If You Don’t Pray Often, You Won’t Gain A Love For Praying. Prayer Is Work, And Therefore It Is Not

22 Storytelling Tips from Pixar

Waaay back in the olden days (2012) Pixar storyboard artist Emma Coats gave some amazing writing tips. I love these and have read them dozens of times.

#1: You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.

#2: You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be v. different.

#3: Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.

#4: Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.

#5: Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.

#6: What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?

#7: Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.

#8: Finish your story, let go even if it’s not perfect. In an ideal world you have both, but move on. Do better next time.

#9: When you’re stuck, make a list of what WOULDN’T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up.

#10: Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in them is a part of you; you’ve got to recognize it before you can use it.

#11: Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone.

#12: Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.

#13: Give your characters opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it’s poison to the audience.

#14: Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.

#15: If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.

#16: What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against.

#17: No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on - it’ll come back around to be useful later.

#18: You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best & fussing. Story is testing, not refining.

#19: Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.

#20: Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How d'you rearrange them into what you DO like?

#21: You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can’t just write ‘cool’. What would make YOU act that way?

#22: What’s the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.

–

Hope you liked these!

(tweet by Jasmine Milton)

New WIP! Working on a new youtuber series starting with the wonderful Zoey Sugg. #youtube #WIP #zoella #art #drawing

Love this man.

長乃   -   http://a-z-10.jimdo.com   -   Nagano10

Digital Painting

Autodesk SketchBook Copic Edition - This is the limited edition of SketchBook Pro with 72 Copic colours to choose from

Krita - Krita offers CMYK support, HDR painting, perspective grids, dockers, filters, painting assistants, and many other great features

GIMP - GIMP is a well known free alternative to Photoshop with similar features 

Mischief Free Version - With six essential brushes, a basic palette of colors and an infinite vector canvas, Mischief-Free is perfect for hashing out ideas, life drawing, and endless doodles

MyPaint - MyPaint is a fast and easy open-source graphics application for digital painters, and comes with 39 different brushes

3D Modelling  

Google Sketchup - Drawing-based tool for architects, designers, builders, makers and engineers who design for the physical world. SketchUp Make is a free version and SketchUp Pro is a paid version with additional functionality.

Sculptris - A free, introductory digital sculpting tool, a great stepping stone for digital sculptors, created by the makers of Zbrush.

Blender - A powerful application with full-fledged professional tools, Blender has a wide community and resources to help you learn.

Animation

Synfig - Synfig Studio is a free and open-source 2D animation software, designed as powerful industrial-strength solution for creating film-quality animation using a vector and bitmap artwork.

ToonBoom Animate PLE Edition - The free Personal Learning Edition gives you the opportunity to learn all the features of Toon Boom Animate and Toon Boom Animate Pro.

EmoFuri - EmoFuri is a new animation software that helps artists easily animate photoshop illustrations in a 2D-3D style! It uses PSD files of character illustrations to animate them.

Etc

Thisissand - An online fun and unique playground for creating colourful sandscapes, also comes in an app version

Flame Painter - A free demo of the full program, it allows you to try out the flame generator and change different brush settings and paint your own flame paintings

Silk - An online interactive generative art program that creates bright silk-like patterns, with options to change colours and rotational symmetry.

Bomomo - This interesting program has a group of dots that move around the screen in the pattern you choose, then paint the canvas according to when you click the screen.

So this is a thing :D

Just remember that sometimes, the way you think about a person isn’t the way they actually are.

Harper Lee’s ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’  (via harrisonjamie)