Dude This Page Is A Lifesaver Google Is Really Bad For Working Out The Order To Read Them In

Alright, a bit of context for why two polymer clay ships are here with so many tags: The brown ship was made for talk like a pirate day, the ghost ship was made while I was home alone and listening to the PotC soundtrack and it just turned into the Flying Dutchman with demon horns and the Black Pearl's sails, because that looked best. I used fimo modelling clay, kebab skewers, used teabags and contact adhesive. Watercolours on the ghost ship sails to make them black. I seriously recommend the stardust fimo colour, I used it for every colour on the ghost ship except windows and the hatch to lower decks. The trick with the masts is to make the holes before baking and then bake them separately; before it can cool, you put them back in and let the clay shrink around the sticks. No glue needed. Sails are done after baking, this is where contact adhesive is needed. I recommend making a template for both the side and above profiles.

I'm very much enjoying the recent pages and just how much character is pouring out especially through body language and facial expressions. My favorite being how Tess is just so nonchalant like this is a normal Tuesday and Tynan's mix of confused and pissed. So I wonder how do you draw facial expressions? I do pencil and paper art as a hobby and for me they're one of the harder things to get down right.

Ahh, facial expressions, the backbone of a character-driven story. I can't remember ever sitting down and perfecting How To Draw Faces, but while I struggled with it a lot early on, I don't remember having much trouble with it in recent years, so evidence suggests that the faces I draw were in large part refined naturally during my chibi-drawing video-making process, which makes me think that the skillset can be refined even if the faces in question are incredibly stylized. Eyes, eyebrows and mouths are apparently all you need for the basics.

Cartoon facial expressions have a benefit of modularity - you can get away with swapping out or tweaking individual parts of the expression without having to do any redrawing of the underlying head shape (a difficulty faced by more realistic or more squash-and-stretch-heavy styles, as faces can be VERY flexible and a mouth shape or eyebrow arrangement can reshape the entire profile of the head). This can help us see how extremely complex our ability to read facial emotions really is. Tiny changes can communicate entirely different vibes.

It doesn't take much repositioning or tweaking to get across a potentially very complex emotion.

Every time I try to think of a hard list of do's and don'ts for this, I fail. Facial expressions can be arbitrarily complicated. Rules like "make sure each part of the expression is communicating the same emotion" might sound good on paper, but in practice you can get a lot of mileage out of an expression where every part is saying something different - a big smile with sad eyes, a small smirk with a calm open gaze, etc. We parse facial expressions as a whole, not as a sum of parts. Like a lot of art, getting an expression to say what you want it to is mostly a matter of tweaking it until it looks right. Suppose we want to make our example elf dude look devastated.

Pretty good, but maybe a little too subdued. This gives me "you just told me something horrible that I haven't fully processed yet" vibes. Let's tweak the mouth to pull the corners out more, putting more tension in their face.

That makes them seem a little less frozen. It looks like they're breathing in, getting ready to say or yell something. But maybe instead of SAD devastated, we want FURIOUS devastated. So let's tweak the eyebrows, where anger is stored.

The other expressions give a feeling of open devastation, perhaps witnessing some incomprehensible tragedy - this new expression looks more focused. Maybe they're currently staring down the person who got them so upset, waiting for them to stop monologuing. Maybe once they're done processing, they'll look a little more like this.

That's a powerful face, but we've strayed pretty far from "devastated" by the end there. Maybe they've started their "you can never win" speech against whoever got them so upset. There's determination in that expression - whatever they were feeling before, they've sharpened it down to a knife's edge.

I wish I could give better advice than "just draw about a million little chibi faces and eventually you'll work it out through sheer numbers" but I really can't think of a better way to get good at pulling together specific emotions to match what's happening in the character's head.

sidenote this ask reminded me how much otherwise solid superhero comic art absolutely blows at facial expressions and how much that annoys me, it cannot be that hard to draw nightwing pretty

If I ever die and the Discworld version of Death specifically isn’t there I’m coming back

If you haven't yet, might I suggest:

@m-p-lebrush

I got the badge painted. I gotta find out which class to make and I gotta find out what color to paint the horns (horns painted). Anyone in general give me your thoughts

Edit: Nvm, no scout. I think I might leave it blank or have the YIPE!!! dude

Edit 2: horns are painted red

re-upload of my fallout 2 edit, including a watermark since this video has been reposted without credit to me. its obnoxious but unfortunately this is what has to happen

Ha! I knew it! Your words are no match for the pure strength of our hearts, bound together as one.

Don't want hin getting brain damage. Can't squeak if he's without beak.

POV you're apotheosis

Hey everyone, I know it's going to be a busy day for a lot of people, but Google enrolled everyone over 18 into their AI program automatically.

If you have a google account, first go to gemini.google.com/extensions and turn everything off.

Then you need to go to myactivity.google.com/product/gemini and turn off all Gemini activity tracking. You do have to do them in that order to make sure it works.

Honestly, I'm not sure how long this will last, but this should keep Gemini off your projects for a bit.

I saw this over on bluesky and figured it would be good to spread on here. It only takes a few minutes to do.

Why must you mention those words? AAAAAAAAAAAAA

Oh my god.

pleasd tell me someone else remembers Skylanders

It wasn't just a fever dream, right? They were real, right?

I've had one of persephone's voicelines stuck in my head for so long

Welcome back! Are you ready for another magical upgrade?