As well as countless of others from the AI generator community. Just talking about how “inaccessible art” is, I decided why not show how wrong these guys are while also helping anyone who actually wants to learn.
Here is the first one ART TEACHERS! There are plenty online and in places like youtube.
Mohammed Agbadi (free, he gives some advice in some videos and talks about art)
Ross Draws (free, he does have other classes for a good price)
SamDoesArts (free, gives good advice and critiques)
Drawfee Show (free, they do give some good advice and great inspiration)
The Art of Aaron Blaise ( useful tips for digital art and animation. Was an animator for Disney)
Bobby Chiu ( useful tips and interviews with artist who are in the industry or making a living as artist)
Second part BOOKS, I have collected some books that have helped me and might help others.
📚Here is my list:
The “how to draw manga” series produced by Graphic-sha. These are for manga artist but they give great advice and information.
“Creating characters with personality” by Tom Bancroft. A great book that can help not just people who draw cartoons but also realistic ones. As it helps you with facial ques and how to make a character interesting.
“Albinus on anatomy” by Robert Beverly Hale and Terence Coyle. Great book to help someone learn basic anatomy.
“Artistic Anatomy” by Dr. Paul Richer and Robert Beverly Hale. A good book if you want to go further in-depth with anatomy.
“Directing the story” by Francis Glebas. A good book if you want to Story board or make comics.
“Animal Anatomy for Artists” by Eliot Goldfinger. A good book for if you want to draw animals or creatures.
“Constructive Anatomy: with almost 500 illustrations” by George B. Bridgman. A great book to help you block out shadows in your figures and see them in a more 3 diamantine way.
“Dynamic Anatomy: Revised and expand” by Burne Hogarth. A book that shows how to block out shapes and easily understand what you are looking out. When it comes to human subjects.
“An Atlas of animal anatomy for artist” by W. Ellenberger and H. Dittrich and H. Baum. This is another good one for people who want to draw animals or creatures.
As for Supplies, I recommend starting out cheap, buying Pencils and art paper at dollar tree or 5 below. For digital art, I recommend not starting with a screen art drawing tablet as they are more expensive.
For the Best art Tablet I recommend either Xp-pen, Bamboo or Huion. Some can range from about 40$ to the thousands.
💻As for art programs here is a list of Free to pay.
Clip Studio paint ( you can choose to pay once or sub and get updates)
Procreate ( pay once for $9.99)
Blender (for 3D modules/sculpting, ect Free)
PaintTool SAI (pay but has a 31 day free trail)
Krita (Free)
mypaint (free)
FireAlpaca (free)
Libresprite (free, for pixel art)
Those are the ones I can recall.
So do with this information as you will but as you can tell there are ways to learn how to become an artist, without breaking the bank. The only thing that might be stopping YOU from using any of these things, is YOU.
I have made time to learn to draw and many artist have too. Either in-between working two jobs or taking care of your family and a job or regular school and chores. YOU just have to take the time or use some time management, it really doesn’t take long to practice for like an hour or less. YOU also don’t have to do it every day, just once or three times a week is fine.
Hope this was helpful and have a great day.
Incase people missed this.
New Frame Plus for character animation! Incredible analysis by the guy that used to do Extra Credits
VERDICT: never made this recipe before literally just grabbed a chocolate ginger cookies recipe off the Google results. OUTSTANDING.
Moderately time consuming between having to chill the dough and the dipping but results SO indulgent. Unbaked dough had an almost boozy quality in spite of containing no alcohol. Baked for directed 12 minutes and they puffed up and sank exactly as described.
Warmly recommend making these for Ur winter celebration of choice!!
Notes on recipe:
I left the spice quantities alone as it was my first time baking the recipe and I think they’re just right but I’m a lightweight. Used black treacle in place of molasses (not typically sold in supermarkets here) which was fine. Recipe recommends good baking chocolate for dipping, i used eating chocolate which was also fine.
Recipe unfortunately doesn’t advise on how to set the chocolate without making a mess so here u go:
Put dipped cookies on cooling rack w some parchment paper underneath to catch drips
Wait until chocolate starts to set (I think mine was about 15 mins) and then remove from racks onto parchment to set fully
Random pet peeve: in most hand-lettered comic book dialogue, the letter “I” only has crossbars when it appears as the first-person pronoun. Otherwise it’s just a simple line. Nearly all simulated hand-lettering fonts get this wrong, and once you know this it’s annoying as hell because a lot of otherwise convincing dialogue edits end up giving themselves away with crossbars where no crossbars should be. If you really want to make your edits look authentic, watch out for that.
What these have in common is that the lowercase looks exactly like the uppercase, except for the i.
Take your pick.
Oh wow, this post was made for me. Font infodump incoming.
Yup, I have been taking this into account for years before.
As far as we understand it, the reason TO use crossbar I comes from back in the lousy-printing-on-newsprint days, when a single-stroke I could disappear, or be confused with an exclamation point. So it wasn’t necessary (and would take two more time-consuming strokes) in the middle of words. Sixty to seventy years later, it’s a tradition, and so to most comic readers, it looks weird and awkward to see the crossbar I in the wrong place. In the digital age, it’s considered the obvious mark of a letterer typing in all caps, who either doesn’t know much about comics, or isn’t paying close attention to their work.
The use of crossbar I for acronyms or names is a topic of contentious debate in lettering circles. 🙂 We at Comicraft choose not to, but some letterers do, and we think it’s fine, as long as it’s a deliberate choice and is applied consistently throughout the story.
With all-uppercase comic fonts you write “crossbar I” by typing “uppercase I”, and “regular I” by typing “lowercase i”. Some fonts include “crossbar I” but you have to type in “|” instead (vertical line/pipe character) - this is more common with comic fonts that have both lowercase and uppercase characters.
I’d like to talk about the “contextual alternate features in OpenType fonts” part though. The newer versions of the CCWildWords font have it as a feature, and it works somewhat like this:
1.) install the font in the OpenType format
2.) make sure the ligatures are enabled
In Photoshop the setting looks like this
3.) with the feature enabled, typing looks like this (Caps Lock is off and I’m not pressing Shift):
(side note: while CCWildWords, like pretty much every Comicraft font, is so expensive I normally would not buy it, they tend to have New Year’s Sales, and I managed to get it last year for $20.24)
Also, worst case, when your font only has “crossbar I” or only has “regular I”, you can always add it yourself with a font editor like High-Logic Font Creator or Glyphr Studio.
(this wasn’t there before, I added it manually, basing off the letters I and J)
Hi! I’m really sick of whitewashing and the various excuses that artists come up with, so I wrote a guide! How To Not Whitewash, at least with regards to skin tone. Please make use of it, and encourage other artists to do so as well. Here’s a link to this guide on a Google Doc - this document has image descriptions. Feel free to contact me if the link stops working, or if you have questions (in good faith).
Google isn’t the only search engine in the whole internet, there are others! And we need to diversify our search engine usage or we’re gonna end up where we were a decade and change ago with the Internet Explorer issue. We can’t let a single brand monopolize everything! This is why Google Search can afford to suck so hard: because people use it regardless! And there are alternatives.
A little bit about search engines, there are 3 types: crawlers, whichwork by scraping the web and developing their own indexes; metas, which get their results from the crawler-type search engines and therefore depend entirely upon them; and mixed, those which have their own (small) index but also pull results from the crawlers.
Right now, there are a couple of independant crawlers apart from Google, Bing (from Mycrosoft) and Yandex (the Russian one): this areMojeek and Wiby.
Supporting independant crawlers is the easiest way to fight the shittyfication of the internet.
Mojeek.com is an independant british search engine with its own growing index commited to fighting internet censorship. It’s small, and therefore it’s usability isn’t as good as that of the Big Three, but it doesn’t censor, it’s fairly respectful of people’s privacy, and it doesn’t drown you in adds. For those old enough to remember, it’s a lot like early 2000s Google: you can find what you need, but if you write “dig shelter” instead of “dog shelter”, that’s what it’s gonna search for. That said, please try to use it and support it as much as you can before we end up entirely dependant on Google, Bing and big corps adds. [click here to go to Mojeek]
Wiby.meis a new indie project that is literally dedicated to bringing back the old-school web. It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. So, for those of you who can’t find any answers to technical questions beyond highschool level because Google buries them under a gazillion commercial sites and other meaningless shit, keep an eye on this project! It has a lot of potential. And, if you know of any personal websites that have great stuff but have been murdered by Google, you can go over to Wiby and submit it to their index. [click here to go to Wiby]
Aside from those, there are also meta search engines you can use to ween yourself off Google and search for random, day to day stuff.
Qwant.com is my go-to here—it has its own index and pulls from Bing, has relatively little censorship, and is fairly private. This is the one I use on my phone for everyday stuff. [click here to go to Qwant].
Historically, DuckDuckGo has always been a go-to for those who want a search engine that respects your privacy and doesn’t censor. Personally, I’ve never been a fan, and there have been a LOT of scandals in recent years. It supposedly has its own index and pulls from Bing, much like Qwant, but I don’t know. I just don’t like it. Still, I’ve added it here for completeness’ sake.
If you have Firefox Mobile browser, you can set any of these search engines as your default search engine and you can also add the others as secondary search engines and switch quicky from the navigation bar. If you don’t have firefox mobile though, what are you doing with your life??? Go get it!! It is So. Much. Better. You can have add blockers and watch YouTube add free, for free! You can have reader mode and dark mode add-ons! You can have the world oh my goshhhh, drop Chrome!!
4get.ca is my last recommendation: it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for reaserch, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can. It’s also very privacy conscious, so that’s an other plus, and it has that late 90s / early 2000s vibe that I totally dig. [click here to go to 4get]
If you wanna learn more about the topic, you can over to the Search Engine Map [click here] which shows you a bunch of Search Engines and how they relate to each other. Or you can also go over to this one dude’s personal website whose done A Lot of reaserch into the topic (way more than me) and seems to be pretty legit, if a little extra. [click here to go to digdeeper.neocities.org] Hope this infodump is useful to someone =D
PS: here’s to hoping all the links work!
EDIT: eliminated the “read more”. Figured there are enough mega long posts in tumblr, one more won’t make no difference lol (tho the version w the read more has been reblogged already, in case you’d rather)
if thriftbooks doesn’t have what you’re looking for, especially if you’re looking for it used/cheap, alternatives include betterworldbooks and discoverbooks.
Other tips for cheaper books is checking amazon and scrolling down to the “buy used” or “other sellers” section and then checking to see if those sellers have storerfonts off of amazon.
There is also a good chance that you might have a local, indie book store that likely also has a used book section! Indiebound might help you find those book stores!
Also, check out your local library, sometimes, they have a for sale section or might have certain times of the year where they do massive used book (dvd, cd, etc) sales to fundraise!
(It’s also worth checking directly from an author’s or publisher’s page and seeing if they have other places they sell their books. I know this is about cheaper/used books, since some of y’all aren’t built for piracy or the library, but also if you want to dodge supporting amazon AND want to more directly support artists you support, there’s a good chance they might have alternate ways to buy the books!)
I use thriftbooks a lot, it’s so good!
as someone who works in an independent bookstore, alibris is the best for supporting yr local bookstore! abebooks is now owned by amazon. thriftbooks is great also just doesn’t usually support independent stores.
I got a laptop with Windows 11 for an IT course so I can get certified, and doing the first time device set-up for it made me want to commit unspeakable violence
Windows 11 should not exist, no one should use it for any reason, it puts ads in the file explorer and has made it so file searches are also web searches and this cannot be turned off except through registry editing. Whoever is responsible for those decisions should be killed, full stop.
Switch to linux, it’s free and it’s good.
u r absolutely right I have SO many complaints about Windows omg.
For anyone who’d like to follow along, I’m gonna share how to get around those things with group policies bc they’re more user friendly and descriptive than registry editor imo :3 I’ll also show how to get around needing a Microsoft account to get setup.
For the Device Setup
“OOBE” stands for Out Of Box Experience which is what that setup workflow is. But it also happens to be a folder with a little program in it that’ll let you skip connecting to the internet; this makes it so you don’t have to sign up with a Microsoft account and can just use a normal local one instead. And it already comes preinstalled! Here’s how you get to it:
Hold Shift+ F10, or Shift + Fn + F10 depending on your keyboard.
Click inside the window that pops up, type the following and press enter afterwards to run it: OOBE\BypassNRO
I believe it should restart your computer automatically, but if not then restart your computer or type: shutdown /r /t 0 /f
Now when you’re brought back to the setup workflow, the page where you connect to the internet will have a new button on it that lets you say you don’t have internet. Clicking that and proceeding through the rest of the setup lets you get around the Microsoft account thing.
Group Policies
You don’t have to know much about them, these are just a bunch of specific settings for what your computer can or can’t do that lets you decide how it works in different ways.
I’m gonna show you how to turn off the recommendations and internet stuff basically. For now bring up search and type gpedit, pick this
It’ll open up to Local Group Policy Editor and we can get started :3c
Start Recommendations
In the side menu, go to User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Start Menu and Taskbar. Click on Settings to sort them with all the “Turn off” ones bumped to the top.
Here’s what you should set:
Turn off user tracking: enabled
Turn off feature advertisement balloon notifications: enabled
Remove Recommended section from Start Menu: enabled
Remove Personalized Website Recommendations from the Recommended section in the Start Menu: enabled
Do not search Internet: enabled
Windows Spotlight
Back in the side menu, go down to Windows Components > Cloud Content
Turn off all Windows spotlight features: enabled
Do not use diagnostic data for tailored experiences: enabled
Cortana
In the side menu, this one’s back at the top under Computer Configuration. You’re gonna want to go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Search
Allow Cortana: disabled
Don’t search the web or display web results in Search: enabled
News and Interests
In the side menu go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > News and interests.
Enable news and interests on the taskbar: disabled
Microsoft Account Login Nudges
When you don’t use a Microsoft account they’ll nudge you repeatedly to sign in so you can “get the most out of your experience” *gag*. The group policy for turning that off has a note that suggests it might not work with Windows 11 though (implicitly), so you can close the group policy editor window now and for this last one let’s just open up the regular settings.
Go to System > Notifications > Additional settings, then uncheck all the boxes. And there ya go! (✿◠‿◠)ﾉ u are done.
Group policies are kind of a rabbit hole so while there is a lot more you could change or read into, for your own sanity’s sake I would advise against it and say call it a day lol
This is all extremely good information, thank you very much for the addition!
I endorse this as an IT technician. I do this to every new Win11 device I set up.
As a bonus, run Chris Titus Tech’s debloat tool on it.
It allows you to add tools, remove/disable shitty parts of windows, and easily change some settings. My default is running the preset for a desktop/laptop and applying security update settings, but there are so many options to customize. I used it on my personal laptop.
ALT
