#even when i was first talking abt the challenge in art class my friend specifically looked over and was like!!! | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

everythingsinred · 2 years

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apparently zoe’s friend coined the phrase “slavaboo” to describe the strange subsection of people who are a little too obsessed with communism and the ussr, call each other comrade, joke about gulags, and pretend to have slavic accents, etc. u know. people who are superficially interested in slavs without knowing anything about slavic culture or history. they took the form of annoying white american boys throughout high school for me and would mansplain to me (incorrectly) about MY culture and history as if their terrible fake russian accent that they put on for kicks trumps my years of being an actual serb. now its tiktok girlies wearing ushankas and making really uncomfortable content about communism and eastern block “aesthetic”.

like on the one hand ushankas are just hats and im really not interested in gatekeeping my culture bc ive always wanted to share it, but tbh what pisses me off is that these ppl ARENT interested in the culture. ill always think back on that post abt cultural appropriation i saw a few years ago, that rightly challenged white ppl pulling elements of poc culture into their lives without first understanding the cultural significance. but that post then turned around and recommended aspects of european culture, specifically slavic and eastern european, that white ppl could use instead (folkwear and holidays), and that pissed me off.

in my balkan class we learned that eastern europe, particularly the balkans, are viewed as europe lite. it’s a strange place to be because obviously were white. thats just a fact. but western europeans view us as savages, uncivilized, a barbaric and war-torn land of backwards people. the first day of class my professor asked us to tell us words we associated with the balkans and GOD DAMN was there plenty of orientalism in that american university classroom. for most of our history we’ve barely been considered europe. our relationship with the word “europe” is so complex and difficult to properly explain. western europe doesnt consider us europe bc were not on their level. so getting grouped in like that, having someone outside of that group give other white people permission to “use” our culture with the same cavalier attitude that they would appropriate poc culture? its UNPLEASANT. i dont like it.

i guess what im trying to say is that knowing about russian war tanks and pilots is cool and all. gushing about eastern bloc architecture and wearing ushankas is fun. but slavic history is a big mess, torn between wanting to be part of the civilized “europe” but also not wanting to reject our specific culture (like the conflict between westernizers and slavophiles in russian history).

im thinking about the heartbreak of telling classmates and friends that i was slavic but having them be more interested in my barebones knowledge of russian history and culture rather than asking me about my serbian culture. that all i was to them was an excuse to talk about the soviet union or the warsaw pact when my country was never even a part of either. they’d get grossed out by the food i brought to school, demonstrate no interest in my culture at all. id watch their eyes glaze over when i excitedly asked them if they wanted me to write their name in cyrillic or teach them serbian phrases... its all so surface level and vapid. tbh really cringe. thats what yall are. cringe. using ur stupid fake slavic accents, calling each other comrades, making jokes about the ussr and gulags as if theres any humor to be found in a gulag. sickening behavior.

i WANT people to be interested in my culture but i want them to appreciate it. i dont want them pulling aspects that they can use for the aesthetic, or for them to oversimplify slavic history or make jokes about the ussr or gulags. i want them learning about folklore and mythology, actually listening to our music (and maybe actual folk music, not just the russian techno ppl like). look at our art, our stories. we have a rich and vibrant and varied culture with many influences. its not all blank cement buildings and ushankas. we have a lot of beautiful culture to offer and it pisses me off how ppl dismiss it.

#i also just #hate being grouped in with western europeans.#eastern europe is for the most part impoverished and has a heavy history of colonization.#were not really the same as the british or the french or the germans. it feels like an unfair comparison #and bold of me to complain right. cuz like no american friend that ive ever had has been interested in my culture #so beggars cant be choosers. but no. im gonna be a chooser.#this superficial interest isnt real interest and im not gonna accept it #are u really into slavic culture if u start getting uncomfy abt coming to my family's slava or trying my serbian food i bring to lunch?#are u genuinely interested if u wont let me tell my own history?#im thinking abt the nonaligned movement. sigh.#little anya things

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meruz · 3 years

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once again i am answering asks in a big compilation post. included is... gotham, patrick stump, tips about drawing backgrounds, tips about drawing in general, links to my faq, and infinity train

like.... the tv series? No... I’ve drawn dc comics fanart before, though. But it’s been years since I’ve been really into it. I like jumped ship like 10 years ago when the New 52 happened LOL.

AFJHDSLKGH I’m sorry I (probably) won’t do it again??

Actually full disclosure I have a truly cringe amount of p stump drawings/photo studies in my sketchbook right now LOL. He’s just fun to draw... hats, glasses, guitar, a good shape... but I don’t think I’ll rly post those until I can hide them in another big sketchbook pdf.. probably Jan 2022. Stay tuned........ (ominous)

(ominous preview)

These are all sort of related to backgrounds/painting so I grouped them together even though they’re pretty much entirely separate questions.... ANYWAYS

a) How is it working as a BG artist? Is it hard? What show are you drawing for?

I think you’re the first person to ever ask me about my job! Being a background artist is great. It’s definitely labor intensive but I think that could describe pretty much any art job (If something were rote or easy to automate, you wouldn’t hire an artist to do it) and I hesitate to say whether its harder or easier than any other role in the animation pipeline. Plus, so much of what truly makes a job difficult varies from one production to the next, schedule, working environment, co-workers etc. But I will say that I think while BGs are generally a lot of work on the upfront, I think they’re subject to less scrutiny/revisions than something like character/props/effects design and you don’t have to pitch them to a room like boards. So I guess it’s good if you don’t like to talk to people? LOL

A lot of my previous projects + the show I’ve worked on the longest aren’t public yet so I can’t talk about em (but I assure you if/when the news does break I won’t shut up about it). But I’m currently working on Archer Season 12 LOL. I’m like 90% sure I’m allowed to say that.

b) ~~~THANK YOU!! ~~~

c) What exactly do you like to draw most [in a background]?

@kaitomiury Lots of stuff! I really like to draw clutter! Because it’s a great opportunity for environmental storytelling and also you can be kind of messy with it because the sheer mass will supersede any details LOL.

I like to draw clouds... I like to draw grass but not trees lol,,, I like to draw anything that sells perspective really easily like tiled floors and ceilings, shelves, lamp posts on a street etc.

d) Do you have any tips on how to paint (observational)?

god there’s so much to say. painting is really a whole ass discipline like someone can paint their whole life and still discover new things about it. I guess if you’re really just starting out my best advice is that habit is more important than product. especially with traditional plein air painting, I find that the procedure of going outside and setting up your paints is almost harder than the actual painting. There’s a lot of artists who say “I want to do plein air sometime!!” and then never actually get around to doing it. A lot of people just end up working from google streetview or photos on their computer.

But going outside to paint is a really good challenge because it forces you to make and commit to lighting and composition decisions really quickly. And to work through your mistakes instead of against them via undo button.

My last tip is to check out James Gurney’s youtube channel because hes probably the best and most consistent resource on observational painting out there rn. There’s lots other artists doing the same thing (off the top of my head I know a lot of the Warrior Painters group has people regularly posting plein air stuff and lightbox expo had a Jesse Schmidt lecture abt it last year) but Gurney’s probably the most prolific poster and one of the best at explaining the more technical stuff - his books are great too.

e) Do you have tips for drawing cleanly on heavypaint?

@marigoldfool UMM LOL I LIKE ONLY USE THE FILL TOOL so maybe use the fill tool? Fill and rectangle are good for edge control as opposed to the rest of the heavy paint tools which can get sort of muddles. And also I use a stylus so maybe if you’re using your finger, find a stylus that works with your device instead. That’s all I’ve got, frankly I don’t think my drawings are particularly clean lol.

f) Tips on improving backgrounds/scenes making them more dynamic practicing etc?

Ive given some tips about backgrounds/scenes before so I’m not gonna re-tread those but here’s another thing that might be helpful...

I think a good way to approach backgrounds is to think of the specific story or even mood you want to convey with the background first. Thinking “I just need to put something behind this character” is going to lead you to drawing like... a green screen tourist photo backdrop. But if you think “I need this bg to make the characters feel small” or “I need this bg to make the world feel colorful” then it gives you requirements and cues to work off of.

If I know a character needs to feel overwhelmed and small, then I know I need to create environment elements that will cage them in and corner them. If a character needs to feel triumphant/on top of the world then I know I need to let the environment open up around them. etc. If I know my focal point/ where I want to draw attention, I can build the background around that.

Also, backgrounds like figure compositions will have focal points of their own and you can draw attention to it/ the relationship the characters have with the bg element via scale or directionality or color, any number of cues. I think of it almost as a second/third character in a scene.

Not every composition is gonna have something so obvious like this but it helps me to think about these because then the characters feel connected and integrated with the environment.

Some more general art questions

a) Do you have any process/tips to start drawing character/bodies/heads?

I tried to kind of draw something to answer this but honestly this is difficult for me to answer because I don’t think I’m that great at drawing characters LOL. Ok, I think I have two tips.

1) flip your canvas often. A lot about what makes human bodies look correct and believable is symmetry and balance. Even if someone has asymmetrical features, the body will often pull and push in a way to counterbalance it. we often have inherent biases to one side or another like dominant hands dominant eyes etc. you know how right-handed artists will often favor drawing characters facing 45 degrees facing (the artist’s) left? that’s part of it. so viewing your drawing flipped even just to evaluate it helps compensate for that bias and makes you more aware of balance.

2) draw the whole figure often. I feel like a lot of beginner artists (myself included for a long time) defer to just drawing headshots or busts because it’s easier, you dont have to think about posing limbs etc. But drawing a full body allows you to better gauge proportion, perspective, body language, everything that makes a character look believable and grounded.

Like if you (me) have that issue where you draw the head too big and then have to resize it to fit the proportions of the rest of the body, it’s probably because you (I) drew the head first and are treating the body as an afterthought/attachment. Sketching out the whole figure first or even just quick drawing guides for it will help you think of it more holistically. I learned this figure drawing in charcoal at art school LOL.

oh. third mini tip - try to draw people from life often! its the best study. if you can get into a figure drawing/nude drawing class EVEN BETTER and if you have a local college/art space/museum that hosts those for free TREASURE IT AND TAKE ADVANTAGE OF IT, that’s a huge boon that a lot of artists (me again) wish they had. though if youre not so lucky and youre sitting in a park trying to creeper draw people and they keep moving.. don’t let that stop you! that’s good practice because it’s forcing you to work fast to get the important stuff down LOL. its a challenge!

b) I’ve been pretty out of energy and have had no inspiration to draw but I have the desire to. Any advice?

Dude, take a walk or something.... Or a nap? Low energy is going to effect everything else so you gotta hit that problem at its source.

If you’re looking for inspiration though, I’d recommend stuff like watching a movie, reading a book, playing video games etc. Fill up your idea bank with content and then give yourself time/space to gestate it into new concepts. Sometimes looking at other art works but sometimes it can work against you because it’s too close.

Also something that helps me is remembering that art doesn’t always have to be groundbreaking... like it’s okay to make something shitty and stupid that you don’t post online and only show to your friend. That’s all part of the process imo. If you want to hit a home run you gotta warm up first, right? Sports.

I should probably compile everytime i give tips on stuff like this but that’s getting dangerously close to being a social media artist who makes stupid boiled down art tutorials for clout which is the last thing i want to be... the thing I want to stress is that art is a whole visual language and there are widely agreed upon rules and customs but they exist in large part to be broken. Like there's an infinite number of ways to reach an infinite number of solutions and that’s actually what makes it really cool and personal for both the artist and the viewer. So when you make work you like or you find someone else’s work you like, take a step back and ask yourself what about it speaks for you, what about it works for you, what makes it effective, how to recreate that effect and how to break that effect completely, etc. And have a good time with it or else what’s the point.

for the first 2, I direct you to my FAQ

For the last one, I don’t actually believe I’ve ever addressed artwork as insp for stories/rp but I’ll say here and now yeah go ahead! As long as you’re not making profit or taking credit for my work then I’m normally ok with it. Especially anything thats private and purely recreational, that’s generally 100% green light go. I only ask that if you post it anywhere public that you please credit me.

(and I reserve the right to ask you to take it down if I see it and don’t approve of it’s use but I think that case is pretty rare.)

a) @lemuelzero101 Thank you!!! I haven’t played Life is Strange but actually that series’ vis dev artist Edouard Caplain is one of my bigger art inspirations lately so that’s a really high compliment lol. And yeah I hope we get 5-8 too...!

b) Thank you for sticking around! I’ve been thinking about Digimon and Infinity Train in tandem lately, actually. They’re a little similar? Enter a dangerous alternate world and have wacky adventures with monsters/inanimate objects that have weird powers... there’s like weird engineers and mechanisms behind the scenes... also frontier literally starts with them getting on a train. Anyways if anyone else followed me for digimon... maybe you’d like Infinity Train? LOL

c) @king-wens-king I’M GLAD MY ART JUST HAS PINOY VIBES LOL I hope you are having a good day too :^)

a, b, c, d) yessss my Watch Infinity Train agenda is working....

e) aw thank you!! i think you should watch infinity train :)

#ask #trying this new thing where i tag people in the body of the post instead

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chubsonthemoon · 3 years

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tagged by @storybookprincess!! (thank you!!) here are some of my fave fics I’ve written! tbh this was kinda difficult; I am very aware that nothing I write is neither perfect nor very polished (it wouldn’t be even remotely fun for me if I tried to do that), but mostly everything I’ve written I’ve written for the sole audience members of me myself and I (and also sometimes a friend :3), so these are some of my more recent faves. under a cut because this got kinda long, whoopsie!

tagging! @superish, @dodici12, and @owletstarlet! <3

Letters from Heaven: haikyuu!!, kagehina, 60k

this fic was written for last year’s kghn big bang and it was so fun! It’s the longest thing I’ve written yet, and boy oh boy it was such a challenge to juggle a bunch of different things that I hadn’t done on this kind of scale before, like longer character arcs and, especially given that this is a violet evergarden AU, describing things in a way that fits with kyoani’s style and VibeTM. My last longer fic, thy kingdom come, was about half this length and almost made the list simply because of how bonkers it was (like I hadn’t written at all that year and suddenly signed up for a big bang and then had to take a month long break in the middle because of school stuff, and then boom I ended up writing the latter half of it a few days before the deadline LOL), but anyway. It’s not perfect (nothing is!) but it’s chock full of recurring metaphors and long-winded descriptions about the sky and pining out the wazoo (basically: all wildly self-indulgent things catered to me and me alone) and I love it all the same. (also bajillion thanks to janine for this one heh she is to blame for most of my kghn madness)

over the edge (of all our knowings): hunter x hunter, killugon, 13k

okay this one almost went to my other killugon fic again bc everything I write is so self-indulgent but!! this fic is probably one of the few fics that I set out to write very intentionally? that sounds weird, hmm how to explain. I tend to write fic mostly to let out Emotions but tbh it’s so much easier and way more fun for me to do that through reading other people’s works--less work for me to read abt my faves than to write them, after all! so most of what’s on my profile before this fic is exactly that: I sat down at like one in the morning with my notebook and fever-dream scribbled out a oneshot that I spent maybe the next two or three days typing up, reading over once, and then yeeting it up onto the archive. but not with this fic! I had already written my Vent fic for the boys in question, but my goals with this fic were more deliberately geared towards examining and changing up my approach to writing: 1) I really wanted to explore gon after the world tree and what his healing might look like, but gon is Really Hard for me to write (the boy is so!! ARGHSLKDFJ). So: deeply inhabiting unfamiliar character pov practice. Asking myself, after every single line of dialogue and event and inner monologue, how this character would react and why. How will this impact their next action? How will it impact their relationship with this other character? How about this? and this? and so on and so forth 2) I wanted to find a balance with my metaphors on both a sentence by sentence and an overarching basis (I tend to just go for the first--I can’t help it I love purple-y prose jslkdfj). 3) Time!! I also went a lot slower with this one. Every night for over a month, writing a little bit at a time in my notebook. And I found that going slower...is actually really nice? Takes a lot of the stress away. tldr; this fic was basically one long exercise in me examining my writing (also ngl my creative writing professor’s feedback on my work for class really kickstarted this LOL) and boy oh boy was it satisfying to see it posted when I finished. I learned a lot! Also I got some of the kindest comments that made me tear up, which was so wonderful. god this got long okay moving on.

your heart, bright heart: natsume yuujinchou, tanunatsu & gen, 7k

after over a year of quarantine I’ve read more fic than I ever have in my LIFE and I have figured some stuff out about what makes me go absolutely bonkers, writing-wise. this fic was an attempt, after several months of reading literally hundreds of fics across dozens of fandoms and relationships and pairings (like geeze! hxh, run with the wind, hq, yuri on ice, the great pretender, ouran highschool host club, snk, mdzs, final fantasy xv, and yes natsuyuu too LOL), an attempt at making myself go bonkers, if you will. and I still can’t quite put my finger on what it IS but I know it has something to do with the naming of things. like an author will Name a Thing, very specifically, whether it is an action or a character thought or something very simple about the environment--and that something speaks volumes about the character and their relationships and the core themes of the series and it’s like. it’s like there’s a moment of understanding between that character and the reader, an oh! I know what that means. it’s wonderful and I’m butchering the explanation here but anyway. I still have no idea how to do this myself yet but goddammit I’m gonna get there one day. This fic was my first attempt in the Naming of Things. idk if there are any oh! moments in it myself, but natsuyuu is the perfect series for the kind of quiet that I think you need for those small moments.

holy SHIT this got long uh. if you’ve made it this far--thank you?? this was also useful for me to articulate what the hell I’m doing in hamsterland. Recently a visiting poet came to one of my classes at university and talked about language-making as a physical art. Language has a physical existence, she said; it leaves the body and enters another and causes a physical reaction in both speaker and listener. She talked about how writers are creators of physical things, and how writing is mostly thinking before the creating. The physicality of language. To say it made me lose my marbles is an understatement!! tldr; there’s so much inspiration everywhere, and I wanna write more!!! So I’m gonna!!

#tag game #rambling #my fic

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