Wilkiniti (dusky Hopping Mouse)

New photo refs for the paleo artists out there, courtesy of Knuckle Bump Farms' naked emu chicks.

Like seriously, look at these guys and their stupid little arms.

[Image ID: a series of tweets from Draconian Crackdown @fencuary that read:

Tweet 1: every character design course in the world should force you to draw twenty people in the same mundane profession like bus drivers or auto mechanics or nail techs before you get to draw an elf

Tweet 2: imagine how cool elves could look if they looked a fraction as interesting as Steve who bags your groceries. have you looked at pictures of your aunts and uncles lately? e-sports competitors from a country you’ve never been to? so many awesome faces to look at in the world

Tweet 3: just saying this from the perspective of a guy who could have been saved a lot of frustration from practicing this earlier on as a young artist rather than stumbling through it now, but then again I think I’m learning to embrace the Real so much more as an adult

Tweet 4: since some are taking this as a design prompt (yay), for this to work you have to show the 10 - 20 “characters” to a non-artist in your life and they have to be like, “yep, i could’ve seen any of these people today” and imagine each of them living their own rich/unfulfilled lives

/End ID]

rainbow lobster

Sunset paints the fur in flames.

Can you believe that there are people who live so close to the ocean that they can just think “hey, I should go to the ocean” and then they just do???

[Video ID: a compilation of fotage from a trail camera focused on a man-made watering hole, which is a very large bowl with rocks in it. It’s in a desert area with lots of bushes and trees, though much of the landscape is hard to see due to the low-down angle. To me it looks like the deserts in western North America, but I could be wrong.

Throughout the video lots of animals stop by for a drink! In order they are: a coyote, a skunk, a raccoon, an opossum, a snake (I think a garter snake?), a small brown song bird, a hare, a hawk (possibly a juvenile Cooper’s hawk), a hummingbird, a variety of small song birds taking a bath, and a western scrub jay, also taking a bath.

The audio is mostly splashing from the animals drinking or from the fountain. In the clip of the hawk you can also faintly hear song birds and the flapping of the hawk’s wings. The song birds taking a bath together keep letting out short, shrill chirps. /End ID]

“A variety of wild animals visiting a water fountain”

(via)

This was one of the tiniest dragonflies I have ever seen, and they were all over in the Masai Mara.

The closest species I have found is the Wandering Glider (Pantala flavescens), but that doesn't seem quite right. The dragonflies I saw were darker and more metallic in tone, with gold-ish patches at the base of their wings. But I was still glad to learn about Wandering Gliders, because they are found all over the world and seem to migrate incredible distances, even crossing the Himalayas. Isn't that amazing? You can read about them here.

my writing fundamentally changed forever ten years ago when i realized you could use sentence structure to control people’s heart rates. is this still forbidden knowledge or does everyone know it now

I rlly love your art! I like to draw too but I'm having trouble with chubby/fat characters. Is there any advice you could give? (Sorry if this is weird or annoying, if so you don't gotta answer it.)

I get this question a lot, and for once I’m going to try to give a proper answer. 

I what most people get wrong is how to distribute fat. People gain fat in different parts of their body, but no one gains fat in only one part. I often see people draw “fat” characters by just drawing a skinny character and making their belly stick out, like in the picture below.

as you can see, the first drawing  looks kinda weird and unnatural, and it certainly does not look “fat”. in the second drawing the fat distribution is more natural, with fat on the characters’ sides and chest as well as the belly. if you want to get better at drawing fat you should practice adding fat to those areas, as well as the arms, face and neck. another thing that makes the first one look strange is how “hard” the fat looks. there’s a really visible border between the “skinny” part of the body and the “fat” part. fat doesn’t work the same way as muscle. fat is soft and doesn’t have any strenght - meaning that unless you physically lift it up its going to hang and sag. a lot of people are afraid of drawing fat that looks fat - as in fat that bulges, sags and gathers in rolls. that is a shame, because you can’t really skip that stuff if you want to draw natural looking fat.

like you see in the drawing above, adding rolls and visible sagging makes the fat look, well, fatter. all I can say is; don’t be afraid of making your fat look like real fat!

What’s up late night folks? Here’s an eerie shot I took down a pitch black road in the middle of the night