art books on the internet archive for you

morpho books

figure drawing for all it's worth (+ creative illustration)

framed ink

will eisner comics and sequential art

will eisner graphic storytelling and visual narrative

understanding comics (+ making comics)

folder of various animation production art

burne hogarth drawing dynamic hands

perspective for comic book artists

michael mattesi force drawing

the animator's survival kit

color and light james gurney

be free

I've recommended this one before, but for all the non-human vertebrate likers out there... the art of animal drawing

have made some pose blanks with thin/fat variations! ive noticed that those handy artist renditions of poses typically dont have a lot of bodytype variation and i thought these might be helpful :)

i have a set of 10 of these available to my patrons and kofi members, id really appreciate any support!

so. i was not happy with the 3D models of horses on offer in the CSP store or literally anywhere else i could find them, i needed one to use for my work, and i went ahead and made my own that is now available for the low low price of FREE in the CSP assets store.

textures included are greyscale basic shapes, multicolor basic shapes, and white with no shapes (but eyes, mouth, nostrils, and hooves emphasized for ease).

shape is ROUGHLY based off the silhouette of an Andalusian. size-wise, it by default stands at around 16 hands, but of course it can be resized to suit your needs. for that, I recommend sizing a human pose doll to the correct height (in centimeters), lining them up on the same plane, and resizing the horse to match the human doll's height. remember that a horse's height is measured at the shoulders!

it also comes with the following preset poses:

if you use CSP and wanna snag it, type 2204263 into the search bar in the CSP assets store. happy horsing!

@horsefigureoftheday digital horse figure ..

AWESOME

@ultrainfinitepit @elodieunderglass youll never guess what i just found

Goodness gracious, that's a lot of hard work! Well done, OP!

This database holds a ton of useful materials for embroidery! many different types of stitches in various difficulties, all incredibly useful!

Violence: A Writer’s Guide:  This is not about writing technique. It is an introduction to the world of violence. To the parts that people don’t understand. The parts that books and movies get wrong. Not just the mechanics, but how people who live in a violent world think and feel about what they do and what they see done.

Hurting Your Characters: HURTING YOUR CHARACTERS discusses the immediate effect of trauma on the body, its physiologic response, including the types of nerve fibers and the sensations they convey, and how injuries feel to the character. This book also presents a simplified overview of the expected recovery times for the injuries discussed in young, otherwise healthy individuals.

Body Trauma: A writer’s guide to wounds and injuries. Body Trauma explains what happens to body organs and bones maimed by accident or intent and the small window of opportunity for emergency treatment. Research what happens in a hospital operating room and the personnel who initiate treatment. Use these facts to bring added realism to your stories and novels.

10 B.S. Medical Tropes that Need to Die TODAY…and What to Do Instead: Written by a paramedic and writer with a decade of experience, 10 BS Medical Tropes covers exactly that: clichéd and inaccurate tropes that not only ruin books, they have the potential to hurt real people in the real world. 

Maim Your Characters: How Injuries Work in Fiction: Increase Realism. Raise the Stakes. Tell Better Stories. Maim Your Characters is the definitive guide to using wounds and injuries to their greatest effect in your story. Learn not only the six critical parts of an injury plot, but more importantly, how to make sure that the injury you’re inflicting matters. 

Blood on the Page: This handy resource is a must-have guide for writers whose characters live on the edge of danger. If you like easy-to-follow tools, expert opinions from someone with firsthand knowledge, and you don’t mind a bit of fictional bodily harm, then you’ll love Samantha Keel’s invaluable handbook

They should add "On Horseback" option to Google Maps. For writers.

"Hevoslinja" (Trans-Horse) is a European art project started in 2014 by Finnish artist Eero Yli-Vakkuri - according to his own words 'skilless in riding and afraid of animals' at the start.

The aim of the project was to travel 270 km / 168 miles between Helsinki and Turku in Finland, and to highlight the possibility of horse travel in modern society. Since then they've took to promoting horseback efforts in urban landscapes with several European collaborators and artists.

Yli-Vakkuri and collaborators first spent eight months practicing riding to become safely self-sufficient in saddle, and bought a Finnhorse gelding Toivottu Poika ('Awaited Son'). The route followed, as closely as possible, the old coastal royal country road of the premodern era, Kuninkaantie/Suuri Rantatie, and took 9 days.

Toivottu Poika is a very average example of his breed, standing at some 155 cm / 15.1 hh tall. The Finnhorse is a relative of for example the North-Norwegian Lyngshest breed, the Icelandic horse, the Swedish Gotlandsruss pony and the Estonian landrace horse and Tori horse breed. It is a mid-sized light draught and trotter, a sensibly realistic mediaeval country travel horse equivalent.

For more hardcore short-term treks, looking into competitive endurance riding can be helpful. Mongol Derby might be one of the most intense races, as it recreates the Chinggis Khan era postal system of swapping horses continuously over a 1000 km / 620 mile route.

By only including skilled endurance riders, keeping up a constant fast speed and swapping horses every 40 km / 25 mil, the Mongol Derby route only takes 10 days even though it's several times the length of the Trans-Horse project. This is the speed of highly organised imperial messengers with the supporting cultural infrastructure, professional marathon runners where Yli-Vakkuri and Toivottu poika were leisure hikers.

The Mongolian landrace horse is a very distant relative of the breeds above, but much lighter and smaller than the agriculturally focused modern Finnhorse - typicaly standing at 142 cm / 14 hh at most. (This would've also been common for Finnhorses before the 19th century.) What really differentiates them from Western breeds, however, is the way they're trained and raised in semi-feral herds, and it's said that while the rider may decide where the pair is headed, the horse is the one to decide how to get there.

also it's not quite google maps, but there is a lovely site called Viabundus!

the last i checked, the map of roads stretches from Calais, France to Moscow, Russia west to east and from Košice, Slovakia to Tornio, Finland south to north. it doesn't cover all of Europe, for example Sweden and Norway are empty at the moment, but it is quite extensive and still being worked on! in addition to showing the old roads, you can calculate the distance and travel time from one city to another, and there are a lot of options:

and that's not all! here's a description from the site itself (emphasis mine):

"Viabundus is a freely accessible online street map of late medieval and early modern northern Europe (1350-1650). Originally conceived as the digitisation of Friedrich Bruns and Hugo Weczerka's Hansische Handelsstraßen (1962) atlas of land roads in the Hanseatic area, the Viabundus map moves beyond that. It includes among others: a database with information about settlements, towns, tolls, staple markets and other information relevant for the pre-modern traveller; a route calculator; a calendar of fairs; and additional land routes as well as water ways."

it's quite neat and also free! i hope someone else finds it as fascinating and cool as i did :)

Thank you so much for sending me this, @quandocoeli ! All very cool!

An interesting question: how much do horses help? There are situations (long-haul hikes) where they’re sort of as much of a liability as a help. They really walk at Human Speed, or close to it, and horses weirdly have less stamina over long hauls than humans do. I don’t think a lot of fantasy authors realise this. If you spend time around horses, you will realise it, though.

• Human and horse walking speeds match very nicely.
• Horses will walk for about as many hours a day as we do (about six-ish, especially if it’s day after day after day, I.e. long travel.)
• You can go at faster gaits on a horse. They trot (similar to our jogging) canter (running lightly) and gallop (running fast.) they do not do this for long trav. you might get a horse to trot on and off all day, but would not, not even a little bit, trot from the Shire to Mordor.
• If you push too hard and knacker your horse, you have to rest them.
• Quite a lot of human history, from military to economic, has been about Dragging the Horses Around.
• Anyway, a walking horse goes like 4mph. That’s on Google maps already. Pick the Walking route. It’s the same thing.

But that’s the automatic “it would take an hour for both myself and a horse, or myself ON the horse, to walk 4 miles” answer. Writers who are interested in the problem are probably picturing something slightly more plot-relevant than walking to the gas station for scratch tickets and an Arizona Iced Tea.

I was interested to know if this could connect and hold true in terms of a long-term travel - say, a LotR-esque quest over weeks and different terrains - and thanksfully, I have a relevant interest to hand. Once again, the Camino de Santiago.

today, you may complete the Camino de Santiago on foot or on horseback. There are many horse rental agencies. A reasonable middle of the road pace suggested by one is: Riding between 25-35 km for 6-7 hours a day (normal mode). Various routes include terrain like mountains and plains; they presume you’ll largely camp. You are not allowed to run the horse into the ground (they will get mad at you) and a pilgrimage should be an amble, not a march. Plus, it’s hot in Spain and there are mountains; you’re going to be mooching and drinking water to survive this six-week hike.

but like I said: a keen math-brained person will note that this is basically human walking speed. It’s also about the time walked and distance covered by the human-only hikers. This strongly suggests that experienced horse-rental long-haul pilgrims don’t break above a walk, or do so very infrequently to maintain the average speed. and certainly aren’t cantering the whole Camino.

(This is definitely a modern company being mindful of horse welfare, although pragmatic animal welfare probably doesn’t stray too far from pragmatic medieval people not wanting to kill their horse. But is also the far more immediate concern that 6 hours in a day about as long as an average human wants to be on an average horse. Like, cattle drives are the outliers.)

You’ll see that the matches up to the second post. The horse in the Finnish expedition went about 20 miles a day, which is at the top end of the human Camino pilgrim and about what a Camino horse does, but heat/hydration is a major consideration on the Camino and probably less of a worry in Finland. 20 miles a day at 4 mph is 5 hours of riding on flat perfect ground and wrinkles if you need to add hills and hydration.

As the pilgrimage has thousands of pilgrims per year and excellent travel records going back to the medieval era, it would be really interesting to work out if this is a “fast” or “slow” estimation of horseback travel by fantasy standards. Are we being nicer to horses? Did medieval horsemen make them walk 10 hours a day? Has better diet and better understanding of fitness/gear sped up humans or given us more stamina? Do roads make a difference? There are a million considerations. If any of them are helpful in your novel, there is a very well-documented horse/human walking route across Spain in which medieval records can be compared directly to 2025 forum posts - a very rich seam, if you know what your question is!

But in general, especially for long journeys over many days, human walking speed on google maps is actually a surprisingly good rule of thumb for horse walking speed.

there’s this extremely kind soul of a woman on instagram that makes accessible recipes that don’t require standing, chopping, or a stove and she might just have a permanent place in my heart

She's on YouTube too! For non-Instagram using friends:

I love her, she's great. Her recipes are friendly for both physical and/or intellectual disabilities. And her 5-year-old helps her cook. 🥰

Link to her YouTube channel:

I can't do much but maybe this will interest someone. This cookbook is by a classically trained autistic chef, made for people with sensory issues. It's sold 1/6th of its initial run because apparently no one wants to have an autistic person interviewed on TV.

Apparently it's also very funny.

Spread this around! I bet someone here can use this.

More info from the link:

"An accessible family cookbook that offers solutions rather than tricks to empower the food-averse, autistic, and picky eater, with 46 recipes.

This much-needed cookbook combines tips and techniques with a dash of understanding about food aversion and how to help your kids—and yourself—cook beautiful meals in an empowering way, and is a groundbreaking resource for anyone who has ever been called “picky” or “discerning.” Learn how to alter the texture or taste profile of a dish, or even fit it within a specific palette with a unique color-coded guide. Delicious, nutritious, and easily tailored recipes (including for gluten-free and vegan eaters) include:

• the perfect smashed cheeseburger
• Italian sausage and potato soup
• the best omelet
• stuffed focaccia 
• chocolate pinwheels
• and dozens more

Professional chef Matthew Broberg-Moffitt’s advice is broken down by category (The Five Tastes, Texture, Color, Aroma, Presentation, and Plating) in order to address each and every aspect of food aversion, and a Food Preference Profile and Worksheet is included for you and your child to quickly identify and summarize their preferences. Instead of leading to mistrust by disguising or slipping in foods your kids don’t want to eat, this cookbook supports caretakers in a way that maintains a healthy relationship with food, and a joyful, less stressful experience around the table."

reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics

@dragonpyre any chance you could elaborate on this

I grew up learning about land formations. Seeing fictional maps that don’t follow the logic and science of them makes me upset

What are the most common sins you’ve seen relating to this? I wanna know

Mordor.

Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.

And then the misty mountains!!!! Why isn’t there a rain shadow!! And why is there a FOREST where the rain shadow should be!!!!!!!!

So what is a rain shadow?

Wind blows clouds in from the sea, but mountains are so tall the clouds can't get past 'em, so you get deserts on the windward side of mountain ranges because clouds can't get there to water the land, or do so only very rarely.

Oh yeah nothing is more annoying than fantasy maps that can't get mountains, rivers and rain shadows right.

May I recommend my new favorite tool: Mapgen4. You start with a random seed and then add mountains, valleys, shallow water, or oceans as you like. You can adjust the wind direction to make wind shadows off the mountains fall where you want. You can adjust overall raininess to make the rivers larger or smaller, or have more or fewer tributaries. It works best for small, isolated landmasses (think islands more than continents) but as there’s no scale bar and it’s all slightly abstracted anyway you can do whatever you want with it. I’ve only just started playing with it but it’s SO FUN.

I do think this could be useful for writers! ...Caveat, if you're going to use this for making a map for anything published (digital or paper, even if it's only in a fanfic archive or whatever), please, please credit the creator and their program as how you made that map! The more ways information like this gets out there, the more useful it'll be to other writers, roleplaying game DMs/GMs, creators, etc.

One of my favourites for mapping plates, biomes, etc is Tectonics.js. If you're familiar with how tectonics shape a planet, you can guess where the features go by toggling plates, crust thickness, etc. Between Mapgen4 and Tectonics.js, we've got some pretty sweet tools at our disposal.

More stuff!:

• European Geosciences Union Blog — Beyond Tectonics: Building fictional worlds to better understand our own
• Reshaping Reality's Worldbuilding Tips
• Worldbuilding pasta's series, An Apple Pie from Scratch also check their resources page!
• R/worldbuilding's Reading List. Also check out their collected resources link. This basic geology guide from 11 years ago is still nice.
• Creating an Earth-Like Planet, and The Climate Cookbook (aka Geoff's Climate Cookbook) technically the climate cookbook is a part of Creating an Earth like Planet I think.
• Related: Worldbuilding Workshop's "Working Out Climates Using Geoff’s Climate Cookbook." Which goes through using the resource in order to map make. Also just the Worldbuilding Workshop in General.
• Madeline James Writes's Worldbuilding Guide
• Worldbuilding 101 (this links to the Biomes section but there's like...everything.)

Also I would recommend looking into Landscape Archaeology as well! That's because Landscape archeology is basically adding the social/cultural layer on top of all that geology and geography. Environments change when communities live in them, and communities likewise adapt to various environments.

This is a short free introduction to the concept: "Notes on Landscape Archaeology." To summarize, Landscape archaeology sort of like...studies the relation of people to places/spaces (that is, landscapes) in time.

Also this paper [An Archeology of Landscapes] breaks down/introduces the key concepts that I learned which is first that you can form the "construct paradigm" of a landscape from settlement ecology, ritual landscapes, and ethnic landscapes.

And then the highlights of their summary of what constitutes defining a landscape:

1. Landscapes are not synonymous with natural environments. Landscapes are synthetic (Jackson, 1984, p. 156), with cultural systems structuring and organizing peoples’ interactions with their natural environments ...
2. Landscapes are worlds of cultural product ... Through their daily activities, beliefs, and values, communities transform physical spaces into meaningful places. ...
3. Landscapes are the arena for all of a community’s activities. Thus landscapes not only are constructs of human populations but they also are the milieu in which those populations survive and sustain themselves. A landscape’s domain involves patterning in both within-place and between-place contexts ...
4. Landscapes are dynamic constructions, with each community and each generation imposing its own cognitive map on an anthropogenic world of interconnected morphology, arrangement, and coherent meaning ...

Basically a "landscape" is made by a community living in an environment. Once you have a geological environment that makes sense, landscape archaeology is like... Basically how I feel confident knowing where trade routes would be on a map, where there are areas of continual high conflict, what kinds of agriculture exists where, etc. once the geological stuff is hammered out, it's like...I know how that would influence the local cultures and vice versa. At that point, it's easy to start marking the natural borders, settlements, trade/port cities, and even strategic fortresses. If you have properly put rivers on a map, then marking your port cities is effortless, basically.

Also:

• This course syllabus for a Landscape Archaeology class is freely accessible. It includes an online resources page.
• Place, Landscape, and Environment: Anthropological Archaeology in 2009
• (Landscape Biographies is open access, as is Landscape Archaeology between Art and Science: From a Multi- to an Interdisciplinary Approach. But I wouldn't try to read every essay.)

If you are like me and find it helpful to have video reference for a process/activity in addition to a written guide, Artifexian is a YouTube channel that does a LOT of world building stuff and specifically he's in the process of creating a world following a lot of Worldbuilding Pasta's methodology!