So today I learned that in (Swiss) German, crane flies are called “Schnok” and nearly pissed myself laughing
I did not know that it was a crane fly, I just heard my boyfriend, horrified, say that an awful bug had appeared and he said he didn’t know what it was in English and I said what is it in Swiss German and he said, in the most horrified voice ever, “A Schnok”
And if that’s not the funniest fucking thing you could call a bug, I don’t know what is
You may have seen this drawing from the original post by user Fuks (post link in desc.), where they cropped a picture of an ass and pasted it over this old painting. When I saw that post, over a year ago now, I had the burning need to improve it.
I originally did it just for shits and giggles, but my chain of the post blew up and a ton of people took an interest in getting prints, stickers, and whatnot, so I put the design on Redbubble. I set it up so that you can get it on most of the items Redbubble has to offer, and you can check out non-magnet items by following this link, scrolling down, and clicking “Also Available On.”
Then, a wlw creator on Tiktok made a really great video with her own print, framed and hung up in her bathroom, and it went viral. She put the link to my shop in her bio and, since then, the design has gotten a ton of attention.
If naked knight ass is what everyone wants, naked knight ass is what everyone shall receive.
I think I saw god this week when I went to an art museum and witnessed some otherworldly crosshatching
The first closeup is by Jacob Matham and the rest are done by Aegidius Sandeler ll, both using engraving techniques.
apologies for the spare tiddie but seeing this up close was crazy
So this isn’t quite the same thing, but this post reminded me of my own use of crosshatch shading. I was experimenting with crosshatch styles one time and did this:
Which is one of my favorite drawings of mine (It’s my Skyrim character).
The dark lines across the face are barely curved to the face - they’re almost straight - but using those lines to contrast the opposite-direction shading made contouring the face way way easier than just shading around a flat, untextured surface.
It also helped to darken the overall tone of his skin without just putting a solid wall of black, unerasable graphite onto the paper (which is what I attempted this to avoid to begin with, because I don’t have a lot of practice drawing dark-skinned characters/people). It’s easier to add color than to take it away, but my usual pitfall with doing that for darker-skinned characters is that the shading ends up looking mostly the same as it would for a lighter-skinned character, or just more contrasted. (I’m not very skilled/practiced with adding midtones in traditional art)
Anyway, I just thought some of you might appreciate the technique (and if you hate it, you can tell me why and I’ll take it into consideration)
For those of you who don’t know, our beloved Paint Tool SAI has been getting a sequel, which has been in development for a while. I just checked in today and there is now a downloadable zip with a test trial in it!
You can’t save anything created in it yet, since it’s not a licensed version, but if you want a taste of what’s to come, you can play around with it. I downloaded it and have been checking out the new features and will break it down below. To start, here’s a screenshot of my test canvas:
New Tools
Text Tool
That’s right my fellow artists, SAI2 will have a gd text tool! We’ve all been crying about the lack of text tool for years, and we will finally be able to wipe our tears and uninstall GIMP
Shape Tool
There is now a shape tool! It’s able to create circles, triangles, and squares at the moment. There is no preview of the shape when dragging, which is a huge bummer, but I assume (read: HOPE) that a live preview will be added further on in development
Gradation Tool
You can now create a gradient! The gradient will fill any selected area. I did the straight gradient, but there is also an option for a circular gradient, which I didn’t try
Scatter Tool
The scatter tool was a mystery to me at first, as you can see in the purple brush strokes I made. The basic tool is kind of just a staggered brush. You can change the level of stagger in the brush settings.
HOWEVER, after checking the other brush options, I found a solitary other brush - STARS!! When in black, it will just make black stars. It scatters them very nicely. When I switched to light yellow, it made multicolored stars. I’m not sure if they intend to add the ability to make stars monocolor or if they already did and I missed it, but I’m really really excited for this!
Effect Brush
The effect brush seems to be much like the marker brush in that it doesn’t blend much. It seems to be intended as a secondary brush so you can add textures without messing with the basic brush settings.
Other Features + Changes
Brush Style Tabs
Brushes of very different types are now in separate tabs.
Arrangeable Brushes
You can now right click and drag brushes around to move them (before, you could only rearrange them with a loophole by making many placeholder duplicates and then duplicating in a specific order.)
Brush Style Previews
There are now preview to brush styles in 2 different senses.
There are previews of the brush style choices
And there is a preview of the current brush and its settings
Slight Appearance Improvement
There have been some tweaks to the appearance that make it look much nicer.
The New Canvas window (and other popup windows) now have a clean, dark border (along with more settings)
And the client itself has an updated window
Higher Layer Limit
SAI2 has a much higher layer limit. There’s more info on the official Systemax website, but I think its like 8k layers or something insane like that
Higher Resolution Limit
You can now have a canvas up to like 100k x 100k pixels. Assuming your computer can handle it lmao
Join Me in Anxiously Awaiting SAI2′s Official Release
I hope I’ve just made a lot of artists very happy. I know SAI2 is not widely known about and I’m excited to invite many many artists to anxiously wait for this with me! Spread the word c:
If you’re an artist with some amount of skill who chronically gives too much of a fuck about the perfection of your product, I highly recommend drawing in mspaint with a mouse.
I’m serious. I don’t mean shitty stick figures, I mean play around with it and just see what you can do without layers, without the constant pressure to keep a steady hand, just go wild
I started doing it for shits and giggles on @paintfroge and honestly it accidentally has been really therapeutic. I’ll be 100% honest, I was inspired to create the blog originally because I love what @catcrumb does and I thought it would be fun to do something similar with frogs.
The thing is, I’m not catcrumb. While their sense of humor is hilarious to me to consume, it’s not what I produce naturally. I ended up accidentally getting sucked into the drawings and putting a lot of effort into them, but in a completely different way than I’m used to. I’m used to putting in backbreaking hours and tinkering with fine details and trying to make something perfect and always end up disappointed.
The effort I put into these drawings is… joy? Passion?? I get excited to try new things and I put a lot of detail into many of the drawings, but the kind of detail is like, sloppy, and made with love, and the pieces actually end up looking really good a lot of the time. But the best part is that when I look at them, they make me smile, because they’re just for fun, and they were fun to make.
And frankly, I would rather make a million pieces of silly frog art in mspaint that make me smile when I look at them than make a single piece that would look at home in a fine art museum.
So if you find yourself chronically frustrated with your own drawing performance and feel like you’re never getting the results you were looking for, I wholeheartedly think you should take some time to just draw in mspaint for a while.
For me, picking one subject (frogs) has been really useful because I never have to wonder what I’m going to draw, I never feel like I fall into a slump of no-art until I get inspired by a new fandom or something. There are always more frogs to draw. And I’ve gotten pretty good at it too! If you’d asked me a year ago if I can draw a frog, I would have been like, yeah probably, but it won’t look good. Now? Bitch I’ll draw you TEN frogs. They’re gonna be fuckin great too. I love drawing frogs, it’s fun as hell.
Find yourself something to just fuck around with and see what happens!
