i dont consider myself a ‘fashion guru’ by any means but one thing i will say is guys you dont need to know the specific brand an item you like is - you need to know what the item is called. very rarely does a brand matter, but knowing that pair of pants is called 'cargo’ vs 'boot cut’ or the names of dress styles is going to help you find clothes you like WAAAYYYY faster than brand shopping
this also goes for aesthetic or -core titles. 'y2k tank top’ is going to get you resellers and fast fashion brands advertising to people looking to meet a current trend. 'thin strap crop tank top’ is going to get you a diverse group of results and not upcharge you to hell and back
additionally, shop second hand when you can, second hand and thrift sites typically organize clothes by the cut and color. theyll be more affordable than a depop seller curating you a style to sell you
useful terminology for different kinds of clothing shapes :)
here are more terms! these are all from enérie. it is a really good blog that has lots of fashion terminology and it’s a good mix of menswear and womenswear! they also have a book as well compiling all their diagrams. you could also look into getting a visual fashion dictionary for terms as well!
neocities guide - why you should build your own html website
do you miss the charm of the 90s/00s web where sites had actual personality instead of the same minimalistic theme? are you feeling drained by social media and the constant corporate monopoly of your data and time? do you want to be excited about the internet again?
try neocities!!
what is neocities?
neocities is a free hosting website that lets you build your own html website from scratch, with total creative control. in their own words:
“we are tired of living in an online world where people are isolated from each other on boring, generic social networks that don’t let us truly express ourselves. it’s time we took back our personalities from these sterilized, lifeless, monetized, data mined, monitored addiction machines and let our creativity flourish again.”
why should I make my own website?
web3 has been overtaken by capitalism & conformity. websites that once were meant to be fun online social spaces now exist solely to steal your data and sell you things. it sucks!!
building a personal site is a great way to express yourself and take control of your online experience.
what would I even put on a website?
the best part about making your own site is that you can do literally whatever the hell you want! focus on a specific subject or make it a wild collection of all your interests. share your art! make a shrine for one of your interests! post a picture of every bird you see when you step outside! make a collection of your favorite blinkies! the world is your oyster !!
i want everyone to make a neocities site because it’s fun af and i love seeing everyone’s weird personal sites that they made outside of the control of capitalism :)
A tutorial on a (bit cheating) way of creating fictional maps.
Open your editing software (RECOMMENDING Krita, since it’s free and it’s very good).
Step 1: Google “X country silhouette” and copy it.
Paste it onto the canvas.
Step 2: Separate the silhouette from the background you copied with it! You can do that by using magic wand selection tool or by making a gradient map with black on 49,9% and transparent on 50% on the slider.
Step 3: Repeat several times with numerous countries and/or islands, cities, municipalities, communes, continents et cetera.
Step 4: Combine, mesh, stretch, rotate, mirror - go ham, make it work.
Step 5: Erase and add.
Step 6: Have your map outline ready, copy/paste it several times in the same doc on different layers and edit in different ways like biomes, kingdoms, mountains and other.
Step Mountains+: To figure out mountains, make another layer on the doc and do something like this:
-and then in every polygon you add an arrow.
Where arrows meet or transfer onto continents, add mountains.
Color the sea with a couple layers of depth and you’re done :D
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.
📺Here is my list:
Proko (Free, mostly teaches anatomy and how to draw people. But does have art talks and teaches the basics.)
Marc Brunet (Free but he does have other classes for a cheap price. Use to work for Blizzard and teaches you everything)
Aaron Rutten (free, tips about art, talks about art programs and the best products for digital art)
BoroCG (free, teaches a verity of art mediums from 3D modeling to digital painting. As well as some tips that can be used across styles)
Winged canvas (art school for free on a verity of mediums)
Bob Ross (just a good time, learn how to paint, as well as how too relax when doing art. “there are no mistakes only happy accidents”, this channel also provides tips from another artist)
Drawbox (a suggested cheap online art school, made of a community of artist)
Skillshare (A cheap learning site that has art classes ranging from traditional to digital. As well as Animation and tutorials on art programs. All under one price, in the USA it’s around $34 a month)
Human anatomy for artist (not a video or teacher but the site is full of awesome refs to practice and get better at anatomy)
Second part BOOKS, I have collected some books that have helped me and might help others.
📚Here is my list:
The “how to draw manga” series produced by Graphic-sha. These are for manga artist but they give great advice and information.
“Creating characters with personality” by Tom Bancroft. A great book that can help not just people who draw cartoons but also realistic ones. As it helps you with facial ques and how to make a character interesting.
“Albinus on anatomy” by Robert Beverly Hale and Terence Coyle. Great book to help someone learn basic anatomy.
“Artistic Anatomy” by Dr. Paul Richer and Robert Beverly Hale. A good book if you want to go further in-depth with anatomy.
“Directing the story” by Francis Glebas. A good book if you want to Story board or make comics.
“Animal Anatomy for Artists” by Eliot Goldfinger. A good book for if you want to draw animals or creatures.
“Constructive Anatomy: with almost 500 illustrations” by George B. Bridgman. A great book to help you block out shadows in your figures and see them in a more 3 diamantine way.
“Dynamic Anatomy: Revised and expand” by Burne Hogarth. A book that shows how to block out shapes and easily understand what you are looking out. When it comes to human subjects.
“An Atlas of animal anatomy for artist” by W. Ellenberger and H. Dittrich and H. Baum. This is another good one for people who want to draw animals or creatures.
📝As for Supplies, I recommend starting out cheap, buying Pencils and art paper at dollar tree or 5 below. If you want to go fancy Michaels is always a good place for traditional supplies. They also get in some good sales and discounts. For digital art, I recommend not starting with a screen art drawing tablet as they are usually more expensive.
For the Best art Tablet I recommend either Xp-pen, Bamboo or Huion. Some can range from about 40$ 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. Galaxy, Windows, macOS, iPad, iPhone, Android, or Chromebook device. )
Procreate ( pay once for $9.99 usd, IPAD & IPHONE ONLY)
Blender (for 3D modules/sculpting, animation and more. Free)
PaintTool SAI (pay but has a 31 day free trail)
Krita (Free)
mypaint (free)
FireAlpaca (free)
Aseprite ($19.99 usd but has a free trail, for pixel art Windows & macOS)
Drawpile (free and for if you want to draw with others)
IbisPaint (free, phone app ONLY)
Medibang (free, IPAD, Android and PC)
NOTE: Some of these can work on almost any computer like Clip and Sai but others will require a bit stronger computer like Blender. Please check their sites for if your computer is compatible.
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.
“also apologies for any spelling or grammar errors, I have Dyslexia and it makes my brain go XP when it comes to speech or writing”
Boosting this in case any of the programs and books suggested are useful.
All the photos on this tumblr ad the animal photo reference site I run is another resource available for artists to use!
As long as you’re not using AI to create your art, you can reference / trace / draw / recombine / make any sort of art you want, with any of the photos, for free.
There’s also MORPHO, a really good book series on anatomy by Michel Lauricella, with very clear explanations and sketches!
And for pose references, there’s @adorkastock who shares a ton of them for free, with different models and props, and her website is amazing <3 you can also buy pose packs from her.
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!
Please take the time to review the one relevant to your questions! They are long- some longer than others- but they likely have a link contained within that can better guide your research!
Too many artists are held back by outdated and bad color theory rules, or even rules that are fine but have built in limitations that you should know and I want to set everyone free.
Tertiary Red and Secondary Blue could be in your color theory understanding and make paint mixing way easier but they played you
Also hot takes:
Learning color theory through oil painting is more difficult than learning it through gouache & watercolor, primarily because it takes way more time to find mass tone and mix everything and also it’s much less obvious to easily and quickly discern if a paint pigment is highly staining or transparent.
Oil painters like to seem like they have the richest and most storied traditions in color theory to past down but also inevitably they are the most likely to retain an extremely limited chroma palette based on classical palettes for the sake of classicism and not always make that fact very apparent to a beginner aside from saying it’s an “old masters palette” watercolor/gouache painters are bad at using paints that are not light-fast and clinging to them despite having better alternatives, but generally still understand chroma gamuts and pigment importance better or at least talk about them more.
When you’re mixing paints, the earth colors (browns) don’t need to handled and thought of as brown. Ask yourself if the brown is yellow, orange, red, or leaning towards a black (which would be treated as a violet or blue, depending on whether black is warmer or cooler).
Yes there are cool reds and warm blues
Any reference color wheel that places red on the very top hurts my feelings, stop doing this just because you learned “roygbiv”. Yellow is at the top and the Indigo-Blue range is on the bottom because this also means the color with the lightest possible value is opposite the color with the darkest possible value, so you have the colors arranged with a value scale from top to bottom BUILT IN.
this is related to why ivory black is actually very dark blue.
This makes me think makeup artists have good color theory, having to understand undertones of skin, warm v neutral v cool toned red lipstick….
Yes!!! I mean first of all, makeup artists are artists.
and they are ALSO ultimately just blending pigments to produce certain colors and effects, so yeah professionally do study the basics of color theory and then necessarily have to adapt it to their medium. And they tend to generally add like, what you talked about with recognizing cool/warm/olive/neutral undertones and such as a big consideration to their canvas.
And that IS why people will say “this is a cooler red lipstick” (although even cooler than that would be magenta or fuschia!).
I think the only thing I’ve noticed wrt to honestly mostly beauty influencers and not actual professional MUAs is that too many people buy an eyeshadow palette of cool tones in the palette and then put it on and complain it pulls “too warm for their cool skin.” And it “isn’t actually a true cool tone palette.”
I just want to grab all these people by the face and say:
“Shhhhhh. Color temperature is relative. Although you have cool skin undertones, you ALSO have blood under your skin which will inherently make your base skin-canvas slightly warm no matter your foundation shade. So when you put any kind of pigment that isn’t fully opaque onto your skin, the transparency WILL be warmed by your skin because you’re alive and have blood still. The eyeshadow palette IS a cool palette. You’re just not a vampire, which is why that cool taupe shade suddenly looks different from the mass tone in the palette.”
These influencers would understand this better if they did some watercolor painting on pre-tintedpaper and then compared it to painting on pure white.
But a MUA probably already figured this out yeah.
In case anyone is curious here are my top color recommendations
Handprint.com is hands down the most comprehensive scientific explanation of how different color wheels or palette choices work. It’s big and dense and exceptionally thorough. I skim frequently and find myself always learning more. https://handprint.com/HP/WCL/water.html everything is done using watercolors as a reference point but a LOT of this translates to other mediums. For the record his CIECAM color wheel is what I consider to be the best (not 3 dimensional) color wheel for artists. Period.
He uses pigment numbers for some of the most common watercolors rather than specific paint brands or color names to place the pigments. It’s also a case study in why yellow being at the top is the best because it also means you have a value scale from top to bottom (since black paints are just dark violets or blues, ultimately.)
When you look at this, you can start realizing more and more why the earth colors can be used as if they were like, straight red, or yellow, or orange. Like if you wanted to make a limited palette, you could use “burnt sienna” as your dark yellow (which will make the whole palette lean orange!) Or it could be your orange or you could use burnt sienna as your red. (Look at gamut masking links below)
Seriously it’s good to try and swatch your medium (even really quickly!) Within a CIECAM Artist’s color wheel. Below are two of my attempts:
From loose memory and then mapping pigments roughly.
Anyways absolutely try to read bits and pieces. The whole site is amazing. Handprint is amazing.
Also:
https://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com and James Gurney’s book: Color and Light: a guide for the realist painter. James Gurney is the dinotopia guy. That book is also amazing for painting fantasy with lots of fantastical examples. Here are two short videos on gamut mapping and gamut masking. Accompanying blog posts.
No surprises here! His book also charts pigments:
Actually these are my four favorite books hands down:
Color and Light: a Guide for the realist painter - James Gurney
Color for Painters: a guide to traditions & practice - Al Gury
The oil painters color handbook - Todd m casey
Artist’s master series: Color & light - 3d total publishing. This one emphasizes digital!
The first two have been out for awhile now and you can more easily find them cheaper/used online than the latter two which are relatively newer and hefty hardbacks.
Also, from personal experience: al gury is a sweetheart angel who is a huge crazy cat man. I adore him, he’s so kind and helpful. I think it’s a little late to join the current session (although they did only start Jan 28, so you can always ask! Class videos are recorded), BUT he frequently offers a class on color that is fully online through PAFA continuing education, as well as other classes. I haven’t taken it yet, but I HAVE taken other classes online with Al and he’s really great.
ALT
