“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.”
- Neil Gaiman,
The Kindly Ones (The Sandman, #9)

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.”
- Neil Gaiman,
The Kindly Ones (The Sandman, #9)
Stumbled across your art recently, and I totally admire your work! As a complete noob to the digital art scene, I'd just like to ask whether you have any tips on colour picking (like for skin tones, under varied/dramatic lighting and such!). I have a ton of other things I want to ask, but I'll limit myself to one question and then try to google the rest, haha/ Thanks for sharing your art with us! ^^
ahh thank you so much! ♥ welcome to the digial art scene friend, i hope you enjoy your stay and ctrl + z
now onto your question! (if you don’t know what layer and layer modes are and how they generally work you should probably google that before you continue reading)
we all perceive colour differently (thx science) and i trust my intuition a lot when it comes to colour picking because of that, and also because i feel like you can make pretty much every colour combination work within the right context. context is key! but still, remember that all of this is about how i perceive colour, so you might not agree with everything i say.
here’s a quick rundown of terms you’ll see around a lot in reference to colours and shading: the hue, which is the ‘colour’ itself, the saturation aka the intensity, and the brightness [or value] which describes how dark or bright we perceive a colour to be.
rule of thumb: when you shade don’t just add black (or white) to your base colours, that will make your drawings boring and lifeless. use different hues and saturation!
now first things first: which skin colour does the character have?
you’ll mostly be navigating in the red to yellow spectrum for the skin tone. so when i pick the base colours i usually start with the skin and adjust the rest of the colours accordingly. if you’re not sure where to begin it might help if you first determine the values (brightness) of the base colours in grayscale.
and here are a few colour variations—i stuck to the approximate values but played around with a lot of different hues and levels of saturation.
now compare 3 and 5: you’ll notice that 3 is very bright and leans towards orange hues, whereas 5 has a pinkish tint.
on the left i gave 5 the hair colour of 3 and in my opinion the pink hue of the skin doesn’t go well with the orange undertone of the hair. you’ll have to experiment a lot to find out which combinations work for you.
ctrl + u is your biggest friend (or image >> adjustments >> hue/saturation in photoshop, the shortcut works in sai and clip studio paint too). play with the sliders and see what happens. i do that a lot myself, because it’s easier to coordinate the colours like that afterwards instead of trying to manually pick perfectly matching ones right away.
for further adjustments i like to use an extra semi-transparent layer on top of everything with just a single colour to add atmospheric light. this unifies the colours and makes them more harmonious, if that’s what you’re looking for. this is about as far as i’d go if i didn’t want to shade the drawing.
if i do want to shade, especially with high contrasts and dramatic light, i darken the base by just adding an additional black layer, here set to 40% opacity. of course you could add a colour layer like the ones i mentioned previously too.
to create an impression of dramatic light you need a high contrast between light and dark areas (1). if i want additional visual intrest i often add secondary light which falls onto the main shadow areas. here i picked a faint greenish blue to balance out the yellow (2). and since light is at least partially reflected when it hits a surface you should add a faint glow that goes across the shadow/light border (3).
for this shading style i like to use the layer mode colour dodge with lowered opacity + fill settings. for some layer modes opacity and fill do the exact same thing (e.g. for multiply or screen). however for colour dodge there’s a big difference:
a lowered opacity merely alters the transparency of the entire layer. that looks pretty awful sometimes, because the bright orange affects the dark of the hair much more intensely than the already brighter skin. but when you lower the fill percentage you primarily lower the amount of light that falls onto darker colours. so the layer’s opacity setting treats every colour equally whereas the fill setting takes their values into consideration. it might be hard to understand if you don’t try it out yourself, so just play around to get a feel for how it works!
and to summarise, here’s a process gif:
colour is an extremely big topic and i’ve only barely scratched the surface but i hope that still helped you out a little! the fastest way to learn is always to try things yourself, so grab a sketch and experiment. 👍
Draco being the dramatic bitch we all know he is
and Pansy tired of having to deal with it
What do you mean "what age is my book targeted at" what are you on?? It's targeted for me and any other depressed goblin out there with a broken humour and a roulette wheel for a moral compass, age has nothing to do with this.
“From now on, we’ll be fighting humans, too, and not just Titans.”
Alright sweethearts it is suuuper late but let’s just act like it’s still 2017 for a bit! So these are my favourite fics from last year i am of course including ongoing and completed fics too (but not those which have started in 2018) Without further ado here’s the list, and i want to thank every writer from the bottom of my heart, you are all great, whether your story is on the list or not (maybe i just haven’t read it yet, or forgot, in which case, sorry)
Disclaimer: sadly couldn’t read that much, uni is really kicking in, i have so many fics bookmarked and for me to read and i swear to the moon i didn’t have enough time to get to them yet. I am always trying to find the time to do it though. That being said, the list may be a bit shorter than the ones i’ve done before, but i’ll link them down below.
Ongoing
Guide Dog by GammaRays Capture The Moments by DrippingInInk Hollow by Heichous_Poncho ALTIVOLUS by BrightEyesEren A Broken Act by iStygianEmpress (iDarkEmpress) Red Heat by sciencefictioness Absinthe and Adderall by punkrockloser A Beast’s Heart by littlecookieman Woven Strings by tainted_ashes (Don’t) Take Me To Church by erenfuckinjaeger Halcyon by snakemittens Scoring Six by SimplyTsundere Make it or break it by Zacksy You Owe Me by CrazyColourful In Your Claws by Corporal_Levi_cleans_my_house, Hyrulehalfbreed If You’re Hell I Can’t Wait to Burn by allyoop_1 Lunacy by sciencefictioness Breaking Down Walls by TheBlackCatOfMisfortune Feel My Vibe by teapotscandal, XanderB
Completed
Hell’s Sake by Wolfish160 Order Up by erensbootydestroysall A World in Color by JasmineDragonFineTeas A Different Kind of Criminal by iheichou Hired Help by Daktasinsanity Earthshine by snakemittens Fast Cars & Freedom by SimplyTsundere A Dangerous First Love by Kiaki One Hundred Ways by OrangeJuiceHP Drowning In The Mediterranean by SimplyTsundere Arrest My Heart by Pocket_Full_Of_Rosies A Series of Sweet Events - Ereri Spring Weekend 2017 by SimplyTsundere
Favourites from the previous years
Okay, so, I spent a couple of hours today looking up heights, weights, my own internal head canons and the deepest pits of filth that I could. I was asked to make a list of biggest to smallest dicks and here it is!
Note: size does not mean quality use, it means size. Only someone with the restraint and prowess can make a good dick.
They’re sorted from largest to smallest in their respective categories, so the number means where they’re placed in their size categories
They will destroy you - fuck with caution
Grade A+ dicks right here, magical from size alone (skill may vary)
They’re not too big or too small but perfect just the way they are (skillful probably, would consider fucking them)
Small to tiny, they rely on skill and had to git gud
I’m so glad I live in an age where there’s a One Punch Man dick size materpost.
I appreciate this so much XD
human: *gentle “owl” hooting*
actual owls: *tiny velociraptor screams*
Excuse me while I pass out from cute.
One of the baristas at a nearby Starbucks makes me lose my mind every time I’m working there by saying things that are not outside the spectrum of normal human words but are just slightly off-the-wall.
Barista: Welcome to Starbucks, home of delicious, what deliciousness can I put in motion for you today?
Customer: … Can I get a trenta pink drink please?
Barista: Go big or go home, we here at Starbucks appreciate your commitment, what else can I get started for you?
***
Customer: Nitro cold brew with shots of espresso please.
Barista: Brave of you to commit to staying awake for three days, anything else today?
***
Barista: *slams open drive-thru window* HI HOW ARE YOU?
Customer: …I’m pretty good.
Barista: Are you ready to be even better? Because you’re about to be. *hands them their coffee*
***
Barista, realizing that a drink was made wrong: *slams open window* SO how do you feel about surprises?
Customer: ….they’re okay.
Barista: Great because I’m about to give you one.
***
Barista: You have two drinks so I am going to hand you two straws which means, FANTASTIC news, these straws double as drumsticks. / You have one drink so I am going to hand you one straw and, promise not to tell anyone, this straw doubles as a magic wand.
***
Barista: Here are those cake pops, I plucked them fresh from the tree myself.
***
Barista: *slams open window, holding drink* Amazing, fantastic, delicious, you are a very lucky man/woman!
***
Barista, realizing drink is being delayed or remade: Looks like it’s gonna be just one minute so they have time to put the extra love in.
***
Barista: I’ll be with you in one hot second. *beat* WOW that second sure was hot!
Anyway she has a few dozen catchphrases she rotates appropriately and it’s both distracting and fantastic to listen.