Sumactic - Plonk

The cousin of "he would not say that:" he would not keep saying that. It was a one off funny line for one particular situation. Every memorable line does not need to become a running gag.

hot artists don't gatekeep

I've been resource gathering for YEARS so now I am going to share my dragons hoard

Floorplanner. Design and furnish a house for you to use for having a consistent background in your comic or anything! Free, you need an account, easy to use, and you can save multiple houses.

Comparing Heights. Input the heights of characters to see what the different is between them. Great for keeping consistency. Free.

Magma. Draw online with friends in real time. Great for practice or hanging out. Free, paid plan available, account preferred.

Smithsonian Open Access. Loads of free images. Free.

SketchDaily. Lots of pose references, massive library, is set on a timer so you can practice quick figure drawing. Free.

SculptGL. A sculpting tool which I am yet to master, but you should be able to make whatever 3d object you like with it. free.

Pexels. Free stock images. And the search engine is actually pretty good at pulling up what you want.

Figurosity. Great pose references, diverse body types, lots of "how to draw" videos directly on the site, the models are 3d and you can rotate the angle, but you can't make custom poses or edit body proportions. Free, account option, paid plans available.

Line of Action. More drawing references, this one also has a focus on expressions, hands/feet, animals, landscapes. Free.

Animal Photo. You pose a 3d skull model and select an animal species, and they give you a bunch of photo references for that animal at that angle. Super handy. Free.

Height Weight Chart. You ever see an OC listed as having a certain weight but then they look Wildly different than the number suggests? Well here's a site to avoid that! It shows real people at different weights and heights to give you a better idea of what these abstract numbers all look like. Free to use.

really hate to do it but i'm locking all my works for the foreseeable future. the capitalistic, callous scraping of free, lovingly human-made art for the purpose of training generative ai is indescribably immoral, and goes against all i stand for as a writer who writes for the sake of it.

what i make is mine. i did that. and no cheap, synthesized, blended-up and watered-down pathetic pale mimicry can ever come close to what i can and have achieved.

i really, really hate to do this. a reader once commented and told me that my work was the reason they went and applied for an ao3 account. that exchange of respect and appreciation could not have happened if my works were locked from the start. i am fortunate to have felt this love for my work, and am sorry that i now have to sequester it.

what generative ai spits out is not art. there is no passion in the slop it regurgitates, no intentionality behind word choice or frustration with tense. no love imbued from hours spent hunched over a desk editing, no joy derived from having driven your friends crazy with the snippets you strategically dropped to deal the most emotional damage.

fuck generative ai and its profit-driven, uncaring, fuck-you practices. every new post about the violation of artists purely for their efforts to make art accessible sickens me. the industry needs to be better, and the individuals behind each model need to be better; every non-consensually scraped training set you weigh is worth a million artists' souls.

also, fuck anyone who says to stop writing a certain way because the llm "style" of writing is to use em-dashes and other such "tells" – the models do that because REAL LIFE HUMAN WRITERS do that. i will continue to use the goddamn punctuation. it was created to be used. don't be afraid to use it.

You know what, I feel like being mean today. Can we stop whitewashing Hax?

I've been seeing a startling amount of it come up in artworks in the recent months, and honestly, that isn't cool at all. That guy is Asian. He is from Hong Kong. It is whitewashing to depict him with a skin tone as pale as or paler than your designs for white runners. It is whitewashing if you choose to depict him with pale eyes. It is especially whitewashing to draw him like that without any other ethnically accurate traits.

Learn to draw people of color. I'm begging you. Or at least don't draw an openly Asian man with a skintone three shades off pure white.

been experimenting

look at this wonderful gif of scallops getting scared and scattering like a flock pigeons

gk