#i made the grayscale ones to make it more realistic or something

[l1m3g0r3]

POV: Ring doorbells

#i made the grayscale ones to make it more realistic or something #They’d def look into the cameras like this #Fnaf #doorbells #nightmarionne #nightmare balloon boy #nightmare bb #ring doorbell memes #because why not

[dr-jem-nutcase]

MvA: The M Files, take-a-peek, pt. 5

Chapter 6:

Dr C's origin story video was a 20-second one-take recording of his accident, so there's little to no room for any deviation from the movie. Still, may this NOT disappoint

Gotta love alliterations but carnage means "widespread murder". And I don't think this sort of kids' book would be willing to show a bloodbath

I just realized, where are the stairs leading to those massive doors?

A pin-up in the audience, wth? Even the guy to her left is saying the same thing

Genetic teleportation device. Makes sense cuz teleportation was the topic of scientific research & experimentation in both Fly movies but this time the bug mutation is intentional. The video game only talks about the genetic part: recombinant DNA (fact: this term wasn't coined until the 70s, so Dr C was ahead of his time). Thanks, M Files, for a better elaboration beyond just a scientific machine

Is it just me or have the illustrators eventually said, "heck with it! let's just get this done & over with!" and got lazy? Taking a look at the last two chapters/the last post, I'm beginning to wonder

Ok, we get a better visual of Dr C's hairstyle. I put this pic in a grayscale filter and his hair in the movie was definitely darker than this ash brown-blond color (I like to think it's dark brown)

That shirt & tie. So much for that turtleneck. But from what I've gathered, the illustrators for a number of kids' books about the movie were given art references (besides the concept art) from DW months before the movie came out. Dr C's swap from the tie to the turtleneck didn't happen until later in the making of the movie; pretty much all the concept art of him show a shirt & tie. I don't know about you but I wanna see that reference art, every piece of it! As a fan of this glorious franchise, may my prayers be answered!

Whozits. Lol

Srsly? Portable phones, or phones that didn't require a cord, were a thing of dreams in the 60s. And what kind of haircut are you guaranteed? A trim? A buzz cut? And chocolate tastes AWFUL after you brush your teeth, and the average adult doesn't drink hot chocolate on a regular basis. It's coffee, if anything. Or even more realistic in the early 60s: a phone that lights a cigarette. You ever watch mid-century period dramas like Mad Men or Call The Midwife? Every other person smoked back then--anytime, anywhere! But this is a kids' book, again. Smoking/tobacco use is nowadays a reason for something not to be rated G. Istg, my inner historian has been doubled over & screaming in pain since this chapter began! Ok, enough whining

The fat guy's constant *ahem* cracks me up tho

Was this presentations of scientific discoveries or a glorified science fair? Dr C had discovery in mind while the fat guy had fair in mind. Imo, that genetic teleportation device was way more practical than a phone with hygiene & hot chocolate powers, not just super scientific

Unsurprisingly, Doc had his own fanbase on a university campus

Say "they called me crazy but I'll show them" without saying "they called me crazy but I'll show them"

Ok, is it just me or did the color pallet change on this page?

Didn't think that the machine was red. Also, the shirt is now black

"Whoops! I made a mistake!" "Just keep going, Jim. We've got a deadline."

So, he's just going with it without actually testing it on something else? That IS mad

I wish we saw more of his face in this instead of the back of his head

Dr C foretold Neil Armstrong's famous landing-on-the-moon quote

O...m...g. You can tell the illustrators had the hardest (or laziest) time with this chapter. I can barely look

A PhD in dance, mind you. A PhD in anything doesn't make you a faultless god

Oh! And go back inside if you want peace & quiet. And if you must, lock the door

Now both the tie and shirt is a different color

Reclining in the trash can, lol

I'm honestly the university campus hasn't been entirely vacated at this point

Welp, if climate change doesn't work, we know where to go...wait this was the 60s. Never mind

So, you've got a washing machine, an oil barrel, two tires, a traffic cone, maybe a bike chain and...what else?

That day, the middle of September 1962, a distinguishable sound that would haunt a secret prison facility for generations to come was born. This lines up with my h/c that being partially human mentally on top of the trauma of the accident brought on some amount of insanity

That tie must be magic. It changed colors again

Omg! Just call that slipper out for what it is!

"Hey, Jim? What's that shoe thing people wear in the morning?" "I forget. In this panel, it's in a junkyard, so just call it an 'ugh'."

In the movie... "Ooh! An old ugh...I mean, slipper!"

That is one heck of a net for that tiny fishing pole

The antennae sticking out of the net

Ooh, Monger's a major now, but how'd he know about Dr C?

But srsly. Is this chapter perfect? No. But I like it for giving "human" Dr C a bit more time than just a 10-second camera footage of a hottie in a lab coat getting into a giant cylinder. I don't know about anyone else, but it gives me more of a comprehension that Dr C's a human being with a cockroach head and tendencies, not just a strange anthropomorphic bug person

Epilogue

The End! Oh, wait!

So the jetpack has a flamethrower? Hot dang...literally

Link lifting a weight with his tail, lol

Blue-eyed Dr C with a gold tie pulling out...what is that? A bra? The illustrators must hate his guts

Poor private Grime. And what are the monsters supposed to do with potatoes? I think B.O.B. & maybe Insecto are the only ones who would eat potatoes, and Dr C might try potato battery experiments. But why so many? Did Monger stop by local gleaners or a food bank/pantry? Was this a donation of charity? Did he accidentally go over the top with potato crops at his farm? I don't get it! But quoting Samwise Gamgee, "Po-Tay-Toes! Boil em, mash em, stick em in a stew!" There's probably a thousand and one things you could make with potatoes. Like vodka--oh, wait! Kids' book

Grime must've been like one soldier online who said he could cook minute-rice in 58 seconds. Still, I feel bad for the guy. Do you know how hard peeling potatoes can be on your hands after a while? Ow, ow, owie...

Overall, not a bad book. Disappointing every now and then, but hey! Kids' book. It was kinda expected. The watered-down, non-violent breakaways from the movie had its ups and downs. Like providing some explanation of details of the origin stories in the movie, like why the tomato and dessert topping. Or the idea that luring a monster into a trap is the ultimate way to capture one, MUCH more scaled out and less violent than fighting them until you get the upper hand and force them into submission and/or tranquilizing them, like tranquilizing Susan and then tying her down when she became too drowsy to fight and eventually consciousness in the movie instead of luring her into a trap (like, how would you lure a confused, scared 50-foot bride into a trap when all she can think of was her fiance's safety and why people were wrapping a rope around her arm?). If you thought this book was a disappointment through and through, I read the graphic novelization, and it is a bigger disappointment than anything in this book. More watered down, the illustration was terrible, and some of the rewritten scenes didn't add up with the events of the movie, like wth. I think I threw it out

I hope you enjoyed this take-a-peek series as much as I did. And maybe I can share the second half of the entire book, a story called Brain Pain, a silly entertaining story about the four monsters (BOB, Dr C, Link, & Insecto) in the facility some time before Susan showed up. Maybe :)

Again, none of this belongs to me, as much as I wish it did

#monsters vs aliens #mva #dreamworks #general monger #general w r monger #childrensbooks #dr cockroach #dr cockroach phd #insectosaurus #doctor cockroach #the missing link monsters vs aliens #kidsbooks #bob mva #benzoate ostylezene bicarbonate

[toonpunk-game]

Road to 2nd Edition

Hey everybody. It’s been a long time since I’ve posted something here—because, simply put, there was no more that needed saying. Toonpunk went out the door, it was a very modest success, I posted some lore updates, and then I turned my attention towards other things. I’ve kept myself very busy the last few years in many ways, including a slew of game design projects—some of which already saw publication, and some of which are so ludicrously expensive that a modest success just isn’t gonna pay for em. I didn’t want to go back to kickstarter, so making money for those is most of what I’ve been doing.

Since the debut of the original toonpunk I made a few little content modules for my own use, in line with my original vision for a product line. And, starting about a year ago, I had a pretty shocking realization: as much as I loved it when it came out, the me of 2022, doesn’t like the game I made in 2017. There were a lot of little things that I felt were lacking, or insubstantial, or not very funny, or maybe a little clumsy mechanically. Plus, its politics stank with the naivite of a 21-year-old liberal who hadn’t yet discovered the golden path to Marxism. So, I started work on a simple project: integrate a lot of the modules I’d made for my own amusement, get some more art, rewrite the flavor text, and release the package as Toonpunk 2nd Edition. 2npunk, if you will.

I’ll be keeping a dev diary here to let you all know how it’s coming along. To fill you in on the new stuff. I’ll be posting the whole finished product here one day, and here’s the first piece of news: it’s going to be absolutely free at point of purchase, with a pay-what-you-want option if you just really feel like you gotta gimme some money. Maybe pessimistically—I say realistically—I’ve just given up on the idea that this game is ever gonna make a dime. But I think it can keep a lot of people entertained, so that’s what I’m gonna angle towards. More on that after the break.

So on that note I’d like to talk about one of the smaller changes I made, that’s also turned out to be one of the more expensive and creatively satisfying ones. In the original Toonpunk book, there’s a list of example player characters near the back. These include statlines and gear recommendations for people who want to play specific kinds of characters. It was—to put it generously—done with the resources I had at the time, and it shows.

Look at that. Very humdrum. There’s a fair bit of information there but it all kinds of blends together and it doesn’t really grab the imagination. One of the first things I learned, selling this book store-to-store across America, is that—simply put—people like pictures. For whatever reason I didn’t realize how important illustrations are to making an idea seem tangible in the reader’s imagination. So I knew, going into this,  I wanted to splurge a little bit and make the player character templates really sparkle. I wanted each one to have more space, more items, and most importantly more style. So, without further ado, here are 5 of the 9 that are included in the full game.

Each one is dripping with style and character. With almost all of these — notable exceptions being the field boss and the big guy  — I basically just handed the archetype description and a few notes (needs to be carrying this kind of weapon, needs to have this kind of build) to the artist and told them go apeshit. That’s why there’s all these diverse and exciting styles on display here. The only overriding artistic decision I came down really hard about is that I wanted them all to be in monochrome. I like grayscale art, a whole helluva lot; I think it lets a line artist’s work really shine. Plus, you can color it in however you want.

I’ll be back later to talk about some of the changes to character progression —which now involves managing your character’s growing reputation, to get a bunch of special perks. If you like what you’ve seen so far...stay tooned!

#tabletop gaming #game design #Cartoons #cyberpunk

[kim-woonhak]

sorry in advance if you've already answered a question like this but i just wanted to ask, how do you improve on drawing?? i think especially for things like coloring, shading, and lighting , its been difficult for me to be happy with how it looks because compared to the sketch (that i think already looks nice) the colors just seem sort of flat and muddy and i feel like i dont have a good grip on what colors to put where and how to make it look unflatt if that makes sense! just curious on maybe what kinds of practices and studying you do for this(if any))<33 obv you dont have to answer if you dont want to, and thank you for being one of my inspirations, love youu<33333

hihi!! for simply shading/lighting, i would suggest you only work in black and white until you're totally comfortable with developing values. why? marco bucci explains it really nicely in this video but basically if you have good values u can have absolutely garbage nonsense colors and it will still make sense aka when i did this lol:

i'm guessing you're more interested in colored artwork though since black and white drawings can't be "flat and muddy" bc theyre in grayscale lol. for coloring, this is so tough for me too so i thought about this for a day or so and i came up with 3 tips that might help^^ 1) getting colors directly from photo reference or color reference, 2) manually adding filters/color harmony, and 3) studying color theory

i always work from photo reference so it informs a lot of my coloring/shading/lighting and often when i don't understand what color I'm looking at i directly just eye drop it and realize that what i thought was purple was actually just a gray-red. working from an actual picture helps make sure my colors don't look strange and while i used to think eye-dropping felt like "cheating" when i worked digitally honestly i've learned a lot from it and honestly if i stare at a color long enough i can get it pretty accurately now but i'm just too lazy so eye-dropping just speeds up my workflow (plus i hate digital color pickers anyways they r not built for artists and i wrote an entire paper on it in college once lmao) anyways here's an example of a color study i did by directly eye-dropping from a gif with @quokki's incredible coloring (love u ale <3)

if you're not working from a picture directly, you can still use other pictures or artwork as a "color reference" which I used to do a lot. i like to look at art from other ppl with pretty colors and create a color palette to use in my own drawings. for example, the color palette for this felix painting came from a piece (idr which) by Simón Prades on instagram but this palette is really easy to use since it's linear values it's like working in black and white but comes out looking cooler LOL

Recently for my lee know kiki's delivery service drawing i felt that the colors seemed a little flat n muddy to me because it was in an animated flat coloring style (lol) so I added a filter layer (just a flat apricot color set to overlay at 25% on photoshop) that livened up the whole thing and made it feel more cohesive. It's a pretty subtle difference to other people but made a world of difference to me :) it helped take the muddiness out of the shadows of his face and the glass reflection and took the painting from gloomy rainy day with stale bread to warm sunny day with fresh bread :]

and finally if u are interested in actually studying colors and lighting and shading and stuff these r some of the youtube videos and channels that i think do a great job explaining these very cool concepts:

pre-realism vs post-realism is a cool video about the difference between the mentality of how beginners draw vs how experts draw and kinda blew my mind tbh i think the big color takeaway from this video is that something that kids would color (like green grass) might actually be a totally different color to an artist's eye (dark yellow, red gray, even a super desaturated purple) depending on a realistic lighting situation

nathan fowkes did a 3-part guest talk series on understanding color temperature and relationships: (1) (2) (3) also not coloring but i love his video on value massing

this lecture on what charles bernard calls "the mother color principle" takes the "filtering" tip that i mentioned earlier to a much more developed level (it's an hour long so just skip through it.. u get the gist of what he's saying in a few min but the whole demo is also cool too)

i mentioned him earlier but marco bucci has many 10 min digestable videos about color on his channel that i like :) (also this lighting/value video is great too)

sorry i don't really know exactly how basic or advanced i should cater my advice but i hope this helps some anon^^ lmk if u have questions or if u ever want feedback my inbox and dms r always open

#ask #anon #my questionable advice #damn this makes me want to go back to art school i remember this time last year i was watching so many of these videos and actually studyin #n now ive just been so lazy n only doing black n white again LOL #also rereading this i hate how i write i sound so peppy and prescriptive these r just my two cents!! sorry its so long #its just all the vertical media

[patbwaifs]

art scraps time

ahaha oh man oh boy

i think my ipad is melting

under the cut is uh what I would call the "middle school emo" of art

while working on that one connor fan art I realized (agaIN) that I'm really weak in terms of light and shadow, at least when it's not for something strictly realistic.

I keep trying to both learn how I want to handle crosshatching while also learning how to actually depict lights and darks and it's just generally better to do one thing at a time, so I did some cross hatch experimentation and then some stylized grayscale studies. I think this week needs to be all grayscale. no color for me.

To explain my perspective: when I'm approaching this "art style gauntlet", I'm thinking about it in terms of what could I draw repeatedly, efficiently, while still looking cool.

this was the first cross hatch a whatever

I think the texture is cool, but it can take a long time to do. But it also shouldn't take too long to learn how to make it into some sort of texture map (rather, i learn how to do that once instead of manually crosshatch everything forever)

It got really dark really fast but that can be fixed.

this one? barf. I made myself work on it past the point of "ugh no" to see if it was just a case of uncanny valley syndrome and

I can't decide how I want to handle hatches and curvature.

I don't commit to it, and I run into p r o b l e m s.

this was just for fun :3

when I would do a lot of inking by hand I really liked filling in details with very very fine lines. It's just wonderful.

And time consuming. I need to find a balance if I want to use this in a visual story.

So at this point, I moved on to some gray scale stuff!!

two problems: - my endurance loses in this fight - i don't have a good grasp on what this kind of stylistic anatomy and it shows up when I try to give my drawings form.

I moved on to my juri sketch because it was still a sketch, and also more anime than realistic.

It's a struggle to balance light and dark along with smooth and harsh lines, but I think here, I just need to put more time in.

There's also layer management... I need to think about what layer I'm painting on a whole lot more, because I want/need to have the pupils and eyes on separate layers from each other, which kind of means I need the eyelashes on a layer of their own.

I'll come back to these kinds of practice either tonight or tomorrow. ngl, the smoothness in her face is messing with me. and it's not even blended that well. I'm a texture, sensory-seeking fiend.

bonus

this is a pretty old sketch of one of my oc's. It was also in my downloads but I sure don't remember putting this on my computer!

It's interesting to see what's similar and what's different between this sketch and how I'm trying to draw now.

#art #art thoughts #art journey #learning how to draw #learning how to art #fanart #dbh #connor rk800 #juri arisugawa #revolutionary girl utena #original character #digital art #illustration #the art style gauntlet #patbw's D:BH sketches #patbw's RGU sketches

[electricbluebutterflies]

“ looks pretty rough to me. “ “ i’ll manage. “ + jessica/leto (if i may be greedy, preferably their early days)

Ask for early-era, get the earliest thing I've written that isn't first-encounter! PG-ish and also on ao3.

If anyone sees her, this will look bad.

Jessica is getting used to that specific situation a little too well, in what feels like the second stage of acclimating to her placement. She has at least ruled out any realistic likelihood of getting murdered-or-worse by the person she’s supposed to let touch her, and surprisingly quickly, but now…

She’d been given permission to wander as long as she stays within the compound, she’ll say if anyone questions her, and she has stayed… at least within sight of it at furthest. And right now she is safe within the walls, on the edges of an interior courtyard, completely-

Whichever of her counterpart’s ancestors decided the entire complex needed to be built in grayscale stone, Jessica is thankful to them for the easy camouflage centuries later.

She’d meant to wander around as she usually does, looking for something to distract her – how little they ask of her here, how much empty time she has for the first time in her life and damned if she has the slightest idea how to fill it yet – and she has, and what a distraction it is. That her counterpart makes time for physical training is not unknown to her, but it is one thing to be aware and another to watch from an appropriate distance, her body practically become one with a stone column and eyes fixed on the scene in front of her. Details she didn’t know, how well he moves – good but imperfect, by the standards she knows, good enough but she suspects there has been disappointment in the past, fluid but not quite-

He steps wrong, angles a block wrong, and she watches impact and something in her breaks.

It would be fine if she stayed where she is, she knows. There is little risk here – she mapped his circles quickly enough and no one in sight is a threat – and the slight bloom of blood on his forearm will not leave lasting damage, and-

Jessica has developed an impulsive streak in these past few months, and she slips out from her watching point, shoulders and hips back and if nothing else her confidence will make one of the other men think they’d spotted her earlier and just hadn’t felt the need to say anything and-

Isn’t this what a woman is for? She’d been told, to the extent she’d been given any instructions whatsoever and that is a whole other mess of anger she can fight later, to tether him. Redirect an unfixable genetic recklessness as best she can, and she isn’t sure she’s that good yet but she is going to try, so help her she is going to-

She is too young for the sharpness of her eyes, and she knows how her counterpart’s circle respond to her and how to use it, how they all step back, a few hands still on blade handles but she’s made it nearly six months here and hasn’t done anything to mark herself as individually dangerous yet so she’ll at least be allowed to-

“Do not give me that look.”

“Wasn’t directed at you.”

She should be more formal, she knows, should be so many things she’s in no mood to be, but the realization that she does not enjoy seeing this man bleed is overwhelming and she needs control, she needs-

There is no attempt to fight her as she pushes back a torn shirtsleeve to see the wound. Surface-level but still unpleasant, might scar, might-

“It’s not that bad.”

“Looks rough to me.”

“I’ll manage.”

At some point in the near future, Jessica decides, she will go through a list of everyone who may have been involved in deciding her fate and figure out which of them hated her enough to put her in a situation requiring a level of patience even she may not-

She was made to make herself useful, and she leans down and tears a strip of fabric from the hem of her dress for a bandage. Imperfect but it’ll do, and dark gray won’t show blood, and-

“You don’t have to hide if you want to watch,” he murmurs.

“I assumed it would be taken the wrong way.”

“Can’t imagine this would give you information you haven’t already acquired… other ways.”

He’s not wrong, but she still-

“Say it like you mean it,” she breathes, some internal desire to provoke, to-

“Do you live for complications?”

“You haven’t told me to-“

“Would you hear me?”

She glances down at her hands still on his skin, every moment a trust-fall, every moment-

“I shouldn’t have-“

“Don’t talk like that.” His other hand comes up to cover hers, calming, anchoring. “I think… I may have seen more of who you are in the past few minutes than-“

“I’m supposed to keep you alive. You do…”

“And you want to. For your own reasons. Not theirs.”

She feels flickers of vulnerability they have not reached yet, conversations they will never have because there is something too familiar in this man, the both of them shaped by expectations they had no choice about and-

Maybe, she thinks, maybe this placement will not drown her after all.

“I do,” she repeats. “For my own reasons.”

What those reasons are, she isn’t sure yet, but-

“You don’t have to stay in the shadows all the time. Nothing will harm you in my sight.”

She believes him, damn her. She believes him, and she wants, and she can’t-

“I feel more sure of that now.”

“Even more reason. You ought to be more aware…”

Jessica bites her lip, holds back a comment about how she’s sure it’ll go over well if she openly learns more about security protocols or-

No. This is nothing. Having a better understanding of her counterpart’s ability to defend himself if necessary is relatively insignificant. Changes nothing. Will calm her, in time, but-

“You should be visible,” he repeats, always desperate to fill a silence, always willing to clear that distance. “It would be less…”

“I should have held back, but-“

“The sight of you might’ve done more than the cut.”

“If I-“

He shifts their position, withdrawing so her hands are more properly in his. “You make yourself clearer each day. Whatever your loyalties, at least I am among them.”

“I didn’t-“

“You worry too much.”

“I am unsure-“

“You move well in crisis. If my skin takes a reminder of that… I won’t mind.”

“You owe me a new dress for what I did,” she mutters, almost a hiss, almost playful, almost-

“In a better color. Not ghost-gray. You’re prettier than that.”

She suspects that too will become a recurrent fight over time, but…

“Whatever pleases you.”

#ebf writes fic #leto x jessica #queue

[fellcharas]

my deltarune theory(ies?)

DISCLAIMER: i am not an actual theorist and i wrote this all from memory! this is taking into consideration the possibility that chara is involved in the making of deltarune (1, 2) as well as other widely believed theories (gaster being involved)

putting a read more because this shit is LONG so buckle up

start with the basics?

something i was thinking about last night is how it’s interesting that we don’t know very much about susie’s home life or her reason for being “the bully.” while there are certainly hints that point to it not being great at all, there’s nothing directly confirming what it’s like.

however something that many people have pointed out is that through the numerous odd similarities deltarune and undertale have, there is the clam girl. for those who don’t know, clam girl is a NPC that you encounter if your game’s fun value is between 80 and 89 and you’re not playing a no mercy route. she talks of her neighbor’s daughter, suzy, and tells frisk that they should become friends with her. but she notes the fact that frisk would have no idea where suzy is yet fate will find a way for them to meet.

in the true pacifist epilogue of undertale with a fun value of 81, clam girl explains that the time frisk (or we, the players) will meet suzy is “fast approaching.” this specific term is yellow in text and her sprite becomes grayscale. then she abruptly vanishes, the noise as she does so being the same noise used for the mystery man and gaster follower 2 sprites when interacting with them. interestingly, her grayscale sprite is “spr_clam_goner”, not much different than goner kid. this dialogue was also added right before the release of deltarune.

so... who is suzy? while it is possible that suzy could just be susie with a different name for undertale’s sake, it’s also possible that suzy could be susie’s sister, likely younger. catty, returning from undertale, has a little sister in deltarune named catti. there isn’t much significance that i could add that would make it likely suzy is susie’s little sister other than this, but i felt it was worth mentioning so do with it what you will.

so... what else?

after interacting with clam girl, if you do the work necessary to access sans’ basement (or “lab”), you’ll be able to find a description of a photo inside one of the drawers that points out there are “three smiling people” with the text “don’t forget” written on it. this has been pointed out several times before due to the fact “don’t forget” is the deltarune song that plays at the end of ch1 (and ch2 although remixed?). if i recall correctly there is no other way of finding this flavor text except for interacting with clam girl. interesting.

lots of people believe that the covered machine in sans’ lab is a time machine. with sans’ many connections to gaster, it’s also possible that this could be a machine gaster made and had broken. it is said to be unfixable.

gaster is confirmed to have created the core. but i don’t believe this is what he fell into. it’s never specified what he fell into, just that it was his creation. so i believe that gaster fell into the time machine. and by taking entry number 17 into account, we are met with the possibility that the time machine might involve a black hole. fortunately for you guys black holes is a special interest of mine, so i can explain this easily.

basically, the anatomy of a black hole, or the structure, consists of the following:

event horizon

singularity

photon sphere

ergosphere

the event horizon of a black hole is the shadowy dark sphere that we see in images. it is a boundary in spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. once having crossed the event horizon, the nature of spacetime begins to deform, causing space’s usual three dimensions (length, width, height) to form only one dimension (movement forward) and time’s usual one dimension (into the future) to form three dimensions (past, present, and future). spacetime is what makes up our reality. remember this. and, as predicted by einstein’s theory of general relativity, mass bends spacetime (imagine our universe as a flat plane, and the mass of our earth causes a dip in the space underneath it), so a black hole’s mass warps spacetime so strongly that any direction you try to go in once having crossed the event horizon will lead you to the singularity. (at least... for a non-rotating, non-charged black hole.)

the singularity is a gravitational singularity, a region that may lie at the center of a black hole wherein the curvature/deformation of spacetime becomes infinite. because all black holes spin (due to their last moments as stars involving very fast rotational speeds), the singularity in a rotating black hole’s mathematics smears out to form a ring singularity (ringularity) that lies in the plane of rotation. in this case (as well as the case of a non-rotating black hole), the region has zero volume. and because of all of the black hole’s mass being held in this region, the singularity can be thought of as having infinite density. within a rotating black hole it is possible to avoid the singularity, and extending this solution as far as possible reveals the hypothetical possibility of exiting the black hole into a different spacetime (region of reality) with the black hole acting as a wormhole.

the photon sphere is a spherical boundary of zero thickness in which photons (elementary, electromagnetic radiation particles, associated with light) that move on tangents (the tangent line to a plane curve at a given point is the straight line that "just touches" the curve at that point) to that sphere would be trapped in a circular orbit about the black hole. while light can still escape from the photon sphere, any light that crosses the photon sphere on an inbound trajectory will be captured by the black hole.

lastly, the ergosphere is a region of spacetime found in rotating black holes in which it is impossible to stand still. basically, it’s like a whirlpool, and any object near the black hole will tend to start moving in the direction of rotation.

okay, so... what does this have to do with entry number 17?

WELL, here’s the dialogue from entry number 17. i’ll bold the key parts that i feel tie the possibility of this being a time machine to the time machine involving a black hole:

ENTRY NUMBER SEVENTEEN DARK DARKER YET DARKER THE DARKNESS KEEPS GROWING THE SHADOWS CUTTING DEEPER PHOTON READINGS NEGATIVE THIS NEXT EXPERIMENT SEEMS VERY VERY INTERESTING ... WHAT DO YOU TWO THINK

as you can probably tell by now, it’s possible that this description of growing darkness, no photons, is similar to that of what a black hole is like.

but why would gaster create a black hole as part of a time machine? well, my idea is that he didn’t mean to do so. he likely concentrated enough energy or mass that caused a black hole to accidentally form. this black hole would have been small in diameter, thus having an incredibly short lifespan, its evaporation being violent. this would have broken the machine entirely. however, for the sake of undertale being a video game, it’s understandable why sans (and possibly papyrus or alphys) would be okay and why the machine is still relatively in tact.

it’s unclear to me why gaster would want to make a time machine. because time travel in the sci-fi sense (involving the grandfather paradox) is likely impossible without breaking the fabric of our reality, this could also be explained for why it went so horribly wrong for gaster. and - fun fact - once you cross the event horizon, you are lost to the universe forever. every particle you are made of, every little bit of energy you hold within your existence, is lost to the outside universe. forever. this is called the black hole information paradox. however, realistically, those who are outside of the black hole will still remember you, but in gaster’s sense... i don’t think this is what happened.

it’s possible that gaster managed to avoid the singularity, if the black hole he crossed was rotational. however, because he couldn’t leave the black hole, he could have traveled to different points in spacetime. this is why he was shattered across time and space as his followers describe, because undertale confirms that within its world, this possible existence of a black hole allows for wormholes to exist.

but... but wait. no, no, no. we can’t think of undertale as space-time. why? because sans himself confirms that the continuum of undertale’s reality is a time-space continuum. he puts time before space, which could be intentional and thus swapping their roles. within undertale this means that time is 3-dimensional, explaining the existence of save points and the ability to reset and load. space, on the other hand, is 1-dimensional, meaning you can only ever go one way which is to the end of the game. even if you load previous save files, you’ll still end up finished.

so if gaster was shattered across time and space, it’s possible that he was also shattered beyond. it’s believed that he had some sense of awareness, that he found out he was in a game with multiple different timelines, thus starting his “experiment.” he created the blueprints for the determination extraction machine, and because it’s also widely believed that he and chara were in cahoots with each other, maybe gaster wanted to extract some of chara’s determination and make something for himself. and maybe he succeeded in some way, not by extracting chara’s but by making his own somehow. it’s unknown right now to me. (though if he acquired determination somehow, that would make sense if the mysteryman sprite was him, considering the weird markings or drippy things on his face as well as the general blob-like look.)

so this implies that deltarune’s reality is a time-space continuum as well?

yes. gaster was smart, brilliant even, but it’s likely he didn’t know much beyond the nature of his own reality. when creating deltarune he made the reality of its universe something similar to undertale’s, with 3-dimensional time and 1-dimensional space. if gaster had the determination or something more, enough to persist even as a remnant of a shattered being outside his own reality, then this makes sense as to how he’d be able to create deltarune. if he’s forgotten to everyone within the world of undertale, and (in some abstract way for the sake of kris, jevil, spamton and possibly others) known to nobody in deltarune, yet he created deltarune, he isn’t dead. he’s something else. he’s a god.

and this is why chara is in cahoots with him, even now.

see, chara has determination. they didn’t fall into the underground intentionally; they tripped (1, 2). given these facts and theories it’s likely that chara had determination, or hope, the ability to persevere and keep going no matter what. chara had a red soul like frisk’s, which is what made their essence attach to frisk’s body. that’s why they are tethered to us via name and stats and narration. and as we all know, the red soul symbolizes determination. power.

but while chara is very much their own person, they are still what their name was meant to imply: a character. chara reflects the will of the player; they are not the player theirself, they are their own person, but due to their attachment to frisk (and by extension, us) they act as a mirror for what we do in undertale. and sadly for them, gaster is much more powerful due to his circumstances. gaster is more like us than chara is.

and given deltarune’s theme of nobody’s choices mattering, nobody having any real control over what they do or say, if we take into consideration the fact that chara speaks in the no mercy route about destroying "this" world and "moving onto the next" and asking "when were [we] the one in control", then it’s clear that they have something to do with the theme of deltarune. chara has only ever wanted control, whether that be a good or bad thing is currently out if the question. they wanted control over their own life when they were alive in undertale, and now they want control over other people. anything they feel is a good thing for them to have control over, they will reach for it.

the gonermaker sequence in chapter 1 is abruptly cut off by someone who speaks VERY similarly to chara, in contrast to the person from before who we all agree is gaster (in both japanese and english, it is very chara-esque way of speaking). now, why is this called the gonermaker? my guess is because chara has been discarding all these vessels, making gaster’s experiment much more difficult to start off and get going.

all the gaster followers from undertale, including goner clam girl and goner kid, show up in deltarune. they are fully colored sprites. the only goner character who doesn’t show up in deltarune is the one WE create in chapter 1′s beginning sequence. and i think that’s because they are set up to reappear, at some point in one of deltarune’s future chapters.

so, chara has been discarding all of the vessels, all the followers, all the now-goners because they know that these people will never have control over their lives. as long as they are shallow vessels meant to worship and serve our (the players’) and gaster’s desires (to play a game and experiment, thereby affecting an entire world/universe), they have no autonomy over themselves. and this resonates with chara for a multitude of reasons we can tie back to undertale. they state that "no one can choose who they are in this world," because it’s true. no one can choose who they are. not in a world dominated by gods like us and gaster. and that’s why chara discards these vessels and characters who were probably once their own real persons, as a means of sparing them from what they lacked for theirself: control. and no matter what, even if chara didn’t interrupt, we would have still ended up as kris because again No One Can Choose Who They Are In This World. chara was making gaster’s sick joke plain and simple for us, that it applies to us in some way too.

so then... what’s the deal with spamton and jevil? 

well, i think they are people who encountered gaster (this is widely believed anyway) and convinced themselves that they were significant for this knowledge that they are in a game, knowledge gaster told them of, driving them both insane and robbing them of who they were meant to be. and because nobody can choose who they are in deltarune, when they try to break free nothing changes or has a happy outcome, because it’s sadly just not possible to change your fate in deltarune.

this presumably-fact becomes clearer with spamton, though. and that’s why kris becomes so afraid, both at the end of spamton neo’s pacifist battle and his snowgrave battle. because kris can’t choose who they are, either. kris is like spamton, a puppet. a heart on a chain. they don’t have full control over who they are and trying to break free only hurts them more, as we see whenever they tear their soul out of their body and disable our input. but, maybe it’ll be different for kris, because they ARE the protagonist. but right now it feels like they’ve given up on the idea of having control over theirself. the only rebelling they do is work to open a dark fountain, thereby continuing the story of deltarune and, really, only helping us more in terms of playing the game.

and i mean, it’s also obvious that gaster holds influence over kris, too, considering the weird hidden encounters where you interact with something and see a man smiling or waving at you or giving you an egg. and this egg doesn’t change into a ball of trash like every other dark world item once you return to the light world. it stays the same. i can’t really remember the significance of eggs when it comes to gaster other than his whole existence being left as an Easter Egg but i do know that on the date with papyrus in undertale, there’s an egg on the side with the dating hub so, whether that’s there for funny points or lore is unknown, but interesting too.

i also want to say that i don’t think gaster and chara are being pitted against each other in terms of "these are 2 different types of gamers." while that would make sense simplistically, i feel like toby would be much more in depth and nuanced with it, as he usually is with his method of storytelling. because even though chara is kind of god-like, considering their death in undertale and their soul being the same as ours, leading to them being attached to us like some kind of angel (and angels have lots of significance in both undertale and deltarune), they’re still only a character and not at all on the level that gaster is.

i personally think gaster and chara are, on a more hidden level because toby isn’t being very direct at all with these two, meant to represent a different side of the "player vs character" perspective. and that’s something that undertale and deltarune have both tried to convey to us in the no mercy and snowgrave routes, but unfortunately in undertale’s case it was widely misinterpreted in both ways. i think it’s a bit more sensible to go about it this way, because gaster is not us, as in we don’t control him like we can other characters, and the symbolism of what he’s meant to represent is there.

ok, one last question: how did chara access wherever gaster’s in?

that part is still very foggy. i can’t come up with a definite reasoning, but for now i’ll take a wild guess and say that maybe chara grew tired of being a ghost with no real autonomy. maybe they decided they wanted to break free for theirself, and by doing this their essence became detached from frisk’s body (and by extension our control), thus causing them to be shattered similarly to gaster or winding up in the void gaster has. however that happened.

there’s a lot of uncanny resemblance between chara and kris, though, especially if this is the case. chara breaks free and winds up in the void with gaster, and kris realizes that breaking free for theirself may not be all that they think it’s meant to be. given spamton neo and all. aside from the fact that chara and kris look similar, have the same family (though in different universes of course), and strangely both have a sweet tooth, this is especially odd to me.

i can’t quite put it into words, but it feels like, to me at least, chara is very much present in the world of deltarune. and they share similarities with kris that are hard to ignore.

so that’s it, then.

for the most part... yes. a lot of the theories i’ve linked here and there explain things i agree with, so you can read them as you see fit. i especially recommend nochocolate’s posts on chara if you’re interested, such as the ambiguity of freedom in undertale (and, though this was never mentioned in their post, by extension now deltarune).

but. there is one character that seems to be involved in some (or a lot) of this. and that’s papyrus. the only problem is, i can’t figure out what’s going on.

at first glance papyrus is just a very charming guy. but you know, he’s actually a lot more mysterious than sans. he shares similarities to chara and flowey/asriel, and holds weird possible connections to gaster. he’s also the only major character from undertale (aside from asriel) who hasn’t made a physical appearance in deltarune. while checking sans and papyrus’ house will have you met with narration describing “a distant trousle of bones”, it’s worth noting that in chapter 2 it’s described as getting farther and farther away. so... why? is this world’s papyrus just shy, or is there a deeper reason?

again, i can’t tell what’s going on with papyrus, if there even is anything at all. but there’s a lot of weird and mysterious little oddities involving him that i don’t think are unintentional or accidental.

anyways... there. hoo boy. that’s my theory. or theories. i don’t really know. like i said, i’m not a theorist, i don’t know everything and i don’t expect any of this to be true. it’s just what makes sense to me. and it’s important that if you believe this, you also recognize that toby is the creator and he does what he thinks is best when it comes to the story of deltarune and the possible connections it has to undertale (even though toby’s said that the two have no connections, it’s not uncommon for him to be untruthful about things).

if you read all of this... thanks! let me know your thoughts!

#inkling.txt #deltarune #deltarune chapter 2 #deltarune analysis #deltarune meta #deltarune theory #undertale #undertale theory #wd gaster #chara dreemurr #w.d. gaster #chara undertale #ok to reblog

[ignisnocturnalia]

Hehehe I lied, but it is here now! Had a crisis about being done with my Band director's bull and wanting a grade on something really bad, did the former and decided to simply disintegrate once Friday hit. Drifter HCs will follow this, also may I say Caiatl. That is all.

Nokris x Reader

“You are a child reaching for a flame; the Taken Queen would not have you burnt.”

You were on point during the Strange Terrain strike, but you had never thought you would run into Nokris again. Granted, you realized, his death was on the physical plain while his Throne World still stood. Considering he never directly addressed you, you assumed that he either didn’t remember you or he chose not to, as oddly disappointing as that would be. The timbre of his voice unsettled you, but it was not as wracking as Xol’s; in fact, it was rather pleasing to hear.

The proposition itself was unexpected, and against Eris’s previous warnings you stopped to listen to what the Hive heretic had to say. Trekking quietly along the broken path of the distorted realm, you stopped occasionally to stare at blights littered over walls and floating in the air to see if you could catch a glimpse of the desecrated prince. The telltale sign of Taken emerging from their portals filled the air, and you genuinely prayed that you’re next decision was a wise one. 

Your ghost was probably screaming on the inside as you placed your guns to the floor, bringing your hands into the air while staring into the gleaming eye of a Knight. Grabbing your arm roughly, it tugged you through a massive doorway leading to a room that was strikingly similar to the Court of Oryx back at the Dreadnaught. The portal at the center of the room shimmered invitingly as the bony bastard himself came out; even in death, he appeared to be in his prime.

“I see you have heeded my advice; come, hope of the Light, see the Darkness.”

His claws are cold as he grasps at your shoulders despite the solar flame surging over his arms. Feeling bold, you let your own solar light extend past your body, lying comfortably across his neck with a warm glow. As a creature who worships the Darkness facing a servant of the Light, he reasonably withdraws with a hiss at your gesture

You won’t say it out loud because he obviously carries himself with extreme pride, but you can’t help but feel bad for him. How can one person be an exiled son, heretic, servant, and now puppet?

“I won’t serve Savathûn. But I think I wouldn't mind spending time with you.” Before he can question you, you are promptly pulled from the realm by Eris.

Cue Vanguard interrogation once you return to the Tower. The talk is so egregiously long you make a move that would make Cayde damn proud: “GuArDiAn, We’Re NoT yEt FiNiShEd WiTh ThIs DiScUsSiOn!” Hopefully your shining reputation will save you from any dire repercussions...

Tracing your steps back to where you first met, you look around suspiciously following the lack of noise inside the Hive breeding grounds. You had cut your comm ages ago, the constant ping of Commander Zavala’s hailing grating your ears. The ground beneath your feet crunched wetly with every step, and distantly you heard the first Hive screech. Turning in a guess to the source of the sound, you set off in a quick pace, gun in your hand.

Upon entering a new chamber, you froze in surprise as you saw Nokris lifting a Knight by the throat. Taken magic pooled in his palm and raced over the armor of the smaller Hive, the bone turning black and a bright white glow shimmering across its legs. Still gripping the soldier, Nokris slowly angled his head to look down at you.

“Little. Light.” Dropping the Knight with no grace, his imposing form closed in on you with haste. Before you could take a step back, his claws came up to close around your jaw and upper neck. The rough of his talons dug into your armor, and for a moment you worried he would pop off your helmet and let your blood boil throughout your body in the harsh atmosphere. Instead, he pulled you closer to his face and brought up his free hand to grasp your forearm.

Nokris easily dwarfed you; even if you stood on your own shoulders you wouldn’t be taller than him. Passively, your thighs rubbed against each other at the realization. A detail he decided he would catch. Teasing mirth danced in his three eyes, hidden malice swimming just behind small organs. Internally, you were probably going to pop your helmet off yourself if you got kink shamed by a Hive prince of all things. 

You squeaked quietly in surprise as he lifted you off the ground, the hand on your lower face readjusting to your hip. His hand, quite literally, engulfed your midsection as he brought you closer to him for inspection. This close, you could see every imperfection on his face. Second hand leaving your arm, you shivered as the prince ran a digit up the side of your leg and continued his way up, stopping thoughtfully at the junction of your jaw.

Staring into the glowing green embers of his eyes, there was no mistaking the murderous glint in them. At the same time, curiosity had made its home among his more dangerous faculties.

"You found me once, you came to me twice. Find me again, at the other side in the field of ash under the dark tower.” Letting you to the floor, Nokris turned his back and departed to Traveler knows where through the portal with the long forgotten Knight. Sinking to your knees in stunned silence, you looked down as a nearly imperceptible squeal broke the quiet. In front of you, was a Hive worm.

“No.” Before you could even speak, your Ghost gave its earful. 

“I can’t not take it! I probably need it to find him. Either way, I told you one of these worms would be coming home eventually, look at its wittle face.” Your Ghost made gagging noises as you fawned over the wriggling creature you held between your hands. Tucking the three eyed larva under your arm, you set out to find the way back out.

____________________________________________

The next week felt like hell. The worm continued to get bigger with every mission you went on and keeping it a secret from the Vanguard was close to impossible. You had been wracking your brain for the answer to his riddle, and to be completely honest, it made you feel inadequate that you couldn’t figure it out. You knew the other side meant the Ascendant Realm, but what was the dark tower? Where was the field of ash? You had initially thought it was at Skywatch, what with the Hive ship jutting out of the ground and the small pile of chitin inside the cave not too far away, but there wasn’t enough ash for it to be a field, nor was it under the ship point.

It wasn’t until a light snow dusted the Tower one evening that it all clicked. He didn’t mean ash ash. He meant snow! 

In a rush to the hangar, you waved a hasty goodbye to Holliday and transmatted into your ship, pulling out a layer of blankets to reveal your now cat sized worm. The grub squeed and reached its head up to your palm, crawling sluggishly into your hands. Holding the worm to your chest, you settled down in the pilot ship and gave your Ghost to plot a course. There was only one place on Earth constantly coated in snow with a structure that could be considered a dark tower.

“Ghost, set course for the Plaguelands. He’s at the Doomed Sea.”

You hadn’t been to the ravaged lands since the Siva Crisis; the whole territory gave you heebie jeebies. And yet, you were returning because one of humanity’s imminent threats wanted a chat that, realistically, ended with your head rolling on the floor.

The closer you got to your destination, the more restless the worm in your arms got. In fact, you could swear it was whispering something. Your skin crawled for a moment as you felt the phantom brush of his claw up your leg.

The moment your feet touched the ground, the world around you stuttered as the colors faded into grayscale, giving way to the Ascendant landscape. Below you, there was no mistaking the keen whispers of the worm. Its words were encouraging in a macabre way, praise and blatant lies; speaking of how well you fed it, talents being wasted on a god that heeds you not, urging you towards the ominous building looming over the shoreline.

Dust swept across at a rapid pace, as usual, in the warped realm. Coming up to the alcove, you saw him with his back turned to you. In a smooth turn, he faced you at last. Beautiful, blazing emeralds.

Relationship HCs

His idea of a relationship has wildly different parameters than any normal human would put up with

No matter where you are, or what you're doing, you can feel him at the back of your mind like a fog; it's a bit disconcerting to hear him talk in your head at first, but it becomes normal and he's actually quite helpful when you're out on missions

He expects you to help him study thanatonautics since you can die and be brought back within moments, but that's up to if you have enough charisma to convince your Ghost to let your bone boyfriend crush your skull repeatedly to see what you can learn about death

The relationship feels more like a symbiotic one rather than a romantic one, but you occassionally catch him practicing human gestures you've seen couples perform in public if he's feeling particularly good on a day

You're probably the only person who listens to him talk about all of his schtick and is able to give viable feedback; he is more thankful than he will let on about this fact

He does not like it when you try blocking him off from your thoughts and will demand to know everything you've done in the day when you see him again. In his perspective, he thinks you're trying to leave him behind like everyone else has

Will not handhold, because his hand can literally fit around your torso and because he thinks it's weird. He will, however, carry you places if you're going the same direction

He also thinks kissing is weird, but will (surprisingly!) actually let you give him kisses on his teeth; the sensation of soft flesh on his cold bones is unusual, but something he finds utterly riveting. Not that he'd let you know

Also doesn't like the amount of straight barbarity you inflict on the battlefield, but can appreciate your efficiency with your job; this is him silently worrying about your safety but refusing to acknowledge his crush on the flame throwing ape

His communication regarding affection is terrible, and if you couldn't tell shame on you. His favorite thing about you, that you will never hear from him or anyone else, is your face. He likes the way it changes into different expressions, the life in your eyes, and your lips because Hive physically cannot emote as expressively as humans do; you are an open book he has yet to read, adding new pages everyday

Nsfw 👁👄👁

First off, however you get the size difference to work, congratulations. His height over you is something he enjoys immensely when you two get into it, and it goes without saying he also likes how you "hug" him

He will fuck anywhere, literally anywhere. The floor? Yes. Against the wall? Yes. Hope you're somewhat of an exhibitionist, because he is not ashamed if any of his or Savathûn's troops walk in on you and will keep going

He bites a lot, and is not afraid to make you bleed because your Ghost can just patch you right up

Likewise, he will scratch you everywhere but he does stop to play with the softer spots

He is rough and fast, going after his own release rather than yours; however, he has high stamina so chances are you'll be overstimulated before he finishes

Absolutely a dom, he will not meet in the middle about anything of sexual nature

If you don't actively fight for your life during his build up, he will take that as the go ahead. He may be a Hive heretic, but he has standards

You don't really have the opportunity to find his sensitive spots as he usually restrains your arms, holding them above your head or pinning them down at your sides

He rarely makes actual noises, but he does hiss lowly whenever he makes particularly hard thrusts

He knows that copulation won't result in little Hive/Human hybrids running around with his blood in their veins, so 9 times out of 10 he will hilt himself and come inside you

Fluff

Uhhh, a w k w a r d

Anything that's fluffy is strictly delivered by you, and occasionally returned by Nokris since he doesn't get the point of such pleasantries

If you're fast enough, he will never get upset if you can sneak up on him for a smooch

Whatever he is doing, if you are available he much prefers having you by his side to have an extra set of eyes to help him observe (at least that's what he says)

Since his physical marks are healed quickly, he gifts you odds and ends from old planets his people have pillaged and little items you can wear on noticeable places

Hides it very well, but is extremely thrilled when you come to him when you want to do or learn something new

When you're particularly frustrated by something, he will comb his claws through your hair to his best abilities

Whenever you're with him, his demeanor is typically calmer; Savathûn's presence and influence over him is highly diminished in the face of your Light

The one thing he will willingly do with you that's remotely romantic is stargazing; not because of the romantic element, oh no, but because he wants to catalogue any changes and is very invested in teaching you about space faring

Has nicknames for you like Little Light or >Insert any game seal<

#destiny 2 #relationship headcanon #nokris #nokris x reader #eris morn #oryx the taken king #commander zavala #savathûn

[ot3]

your last post made me think about how I loooove how you use color in your art, it's so vibrant and full of life and movement and expression! I was wondering if you had any advice on how to do color studies? perhaps doing drawings with limited palettes? or anything similar?

First things first, thank you, I really do appreciate comments like these! this post now also has a follow up for finish limited palette pieces

I'm obviously very fond of limited palette art and color studies/color thumbnailing are great ways to get that done. When people think limited palette there's often the association of unrealistic and fantastical color palettes, but learning to limit your color use absolutely applies to semirealism and just builds stronger color theory in general. I was planning to talk about limited palettes in more realistic color use in this post, but this already ended up way too long. If that's something people want to hear about I can talk about it later.

Color theory basics crash-course! I'm sure almost anyone who has colored anything is familiar with this, so I'll be SUPER brief, but I want everyone to be on the same page for this. Color has three qualities you need to take into account: Hue, saturation, and brightness. Hue is what we think of as the 'color'. Saturation is the vibrancy of this color; how bold or dull it is. Brightness is how light or dark the color is. Here's this all labeled on a color picker I stole from google.

As a rule of thumb, things that look good in color should look good in grayscale. Having a strong range of values (brightness) makes for a strong image. Keep this in mind when you're picking colors – knowing what areas need to be light and what areas need to be dark before you start coloring will make your life easier. I'm going to teach you when and how to break this rule later, but for now let's just talk about picking a palette. I've found five to seven different colors to be a really nice sweet spot for working with limited palettes.

There are three main types of color palettes ill work with and ill provide examples each of them. I expect you to all politely refrain commenting on the amount of homestuck fanart that's here.

Monochromatic, where the piece is all within one color family with slight variations in hue, and larger variations in brightness and saturation

Accent, which is essentially the same as a monochromatic type with the addition of a strong, contrasting secondary color in one or two variants. Normally the accent color is lighter and serves as a highlight. This is not any kind of a hard rule, but is instead just what I like.

Split. There are two (or more) main colors at play, each with a couple of different shades.

Cool. Now lets see how we'd go about making one of these palettes.

 I'm grabbing an inconsequential sketch i've already got and we're gonna slap some color on it. Let's start monochromatic – I've gone and just tossed six pretty random shades of green on it, picking what goes where based on what I want to be light and what I want to be darker. 

Keep in mind, by monochromatic, I don't mean just picking one color and making it lighter or darker! Adjust your hue within the same color family – some of these are very blue, definitely more blue than green, and some are much warmer and yellower. Play around. In this stage I like to have every color on a distinct layer, so I can just recolor the entire layer at once as I tweak the palette.

 On the right, I have each color lined up in order of lightest to darkest just so I can get a sense of what I'm working with. Lets go ahead and call this one thumbnail. Now I'm gonna group the layers, duplicate them, and flatten the copy. I'll shrink it down and shove it off to the side so I can compare it to the other ones I make later.

Okay, I did a few more almost completely arbitrary monochromatic palettes. Here they are compared with their grayscale counterparts. 

All of them have the same number of colors, and lights stay lights, darks stay dark, midtones stay mid consistent between all of them, but the range of values is different between them all. The difference in light or dark between each tone is different and it gives a different mood that you can see even in black and white. None of them is more 'correct' than any other, and it's all about establishing the tone and atmosphere you want. Experimentation is key.

Now lets try making this a complimentary palette. With a strong accent color, your accent should be placed at areas of importance. People are naturally drawn to contrast and when using an accent color in a piece it'll make that area stick out, so make sure you're placing your colors with intent. For this I went back to that first set of greens I had because it was my favorite. Since this palette is over all very dark, I am going to make my accent the lightest color, because that'll stand out more. In a lighter palette, try making your accent the darkest color. Once again I must stress these are not hard rules – there are very few hard rules in art at all – but these are very useful tips for getting emphasis in the right place. This is just an example piece so I'm not being huuugely thoughtful with how I'm placing the color. 

Here's the same image but with the lightest green just swapped out for a far more vibrant accent of yellow. Looks pretty terrible. I don't want all of the papers and blinds to seem so prominent. So let's scrap this and try a different approach. We're gonna instead add our accent as a sixth color to our palette.

By adding another color, I've added another level of detail. Figuring out how to manage detail isn't just dependent on how many colors you have, but this is already going to be ridiculously long so I'll spare you that spiel. This is another one of those things I'll talk about more later if people want to hear my #thots. Using the new yellow accent, I emphasized the eyes, the mug, and added some interior detailing to the objects on the table. I also decided to place yellow in some of the windows of the outside buildings, to add a bit more interest in that area, and to justify giving yellow back lighting to our little goblin lad here, which makes him stand out nicely.

A split palette makes things a whole lot more complicated. Now that you're gonna be working with two different base colors you don't just only have to worry about which one is lighter or darker, you have to worry about how the hues look next to each other. Lets work with an orange on top of our original green here. I picked two of the greens and replaced the darker one with a darker orange, and the lighter one with a lighter orange. Now our palette is six colors split 50/50 between orange+yellow, and green. 

But now something interesting is happening. Let's take a look. If you're particularly keen eyed, you might have noticed that there's a third set of colors here, using a greyish brown in place of the oranges. What's up with that?

Well, what's up with that is, they are orange. The palette on the far right is what happens if, instead of choosing my own oranges, I simply hue-shifted the bluegreens until they were technically orange in hue. 

The oranges I chose just based on how they looked without actually checking the value and saturation of actually changed the value hierarchy of the whole piece. The table, instead of being in between the objects stacked upon it in terms of brightness, is lighter than either. This isnt bad at all – there's absolutely nothing wrong here. It's just important to be aware of things like this! This is why I said a split palette is the most complicated of the three I'm talking about here – in many occasions, the hue hierarchy can top the value hierarchy. Keep that in mind for slightly later.

I think split palettes work really well for comics, and I like to make my comics with split palettes. Whereas with a single illustration, you can just putz around with your color thumbnails until you get something good, for a comic you're locked into your palette once you've done the first page. Unless you're some sort of insanely meticulous person, in which case I envy you, you probably don't have every single page of your comic blocked out with respective values and can't apply your palette to the whole thing at once to test it. This means you'll need a palette that's pretty versatile. Having a split palette where one of the hue sets is lighter than the other overall allows you to decide whether you're going to create an overall light panel with dark accents, or vice versa. I'm gonna compare two palettes I'm using for comics to make this point. 

Here's a sampling of the comic pages in full color, at 0% saturation, and adjusted for grayscale respectively. You'll notice a slight difference between the desaturated colors and the grayscale colors – grayscale seems to hold truer to the full color version, doesn't it?

Now, here are the palettes themselves, and some grids showing the relationship between every pair of colors. When you don't know exactly what you're going to be using any given palette for, the relationship between any two colors becomes more important than ever. The bottom palette is split three ways, red yellow and blue each with a light and a dark, and then a completely neutral dark gray color. I'm using it for a long ongoing ace attorney comic I'm drawing. The top one has 4 shades of blue that go from darker and cooler to lighter and warmer, then 3 shades of orange that get yellower as they get lighter. Underneath is just the values – you'll notice that the top palette has a larger value range, with its lightest color being lighter than that of the bottom palette, and it's mid tones spaced further apart. 

What you'll also notice about the bottom palette is that instead of the reds being lighter than the blues and darker than the yellows, the value alternates dark red dark yellow light red light yellow. Take a look at the color grids. You'll notice that for the most part, every color in the palette on the right looks good with every other color. That's not nearly as true for the palette on the left. The light blue has a weird vibration where it meets either of the reds, and a few of the pairings just aren't particularly pleasant. Honestly, from any objective ideas of color theory, this palette kind of sucks shit. Lets make some adjustments to it.

I've changed the dark yellow and light red hues so now the light red is slightly darker than the dark yellow. That's the palette that's on top now. Looks better, doesn't it? But so now the question becomes why am I using a palette that looks awkward, disharmonious, and visually strained when I know exactly how to fix it? The simple answer is because I wanted a color palette that's awkward. I wanted that visual strain. I have trouble working on comics and general, especially anything as long as this one, and I wanted a color palette that already meant things would come out looking a little bit wonky, so I wouldn't be as concerned with nitpicking all the details and making everything pretty. I think the sort of visual upset also fits the tone I'm keeping with a lot of the comic.

Remember earlier when I said I'd talk about breaking the rule of stuff looking good in gray scale and in color? That's now. Take a look at this image. 

Which of the three colors is darker: the red, blue, or yellow? The stupid truth of it is that there's not really a proper way to tell. All three are technically the same 'brightness' but our brain tells us that the blue is the darkest, and the yellow is the lightest. Why do our brains do this? Let’s make em gray now.

On the bottom you can see what the colors look like when they are set to 0% saturation; as you'd expect it's a homogeneous gray blob. So then what the fuck is going on with the grayscale one? The grayscale one is closer to the way our brains interpret the colors, but we know this to be an improper rendering of their respective values. Which is the correct version, then – the grayscale or the desaturation? Luckily, we're using a computer, so we can have photoshop tell us the exact balance of hue, saturation, and brightness of any given pixel. Let's take a look now.

Wait, huh? We can plainly see that all three of the colors are at 49% brightness. But neither the desaturated value or any of the 3 grayscale values have a brightness of 49%. So what does a brightness of 49% look like?

Okay. Sure. Why not.

All of what I've just shown you regarding grayscale is to emphasize the point that your best judgment for which colors look good is a far better measuring stick for a good color palette than any technicalities. Even if the value is the same, the hue can differ enough that you can still get a beautiful finished drawing. Color and our perception of it is so, so vastly technically complex. You can not allow yourself to be bogged down by this. Simply practice, and color will become intuitive to you over time. I have a lot more I could say on the subject of picking and using your colors, but this is already insanely long. Feel free to ask any follow up questions, I hope this was of literally any use!

#long post #uhhhhh. #color theory #i guess #i drew this #Anonymous

[sacrvligious]

[ STEVEN R MCQUEEN, THIRTY, CIS MALE, HE/HIM ] Have you seen BROOKS HUNT down in St. Landry again? I heard they’re one of the SPECIALISTS, for the MATTHIEUS now. They’ve been so ASCETIC & ANALYTICAL lately, it’s no wonder. I’ll sure miss when they were  REALISTIC & SCHOLARLY. I wonder if they’re going to stop listening to TRAUMA by NF now, or if A DARK ROOM ILLUMINATED ONLY BY A COMPUTER SCREEN, ZONING OUT OF REALITY OFTEN, BOUNCING HIS LEG ANXIOUSLY, STACKS OF PAPERS AND BOOKS LIKE WALLS AROUND HIM will still announce ‘em.

basics

full name:  brooks nathaniel hunt

nickname(s):  n/a

age:  twenty seven

date of birth:  january twelfth 

place of birth:  manchester, nh

gender:  cis male

sexual orientation:  bisexual / preference for men

romantic orientation:  bisexual / preference for men

religion:  n / a 

occupation:  specialist  (  mostly  accountant  /  hacker  )

language(s) spoken:  spanish, english, french, asl, russian.

physical

face claim:  steven r mcqueen

hair color:  sandy brown

eye color:  brown

height:  6’2”

weight: 157lbs

build:  built / toned.

tattoos: none.

piercings:  none.

distinguishing characteristics:  nothing really.

personality

positive traits:  intelligent, intuitive, organized, loyal, dedicated.

negative traits:  naive, reclusive, anxious, distrusting, jaded.

fears:  losing sight of his morals/the light.

hobbies:  anything involving his computer.

quirks:  chewing inner lip, bouncing his leg.

family

father:  johnathan hunt, fbi agent, deceased.

mother:  lauren hunt ( nee argent ), librarian.

sibling(s):  jackson hunt ( estranged )

significant other: n / a

TRIGGER WARNINGS ,  mentions of death.

brooks grew up the youngest of two boys, in a fairly middle class household. his father, since he can remember, has been an fbi agent and his mother was a librarian, but otherwise a stay at home mom. his brother was older than him by ten years, and so, there was a connection as young kids but not much beyond his teenage years.

he watched his father constantly battle criminals of the worst nature, and he hardly got the right amount of payment for how often he put himself on the line or for how much he sacrificed. however, his father was always a hero to him until watching his father come back battered every time started getting to him. it seemed that the bad guys were continuously winning.

the ultimate loss was that of his father’s life, and it left his family in shambles. his brother took off, and he never really heard from or about him much after that. his mother became a hermit, even in her best attempts to continue parenting her seventeen year old son.

brooks has always been incredibly intelligent, enough to skip grades and be awarded. he found his calling in numbers and technology, constantly behind a computer screen while also excelling in all his math courses. he went away to college, graduating top of his class at MIT, which was barely an hour outside of his home city.

after graduating, he decided to get out and see the country. he found a temporary home in las vegas, finding a thrill in counting cards like it was a game. he didn’t care for the money, in fact, he would make sure to lose every time just to keep himself out of the law’s radar. he sought out to play the worst he could, kept his wallet and the feds satisfied.

then he traveled down to louisiana, st landry to be specific. with his father’s investigative nature, it was not hard to figure out how the city worked rather quickly. he found a place within the matthieu family, knowing the ins and outs of an fbi agent’s brain and habits and having his own intelligence to aid him. he started small, just by hacking small servers here and there for them, but eventually moved on to keep their books. 

it was the hacking that got him into trouble; at twenty three, he was doing some tech work for the family when there was a raid and seizure of computers. it seemed like a blimp, a small bump for the matthieu family as a whole but for brooks, it was everything. with him being prime geek squad for the family, he was the first to go under.

he was thrown in prison for hacking federal servers and some fraud counts with the accounting he had been doing for the matthieus.

brooks was not the type who would hold up well in prison; he was scrawny, and brainy, and he didn’t grow up in st landry or with the matthieus. it was nearly expected of him to fold, and take some deal to assure his innocence. but he didn’t. he stood tall and bit his tongue. when the matthieus caught wind of his unwavering loyalty, they made sure he was protected on the inside.

for seven years, he was inside until he got out early on parole. he now cannot legally own a computer or smart phone, and he must keep a steady job for his p.o to sign off on; considering his job was waiting for him when he got out, with the family, the computer and phone thing is worked around. as for the job, he works as a bartender at grayscale (the paycheque is rewritten to look like he works somewhere more legal, his p/o doesn’t care too much to look into it so long as  the cheques keep coming). it’s an easy job, something he can do once or twice a week and keep up, while still earning his living with the matthieu family.

prison, despite being completely terrifying for him, gave him a glow up considering he had nothing to do other than read, work out, and try not to die or get beat up. he came out far more toned than he went in. it also changed him. he had bright eyes going in, just a soft techy nerd. now he is a bit more jaded and reclusive.

from time to time, he will give out facts/answers/corrections no one asked for, spencer reid style.

he’s quiet, he’s soft, he’s a nerd. be gentle with him pls

the muscles are a lie, he cannot fight pls don’t raise a hand at him.

he reads a lot. 

#renn.intro

[jackbabewang]

His good girl

word count: 2,678 genre: fluff, smut

Often times you wished your boyfriend were a little more anonymous. And yet his social standing was also part of his appeal. Jaehyun the jock he was, basketball team captain and also a member of a respected fraternity—they have everything, all had led to the impossibility of concealing himself from the glory being showered with. So how the hell did you end up with the almighty himself? Call it fate or luck, you both were the high school sweethearts—he happened to squeeze himself a place in your heart with his self invented pick-up lines. That scene of Jaehyun pursuing you, wooing you and winning you over itself would always be funny to you and him, as well as among the rest of the boys. And speaking about the boys, they treated you as though the lady boss since you’re the only girl in the clique. It was enjoyable. 

However college itself hadn’t been the case. You were rather excited on the first day but soon you realized otherwise. People were more realistic about life and you found yourself having a hard time making friends just because you didn’t “fit in” to the so-called societies’ beauty ideals. Girls your age were adorned in makeup and form-fitting clothing, whereas you only wore plain T-shirts with jeans other than switching between white and black time to time. Though it was quite wrong of you to wonder why Jaehyun still stuck out his hand to you all the time when you’re undecorated and boring, while he soared to the top with outstanding visuals and qualities that every girl deeply wished to own him to themselves. And because of that, your presence as Jaehyun’s girlfriend was overlooked and never taken seriously by anyone else. They simply took you as that side chick who’s about to deal with being dumped any time, or that introverted cousin who clung to her big brother that was a star himself. Regardless, the attention that was occurring around Jaehyun didn’t seem to faze him in the least. There was no breakup and no debris of shattered heart. He still loved you a lot. 

Three months had gone by in this manner and the boys decided to throw a huge party as soon as finals ended. You knew you were just not a social butterfly or party person, but since the celebration was being held at the fraternity’s property, you decided to give yourself the opportunity to let loose after major stress from studies, and a dress-up once in awhile. First, you abandoned your thick-framed glasses and freed your messy bun to soft romantic curls. Then you switched out your grayscale clothing to a floral crisscross halter dress that welcomes the approaching spring season. 

While you were having a dilemma picking out accessories to accentuate your outfit, Jaehyun stepped out from the shower bared with still a towel wrapped low on his hips. His feet padded on the timber flooring across the closet and immediately made a stop at the vanity where you were still occupied. 

You shot him a timid smile as he continued to watch you through the mirror working magic on your already-perfect appearance. The blusher seemed a little too much over your redden complexion. 

“What?”

“You’re so pretty,” he said with twinkling eyes.

“Just pretty?”

“Pretty good enough to eat.” Jaehyun loves flirting—sometimes to the point where he couldn’t help himself. But the majority of them all he was the gentleman who deposits appreciative kisses on your knuckles. 

You shoved him away in the chest and he dissolved into fits of laughter seeing your flustered expression. 

“On second thought, let’s just ditch the guys and have a party of our own. I can steal the pizza and some drinks, hm?” he suggested.

It wasn’t a bad idea actually. “Go get yourself ready!”

“C’mon, help me,” he grabbed your hand and pulled you to your feet, “We can play dress-up, I’ll be your Ken doll!”

So much so you were messing around in the closet. You had him tried out horrendous mismatching of clothing and still managed to look good in them. Eventually you picked out a shirt matching the blue of your dress and a pair of black ankle pants. And to top it all, you helped to style his hair in a lovely disheveled look. 

“All done, handsome.” Your eyes flitted around his body and then finally rested on his face. You had no shame in yourself as you checked him out blatantly. “Let’s go!”

“After you, my lady,” he made a dramatic gesture towards the door, waving his hand about so you would step outside first.  

The backyard was already filled with people; Doyoung was mingling with the other guests in attendance; Yuta was drinking straight from the beer dispenser; Jungwoo was hogging the food table; and the twin towers being Johnny and Lucas were engaged in games of beer pong. 

“This wasn’t so bad…” you let your eyes roam around the room with obvious curiosity, everything about the party was new and you couldn’t seem to pull your gaze away from the sea of people submerging themselves as fish in water. 

“Nudge me if you don’t feel like staying. The offer still stands,” he wriggled his eyebrows at you, causing you to giggle. “Do you want something to drink? Like, juice, soda or water?” 

You rolled your eyes at his mindful self. Drinking alcohol is a common practice at parties and you weren’t hesitant to give it a try, as much as the after-effects would be deadly. “I can drink, Jae.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’ll be fine. Besides, I have a goonda with me for the whole night,” you assured him. 

“Are you seriously calling me a thug?” 

“Quick!” you dodged his inquiry, “Make me a drink maybe, baby.” 

Veins strained and popped against the skin in his forearms as he strived to impress you with his bartending skills. To fuel his ego, you squealed with delight at his antics and he laughed and blew you a kiss. 

“I call this the ‘Sand in the Crack’,” he spoke proudly, perhaps too proudly and you snorted at the odd sounding name. 

You rubbed away some of the condensation fogging the glass, but the icy cold moisture numbed the tips of your fingers and you took a sip of the drink. “Mm, this tastes like summer.” It was a mix of pineapple juice, cranberry juice and some alcohol that you could hardly put a name to but it made you long for warm weather and deserted beaches. 

“So, pretty girl,” Jaehyun began with the comment out of his role-playing: the breathtaking bartender and a lone girl. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

He was probably fishing for compliments again. 

“No, baby, I do not,” you shrugged, leaning forward, arms on the table. 

Though it was only pretense, your comeback had him squinting his eyes at you, as if he was genuinely offended by it. He leaned forward, as well, bracing himself against the table’s edge. It put your faces only inches away, the russet-brown of his eyes so clear that you could see the subtle shading of the irises. He smelled of expensive cologne and soap, and the scent of him was very alluring. 

“If that’s the case then, can I like, maybe, get your number so I can take you on a date?”

“You don’t sound so confident.”

“Oh, do I?” he raised a brow, “What if I-” he didn’t finish his sentence because he bent his head and kissed you on the lips, “Like this?” and a few fat smooches on your forehead, nose, cheeks and everywhere, “Hm?”

His lips dotted on your face like butterfly flitting and fluttering around made you giggle uncontrollably, “It tickles!” but you didn’t try to pull away and you didn’t want him to stop. You gently cupped his jaw in your palms and kissed him on the mouth, so lightly, so tenderly, he melted under your touch as he released a long sigh through his nose. Never did he want the moment to end.

“Let’s head out and play,” the endearment ended reluctantly, you slipped your hands in his again and dragged him to where the whoopee was happening. “I haven’t got a full experience on this yet.”

A huge part of you regretted what you had said. As soon as you made it to the yard, the girls who had their own groupies were looking at you with terrible, stern, mocking, hateful faces. You still wondered how they got invited in the first place. They were always giggling like hyenas, a bunch of half-starved hyenas about to pounce on your boyfriend too. 

Your grip on his hand tightened when a skinny-little girl with big dark eyes and long chestnut hair—a little shorter than you and was a complete stranger, walking straight in your direction with no hesitation. Oh, you may have forgotten Jaehyun was exposed now and she was one of the braver girls. 

“Hey, Jae!” your insides churned at how easily she called him by the name with fondness or familiarity. Her perfume was so strong and floral, it gave you an instant headache. Her cheeks were accented with rose-colored blush that didn’t quite match her pale skin tone. But you had to admit she was cute. 

“Yerim, what brings you here?” Jaehyun had always been friendly, kind and attentive to others.

“I came to see how you’re doing. Plus, I can’t miss out on a party like this.” 

You swallowed down a moment of awkwardness, your head tipped to the side as you chewed your lips. Nothing would ease the endless ripple of agony eating through your body. Yerim seemed to have no intention of leaving or perhaps talking to you. She ignored you and held a very long drawn out conversation about her everyday things with Jaehyun only. You learned that she was the varsity cheerleader and they worked closely with the basketball team. When her eyes flicked, for a split second, to you, and perceived a slightly annoyed expression on her face, you decided that your presence was unwelcomed. So you excused yourself from Jaehyun and chose to make your exit instead.

Watching the festivity from the elevated floor above, they all had smiles on their faces and were having a great time meanwhile you were wearing a poker face, almost sad, that didn’t fit in to the mood downstairs. Just before you thought you were getting the hang of it when you had fun with Jaehyun but then you decided you weren’t, you told yourself, you weren’t made for parties. 

And from the incident prior, you kind of hated yourself for being that way. You hated yourself for being weak, hated yourself for not being able to control those people you considered as powerful. It wasn’t that you didn’t want to stand up for yourself, but that you understood you were a weak girl. All these thoughts were circling in your head and then you were twirling around mindlessly on the swivel chair.

“Found you,” the door cracked open just a little. Jaehyun poked his head through before slipping in his room, and quietly shut the door behind. 

“You found me,” a hint of dejection creeping into your voice despite your earnest endeavour to sound unaffected. 

Jaehyun was quick to figure that there was something else, “What’s wrong?” One of his hands curved around your head, gently rubbing your hair. 

“I’m just tired,” you slipped your arms around his waist and buried your face into his chest, thankful for the touch. 

You pulled away at arm’s length and looked into his face. Slid your hands over those muscled shoulders, lifted on your toes, and kissed him. He immediately returned your kiss, moved his lips tenderly against yours. You opened your mouth and his tongue swept in, probing. Promising. His body was hard, throbbing against you. Your arms wound around his neck and you lifted higher on your toes. You needed to get closer. With that, you walked forward, making him back up towards the bed. 

Jaehyun stiffened with surprise when you pulled back and sank to the floor, reaching for his crotch and removing his belt and tossing it to the side. Timidly you ran your hand over his crotch, the pressure firm enough to make his eyes roll. Never had he imagined his good girl would voluntarily offer herself. He was getting harder. 

“Baby,” he whispered when you brushed your fingers along the seam of his zipper, then caressed him, feeling the unmistakable swell of his response beneath your hand. 

“Baby,” he managed gruffly, but didn’t stop you as you undid the snap at his waist and slowly lowered his zipper. 

He groaned your name when you freed him, when you took the long, hard length of him in your hands, then traced the tip of your tongue over the engorged head of his pulsating shaft.

His head fell back, pleasure zooming from one corner of his body to the other. The temptation to pull you back into his arms—to rake his fingers through your hair, to feel your mouth opening beneath his—was overpoweringly strong. He fought back the urge, knuckles turning white as his hands fisted on the sheets. 

Figuring that this was your first time, he let you take your time, letting you feel every inch of him, experiencing and exploring ways that brought out deep animalistic groans from him. 

You lashed your tongue along his length, gliding up and nibbled so gently at the reddened, wide head of him. A sticky sweet droplet pearled at his tip, and you licked it off then sucked him in a tantalizing frequency. The extent of your inexperience and now tainted innocence did nothing but turn him on further.

Johnny nudged the guy beside him with his elbow, looking up at the second-story window in amusement. 

“Someone’s finally lost her shit,” Taeyong commented, equally amused by your change of attitude. 

Even though they had no idea what it’s like behind closed doors between you and Jaehyun, whether you had actually done it before or not, however this side of you displayed was never to their expectations. 

And through the large windows, you were hoping those girls were observing attentively at how this man, forged from muscles and determination, was at your mercy.

Mayhap, you left the blinds opened, intentionally.

Teasing your teeth along the thick vein that lined his length summoned a hissing curse from him. You hadn't hurt him. He's enjoying this too much, enjoying your aggressiveness aside your usual soft and gentle manner.

You had complete control over him. He could not utter more than a word. 

His bones shivered inside his skin. He had grown so hard and thick within your mouth you could barely encompass the head of him, but you did so, offering what you could that sent him to a dreamy-eyed heaven.

“Babyㅡ I'm cumㅡ I'm cummingㅡ” he gasped.

His torso arced forward as his body curved in an exquisite bend, moving his groin to the motions of your head, begging for release.

Your mouth closed over his head, with your thumb and forefinger edging the base of his manhood pushed him into a forceful climax that spilled down your throat. A guttural groan that came from his core released and he straightened his arms, coming forward in a stretch, gliding his hands down through your hair. His body shuddered, hips jerking subtly as he rode the wave. Each breath came in a heavy pant, his chest rising and falling.

“That was mind blowing,” he whispered as he cradled you into his arms, bruising your lips with his hungry kiss. And he realized his erection had not gone away. 

How could you underestimate the dominance you had over him?

“But baby,” he called through, voice croaked out of a dry throat, “Everyone probably saw us.”

You hummed low in agreement, bit down on your lower lip and a cheeky grin on your face as you observed closely—his eyes grew wide with realization.

“Oh, fuck.” 

#nct jaehyun #jung jaehyun #nct smut #jaehyun smut #nct scenarios

[kim-woonhak]

i’m sorry but WHY TF DID U FOLLOW ME UR A LITERAL GOD/GODDESS/POWERFUL ENTITY AND IVE BEEN CREEPING UR WORKS BUT SILENTLY SUPPORTING AND QUEUEING THEM RN AND IM ACTUALLY FREAKING OUT THAT U FOLLOWED ME LIKE THIS IS TALENTED CELEB STATUS😭 i’m sorry for the aggressiveness but you made my whole month, whole two months actually like i’m so happy i hope you have blessed day/night, i love your work the way you doodle/sketch that makes it look like it’s done in one singular line😭🥺💗💗💗💗 i hope you know that now that i’ve found your work i am sending you love every single day 💗 i seriously love your art style and you’re the only artist i’ve found that draws realist black & white images so beautifully/perfectly 😭 anyways ily i’m screaming now😭💗✨

skjflasdklfaklsflkdafjd tHANK U i love reading your tags every time and thIS message is juST AS CUTE UGHSDKFJSDLKFASDF is it weird that i love u n ur aggressive energy a lot bc same lol i feel like am also that level of excited just reading this 😩💖 alsO “CELEB” HUH/????? pLEASE iM juSt some raNDO here on kpopblr / nctblr creeping on all my mutuals at 3am instead of sleeping lmfaoo ALSO ALSO thank u for complimenting my black n white style 😭😭😭 honestly I’ve been trying to pressure myself to do color again since its been so long (and I’m lowkey a painter by training? not that I went to art school but) that i’ve become so comFY just doing these grayscale drawings instead lol. now i think i feel less pressure to change things up haha... i’ll figure something out... either way i’ll hopefully keep improving too so i can post more and more things for you :)

#i want to color but also i haven’t figured out how to paint + do this line style together 😭 #this was such a TMI post sorRY #sending u some TEN love too 😘 #nct #wayv #ten #*ambiv.gif #chittapornswife #ask

[mysticsparklewings]

I’m Not Dead‪

I'm not laughin', You're not jokin' I'm not dead I only dress that way Out nowhere take me out there Far away and save me from my Self-destruction, hopeless for you Sing a song for California --My Chemical Romance, "Boy Division" ____ Have you heard?? Have you heard the news?? Well if not, I'm gonna tell ya: MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE IS BACK, BABY!!! :D On Halloween, we got the announcement that they will be playing a show in Los Angeles, California on December 20th. And just a few days ago we got the news that they're also going to New Zealand, Australia, and Japan which basically confirms to me they're doing so sort of tour, whether they actually call it that or not. There's still a lot we don't know for sure; whether this is just a one-time reunion tour or their official comeback tour, if we'll be getting new original music both at the shows and available for download/purchase or if they're just going to redo their existing music and covers, if it's only going to be the main four that were there at the end or if there will be some of the other members that were in and out over the years rejoining them...Where all they're going to go on this tour...the list goes on. But! The important thing, at least to me, is that they came back at all. Six years. Six years we've waited and hoped and prayed, been let down by false rumors and speculation...And now it's actually happening. I just... Hence why I had to make an art piece celebrating the occasion and as an excuse to talk about it. (I figure if I'm going to dump my opinions on the internet I might as well make some art to go with them. Sue me. ) Originally, I was planning on making something more along the lines of true fan art, as this is more pseudo fan art here, but I just couldn't settle on one good idea that I felt really comfortable pursuing. Although I am still considering doing an updated (or at least colored in) version of my Killjoys, Make Some Noise! (lineart) I did a couple of years ago...we'll see. Anyway. Since we did get the news on Halloween, it's worth noting that originally I'd been debating if I wanted to do any makeup this year at all or just slide on a mask since my only plans were going to Krispy Kreme, who was offering a free donut if you showed up in costume. But after the news broke, my decision was made for me. I had to. MCR isn't strictly associated with skeletons/skulls, as has become my preferred Halloween costume, but The Black Parade, their second album, does have a little skeleton as the leader of the marching band, and the band members did wear skeleton/skull inspired makeup during that time. Admittedly this year's makeup wasn't nearly as involved or elaborate as what I've done in years' past, but it beats last year's absolutely nothing. I ended up taking a few pictures to preserve the look, as I always do even though I rarely take photos of myself, and I would decide to draw one of them where I was trying to do this face that Gerard (the frontman and lead singer of the band) has made on a several occasions; this wide-eyed intense stare. Partly because this, I'm sure, is very close to my actual face when I heard the news that they're back, the makeup was inspired by them anyway, and also because it pairs very well with one of my favorite lines from my favorite song by them. Said line being, obviously, "I'm not dead I only dress that way," from Boy Division, as cited at the top of the description. If I'm being completely truthful, I can't even really put my finger on what it is about Boy Division specifically that makes it my favorite, as I've yet to hear an MCR song I truly do not like, but I think there's something in the lyrics of the full song that just sells it for me in combination with the high-energy music. But whatever the case, it is my favorite nonetheless. Beyond that though, it's really hard to place the rest of them in any coherent order because, at least to my ears, they're all really great. Anyway. So I went about drawing my face, erring slightly more on the realistic side than usually (but obviously not too much) in hopes of capturing the facial expression. Which, it's pretty good, but I do think it could've been a little better. I think my biggest problem was getting the eyebrows a mouth right, and I'm still not sure they're quite there since my real eyebrows are pretty translucent and the mouth was hard to balance between looking logical and more neutral than sad/angry. And I think maybe the proper expression was a little more apparent in the sketch, but it's pretty normal to lose some feeling between the sketch and the final product so that I won't discount too much. After that, I had to take a break from the drawing to think about how to color it in any style it and everything. I ended up transferring the sketch to Mixed Media paper after deciding I wanted to use alcohol markers as a base but not knowing if I'd need to adjust it with colored pencil and/or other mediums on top or not, and I did the lines with my Faber Castell Polychromos once I felt like just black lines would be too harsh and thinking colored lines would be better. Plus, the Polychromos are very non-reactive to water, so if I really wanted to I could add watercolor or something water-activated without having to worry about the lines getting messed up. I did not consider how the Polychromos would react to the alcohol markers, but other than one or two spots where the top layer of pencil kinda dissolved after some heavy layering (which was easily fixed by just going back over the lines in that area again really quickly), fortunately, it worked out okay. Although sweet sparkles I swear it took at least twice as long to actually do the lines as opposed to normal between having to apply enough pressure to get the right amount of color down and working on the differences inline weight.   Anyway. I was a little worried about some of the shading/effects I'd be doing with the markers, but I think I did alright with it. This mixed media paper (Strathmore 400 series for anyone who cares) is nice and thick, so I had plenty of room to layer up and blend as I needed to get the look I was going for. This came in especially handy around the eyes and on the nose when I told myself to at least try and get the colors like the photo before cheesing it and just using straight (or nearly) black. The only area that I think came out a little rough is really the skin, mainly the forehead. But that has more to do with 1. There isn't much contrast on the face in the photo so I didn't want to take it too far in the drawing and 2. I think I may have started slightly too dark for skin this pale. I realize that's a weird thing to say, but when you're pale as a ghost like I am, you'd be surprised how easy that is to do. And to be fair, I probably could've tried to adjust that with colored pencils, and my original plan was to add some white pencil on top in the areas of the face where a highlight would naturally hit (forehead, bridge of the nose, cheekbones, etc.)  But by the time I got done with the markers, I honestly felt like it was nice enough without any additional pencil that I thought it might be best to just leave it alone. Since I still have the original drawing, my thoughts may change on that and I could update this eventually, but for now, my decision stands. On the other hand, I was actually pretty pleased with how the hair turned out once it was colored. That is until I scanned it in. I don't know why, but the darkest shadows in the hair were too dark and too bluish on the scan, despite everything else looking fairly color-accurate. I fiddled with the scanner settings for a few minutes to try and fix it, but it became quickly apparent there wasn't much to be done about it at the level. Which meant I had to try making the adjustments in Photoshop. Now, I've done my fair share of scan-fixing, photo editing, and just color adjustments on digital art, but for the life of me I could not get things to work the way I wanted them to here. It became to the point I'm starting to suspect if the actual true-to-life shades of purple of the drawing are just really hard or even impossible for computers to capture and/or create accurately. Fluorescent colors fall in that category, surely they're not the only ones. In the end, after more time than I bothered to document messing around with settings and adjustments, and firmly decided I was not going to essentially manually re-color/shade the hair digitally, I tried the only other thing I could think to do. I took the hair, as I had been for all my adjustments since the rest of the colors were fine, on a separate layer and took all the saturation out so I was left with just the gray values. And I noted while I was at that point that it didn't seem to be an issue of the contrast between the shadows and the rest of the hair. The transition looked perfectly acceptable in grayscale. Then, I added a color layer on top of that one, clipped it to only show up on the hair, and changed it to an "overlay" layer so that I would get the values from the gray layer, but colored purple. It did take a couple of tries to get the right shade of purple for the color layer, and I'm sure it's still not 100% accurate to the IRL drawing, but it's a heck of a lot closer than it was. And this gets even weirder when you consider that just a few days before I made this drawing, I made a different one for a friend where I used the exact same marker colors for the hair, blended in almost exactly the same manner, on the same paper, and it didn't have this problem when I scanned that one in. I have never in my life. Anyway. The accessories actually didn't give me much trouble in drawing or coloring. Admittedly, I did tone down how many feathers and stuff are actually on the tiny hat for my own sanity's sake, and while I did my best with the lace on the choker, I don't have a ton of practice with drawing lace like this so I'm sure it could be improved. Although I did decide to color both of those areas (what I didn't draw/fill in with the pencils at the line stage) with a super dark blue-violet instead of a gray or straight black for the purpose of not totally hiding the linework I'd put in and to make it just slightly more dynamic. Which I think was a good call as it seems to tie in pretty nicely with the grayish tones on the face. Other than that though, I did try to stay fairly accurate with my color choices, and I think I did pretty well with that, all things considered. (Despite having a much larger selection than I did just a few months ago, I do still need a wider selection of alcohol markers in some areas just for the sake of color accuracy and smooth transitions.) Once my face was done, then came the text. I searched for a while, hoping to find an MCR appropriate font that I could hopefully add by hand, but my search came up empty. I did find one I really liked the look of though, called "Miserable." So I scanned the drawing in and after the aforementioned hair struggles, I got to play with the placement and structure of the words. I knew I kinda wanted something that just has that "I'm a logo/t-shirt emblem" kind of feel, and in the end, I think I got that. But I do think I could've planned out the drawing itself a little bit better in terms of the space left to fit the words into. I really didn't do myself a lot of favors on that one.   It has its problems, but I'm still really actually kind of proud of how this turned out...and that's really all I have to say about it. Eh, maybe I'm just really happy because I know why I made it in the first place. Now if MCR can just come within 1-2 hours of my location so I can actually go see them...please... ____ Artwork © me, MysticSparkleWings ____ Where to find me & my artwork: My Website | Commission Info + Prices | Ko-Fi | dA Print Shop | RedBubble |   Twitter | Tumblr | Instagram

#my chemical romance #mcr #boy division #dead #conventional weapons #return #the black parade #skullmakeup #art #fan art #self portrait #i’m not okay #killjoys make some noise

[r3dye-blog]

"Yay!". I know right? Another tutorial that makes you wanna run a naked build instead. Absolute rejoice~ ☆

As a friendly reminder, these are all just my personal opinions and approaches, so take everything I say with a grain of salt, in fact take anyone's advice with some tossed foot lettuce. “Art” is purely subjective, you can do whatever you want.

So then, how to paint armor the right way?

You just don't.

There is no right or wrong. Everyone has a different approach for different reasons, and my recommendation for you is to experiment with many different approaches until you can effectively achieve the style and look you have envisioned. Or at least something close to it. And again, your vision does not need to be rooted in reality, or obey any fundamentals- it’s your choice.

While studying masters is essential in my opinion, instead of just copying them, try to get an understanding of what makes certain aspects great, and absorb these little things into your own process.  

Also, “success” and popularity don't equal to fundamentally "good" art, and by trying to make your style look like something you're not wholeheartedly into.. well I'm sure you can guess that it's not gonna get you too far; if anything it will make you bitter, frustrated, and keep you from genuinely improving.

Enough philosophy, let's start.

First, you should decide in what style you want to paint your armor, are you going for a more anime-esque flat rendered look, or are you pushing for something more realistic? If you only have one style, you've already won half the battle.

Next, be considerate of your materials. Since in this case the armor is primarily metal, decide if you want to make it matte, reflective, or just pure mirror material.

I've made a few quick examples just for this occasion. All except the one at the end of the post are done without reference, and you'll see why.

A tip for actually designing new armor, is to draw such little characters reminiscent of Yoshida's Bravely Default designs, and dress them up in various outfits. It's quick, easy, and leaves you with enough room for innovation and complexity. If something end's up looking decent, just transform it into an actual concept design.

Next up is something more akin to Dark Souls, it's probably what most of you have been looking for. I've painted my fair share of armor, so I have a rough idea of what totally original design I'm going for.

First lay down the shapes- if you start with line art on a white surface, chances are your figure or object won't have any weight to it afterwards. It's okay if you're drawing anime, but you should probably avoid it if you're going for something more realistic. On a side note, it's also one of the reasons why lolis look so gracefully light in half a ton of heavy armor.

Next, design the actual armor with lines on top. It's tricky to aesthetically design armor with shapes alone, since you're constantly being busy thinking about the form and planes. You'd probably end up with a decently rendered chunk of iron, but I assume that's not what you want.

After your design is somewhat set, keep the light source in mind and move to rendering the planes. Since this one is done in grayscale, you can throw some basic coloring on top either with layer modes like “color”, “overlay” or whatever suits you at a given time; or by using hue/saturation sliders. 

It's important to always keep an open mind, don't treat your painting as something final, it's transforming since the very first moment, and it will keep transforming until it's good enough.

Now for the last example, this one is done with some metal reference. By now you can probably tell that I have some weird dragoon fetish, so keep sending those spear pics. I've mostly focused on giving it that semi-reflective realistic look, with plenty of warms and cools accompanying it.

The arrows give you a rough idea how metal behaves. A general rule you can follow until you get a grasp of it- highlights are right next to the darkest parts of the form, and the form/surface as a whole features plenty of reflected ambient light which influences the armor's local value and colors. Highlights are placed at the points that are closest to the camera(viewer), the most protruding area of each form if you so will.

The halftone right next to the highlight, should hold the most of the armor's local(original) color. Depending on the specular level of the metal's surface (matte, polished, highly polished), the higher the specularity, the shinier and reflective your armor should look. And lastly there is the Fresnel effect which generally applies to reflective materials. For the lack of a better term, it "sinks" the edge of the form back into the surrounding environment. Think of it as an lost edge, you can easily achieve that by painting over an edge with a big, soft, low opacity brush, while using the color of the surrounding environment. Just be careful not to make the values muddy.

That's it for this one. Silly jokes aside, take it one step at a time, practice diligently, and always stay positive. You’ll make it

Let me know if this tutorial was helpful to you. ( ͡~ ͜ʖ ͡°) or just don’t

#art tutorial #artists on tumblr #how to draw #dark souls #fantasy #knight #drawing #illustration #painting #sword #final fantasy #akihiko yoshida #fantasy art #warriors

[humansoulsarg]

We Welcome All Solve

This post https://pangenttechnologies.tumblr.com/post/185253110867/ not only celebrates the 2019 Spice Girls Reunion Tour, but also contains some (come to be expected from) Pangent Lore upon deeper investigation.

Included in the post are several images from the Spice Girls’ Spice World 2019 concert in May at Etihad Stadium. It does appear Lottie and Eric were able to attend this concert. I’m not clear on how the timelines align or work or what not, but I’m glad they were able to find their way into this amazing synchronistic Spice World.

The graphic image posted that states:

We welcome all ages all races all gender identities all countries of origin all sexual orientations all religions & beliefs all abilities: Spice World

contains three rows of grayscale shading at the bottom. These can be recombined as Red, Green, and Blue layers to create a color image which follows the Standard Pangent Color Code:

The numbers decoded from this combined image can be interpreted as decimal ASCII as follows:

57 57 51 119 50 122 103 51 122 49 119 104 111 117 48

993w2zg3z1whou0

And the 15-character lowercase alphanumeric value we recognize as a mediafire link: http://www.mediafire.com/?993w2zg3z1whou0

This leads to a ZIP archive - concerted.zip which contains an MP3 - concerted.mp3 with clips of Spice Girls songs.

Thanks to a very helpful stranger who happened to be wearing a Spice Girls shirt one day in the cafeteria and spent time with this MP3 file (Thanks LT!!) it was discovered all the clips were from the 1996 SPICE album, and the track numbers were significant.

timestamp   #   track name 0:00-0:03   1   wannabe 0:03-0:12   9   naked 0:12-0:17   1   wannabe 0:17-0:20   7   who do you think you are 0:20-0:25   1   wannabe 0:25-0:27   7   who do you think you are 0:27-0:30   1   wannabe 0:30-0:32   10  if u can’t dance 0:33-0:34   5   last time lover 0:35-0:37   1   wannabe 0:38-0:40   10  if u can’t dance 0:40-0:42   6   mama 0:43-0:47   1   wannabe 0:48-0:50   10  if u can’t dance 0:51-0:52   1   wannabe 0:52-0:55   10  if u can’t dance 0:55-0:58   2   say you’ll be there 0:58-1:00   5   last time lover 1:00-1:03   1   wannabe 1:03-1:05   5   last time lover 1:06-1:08   7   who do you think you are 1:08-1:13   9   naked 1:13-1:16   1   wannabe 1:16-1:18   10  if u can’t dance 1:18-1:20   2   say you’ll be there 1:21-1:25   1   wannabe 1:26-1:28   5   last time lover 1:28-1:30   1   wannabe 1:31-1:33   10  if u can’t dance 1:33-1:36   9   naked 1:36-1:39   1   wannabe 1:39-1:41   10  if u can’t dance 1:42-1:44   8   something kinda funny

The durations of the clips were significant as some track numbers repeated, but a workable ASCII decimal string was found from this sequence:

119 99 117 117 105 106 110 102 51 57 99 102 115 109 108

wcuuijnf39cfsml

Another 15-character mediafire ID:

http://mediafire.com/?wcuuijnf39cfsml

This time to blackbird.zip which contains blackbird.jpg (an image of a blackbird) and blackbird.wav (an audio file in Kansas City Standard format)

The KCS WAV file decodes to Vigenere-encrypted text with password ‘argentina’ - so it’s from Lottie.

blackbird.txt - https://pastebin.com/Ry6hiXe1

444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444

  Packing up, for the weekend. Well, not the weekend. The back half of a week, and then the weekend, kind of. A few days off, for once. Special occasion. Pushing my luck. Working remotely, but that’s nothing new. Hoping everything’s not on fire when I get back.

  At the moment, there’s nothing about these projects that I can take for granted. I can’t just leave town and know that everything’s going to be all right. No, it’s going to be a damn mess.

  Rachel was sick for two days so Eric and I were sick for the better part of three weeks. He wasn’t sleeping well, worse than usual. Neither was I, and I’m still not sure why. He’d get up and walk around at all hours like a zombie. It was unnerving.

  That was three disgusting weeks, and so this is gonna be the first fun week in awhile. We’ve even got a kid taking care of Rachel, for a couple of the nights. So, fun.

  I’ve never been good at having fun. When I was a kid, sometime in my teens, a friend dragged me to a heavy metal concert and once they started playing I immediately needed to get the hell out of there, away from the noise. It was so loud it rattled my organs and made me want to throw up. Nobody had fun that night, I’m sure. I hadn’t discovered that earplugs were a thing yet. I wear earplugs every night now, or I did before Rachel.

  Things have gotten back to normal, by which I mean I’m working with a team again and getting twelve dipshit emails every morning from each of them because they don’t know how to tie their own shoes without me writing a visual tutorial.

  I hate to make this a generational thing, but working with men over fifty, in particular, is like dragging their whole weight up a mountain, or carrying them, when they should be able to walk on their own. They don’t listen and need to be told what to do at every step. Every day it’s like nothing I’ve done matters and they’re back to square one.

  I’m working my ass off, inbetween depression naps. Working harder than usual because I’m interested. Genuinely.

  For the life of me I don’t know why Pangent proper is letting me do this, and get away with it. Either X has other things on his mind or he’s finally given up on me. With Leslie’s help we now have a plan. I won’t go into it to jinx it but I think we could survive this. Have a future. Get out of this whole mess with our human souls intact.

  I’m enjoying the science again. Enjoying the research. Enjoying doing for real all the stuff that Management wouldn’t let me do before. It’s only been two weeks but a couple of days were genuine breakthroughs. People at Pangent, people who I thought were nutty and useless and liars, suddenly came through with research that changed everything.

  So this is the plan, or part of the plan. Project SOS. Save our souls. Shut everything that’s dangerous down and call it a success. Bring this to a conclusion before it’s got a chance to kill us, but in a way which looks good on paper.

  In my life I’ve taken on so many projects that are bigger than I can handle. I pretend they’re not, and the scope gets larger and larger, and they take so much more time than I pretended they’d take. And at the end, best case scenario, I think, Well, that just barely worked. Mistakes were made. Mistakes were fixed, as best we could and a little too late.

  And a project shouldn’t be like that. A project should be manageable. I shouldn’t be shooting the moon and losing my grip on the project, my time, my health and my sanity. But for the most part those are the only projects I remember. Where I tried to do something great and got halfway there, fucking up the other half along the way. Those were almost the only projects worth a damn, where I was punching above my weight a little. I don’t know what the lesson is there. Maybe there isn’t one. Dare to be great and you’ll always be a goddamn mess who gets part of the way to genius, with a few small errors on every page.

  People think I’m a pessimist. I’m an optimist really, an outrageous optimist. I plan every project as if doing the impossible is going to be easy. I know in my heart of hearts that it’s going to be tough, and take a chunk of my soul, and turn into a whole entire mess, but I plan out these projects as if I’m Superwoman, made of steel. A cutout of Ginger Spice, spicing up the world.

  I forget how to be afraid, when I should be. I forget to set my sights lower and be more realistic about things.

  A few weeks back I was walking out by the shops, in my blue sweater, sometime round sundown. As I passed the grocer, three teenage boys walked by me, hooting and hollering. It wasn’t even coherent enough to be catcalling.

  Children. They were just children. They kept shouting nonsense from thirty feet away. Swearing a blue streak, calling me the N-word, as if that makes any sense.

  I turned. I must have thought that required a response. “Yeah?” I said. “Fuck you!” I flipped them off.

  I was calm. They could have been anywhere from 13 to 18, I honestly couldn’t tell. They just looked like children. I didn’t know how to be afraid of them.

  One of them shouted, “The fuck did you say, bitch?” They were a long ways off now, but one of them, in a red hoodie, came running up to me at full speed. And he punched me, or tried to. He whiffed, right off the side of my head. Bad aim. I didn’t feel more than a slight breeze.

  He was right in my face now, breathing hot air like a steer in a bullfight.

  “I said, fuck you.” I stayed calm. We stared each other down for a moment. He was ready to fight. He spat and he swore, and he saw I wasn’t backing down. And he had, in that moment, a decision to make.

  He ran off with his friends.

  I kept walking.

  That whole time I couldn’t make myself be afraid. And I should have been.

  They were just kids. Teenagers who looked about twelve and were probably seventeen. But there were three of them. And if they’d wanted to, or had better aim with their punches, they could have …

  Hm.

  I did feel nervous, afterward, once I’d had time to process the whole thing. I crossed the street. I went to a different row of shops. And I looked over my shoulder the rest of the night.

  They clearly walked there. No one was watching them, and they had nothing better to do than get into trouble.

  Every time I pass that row of shops I think about them now. But I wasn’t afraid at the time. I didn’t know how to be.

  I haven’t worn my blue sweater outside since then.

  The other day a guy tried to stop me in the street. “I just want to ask you something,” in the way that men do when they’re panhandling for money. He didn’t seem like a sex creep so it could have been worse, I guess. I kept walking, and he kept talking, pretending to be offended, like I was the bad guy here for ignoring him.

  “What, are you scared?” he asked indignantly.

  That got me. I turned.

  “No.” I wasn’t scared. I stared him down. “You got something to say?”

  Silence, for a moment. Then he said, “Aw, forget it,” and backed off.

  He made a decision.

  There was a dead blackbird in the road. I took a picture. I had to get too close to the cars to take a picture.

  Why did I need to do that? Commemorating its death, like it means something. “Much to think about,” I guess.

  Dead blackbird on the side of the road, just far enough away from traffic. Must have hit a windshield. Body completely intact, enough that I kept hoping it would show some signs of life.

  It was still there on the way back. No one ran it over. I hope nobody ever does. That it stays that way forever, or until there’s nothing left of it.

  A beautiful bird. Making people think about death, if they’re walking that way, so close to traffic. Maybe I’m hoping it teaches people how to be afraid.

  Much to think about.

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#puzzle #puzzle solution #human souls arg #submission

[pixiteapps]

Announcing Grayscale Category in Pigment.

In the next couple of weeks, we at Pixite are excited to bring grayscale coloring to Pigment! While Pigment has long offered the ability to import photographs and other images, (a process that renders them in shades of gray and allows artists to reintroduce color using Pigment’s tools,) we’re thrilled now to offer a new category of themed coloring books, full of gorgeous, high-resolution images that have been carefully selected for their responsiveness to the special techniques of grayscale coloring. Since the term “grayscale” can refer to several things in the art and coloring world, we’d like to take a moment to go over the term and talk more about what awaits artists in the app.

“What is grayscale?”

Simply put, it’s complicated—But don’t let that scare you. The experience of grayscale coloring could become your next creative obsession once you give it a try! The best place to start is to understand the term and the different, but related, things it refers to. “Grayscale” can mean any or all of the following:

The literal definition of the term which is the gradient, or expression of the range of shades and tones, between pure black and pure white. Johnny is using a grayscale palette—his “colors” are all just differing intensities of black and white.

The general category of images that are rendered in this gradient format, which often includes but is not limited to photography. Johnny’s favorite kind of pictures are grayscales—whether it’s a photo of a dog or a sketch of a tree.

The specific category of coloring pages, both analog and digital, that are rendered in this gradient format. Johnny’s favorite kind of coloring books are grayscale coloring books...he just loves the realism grayscales inspire!

The techniques and processes associated with introducing color to these images. Johnny has a lot of experience with grayscale coloring.

The literal definition of the term which is the gradient, or expression of the range of shades and tones, between pure black and pure white. Johnny is using a grayscale palette—his “colors” are all just differing intensities of black and white.

For the purposes of advanced/adult coloring, the term “grayscale” most often refers to the namesake category of images and the techniques involved in coloring them. While any image can be turned into the familiar black-and-white by stripping the color information away, that does not necessarily result in an image that will provide the best canvas for grayscale coloring. Great grayscale coloring starts with a great grayscale coloring page and that requires a unique balance of darker and lighter areas, both in quantity (the overall amount of black and white in a picture) and in quality (the intensity of those black and white areas—that is, how dark or how light those areas are). The images we’ve curated for you in Pigment are perfect for grayscale coloring because they represent that critical balance of light and dark that will help you make your grayscale colorings look their best.

“How do I add color to a black and white image in Pigment?”

Since grayscale images are much more complex than the line art images that have historically filled the Pigment library, they do not respond to the “automatic” and “advanced” coloring modes. Those modes rely on simple, clear black lines that separate white areas from one another. With grayscales, there are no obvious black lines or pure white areas to separate from one another, so the best mode to work in is Pigment’s “freehand” mode. This mode is also the most realistic coloring mode since it mimics analog coloring by placing no restraints on where color is deposited when touching the “paper” (screen). We’ve made things a little easier by ensuring that when you open a grayscale coloring page from one of our grayscale books, you’ll automatically be put in “freehand” mode so you don’t have to remember to switch over. Just like paper coloring, you’ll be free to move across the page and place color anywhere; there are no lines to color in or outside of which means you’ll be in charge of making sure color goes where you want it to go. The great thing about digital coloring in Pigment is that if (whoops!) color goes where you don’t want it to, you can always undo your stroke or use the eraser tool. You can also color directly over another color and eliminate any mistakes you might make that way. How cool is that?!

“Is there a right or wrong way to color grayscales?”

Nope! However, there are some tools that will work better than others for coloring grayscales in Pigment. There are also some techniques that you can use to get the most out of grayscale coloring and maximize the “wow factor” of your finished images.

The tools: 

In general, the basic brushes (such as pencil, marker, airbrush, paintbrush, and oil brush) and basic fills (such as plain fill and pillow fill) will give you more control and result in a better grayscale coloring experience than the patterned brushes (like the wood brush) and patterned fills (like the floral fill). Also, keep in mind that since you’re working in freehand mode, all fills will literally fill your entire picture because there are no boundaries between areas like you see with simpler, line art images. This can be useful if, for example, you’re coloring a grayscale portrait where most of the image will be skin tones—you can use the plain fill tool to deposit an entire layer of color and then go in with one of the brush tools and refine that color by adding light and dark versions of different colors, (check out the instructional video here to see what we mean: How To Color Grayscale)

“Can I import my own grayscale images?”

You can. We’re making it easy to enjoy grayscale coloring by curating gorgeous, high-resolution images that we know will respond well to grayscale coloring techniques...something that isn’t always true of imported images. We’re also simplifying things for you by making sure you’re automatically placed in the correct coloring mode when you’re working on a grayscale image from the library. You’ll still be able to import images and color them just as before, but we invite you to take advantage of our themed, curated collections and see if you have as much fun experimenting with grayscale coloring as we do.

We can’t wait to witness the creativity grayscale coloring inspires amongst our community of artists. Be sure to share your work in the Gallery and we’ll see you there!

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Art painted by: @AmeliahMariah @Chr22840 @brady

Pigment - Adult Coloring Books

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