crew’s symbols.

Create something for Superhero Alter Egos! (It doesn’t have to stop at PowerEdd’s canon either! Go nuts! Give Edd and his friends new superhero alibis and outfits!)

Create something for Supervillain Alter Egos! (Reminder that it doesn’t have to stop at the ‘Green/Blue/Purple/Red Leader scenario! Again, go nuts! Get wacky if you must!)

Create something for Minor characters of the show. (Except the Neighbours - they already have their own prompt.)

Create something for descendants of the main four guys. (Sure, you can make it about the love children of your favourite ships, but the point of this prompt specifically is to not be ship-related. See if you can come up with descendant characters from the bloodlines of the main four.)

Create something for Tord. (He’s late in this list for a reason. Trust me.)

Create something for the neighbours of 29 Dirdum Lane. Are Kim and Katya still there, or are there newbies in the street?

Create something for the neighbours of 25 Dirdum Lane.

Create something for unlucky things happening to the guys, or one of them. Feel free to go as dark or as humourous as you like!

Create something for genderbends of the guys, maybe as if the Ellsworld we know never existed. Or you can stick to canon, up to you.

This prompt is a wild card. Do with it as you wish. (In 2017 everyone was told to quote: ‘go whole hog on this’. The next thing we all knew, everybody literally drew pigs with the guys. That wasn’t supposed to be literally taken, but by god it was hilarious.)

Create something for your crew. Whether you’re the main character with your friends or have OCs taking that place or a mix of both is up to you.

Create something for an AU of Eddsworld. You can make one up on the spot, or even fan content for an AU that already exists is cool too. (As of rule number two of Eddtober, the Blessworld AU will not be accepted for this prompt. I know it is a popular AU, but if you have any issues with this, please contact me in the blog asks myself.)

Create something for Eddsworld as a video game. Whether it’s concepts and covers for your own ideas or fanart for games in the making such as Eddsworld Armageddon, up to you.

Create something for Todd, or whoever the ‘Tord’ figure is of 25 Dirdum Lane.

Create something for a Saloonatics-WTFuture Crossover. (What? Shenanigans could be made here, guys. Just take it!)

Create something for the future selves of the guys. Or if you want to take it up a notch, make your own versions of them! Have them all be hobos (#HoBrosforlife), or have cola not be banned in the future… up to you!

The End who? Create and elaborate on how you would finish off the Eddsworld Legacy season. (For the purposes of this prompt, I can accept an angsty end for this, but I personally do not recommend it. The Eddsworld fandom has had enough unnecessary angst already.)

Create something for Zanta. (I guess you could call him a Nightmare Before Christmas, then.)

Create something for an Eddsworld movie. Whether it’s stuff for the Eddsworld Fan Movie or your own ideas, up to you!

Create something for the deal with Tom’s eyes. If you want to call them that.

Pick a song, any song, and put that on repeat. Use it as inspiration to create something in relation to Eddsworld.

Create something for Edd Gould himself. Not his character in Eddsworld, the real-life person.

An obligatory prompt without Eddtober in the beginning: create something for Edd’s birthday. (This was made into a prompt and will permanently remain as one as Edd’s birthday shouldn’t be taken away from today.)

Create something for someone/multiple someones in the fandom who inspire you - even the small artists and writers and such who are just starting out!

Are you afraid of the dark? Are you getting goosebumps? Create scary/monstrous/terrifying things happening to the guys. Interpretation and how far you go with it is up to you.

Happy Halloween! Create something about the guys on this special spooky day. Interpretation is up to you.

If you have any questions, concerns or queries as to all of this, don’t be hesitant to come shoot an ask through this blog. Have fun and a safe Eddtober!

#Eddsworld #Eddtober #Eddtober 2018 #founder chris talks #Eddtober Fixings

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notwhelmedyet · 6 years

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More than Meets the Eye, beginner’s guide / resources

This guide is long. Use the headings to find the information you need & if you’ve got resources this post lacks send them along!

Has anyone pitched the comic More than Meets the Eye to you yet? It’s a very gay action-adventure comedic drama with robots and you would probably love it (especially if you’re lgbt and/or have good taste). Here’s a few posts/articles that will tell you why you’d love it:

This article review/retrospective was what got me to read MTMTE. (warning - it has a bunch of spoilers, that didn’t bother me but might bother you)

My semi-jokey MTMTE sales pitch

@zzxid’s salespitch with dancing rats

This full entire page of radical space socialist philosophy

15 Reasons Why MTMTE/the sequel is The Best Transformers Comic (warning - has spoilers, though some will prob go over your head as a new reader)

Kiss me, Chromedome - retrospective article by The Guardian, contains some spoilers

How/Where to Read

Okay, maybe you’re convinced. Now you want to know how/where to read MTMTE. Got you covered:

Detailed guide by @gaymilesedgeworth: How to start reading Transformers Comics

My very short answer: just read MTMTE in trade paperback form. That way all the issues are in order and you get all the extra stuff (there are prose stories after a couple issues that are very important so don’t skip them!) They’re available that way as both physical and digital books.

Here’s some ways to get access, legally (US centric, sorry):

If your local library has Hoopla (digital library subscription service), you may have access to some of the MTMTE trades that way. They’d be here; but check if you library has Hoopla first.

Your local library very well might have physical copies, so check their website!

If not and you’re very patient you can often request inter-library loans (your library borrows the books from another library) or request your library purchase materials.

You can buy digital trades via either IDW or Comixology. Comixology also includes the first 5 volumes in their comics subscription service. I’ve seen the series go on sale on both of these sites at least 4 times in the past 6 months, so keep an eye out! (Sometimes IDW participates in humble bundles, which are great, but those sales are far more infrequent)

You can also buy them in trade form from wherever you can buy books/comics. US links: Amazon, B&N, Comic Store Locators

Character Guides

So you’ve picked up this comic and oh boy there are a lot of robots. You’re a little intimidated. Maybe you’re having a hard time telling them apart.

If you have the paperback, there’s a guide to the characters on the back cover/the last page of the digital volume. See a copy here.

It’s okay if you keep reading not knowing who these robots are. For real. You’ll get the hang of it. Don’t worry if it takes you awhile and you’re confused. Everyone’s a little lost the first time through.

Some helpful posts in case you’re struggling:

Here’s a guide that matches appearance -> name, and one that matches name -> background info (both spoiler free for issues 1-22)

A visual guide by @squireofgeekdom and @kscinewt: here

Another helpful visual character guide by @bluering8: here

If you’re confused and need help, please ask! I’m willing to answer questions, I know @gaymilesedgeworth has volunteered to answer new reader questions. (Willing to help out new readers? Lemme know and I’ll make this a list)

Lore & Background Info

Okay, so maybe now you’ve gotten into it. You want more information, you want to know all the background lore, you want to dig deep. Awesome! Got you covered!

The holy grail of Transformers information, TFwiki. A slightly snarky, overly-minutely-detailed wiki for the digital age.

They’ve also got a tumblr if you’ve got questions.

And Chris McFeely, one of the main editors, runs a Youtube series called The Basics where he explains characters/concepts across continuities

The podcast Sound.wav has episodes talking about every issue of MTMTE in great detail.

The writer of More than Meets the Eye, James Roberts, answers fan questions on his twitter. I’ve archived a lot of those questions at @jrtweetsindex.

More than Meets the Eye has a soundtrack, because of course it does. People have made playlists collecting it on spotify and youtube.

Further Reading

I finished MTMTE, what’s next?

If you want the direct sequel to MTMTE, go straight to Lost Light, the sequel series. It’s still ongoing and (as of right now) 12 issues have been released. There are spoilers for it EVERYWHERE on Tumblr, fair warning.

There are also a bunch of other series within the IDW comics universe, depending on what you’re interested in.

@zandergb has a chronological listing of all the IDW comics

TFwiki summarizes the IDW comics line

alt chronological guide

another guide/reading order.

You don’t have to read all the books! If you want to just read Lost Light/MTMTE, you can do just that.

There’s also a bunch of animated series, which don’t exist in the same continuity as the IDW comics. Some of them are well liked.

@ponett has a guide that’ll help you decide which you’d enjoy

And here’s a brief guide by TFWiki

There’s also the Michael Bay movies which are awful and so is he. Not gonna recommend watching them, but if you wanted to learn about film theory by listening to Lindsay Ellis dissect them, there’s a youtube series for that.

Fan Stuff

Okay...but what about fan content and fanfic and art and community events?

First thing to know: Transformers content is posted on tumblr under the tag Maccadam. (more detailed explanation why) A lot of mtmte content is also under ‘mtmte’, so look there too. I only use Maccadam if I think a post deserves to be seen by a lot of people but opinions vary.

Second thing to know - the sequel to MTMTE, Lost Light is still being published and you will see ALL SORTS OF SPOILERS for it on Tumblr. To mitigate the damage, try blocking “LL Spoilers” “Lost Light Spoilers” and “Wednesday Spoilers”. You cannot avoid it all, so if you don’t want anything spoiled, get caught up on both MTMTE and Lost Light before browsing around Tumblr.

Fanfiction:

Warning! A lot of Transformers fanfiction is smut. Please take a moment to integrate this fact into your understanding of the universe. If you can handle that, go ahead to AO3.

If you’re curious about all the terminology used in those fics, here’s a guide to it (not every writer uses every word, but this will get you started)

If you’re not into the idea of robots having sex, here’s a link to AO3 with my personal best-effort safe-search (no guarantees, relies upon people tagging properly)

And here’s a blog dedicated to recommending good sfw transformers fanfiction

If you want to know more about Transformers fanfic, I did a whole statistical survey of it, cause I’m a dork.

Here’s an old-school Transformers-only fanfic archive (I don’t see a category for IDW comics but maybe you can find somehing)

Fanart&Fanfic Events/Zines/Gift Exchanges/Collaborative Projects:

As many active projects as I could find - I’ll try to keep this one updated

Fan Artists:

(same warning as the fanfic - there’s a goodly amount of transformers pornographic art, be aware of that and block ‘nsfw’ if necessary)

There are a ton of active fanartists who draw IDW Transformers art. If you search a bit under ‘Maccadam’ you’ll find them.

@iaconlibrary reblogs a great deal of fanart & is a great place to start browsing

Roleplay:

If you’re into roleplaying on tumblr @teletrans-comm-unit runs a master list of active rp blogs

Transformers: Lost and Found is a long-running independent game set on the Lost Light

TF:Galaxy appears to be a forum-based tf roleplay game

My Favorite Jokes:

The best amazon review

Emotional labor (nsfw-ish warning)

Bros with Vows

Hands

Conventions:

There are Transformers-specific conventions, which is pretty cool! I know nothing about them but tfwiki has some info: Official and Unofficial conventions.

Regrettable Opinions:

hey this is just a quick guide of things not to do so you don’t hurt other people in the community

Do not compare Megatron to Hitler. The comparison is both vapid and offensive, as Jewish members of this community have pointed out time and again.

Don’t say transphobic/homophobic/racist/antisemitic/sexist things. You’re better than that!

Don’t attack the creators of the books/harass them on social media/make bizarre unfounded accusations of them acting in bad faith

we’re really lucky that JRo and the other creators interact with us & answer questions and don’t you dare screw that up, I’m trusting you.

on a less serious but useful etiquette note: don’t tag creators into negative reviews of their work/people complaining about their work. It’s rude to the creator & the reviewer.

That was a short list but remember to also treat other people with respect & that it’s okay to disengage with content/people that upset you.

Fandom:

There’s a guide on Fanlore, but it’s freakishly outdated and doesn’t even mention the comics. If you’re a informed tf fan maybe you should update it. 😉

Tumblr!

MTMTE is a pretty small community on Tumblr, but there are a few cool folks. Remember, ‘maccadam’ and ‘mtmte’ are your tags of choice

Various websites!

Since the transformers fandom is super old, there are a bunch of dedicated websites with traditional forums to chat on. (most of these are news sites that also contain forums) idk anything about them but maybe forums are your thing:

TFW2005 - big site with a large community but be warned there appear to be more than a few alarmingly bigoted people on that site

TFormers

Cybertron.CA

Allspark.com

Seibertron

I’m gonna throw the IDW TF reddit on this list rather than make a new section

Discord!

there’s at least two active discords at the moment. I know nothing about them or discord, but maybe one of them would be to your liking:

#1 - run by @zzxid

#2 - run by ??

The community is, like all fan communities, is a mix of good and bad, awkward and friendly, opinionated and goofy, self-serious and offensive. You won’t like or agree with everyone and there are some folks you should probably block.

Just find some people who share your general outlook & are interacting with the books in the same way you want to 💕

-Lynn. I have no qualifications to write this guide, I am not an authority of anything. I just really want you to love these books. Last updated on Dec 24, 2017, click through to check for any updates.

image descriptions below cut:

[image 1: Panel from MTMTE of Rewdind and Chromedome kneeling and holding hands while Chromedome says “Rewind, my love, it’s not for me to say.”]

[image 2: Fortress Maximus covered in small brightly colored robots shaped like various animals saying “Don’t worry, my friend, all taken care of.]

[image 3: Swerve holding a cartoonish drawing of Prowl and pointing at it, saying “No! Prowl with the head spikes and the cruel mouth and the - cross all the time! Epically, preemptively, existentially cross! And cold! Supercilious and cold! Imagine Ultra Magnus without the warmth and people skills. How can you not know who Prowl is?”]

[image 4: Trailgate in holomatter form, holding the first issue of More than Meets the Eye and saying: “Besides, I didn’t say I didn’t like it - I just don’t understand all the words. And it presumes a degree of familiarity with the Autobot/Decepticon war that I still don’t have...I suppose there’s always the wiki. Or tumblr...”

Cyclonus from off panel: “I told you to stay off Tumblr.”

Tailgate: “You’re right: spoilers. I want to enjoy it issue by issue - it only goes up to 43.”]

[image 5: Drift smiling a big fake smile and saying: “Anyway - let’s move on.”]

[image 6: A panel of Cyclonus gazing out the window in his dark and empty bedroom with a panel of narration: “Of course we’re not the only ones. This ship is a refuge for the emotionally inarticulate.”]

#maccadam #long post #mtmte #more than meets the eye #transformers #intro guide #new readers guide #explanatory #my tags for sorting:#gay space car robots: IN SPACE #mine #nazi mention #overthinking it

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epona1991 · 6 years

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52 Week - Art Challenge

This will be my own 52 week art challenge.

At each end of the week I want to give something like a status report. What went good, what was bad, where did I have incidents and what could I do better for the next week.

If you want to hop on make sure to use the tag #52WAC or #52W-AC

I listed the different topics under the cut. I didn’t want to spam your whole tumblr page with the challenge.

Me and my brother @balko37 will start the challenge on 02.07.2018 and will see this as our first week of the challenge. I wonder if I can make it through. But I don't want to give up.

Draw at least one picture of your choice (doesn’t matter if traditional or digital) Save the picture until the end of the challenge

Recap and Time management for the challenge If you really want to do this 52 W-AC you’ll need time! So write down your general appointments throughout the week. Try to consider everything. Going to school or working? Having other hobbies or weekly meetings? After you wrote down all your appointments, you’ll see where you have free time to devote to the challenge. Try to reserve at least 1 hour a day.

Information: Material Study Get to know the medium you’ll be using for this challenge. Search for information on how to use it (When should you use which pencil? What kind of settings does your digital program provide? Or are you using something absolutely different?)

Information and Train: Composition Gather information about compositions and draw different compositions for different scenes.

Practice: Make it simple Choose an animal/human/objekt and make it simple. Break it down to its basic shapes like squares, cubes, pyramids, triangles, etc. or just lines.

Practice: Scenes with simplicity Think of different scenes and break them down into their basic shapes. Include your knowledge about composition.

Information: Light Study Gather information on different light and shadow techniques without using colors (only black/white/grayscale).

Train: Light Study Now it’s time to use your new knowledge and try them out. Which technique do you like most and why?

Information: Color Study You probably heard something about a color wheel and how some colors mix better together than others? But is that really all to it? Collect information on it. Was there something new you didn’t know?

Train: Color Study Try out your collected knowledge. From now on try to use it as often as you can in this challenge.

Information: Light Study with Color You know the basics of light study but how do light and shadow react with color?

Train: Light Study with Color Train your light study with different colors. Remember your color study!

Information and Train: Shading Search for different shading techniques. Try them out. Which is the one you prefer most and why?

Train: Preferred Shading technique Train your preferred shading technique a little bit more. From on try to use it as often as you can in this challenge.

Information and Train: Faces and heads Get information on how to draw faces and try them out. Remember every face looks different. Try to draw a variety on head and face forms.

Information and Train: Hair styles Collect information on how to draw different hair styles. Do you like it more to draw hair styles with hairlines or without? What kind of hair style do you prefer?

Information and Train: Facial Expressions Try to get to draw different facial expressions. Use yourself as a model if you want to or search for references on the internet.

Information and Train: Hands Hands are hard. At least for me. Find references and tutorials on how to draw them. And practice them for this week.

Information and Train: Gestures Hands are actually pretty expressive. Find different gestures and practice them. Use an appropriate facial expression to express the emotion even better

Information and Train: Feet Now it’s time for practicing some feet. What kind of positions can they take?

Information and Train: The human body In this week we are dealing with the human body. And I’m not just talking about the ideal body. Some poeple have long legs, other a longer torso. Try to experiment with the body shapes.

Information and Train: Body language Time to put everything together. Body language includes everything you trained in the previous weeks. Search for different body language poses and draw them in different body shapes with hands, feet and facial expressions

Information and Train: Body language Deepen your knowledge of the body language and practice it more.

Train: Clothes Now it’s time to get some clothes down. Search for references and draw different clothing articles. Maybe look into your own closet and draw your favorite outfit.

Train: Wrinkles Don’t forget the sweet sweet wrinkles in clothes when they are worn. Wrinkles can be pretty tricky, that’s why we’ll be doing a little bit more of clothes with the focus on wrinkles.

Train: Shoes Did you know there are a lot of different types of shoes? Draw some of them. We associate a lot with different kind of shoes. To give your characters variety you’ll need a selection of them.

Train: Different accessories for a character Search for different possible accessories for a character and draw them. Maybe they’ll always carry an umbrella or technology with themselves.

Information: Character Design Now that we have the basics it’s time to create some new characters. But before we can start it’s important to have some information on how to create a good character. So gather as much information as you can.

Train: Character Design With the gathered information create some new characters.

Information: Perspective To bring the right perspectives into a drawing can be very tricky. That’s why we’ll concentrate on collecting information on how to create different perspectives. Are there easy tricks you can use?

Train: Perspective Practice your new information with different perspectives in your drawings/sketches.

Train: Perspective Train your perspectives more!

Information and Train: Characters interacting with other Characters Now that you have a few different Characters and the basics of perspective down it’s time to let your characters interact with each other. Do they talk/fight a lot or have a healthy relationship with each other?

Information and Train: Characters interacting with other Characters Let your characters interact a little bit more with each other and maybe with completely others too. Maybe they meet their famous fictional or real live crush.

Information and Train: Characters interacting with their environment Gather Information and practice your characters interacting with their environment. Sometimes they’ll probably open the door, drink a glass of water or are sitting and enjoying the sun. How are you interacting with your environment?

Information and Train: Water Water is the most important element on our blue planet. That is why this week we will deal with this particular element. Gather information on it and draw a river, the ocean, a sea or maybe rain.

Train: Flora Our Flora has so much variety to offer. Besides all the different trees, there are a lot of flowers, weeds, parasitic plants and even carnivorous plants. Research some of them and practice their designs and textures.

Train: Landscapes Time to look for some landscapes to practice. I love landscapes. They can set a beautiful atmosphere for a drawing. So train a lot of different landscapes in this week.

Train: Buildings Drawing buildings seems to be pretty boring in the beginning. But if you drawing or story plays in a city and not completely in the wild you’ll need to draw a house or a building eventually. So search for references and draw some buildings. Maybe you can use pictures from your neighborhood?

Train: Vehicles Vehicles are important for transportation. That includes logistic, public transportation, road traffic and so on. Look for references and draw different vehicles. You could design a futuristic car or an old carriage.

Train: Furniture Furniture is important and can tell a lot about a drawing. Is the table well taken care of or does it show a lot of sings of usage? Is the kitchen clean or dirty? Draw a lot of different furniture and experiment with it.

Train: Real Animals Search for references and draw a few animals. But remember that there are not only mammals, but also insects, fish, reptiles, etc. The world has much to offer

Train: Fantasy Animals Now it’s time to draw some fantasy animals. But don’t just create unicorns or dragons. Try to create a few completely new ones.

Information and Train: Backgrounds Backgrounds are a sore subject for some artists. But it is important to set your character in an interesting environment. Is there something in the background, that could catch the viewers attention at second glance?

Train: Backgrounds Practice your backgrounds more. Don’t forget it makes your drawing more interesting.

Train: Set yourself a time frame Set yourself a time frame in which you want to finish a drawing. After that exact time you have to stop and look at your result. Were you able to finish it? If not, think about where you wasted time and try again.

Information and train: Field trip Get out and try to find inspiration from outdoors. Maybe there’s a place in your town you always wanted to visit. Sit down and sketch the scene before you. What does the composition look like?

Information and Train: Field trip Same task as last week, but visit other places. Maybe a zoo for differences?

Practice: Draw to the lyrics of a song Take a lyric line from your current favorite song and create art for it. Try to use every information and knowledge you collected so far.

Practice: Draw whatever you like Draw whatever you like. Where do you still have potential to grow? Which topic do you need to look into again?

Information: Recap what you learned Check over your collected knowledge and refresh everything for the great finale. Look more detailed into the topics you have the most potential of growing in. Try to rest your mind and hands :)

Draw the this again Draw the picture form the first week again. Try to use all your different collected knowledge form this challenge. Congratulations! You did it!

#52wac #art challenge #52W-AC #my own art challenge #improve challenge #self improvement #improve art challenge #52 W-AC #determined to finish

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buttonholedlife · 4 years

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Designing Live House & Techno along with Hazmat|Waves

Musician, speak carton enthusiast, songwriter and also manufacturer Walter Howard-- a.k.a Hazmat Live (Charlie Wilson, 4 Bests, Amp Fiddler, Soul Clap)-- speaks digital improv, creating real-time techno/house and also exactly how he remixes classic tracks, taking all of them to one more sonic size.

Through David Ampong, Waves Sound

Where does the name Hazmat stem from?

The title Hazmat happens coming from a location where I experience the music I help make is actually unsafe material that disrupts mainstream smugness. I do not care about cookie-cutter tags or keeping in my lane. I wish to push perimeters and also make eternities. The moniker "Hazmat Live" provides me the cover-up to work along with.

Being actually from Detroit "Electric Motor City," place of origin of Techno and also Motown-- and also all the other reformations in scripture, funk, jazz as well as deep home that were created in this attractive area-- I've been blessed to operate in all of these categories as well as it has assisted me promote a really one-of-a-kind audio. The effect Detroit carries the world is clear and present. I'm very honored to become a component of the popular music material of Detroit. It is actually quite important that I exemplify my people.

What plugins perform you make use of during the innovative method in the center?

I am actually a significant supporter of the Bass Fingers. When I first heard this VST, it blew my thoughts! I couldn't believe what I was actually hearing-- The fatness, fret noise, the cord prate, etc.-- It all simply compared for me. It matches all my bass creation requirements and also is actually quite simple to make use of.

I additionally can not reside without the Abbey Road Compilation (specifically, Friary Road Plastic and the J37 Tape). It blows my thoughts how warm and comfortable and also textural you may acquire along with the entire collection. Revival Vox is a requirement in my audio chain; joined the H-Delay, you can't shed. The Aspect Digital Analog Synth is just one of the only software program synths I such as to make use of. It possesses a really uncooked and analog really feel, plus the sequencer conserves the time for me. Definitely fantastic resources for my creative method.

How perform you make and also perform online techno & & house? Exactly how do you specify 'Digital Improv'?

Well, my existing excursion gear is a light one, however extremely effective! I have the Roland TR8-S, MC-707 as well as a JD-Xi in combination with an Akai MPC Live. I possess an exterior clock that I deliver to a SKIRT center which regulates the entire gear. As well as relying on the space and what form of efficiency I am actually carrying out, I could bring the chat carton out with me at the same time.

Playing real-time house/techno for me is actually a whole lot like the post-bop, free of charge jazz-era. I am actually a jazz music performer through field and "electrical improv" is merely me relating the policies of jazz music to a dance flooring. I could modify the drum gouge entirely or remix the bass pipe through including and deducting details. I could hop on a synth lead and also generate a haunting tune as well as loop, then produce an entirely various keep track of completely. There is actually something concerning playing with guitars that gives me a various sense of impulsiveness.

I pick to create 90% of the stuff I carry out coming from blemish, merely due to the fact that I really want the dancing flooring and also listeners to feel me in that minute. Essentially, I desire people to experience the effort as well as musicality I took into each set. Producing the popular music in your home simply acquires you until now; it's the online energy of people that assists stimulate originalities as well as raises the audience or dance floor to yet another amount. My target is actually to exemplify who I am actually though house/techno and as a Detroit artist. My chance is actually to motivate additional entertainers to create residence and techno and also provide the phrases "live collection" their suitable dental crown.

You recently did a remix cover of Sade's timeless song: 'No Regular Affection'. Just how performed you create it unordinary?

Sade's popular music has consistently interested me! I really love every canal and by chance, I think an exotic wind on my face when I pay attention to their popular music. For 8 minutes I failed to wish you to become on the dance flooring; I wished you to become floating above it. I preferred people to be actually carried into a colorful sonic measurement where they can experience wind on their skins, as if they were flying over a wonderful horizon.

I'm a big synth nerd and I desired to develop all my structures with the old gear and drum machines I possess in my collection. I feel this absolutely gave me a means to bare my soul and also to have a countless palette to repaint along with. The groove of Sade's "No Ordinary Love" is super-sexy, and I desired to honor some of the dopest bass lines ever by merely maintaining it the exact same and property electronic atmospheres around it. Hopefully I did right by it and also the world dancings with my interpretation of the attractive track.

The mix on this keep track of is actually quite fatty tissue and I can't take any credit score for that. Grammy-award succeeding developer Khaliq Glover (a.k.a Khaliq-O-Vision) placed his squish this tune as well as created it come. I am going to point out that I'm a budding mix engineer which I possess a whole lot to find out concerning the sonic realm. Waves plugins have completely given me great resources for finding my noise. Yet I like to pass off the blending components to the sonic artist or mix engineer to accomplish their factor and take everything to lifestyle.

Vocoders and talk containers are absolutely nothing brand-new, but what is it regarding all of them that can produce one thing audio new once again?

The talk box can turn heads instantaneously! It's a device I use to be actually expressive vocally as well as to record the audience's curiosity. It can easily deliver brand new life to an old part and also include an indisputable spin to the best tune. I utilized it on my remake of "No Ordinary Love" and also to boost my remake of "Music & & White wine" in 2018. I believed the talk package would be a great request for this traditional jam. I attempted extremely difficult to coating the parts and also provide the tune a soulful distribution.

Some individuals still have no suggestion what a chat package is, however they have actually heard it their entire lives. The discussion package entails numerous hours of rigorous experimentation, ear training, practicing scales and also finding out how to sing with a cylinder in your mouth! It absolutely is a craft kind and a 10,000-hour project. My goal is to bring additional understanding to a currently global music martial craft. Talk fighters like Byron 'Mr. Talkbox' Enclosures have actually created massive strides in maintaining the talk container in the mainstream radio as well as present day popular music. Our team perform the sonic combat zone, protecting the art as well as tradition of Mr. Roger Troutman, the king of talk container. Ideally even more folks will aid our team keep this art make up a part of the future as well as restore its rightful location as the leader of voice modulation.

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helpmagic08-blog · 5 years

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Pores and skin And Hair Care, Jewelry, Body Art, And Fashion

Facebook is a social community that makes use of Web 2.0 platform. How affiliate internet marketing works is…that you sign up for a product to advertise, you advertise, somebody buys it and you receives a commission a fee or a predetermined compensation. Facebook can even step up its monitoring of hate speech, adding three,000 content reviewers to just about double the size of its present staff, Senior Vice President for Global Advertising Solutions Carolyn Everson mentioned in a blog put up. In writing our book, The New Handshake: Sales Meets Social Media, Barb Giamanco and I discovered that some companies prefer Facebook, some prefer Twitter, and some use neither. Facebook has taken some steps to forestall corporations from recklessly using your data for focused advertisements , but now it might put strain on them to come back clear. Therefore, choose a company whose caregiving providers are very affordable. In line with the latest investigation, it was noticed that 1 billion people are the energetic users of the Facebook. With roughly 800,000,000 subscribers, Facebook gets bigger by the day and has changed the way in which that people get in contact with one another. The other 'secret' to utilizing paid traffic is in selecting the best merchandise to advertise. In fact, many manufacturers like Wayfair, Wholesome Tradition, Casper, and ASOS are additionally utilizing social media platforms to grow their model every single day. In the social bookmarking users Interact by tagging web sites and looking out via web sites bookmarked by different individuals. All you want is a web site or a blog to have the ability to embrace adverts or links you'll get from signing up for an associates program such as Amazon Associates, LinkShare, and ClickBank. HubPages already optimizes your Google AdSense adverts, in some advanced ways in which small publishers that Google typically reaches out to aren't able to. We look at a number of things in the case of optimization, including the format and style of textual content adverts, and the placement of the advertisements on the web page. Bloggers begin their weblog with the area of interest that they are knowledgeable in or need to be professional in to. It is a common thing that bloggers sell male enhancement merchandise. The type of affiliate program that you choose to possess is totally up to the person that is the proprietor of the enterprise. Among the greatest errors brand new on-line marketers assist to make is definitely signing up for almost each affiliate marketer system these folks experience. The survey requested members how usually that they had social contact with household and associates in particular person and on Facebook. I'm taking loads of nature footage, but I didn't know I might promote them and make some cash, it is a very useful info. The businesses that supply this service have knowledgeable affiliate and network program managers who employ numerous associates program administration techniques. I've solely not too long ago started serious about promoting my pictures. You can set up your lookalike viewers in Fb Advertisements Supervisor or Power Editor. But what's still pissing me off until immediately is the way in which that the gurus are presenting their earning money online merchandise. After getting obtained your whole programs in place, check out SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, and find out how to urge your web site up on the primary web page of the search engines. With more than 500 million users on Fb at present, it's a extremely profitable income supply if you know the way to utilize accurately. That is it. If I can get your electronic mail, I can maintain sending helpful advices, and advocate merchandise… Creating wealth within the course of. You can also create pages and groups on Fb related to your small business and provides information on it. Invite you are own mates and fans on your corporation page. I found it to be a very simple technique to reach individuals online and make further income on the identical time…and I was hooked. But whenever you're providing a search service, especially when it's touted as utilizing Google results, sticking an affiliate hyperlink in as the highest ranked outcome does raise some questions. The aim here, after all, is to help you visualize what a product appears to be like like on you, or round your physical surroundings, before you purchase it. Michael Kors is the primary brand to have AR Ads in the News Feed, the place it will enable people to browse different sun shades, use the digital camera to "put them on" and then buy a pair in the event that they like it - all inside an ad. Fb's efforts to guard user knowledge are creating some complications for attempts to enhance accountability for political adverts. Amazon Seller - If you're inventive sufficient to fabricate any particular merchandise which has great demand in the present market then you may easily turn out to be Amazon vendor and start selling your objects on-line to earn extra profits out of them. The navy government final week imposed stringent restrictions on the usage of social media campaigning. Selling beats is definitely simpler and more doable now, in the digital age, than at any other time in music history. Those that used social media excessively, via visual postings, displayed a median 25% increase in such narcissistic traits over the 4 months of the study. The brand new fb cell web site gives more convenience to entry fb from your cellphone. In response to the location, even social media professionals nonetheless make errors on the subject of shopping for Advertisements and designing campaigns for them. The decade of "Networking" and "Network Advertising and marketing", where all of us assist each other to succeed and get paid to do it. More cash will come as soon as we get the mixed effort of thousands of individuals prepared to help different individuals. Having been taken with images for many years - especially black and white images, I was intrigued by your article on easy methods to go about selling your images. For anyone who has ever thought-about the possibility of earning profits on-line, you won't have a problem itemizing the benefits and advantages of an internet enterprise alternative. Dale - don't fret about it. You've been in internet online affiliate marketing long enough to know that whenever you mention the mere phrases, individuals change into suspicious, especially here the place there are many different entrepreneurs. You'll read tales about completely different individuals making an attempt to earn a living from online marketing but failing badly despite having all of the sources and the necessary traits. Advertising banners of retailers merchandise generate instant gross sales whereby they get a fee. The plan was tied into Fb's larger technique to provide its customers a more nice promoting experience. People have additionally heard that beginning affiliate marketing online enterprise isn't fairly simple. I've been persistently creating wealth on-line regardless that I am not a full time blogger nor do I weblog usually. On this article, I will provide you with a good understanding on Facebook ads - Comparable to how you can get started and setup your very first Facebook advert marketing campaign, how you can target your prospects, the place your adverts will likely be proven, and at last, the forms of adverts that may produce one of the best results. Affiliate marketing online is basically a good way to earn a living on-line and its what many work from home jobs come all the way down to, finding a hungry market and promoting a product to them. In case, you've got any query or confusion associated to rising your corporation with a mobile utility, get in contact with a mobile app growth firm, which has expertise in creating diverse types of mobile apps. And, for the primary time ever, social media advertisements made up the largest slice of digital spending — forty three per cent, or roughly $7.8 million. However, similar to a coin, the affiliate marketing program also has its obverse and reverse facet. Then Oliver supplied a mocking new commercial for Facebook that probably won't be shared” by the corporate any time quickly. Acquire an affiliate hyperlink by their internet online affiliate marketing program. The recognition of the Fb has the direct impression on the online business of any service or the product. There are reliable and trusted affiliate programs over the internet. It's higher if you observe the right facebook marketing methods if you want to succeed with what you are promoting. how to know a 9 5 isn t for you offers one thing that many other websites do not a step-by-step course in article advertising and PPC advertising to actually aid you get to another degree. I'm not going to ramble on about what online marketing is or what programs to join. When you see that the articles advisable on the bottom of one in every of your personal aren't very associated to the subject of your content material, transfer your article to a more specific Topic. So Tyson brings the universe right down to Earth succinctly and clearly, with glowing wit, in digestible chapters consumable anytime and anywhere in your busy day.While ready for your morning espresso to brew, or while waiting for the bus, the train, or the aircraft to arrive, Astrophysics for Individuals in a Hurry will reveal just what you'll want to be fluent and ready for the next cosmic headlines: from the Big Bang to black holes, from quarks to quantum mechanics, and from the seek for planets to the search for life in the universe. The web market is saturated and individuals are shifting to efficient and smarter ways to earn money. The "flags" consult with you studying other people'sTriond articles and flagging low quality or inappropriate content. Trying completely different affiliate packages to search out which one works best for you is okay. I averted paid strategies for a long time as a result of I did not have the arrogance in the merchandise I selected. Choosing the internet online affiliate marketing applications that you simply want to go together with is not onerous to do at all. Nevertheless, enterprise homeowners who have already got a services or products in the marketplace and simply need to build their customer base with the help of a larger, extra established firm, JV advertising might be the smartest choice.

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felixluis · 5 years

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Five SEO 2019 Tips You Need To Learn Now

This is important to focus upon SEO professional if you want to bring more traffic in order to your site and increase the particular visitors of your content. Every advertising SEO blog is usually talking about online video marketing and advertising and every third company professional you talk to is about to shift marketing dollars to a good online video campaign. ” Simply by 2019, video is expected in order to account for 80 percent associated with all web traffic. Don't set it and neglect it. Take time to review your SEO keyword strategy every single few months to make certain it's still relevant and attaining the final results you want. Stories are a easy method to do marketing, you simply need to include some custom made images or text in purchase to let people know they will could swipe to click plus see where you can obtain a skirt, grill, buy SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, or anything else you're attempting to pitch to the people. Jana Granko, PR (public relations) head in SEMrush - one of the particular top marketing tools of the particular world - believe that within 2019 AI (artificial intelligence) might change the way people research for keywords. In fact, SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is simply one part associated with every successful digital marketing technique, but possibly the most essential part. These are called SEO rank factors. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is the art and technology of driving the most skilled visitors to your website simply by attaining high search engine outcomes. In Digital SEO Land, Rintu Biswas a professional SEO expert within Kolkata will assist you in order to build quality backlinks aimed at your website. This ‘what is SEO‘ guide (and this whole website) is not about churn and burn type of Search engines SEO (called webspam to Google) as that is too dangerous to deploy on a genuine business website in 2018. You may generally see outcomes of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION efforts once the webpage proceeds to be crawled and listed by a internet search motor. Most likely the best form of cultural media to pay attention in order to when turning to SEO will be Google Plus. A single of the most successful methods to ensure your clients discover your photography business is simply by implementing an SEO strategy, this specific is more than just generating it to number 1 in Google, it means ensuring the fact that a varied and steady supply of traffic is planning to your site, over and even above that of your opponents. If you are usually willing to improvise your web site search and boost up your own Google ranking, but do not really have time or resources with regard to doing that, hire an SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION specialist for the same objective. Mobile SEO will be mobile search engine optimization or even optimizing content for a much better search ranking. Titles on pages and explanations affect what people see within search results, so it's important to check these out within any SEO audit. Search motors give some guidelines for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, but big search engines maintain result ranking as a business secret. Along with $80 billion forecast to turn out to be spent annually on SEO — and content marketing set in order to become a $300+ billion industry simply by 2019 — it might end up being tempting for stakeholders to notice SEO and content marketing since cost centers rather than profits centers. While that will theory is sound (when concentrated on a single page, when the particular intent is to deliver energy content to a Google user) using old school SEO methods on especially a large web site spread out across many webpages seems to amplify site high quality problems, after recent algorithm adjustments, and so this type associated with optimisation without keeping track associated with overall site quality is self-defeating in the long run. PeepCon (which stands for The Householder's Conference”) seeks to teach doable SEO and digital marketing training. See how Matthew got a website from zero in order to one million visits in much less than a year, using the mix of blogging, content advertising, and SEO. Solid being familiar with of the keywords, questions, in addition to phrases your ideal customers make use of to find your products and even services is critical to successful SEO. 34. Applying SEO practices (such keyword optimization) to social networking raises discoverability when users search sociable platforms like Facebook and Youtube . com. Onsite SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION Guide — If you the particular actual link, you will observe a opt-in button where a person can download the Onsite SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION Guide. ” Matt Diggity will a lot of testing upon his own sites, and this manual reflects what on page strategies are working best for your pet. One important aspect associated with taking care of SEO will be identifying issues that are harming search engine ranking positions plus reducing the traffic you obtain through SERPs. User-generated content like reviews assist SEO through SMO, because this often comes in the type of social shares, likes, or even commenting, or common threads such as hashtags that point back toward a brand. Local SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION services offer a very focused online marketing approach, (it's not really like dropping off brochures upon front-porch steps or paying for a good ad in a local newspapers that could or may not really be seen by a achievable client that is actually fascinated in your products or services). For blog websites the greatest SEO practice would be in order to set the title of your own post in a heading1 label. Search engines is the gatekeeper to enormous amounts of traffic and prospects - search engine optimization (SEO) opens the doors. Mainly because long as they are gained naturally, inbound links are most likely the most dependable authority contractors in the world of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. All of us call this new methodology AdaptiveSEO so that as its title suggests, it is made in order to adapt to the evolving plus sometimes unexpected changes in research algorithms. Numerous get confused in this region of SEO article writing recommendations for either they in place too little or maybe the particular wrong kind of keywords, or even they mention the keyword method too much which is occasionally called keyword over stuffing. Social SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION isn't a separate branch associated with SEO and it won't quickly be replacing traditional SEO, yet social signals are becoming significantly incorporated into search engine methods. Perhaps the particular most important aspect of lookup engine optimization is how a person can actually leverage SEO in order to assist drive more relevant visitors, leads, and sales for your own business. Just browse through the various types of our SEO blog page to find those important on-page ranking factors. According to him, key phrases have already lost their significance and in 2019 this pattern would only get stronger. Seo (SEO) is definitely the most efficient way in order to drive traffic to your internet site. An SEO on-line marketing strategy is a extensive plan to get more individuals to your website through lookup engines. Several search optimizers try to tip Google by using aggressive methods that go beyond the fundamental SEO techniques. Subscribe to the particular Single Grain blog now regarding the latest content on SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, PPC, paid social, and the particular future of internet marketing. SEO can furthermore stand for search engine optimizer. Like the rest of the particular digital landscape, SEO marketing is usually continuously evolving. Search Engine Book — Read information right after Moz's guide to solidify knowing regarding it of the basic parts of SEO. If a person do not have the period or have insufficient training upon web design or SEO, Appear for web design experts plus hire a professional SEO services agency to keep your site and your good reputation normally you business may depend upon it. I ended with the website number 1, 228, 570, 060. This particular generates SEO anchor text, which usually helps you in improving your own search engine rankings. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION marketing is about the keyword choice that will attract a excellent deal of unique visitors in order to your website. Perhaps you have question what will be the brand new changes and updates that many of us can experience in SEO inbound links sphere in 2019? A Cisco research found that by 2019, eighty percent of all consumer Web traffic will be from Web video traffic. If might spent time online recently, might probably see the term "SEO, inch or "Search Engine Optimization.

Search Motor Optimization (SEO) is the technique to campaign your products on-line towards the right clientele with regard to increasing ROI. There are many tools upon the web to assist along with basic keyword research (including the particular Google Keyword Planner tool and there are even more useful third party SEO tools to help you perform this). The biggest change that will we'll see in 2019 (and that's already happening) is the particular fact that keywords are getting less important. Once you've discovered your keywords, use another SEMrush tool, the SEO Content Design template, which is part of their own Content Marketing Toolkit, to function out the best way in order to optimize your content. If a company is providing you all these services below one roof, climbing up the particular SEO ranking will not end up being an uphill task for your own business any more. Local SEO companies allows a person to position your business upon search engines like google plus other digital marketing platforms therefore you're seen by potential clients — on their terms. YouTube adds the particular nofollow” tag to their hyperlinks, so they don't really assist with SEO. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION isn't just about building research engine-friendly websites. The sooner you understand the reason why Google is sending you much less traffic than it did this past year, the sooner you can clear it up and focus upon proactive SEO that starts to effect your rankings in a beneficial way. The trending SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION technique or strategy now plus in 2019 will be Research Enterprise Optimization It has already been coined by myself since 2015.

When a person think of a white head wear you may think of the particular Kentucky Derby or even a Royal Wedding ceremony but in SEO speak this means the group of strategies involving the best practice, the particular ones that earn you just about all of the gold stars plus brownie points, the ones that will don't use bad manipulations to get traction or ranking, but individuals who do what they perform to the best of their own abilities, create wonderful content plus follow all the rules. Also, worthy of bearing in mind is the fact that Google pay attention to styles and what their customers need, if you want to continue to be ahead of the game plus make sure your SEO is usually fit to get a 2019 audience, the idea is worth ensuring you likewise include SEO techniques that take up newer trends such as words searching. The search engine optimisation (SEO) solutions are designed to increase presence inside the algorithmic (natural”, organic”, or free”) search results in order to deliver high quality, targeted visitors aimed at your website. We might suggest them as an agency to get a range of digital marketing providers from content marketing and on-page SEO. In short, we think that SEO in 2019 will certainly have to shift focus actually more towards answering people's queries and solving people's problems. With this SEO article composing guidelines formula it pleases the particular search engines and the visitors reading the content. Search Engine Search engine optimization Starter Guide — This guidebook was written by Google and possesses many SEO best practices regarding webmasters. The main stage of SEO is to become friendly both to users plus search engines. Based in Colorado springs municipal airport terminal, CO, SocialSEO has been the particular preeminent digital marketing firm within Colorado since 1996. Although the SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION experts provide great SEO providers for their clients, there are usually a few who ruin the particular internet design industry through their particular greed in marketing efforts plus manipulate search engine rank. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION may target different kinds associated with search, including image search, nearby search, video search, academic lookup, news search and industry-specific top to bottom search engines. The benefits of successful digital marketing plans are quite much proven throughout the board yet when it comes to organizations Blog9T within the photography industry the particular SEO components of the marketing method really do make all involving the difference to helping the photographer stand out from this crowd. HISTORY LESSON: Old SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION advice suggested you connect along with websites and trade links along with each other True, a huge reliable site linking to you may boost up your ranking, yet, it's not going to assist your relevancy score when the particular linked content isn't related in order to the website sharing it. 10. Quality back back links need to be built upward to your site for efficient SEO. SEO is about attracting individuals to your site to start with by making sure this shows up searching queries. A greater number associated with people will stick to tone of voice search, so SEO specialists can need to adjust to this particular relatively new kind of lookup. Seo or SEO is definitely a powerful method to generate targeted traffic to your site and hopefully increase your bottom part line. Whilst many marketing tactics rely upon you reaching out to your own audience, SEO gives you the particular power to achieve people whenever they are actively searching out there information related to your solutions and products. Light hat SEOs the actual suggestions of Google and other lookup engines like google. As Google's search engine outcomes become increasingly monetized and additional platforms such as Amazon plus YouTube gain more SoV plus search volume, I think wish overdue for the focus associated with SEO to shift far through Google. Traditional SEO will be focused on building (keyword relevant) links and (keyword relevant) content material. The main reason these kinds of are sometimes misunderstood is because there are a whole Internet underbelly of alleged SEO companies that you may pay to link to your own site on their networks associated with low-quality articles. However, before we obtain to our main event, I actually must note that after the 2017 edition of SEO developments launched last year on Lookup Engine Journal, we heard the couple of complaints about simply how long it was. After that your boss tells you you aren't accountable for search engine optimisation (SEO), too. Michael jordan Harling, SEO Specialist at Roman Blinds Direct, agrees with the particular consensus that voice search may be the trend in 2019. User-generated content racks up serious SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION points by providing sites along with fresh content, bundles of inbound links, and sources for organically framing natural attributes. You'll find it right here Also really worth checking out there is Moz's Beginner's Facts SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, ” which you'll find right here, and the SEO Success Pyramid from Small Business Search Marketing and advertising. Off-page SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION strategy refers to the impact of a change in additional websites in your search rank. Bruce Clay-based set the standard for honest internet marketing by authoring the particular " SEO Code of Integrity, " now translated into eighteen languages, and it has already been a respected leader within the particular ever-changing lookup engine marketing industry since mil novecentos e noventa e seis. Website SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING (including, content optimisation, meta optimization, the significance of links). A good SEO Specialist is someone who else is an expert on the particular topic of search engine search engine optimization. Just since a proper On-page and Off-page SEO optimization work will provide a better Ranking to your own website in Search Engine Outcome Page (SERP). The largest SEO change and pattern I realize already happening within 2018 is Google's switch in order to a mobile-first index, so when a site is not however mobile-friendly and optimized for this, it's critical to prioritize this particular as it is now basic for its SEO success. With good on-page SEO, lookup engines can easily index your own web pages, understand what your own site is about, and very easily navigate the structure and articles of your website, thus rating your site accordingly.

Keep in mind that will links, content, and user expertise are all major SEO position factors. Could holistic approach will ultimately eliminate a lot of the particular issues created by some SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION practitioners over the years, We suspect that search engines' technical engineers will initially overestimate the accuracy of their AI, resulting within Penguin-level collateral damage. SEO (Search Motor Optimization) is the process associated with making a website more noticeable in search results, also called improving search rankings. Siteimprove SEO furthermore provides in-tool tips on where to start and the way to get the most out associated with your keyword research and supervising. We've already been operating in the SEO plus content marketing industry since last year and know how search motors work. Right now there are a great number associated with resources out there surrounding competing link analysis (and a great deal that have been authored simply by me! ) but whenever We speak with people that are usually working on SEO projects, really always one of those "yeah, I understand I should do this more" tasks. Amy Kilvington, Marketing Executive at Custom Drapes, believes that SEOs are heading to have to optimize social networking more as Google indexes this and prioritizes it over their particular sites' pages. Social media is usually the easiest and most efficient way to push the SEO-based content. However, presently there are some easy adjustments that will you can make to the particular search engine optimization (SEO) component of it, which will ideally provide you with fantastic results.

Erase all duplicated content material; it will increase your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION ranking. Long-term: as discussed over, you'll ultimately get more research traffic from better usability, also though you don't squeeze every single last drop from the SEO-trick lemon. However, to accomplish all this particular, web-developers use SEO custom providers, that have long-lasting SEO Search engines rank. That being said, companies usually have little or simply no time for you to maintain up with the latest advancements in SEO techniques. Social search motor optimization is largely built on user-generated content. Keywords are at the center of SEO, but they're in fact not your first step in order to an organic growth play any longer. Obviously, reviews are a powerful type of customer content that has large implications for SEO and increasing organic traffic. With right search engine optimization and with the help associated with an SEO expert however, your own website can give you a good increasing number of visitors plus exposure. Just keep in mind to pay attention to strong content creation and copywriting principles, engage your viewers deeply, plus stay abreast of technical tendencies such as backlinks, SEO health, site velocity, and schema. SEOmonitor pricing is based on the particular number of websites and key phrases you track. So, I actually would say that 2018 is definitely a challenge for Google, mainly because much as it may be for SEOs. The SEO Guide Keyword Suggestion Tool aggregates lookup data and provides volumes, associated terms, and more. Off-page SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION concentrates on increasing the authority associated with your domain through the act associated with getting links from all additional websites. Regarding: Search Engine Journal's flagship meeting, SEJ Summit, is dedicated to providing SEO pros the actual require, with an agenda of initial, first-run presentations covering the most recent SEO and PPC tactics through renowned experts, plus excellent social networking opportunities. SEO combines official research engine guidelines, empirical knowledge, plus theoretical knowledge from science documents or patents. This is usually a half-day workshop at LeadsCon that will be designed to be able to give attendees an end-to-end look at of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), how it works, and concrete things they can do right How SEO 2019 Can Help You Improve Your Health now to improve their SEO efficiency. After the Search engines Panda algorithm appeared, SEO specialists realized just how much key word frequency and density matters. SEO means optimizing your content so it shows up a lot more often in search results. 33. With social media systems like Facebook diminishing visibility associated with companies and brands, SEO (as well as paid promotion) is definitely becoming critically important for generating traffic to your social stations. 2019 dates TBD. ). Why go to: One-track conference full of forward-thinking, tactical sessions in SEO, development marketing, the mobile landscape, analytics, content marketing and more. ” Don't miss the LeadsCon Meeting in Vegas, March 4-6, 2019. Several search engines have also supplied to the SEO industry, plus are frequent sponsors and visitors at SEO conferences, webchats, plus seminars. If a person have a website that a person want to become easily discovered by a search engine, you have to increase your site rank via SEO as well. Some SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION companies focus on link building” and increasing the authority associated with their clients' websites. 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nofomoartworld · 7 years

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Hyperallergic: Selling Sticks and a Slap in the Face: Artists Intervene in eBay

Megan Hildebrandt, “ANXIETY DISORDER FOR SALE,” #exstrange auction (all images courtesy #exstrange)

Editor’s note: This essay is excerpted from the book #exstrange: a curatorial intervention on eBay, in which seven writers consider critical artistic perspectives on and provocations within the online market.

The sweet dream of a commercial marketplace doubling as a space for community and connection is an old one. We imagine the Ancient Agora of Athens, for instance, as a place where merchants peddled goods and citizens swapped political ideas. Perhaps this was even true.

By comparison, eBay seems more coldly mercantile. Its creation story, which involved the founder wanting to help his fiancée trade Pez dispensers with like-minded collectors, has only the flimsiest link to human connection — and is in any case a myth invented by publicists. The real goal of eBay’s inventors was to devise a “perfect market,” in the pure and uncluttered sense of matching buyers and sellers with zero friction. The Pez yarn may have contributed to somewhat condescending early assessments of eBay as little more than a digital flea market. Today, of course, it is a multinational ecommerce giant, facilitating all manner of transactions in dozens of countries.

But either way, why not take the flea market seriously? The fifth episode of Robert Hughes’s famous 1980 documentary series The Shock of the New memorably sees the critic striding through one in Paris, bellowing about the Surrealists, who had found inspiration in such settings and their “endless profusion of battling objects” in the early 20th century. “The flea market was like the unconscious mind of capitalism,” Hughes booms; artists prowled the sales stalls to mine connections from the seemingly impersonal goods on offer, revealing “secret affinities” within a world that their work “declassified.” And then the curators of #exstrange, Marialaura Ghidini and Rebekah Modrak, showed up in eBay’s infinite flea market with a different, but not unrelated, intent: to set up shop.

The selling of goods and services, in this context, would serve as a “pretense,” as Modrak put it, for facilitating exchanges among strangers — borrowing sociologist Georg Simmel’s take on the “stranger” as a “mobile figure who circulates goods.” And thus, through more than 100 auctions, involving dozens of artists (and non-artists), #exstrange joined and added to the commodity conversation, simultaneously cacophonous and silent, happening on one of our most familiar online agoras.

To take one example of what this looked like, consider “Stick—with history of affordance,” listed by Fieldfaring, the collaborative name used by artists Susanne Cockrell and Ted Purves. Like many #exstrange listings, it inspires a second look at the familiar eBay format, suddenly made noteworthy. For all its slick, global might, eBay’s aesthetic remains a bit of a mess. Pre-formatted text is cluttered by logos for payment-service options and social-media tools to promote whatever is for sale. The designated photo box is the main wild card: the sales image, whether seductively professional or alarmingly amateur, sets the visual tone. In this case, it’s a workaday picture of three sticks.

Fieldfaring, image from “Stick—With History of Affordance,” #exstrange auction

“When our son was in primary school,” the listing reads in part, “he would often have these sticks with him when we picked him up after school. He found them in the trees by the schoolyard and played with them at recess-time as make-believe firearms.” And yes, now that you say it, they do look sorta kinda like guns, particularly through the imagined eyes of an imaginative child. Bidders are invited to choose one stick, accompanied by “the memory of its original affordance,” as well as an acknowledgment that the buyer may add his or her own. The stick attracted 26 bids and sold for $71.

Possibly the winner was familiar with psychologist James J. Gibson’s “Theory of Affordances,” defining them as “action possibilities” in an object or environment; or Donald Norman’s subsequent adoption of that term in the context of human-object interaction in the book The Design of Everyday Things; or contemporary philosophical discussions of object-oriented ontology, where it’s not unheard of to encounter the affordance idea applied specifically to the action possibilities of a humble stick as an illustrative example.

But possibly not. Ebay sellers slot their auctions into eBay’s category schema, to make them easier for shoppers to discover, and in this case the artists listed their object under “Entertainment Memorabilia,” more typically represented by movie-prop replicas, concert T-shirts, and all manner of celebrity-autographed objects.

It’s a good example of the multiple ways that #exstrange aims to disrupt — to use a word popular among internet capitalists — assumptions about commercial exchange, virtual connection, and the contexts in which art can live, among other familiar paradigms. Characterizing their enterprise as a “curatorial project,” the organizers of #exstrange used eBay to obliterate the physical, geographic, and ideological norms that define, for instance, a gallery exhibition. Participants contributed listings/works from Austria, India, the United Arab Emirates, Mexico City, North Carolina, Brooklyn, Rome, Amsterdam, Ann Arbor, and so on. Some were recruited by Ghidini and Modrak, others by curators they brought into the project; still more joined in after the auctions got underway, building on an open call for engagement. (“Any artist, designer or eBay account holder may post an auction using the tag #exstrange and following the set of instructions posted here,” the project’s home site explained.) The volume of contributions demonstrated the appeal of sidestepping traditional gallery or art-world settings for a playful and possibility-filled alternative — but the works themselves demonstrated the value in acting on that appeal.

Lanfranco Aceti, images from “One Unit of a Slap (Slap in the Face, Medium to Strong, Colorful),” #exstrange auction

For all the freedom it offers from gallery strictures, eBay comes with its own constraints — a conceptual (as opposed to material) piece still needs to be framed to function in, or respond to, a sales setting. Lanfranco Aceti listed “One Unit of Slap (Slap in the Face, Medium to Strong, Colorful),” for instance, as a $500 gift certificate that would entitle the buyer “to own a slap in the face,” dealt by Aceti to a collaborator; this would entail a numbered and signed receipt, as well as the opportunity to witness the slap via Skype or FaceTime. Ann Bartges sold “shadow, middle-aged,” listed under “Other Women’s Accessories,” for $2.25. Megan Hildebrandt offered “ANXIETY DISORDER FOR SALE” (listed under “Tickets & Experiences”) without any clear explanation of how this would be delivered. When a potential bidder raised a concern about whether whatever it was could shipped to India, Hildebrandt replied she would ship for free, “as I am really looking to get rid of it.” It sold for $1.99. Meanwhile, she solved the problem of providing potential buyers with a depiction of her wares by filling eBay’s image box with the familiar red slash-in-a-circle “no” or “do not” symbol.

Obviously this sort of listing reframes eBay itself, converting the potential transaction into something a lot more complicated than the neat, near-mindless fusion of supply and demand. So did #exstrange listings that involved material objects. Sreshta Rit Premnath offered “A Flimsy Alibi,” in the form of a hunk of cardboard, pictured on a subway-station floor, with a poem as the official item description; someone bought it for a penny.

Norie Neumark and Maria Miranda, operating as the collaborative practice Out-of-Sync, listed clear bags of paper shreds, positioned as the result of an “endurance performance” — a year spent shredding “every piece of text” associated with Neumark’s lost teaching position; listed as art, under “mixed media, collage,” “Shreds” sold for $5.50.

Out-of-Sync (Maria Miranda & Norie Neumark), image from “Shreds,” #exstrange auction

Some artists addressed internet or tech-defined culture directly. In an extension of her ongoing Archive Fever project, Elisa Giardina Papa offered one month of her browser history on a pink thumb drive for 99 cents, describing it as a de facto “unedited narrative” of her personal and professional life, as mediated by the traces of her web wandering. JODI’s “EBAY shopping bag,” a physical shopping bag decorated with the digital store’s logo, listed under “Equipment & Material Stores,” sold for €60. Given the variety suggested here, it’s worth pausing over how #exstrange contributors resolved the challenge, or exploited the opportunity, of eBay’s image box: a no-frills photo of a bag of paper shreds actually makes a perverse kind of sense among all the amateur photography on the site, while the shopping bag quietly mimics the slick, professional merch pic that’s really just as common. The visual quality of the sales image usually communicates something about the nature of the seller and his or her goods — and #exstrange artists seemed to both play to and with that expectation.

Others turned the eBay listing into a site for political provocation. Masimba Hwati, based in Harare, Zimbabwe, sold a “soil sample” taken from a hill in that city where “the First Colonialist settlers planted the British flag” in 1890. (Here the sales image is a tasteful vase, full of dirt.) Listed under “Land” on ebay.uk, then relisted on ebay.com, where the closest available category was “Real Estate,” it sold for $36. Speaking more bluntly to current events, UK-based artist collective IOCOSE offered “Instant Protest!,” described as “photos of people from all over the world demonstrating in the streets with your favourite slogan” and allegedly useful for news articles or social-media campaigns. The listing’s promo images showed anonymous demonstrators with signs marked “LOREM IPSUM.” Offered in an edition of 10 at the “Buy It Now” price of $10, it sold out.

Masimba Hwati, images from “(Kutengesa Nyika) Soil Sample from Harare Kopje,” #exstrange auction

While this sampling covers only a small fraction of #exstrange, it should hint at the border-hopping sweep of the project, the sheer variety and firepower of the provocations — and, it’s important to note, the entertainment — on offer. One can only speculate as to the time and effort it would take to match it with an exhibition in art-world-suitable physical space(s). But whatever this may say about the challenges the project offers to standard gallery practice, the way it engages with eBay and the intersections of capitalism and technology that we’ve slowly come to take for granted is even more significant.

Toward the end of its run, #exstrange explored these intersections through a batch of auctions devised in collaboration with consumer-culture researchers. Eight listings offered unusual “products” that commented on contemporary notions of “networked” society — and, to further complicate matters, offered duplicates that simply positioned the exact same items in different ways. For instance, an iPhone EarthX – 4.7” was described as brand new, unlocked, and biodegradable, among other features; with no battery or memory limits, an “analog” operating system, and compatible only with an “Earth to Earth” network, it “dramatically improves the most important aspects of the iPhone experience.” The body material: “cast clay (unfired) and earth.” It was listed for 1 cent. An essentially identical version of the object and its accompanying sales text, with different promotional images and auction titles, was listed for $10. Through a series of direct interactions with the public, the researchers borrowed #exstrange’s conversion of a shopping space into an art space, and further converted it into a laboratory space.

ConnX, images from “iPhone EarthX — 4.7” Smartphone, Compatible with LFR Networks,” #exstrange auction

Whatever the results, it’s the fact of the experiment that matters. At the time eBay first made its way into the public mind, optimistic self-styled experts on the coming web-connected world declared that a new utopian marketplace of ideas was upon us; tired and stultifying gatekeepers would be swept aside, previously marginal or idiosyncratic thought could compete fairly with the hidebound and the elite, and the people would form our own more perfect polis. One popular metaphor for describing this suddenly inevitable new world pitted the cathedral against the bazaar — one model suggesting that the many are forced to listen to and obey the few, the other reflecting the agora-like ideal of unlimited conversation and debate and exchange.

Perhaps this has even turned out to be true, although we have since learned that the unlimited marketplace of ideas offers peddlers of the ugly and the shoddy fresh opportunity to expand their audiences, too. But more to the point, this wild new world often turns out to feel surprisingly stultified and regimented and formatted and controlled, filtered through prefab structures like Facebook and Google and, yes, eBay. What replaced the cathedral often feels less like a bazaar than a mall.

#exstrange reveals that there are some cracks and corners in these virtual structures, hidden in plain sight and waiting to exploited. It takes just one encounter with a truly unexpected eBay listing to reframe what eBay is, and what (and who) the wider techno-culture it now represents is really for — to complicate, if only momentarily, whatever’s going through “the unconscious mind of capitalism.” This is the real transaction, and this is the real exchange. It doesn’t cost a penny, and you couldn’t own it if you wanted to. There is nothing more valuable.

Elisa Giardina Papa, image from “Archive Fever Vol.37: My browser history [Feb 2017],” #exstrange auction

JODI, image from “EBAY shopping bag (#exstrange edition),” #exstrange auction

The post Selling Sticks and a Slap in the Face: Artists Intervene in eBay appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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