Dubiasdead - Welcome To My Empty Blog

How to be a white or non-black ally at a rally

via  @laurielovelugo 

[SuperheroesInColor faceb / instag / twitter / tumblr / pinterest / support ]

Webcomic tips

In the conclusion for now, some things I’d really recommend doing if you’re seriously considering making a webcomic (or really a comic in general). Some of these don’t really apply to strips or gag-a-day type of comics, but I’m not talking about those here.

1. Write down ideas\sketch stuff, LEGIBLY. “I’m gonna remember it later” NEVER works. And if you scribble it somewhere on a piece of paper, you’d better scan it or retype in one doc later, because tiny notes always get lost among other doodles in my skethbooks.

(i know it’s hard to keep everything clean and organized, but this mess is just not productive)

If your project is a collaboration, save your conversations. If you’re working alone, make a blog for your ramblings. You have no clue what tears of relief I cry when I open that blog and rememeber I don’t have to painstakingly look through my heaps of sketchbooks and folders for a tiny idea I’m not even sure I wrote down a few months ago.

2. Inspiration folders, or even better, inspo blog with tags also help with collecting and remembering ideas. Color schemes, landscapes, style inspirations, atmospheric stuff, maybe some photo references, all those neat things.

3. Basic tier: character design sheets. Top tier: common poses, expressions. God tier: outfits they wear throughout the comic. Holy cow tier: turnaround sheets for all those outfits.

(I’d die trying to find good pages for references without these)

4. If you haven’t finished detailing the plot, don’t even think about moving on to drawing the comic. You’re gonna regret it when you come up with a really cool plot element that can’t be incorporated anymore because you’ve already drawn all the parts you could’ve tweaked.

5. Don’t just define the plot, make a script. Writing down the lines and the brief description of the actions serves me fine:

(notice that I approximately divided the pages & the text that’d go to each panel on a page)

6. Hard mode: make thumbnails for all the pages, if possible. At least whenever a new chapter starts. 

7. If your story involves some convoluted chronology shenanigans, you’d better write down the events of your timeline in the chronological order.

8. Backgrounds. You can’t avoid them, bro. Like half of the comics are backgrounds, especially if your story involves a lot of adventuring and looking around. I know it hurts, but you’ll have to become friends with them. Read some tutorials, practice on photos, go out and sketch some streets, use 3d programs (like Google Sketch) to understand the perspective, use sites like houseplans to visualize your buildings better, I don’t know. Just be prepared for their imminent evil.  

9. If you’re drawing digitally, pick a brush size for the lines and stick with it. You don’t want your lines and detail levels to look all wonky and inconsistent in different panels. And I don’t mean the cool stylistic varying lines, I mean this:

Also, things on the background should have thinner and/or lighter lines to avoid distraction. Usually less details too, unless you’re making a busy background with a simple foreground to help it pop out. Or wanna draw the attention to an object on the bg.

10. Readable fonts. Even if you chose to ignore people with poor sight or dyslexia, the majority of your readers aren’t gonna be excited about struggling to decypher this:

Also, as much as I love my black speech bubbles, colorful text on black still kinda hurts the eyes. I wouldn’t recommend doing that for all the characters. Black speech bubbles are usually used for creepy, inhuman voices. And yes, having a colorful outline in this case helps.

11. Probably newsflash, but did you know that panels have their place, order and functions? They do! My favourite thing ever is how I used panels when I was like 12:

(comics ain’t rocket science, but this one is)

The composition of the panels and word balloons always serve for a better reading experience. They guide your eyes over the page, so that you never feel lost or confused. The images in the comic equal frames in a movie, so it’s pretty damn important in what order you look at things and how quickly you can understand what’s going on!

(Eric Shanower & Scottie Young’s Wizard of Oz)

12. One update a week is fine for testing waters. Don’t overestimate yourself, especially if you have a pretty busy life outside it. A stable comic that updates slowly, but regularly is better than an unpredictable erratic one. You can always pick up the pace later, if you feel confident enough.

13. Try to always have a buffer - a couple of pages in reserve. If you’re making the pages much faster than you’re updating, this shouldn’t be a problem. But if those paces are equally the same, it’s goddamn HARD. But on the other hand, if something happens and you skip an update, those come in handy.

If you’re looking at this list and thinking “wow that’s a LOT of work”, you’re totally right. And it’s okay to be intimidated at first! But that’s why it’s important to start with something small. Once you get the formula down, these things will be natural to you.

i’m starting to hate the frequency of pinterest as a google result more than i hate pinterest itself. listen, google, googly-mate, pinterest isn’t a fuckign source. I want the sites those pictures came from because those are the ones with information such as dates, which is the entire point of the thing I am googling.   

When you shatter a diamond

Have a lazy Saturday

What ARE Vanishing Points?

So I feel like a lot of confusion with drawing in perspective is because people are not taught the absolute basics properly? So let’s do that.

Let’s say we have a cube.

Now, a cube we know is made out of 6 squares or rectangles, and every edge is at a 90 degree angle.

so every opposite edge of a cube is exactly parallel, right?

but let’s say we draw a cube using only parallel lines:

this looks a little weird, you know? Like if i try think of this as an object in 3d space and i look at it for too long, the faces start to look really warped - with like the back looking bigger than the front as if its been made out of weird wonky trapeziums

so what’s going on here? if all those edges are exactly parallel, why does it look weird?

lets take a look at this photo of a railway track

Now we know that the rails on a track are always going to be parallel, they have to be the same distance apart so the train can stay on the track yeah?

But we can very clearly see that these tracks are converging to a single point in the photo.

So what does this tell us, exactly? That our view of the world is naturally warped, and that lines that are physically parallel when drawn in perspective will converge to a single point.

Now, I could call this image “one point perspective” - but that’s not really true,

if these lines are also parallel, then they must also converge to a single point in perspective, right? so lets add another point

clip studio paint automatically adjusts the horizon line to fit the new points you add to your perspective…. notice how the horizon line actually fits the photo better now?

our new point is a very very long way away, so we don’t notice a lot of difference in the angle between lines, but the point that i’m trying to make here is:

Drawing with perspective guides is not about choosing one, two, three point perspective etc. those are just quick ways to set up a certain viewing angle

What you are doing when you use these guides is making your parallel lines converge to a point.

So, if you want to draw a big ol’ cube that’s aligned to be parallel with these railroad tracks, then you can do that with the same point as the tracks - because it’s parallel. It’s on the same axis!

but what if you want to draw a cube that’s rotated, and isn’t parallel to the tracks?

well that’s not too difficult to do if you know that every point represents one set of parallel lines.

If these lines aren’t parallel to the ones you already have, then clearly you just need new points.

We’re not planning to tilt this cube up into the air, or rotate it onto its side, so we’re going to leave the vertical axis alone, and just move our horizontal points to a different place on the horizon line

But speaking of the vertical axis - the only points that will be on your horizon line are the ones that are flat on the ground. But you can still have points that are not on the horizon line!

This is important to remember because if you’re trying to draw something like a slope or stairs, something that has an incline, it’s not going to be level with your horizon.

Let’s draw some stairs as an example.

This is actually pretty simple - first draw where your slope starts and ends by drawing a big L shape.

this will give you some parallel corners, which you can then connect to make a new point for your slope

And with this you can then find the centre and divide that up into equal parts to make your stairs (http://lesbianlinkle.tumblr.com/post/176704472820)

So lets go back to our original cube, with the knowledge that our parallel lines should all converge to a point and draw it again

well, doesn’t that look better!

but also, now you know how to make a cube lean against its buddy like this

because we just make new points for the new parallel lines

Anyway I hope that clears some things up, and makes perspective easier to understand!

Also if these tutorials have been helpful and you’d like to support me, I do have a patreon & a ko-fi you can donate to :^)

basic structure of human body

got my tutorial books and comics here

This is the Curse of Andrew Hussie.

Reblog in the next 4 days and 13 hours and receive a copy of Sburb for you and your friends. Fail to do so, and Andrew Hussie will torment you for the rest of your days.

Alignment chart ft vocaloid series you were into in middle school/freshman year of high school