being a self-taught artist with no formal training is having done art seriously since you were a young teenager and only finding out that you’re supposed to do warm up sketches every time you’re about to work on serious art when you’re fuckin twenty-five
attentiondeficitstarscream
someone: oh yeah, do this exercise during your warm ups! it’ll help
me: my what
What’s up I have an actual college degree in art and I was never ONCE taught to do warm ups.
when i was in undergrad, it was kind of mentioned in and offhand way that we should do warmups, but we were never shown what that meant. And, y’know, we were young so it didn’t matter so much.
Being older now and having an art job it’s…kind of essential.
So: a quick primer for those of you who are like ‘ok but how do i actually go about doing this warmup thing.’
1) you may be tempted to do ‘a warmup drawing’ which is just a drawing that will take longer than it needed to and probably be frustrating and kind of bad because you didn’t warm up first. It’s tempting but always a trick your brain is playing on you! Do not trust!
2) warmups will vary based on what feels good to you/what task you’re about to do/what motor skills you want to practice. That being said, some good standbys:
a) circles. Just a whole page of circles on whatever drawing surface you’re going to be using, whether that’s your tablet or your sketchbook or a drawing pad on an easel. For these circles you should make sure that you’re drawing from your shoulder and not your wrist. In fact, you want to be drawing from your shoulder rather than your wrist most of the time! forever! your wrist is delicate please preserve it!
In order to ensure that you’re drawing from your shoulder, when you’re holding your pencil or whatever drawing tool you’re using, the only part of your hand that should be touching the drawing surface is part of the last two fingers–some people prefer the finger tips, but I tend to favor the first knuckles. Either way, the fingers should really be ghosting over the surface, providing guidance rather than support.
I usually start with big circles and then go to smaller circles and lines of ellipses, and then try to fit circles and ellipses inside other shapes i’ve already drawn as a precision exercise, but i don’t do that unless i’m feeling loose
b) spirals! i don’t always do spirals, but if i’m stiff and the circles just aren’t cutting it, spirals are a good fall back. I start from the center and work outward, going both clockwise and counterclockwise until i feel comfortable with the whole range of motion. Some people really care about getting perfect spirals but for me it’s all about making sure i’m comfortable with how i’m moving so who really even cares about how the spirals look. Not me!
c) lines! straight lines! in parallel! i do a mix of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal. These are often more from the elbow than the shoulder, especially if I’m working on a smaller surface. For this exercise, I recommend holding the drawing tool perpendicular with the surface
d) connect the dots. This is a precision and accuracy exercise and takes two forms. The first is to draw two dots and then draw a straight line between them. The second is to draw three dots and draw the curve that connects them. This sounds a lot simpler than it is in practice. Take time to ghost over the line you plan to draw before actually committing to your line. (I don’t always remember where I picked up my warm up exercises, but I’m pretty sure I got this one from Scott Robertson. His how to draw and how to render books are very technical but also accessible and worth checking out)
e) cubes, spheres, cones, and cylinders. These help get your brain into a more volumetric space. I draw multiples of each, rotating the forms around, and I’ll often take the time to do some rough shading on at least a few of them
f) spidermans! This one is really good if you’re going to be storyboarding or working on dynamic poses. Just fill a page full of spidermans doing all sorts of acrobatics.
g) beans. I don’t do beans too much anymore, but I know a lot of people like it so I’m mentioning it here. Fill an area with different size bean shapes without lifting your pencil off the paper.
h) short medium and long line repetition. draw a short, medium, and long line on your page, and then draw directly on top of them 8 to 12 times, doing your best to exactly trace what you’ve already drawing. Repeat with a wavy line. I’m bad at this one, which means I probably need to do it more.
And there are lots more options too! Hit up youtube to see what other people recommend, put together your own go-to list, mix it up when you’re getting bored, etc.
This is a long list, I know, but I usually don’t take more than 10 to 15 minutes to warm up, and I can warm up one handed while I’m drinking coffee, so, multitasking hurrah.
Sometimes I’ll advance to a precision warmup and find that I haven’t loosened up enough yet; it’s totally ok to go back to an earlier exercise! Also, all of this has the added benefit of kind of ritualistically getting you into the drawing mode so even if I’m not feeling it before I start, by the time I’ve gotten to the end I’m usually Ready For Drawin’. Brain hacks.
so, yeah! that’s a lot of words, but! Warmups are important! Save your joints, take less advil, do better drawings!
How on earth are you supposed to draw from a sholder? might as well tell me to draw from the foot. It makes no sense
stupidlittlereblogs
Reblogging to save a wrist
I offer some WIPs into the void? This one's for a Monster of the Week game I'm running. Context under the cut.
:readmore:
It's a spider that sits in the middle of a web of alleyways. It knows when anything enters any of the alleys and where. It shifts people around, getting them lost or feeding them to the other monsters that live in the alleyways.
It can manifest parts of itself out of graffiti on the walls, and there's a giant mural of it at the center. This is meant to be the design for the mural.
Like I said this is a WIP, so I'm gonna do a better version of it at some point. --there were supposed to be 8 hands obviously but I'm shit at space management.--
Some ghostly boys from my sketchbook
(Ft a tiny lil cat from one of my friends)
sigh. oh to make ocs with other people. oh to collaborate on a narrative theres literally nothing more magical than that to me
One thing I feel people miss about lord of the rings is that it’s sort of……….post-apocalyptic?
Like– the world already ended, a long time ago, and the characters are surrounded by the ruins of dead countries. They spend most of their time journeying through places that are either abandoned (Moria) soon to be abandoned (Rivendell/Lorien) or half-destroyed and falling into decay (Rohan/Gondor.) The villains are creatures that Used to be Human; I feel like Lotr’s orcs/ringwraiths have more in common with zombies than they do with DnD-style orcs, because they’re a state that “normal” people enter when they’re corrupted by a supernatural force.
Even the Shire is surrounded by ruins– the ruins of watchtowers, the ruins of the old Northern Kingdom, the ruined city near the Grey Havens. The people around there have an idiom “when the king comes back” that means the same thing as an idiom like “when pigs fly”– “when a completely ridiculous improbable thing happens.” They’re so used to the disintegrated state of the world that the idea of a central government is fairy-tale-like and bizarre. They have their little mayors and thains; they don’t need anything else.
So yeah! I see people try to “modern-real-world- au” versions of Hobbiton by making it “a peaceful suburb” but to me, a modern au version of Hobbiton would be more like…….
You are a hobbit.
You don’t know much history, but you understand that there were Wars a long time ago that destroyed a great amount of life on earth.
You live in a little hole in the ground. You don’t know that long ago these holes used to be called “bunkers;” you decorate them with flowers.
When you want to say that something won’t happen, you’ll sarcastically say things “lol yeah SURE that will happen! And tomorrow pigs will fly, Parliament will come back into session, there will be a president in the White House, there will be a prime minister making speeches, and diplomats will intercede between all of them! ha! XD”
If you journey even a little outside of your home, you’ll find the ruins of old cities and skyscrapers. There are messages in the ruins that are written in languages you don’t speak. Human beings used to live here; they don’t anymore.
And you’re not supposed to leave the Shire because sometimes you’ll meet the things that used to be human, but aren’t anymore.
Glaze is out!
Tired of having your artwork used for AI training but find watermarks dismaying and ineffective?
Well check this out! Software that makes your Art look messed up to training AIs and unusable in a data set but nearly unchanged to human eyes.
I just learned about this. It's in Beta. Please read all the information before using.
Art thieves already hate it:
Dude, if you're stealing, you deserve to have the data poisoned. Because you could have asked and you didn't.
The link is only in the original post inside an image, not as text, so here it is as plain text: https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/ and the paper about how it works: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04222
As links (because some of us are on mobile and can't easily copy and paste to our browser), those are:
&
A bit of a TLDR for some questions I saw in the notes:
The team that created Glaze is from the University of Chicago. Their names are each listed in full on the Glaze download website. (This group of students/professors did this for their SPRING BREAK 😱 so go give them some love lol)
It is free to download. No, they won’t ask for or raise money from/for this project.(stated by one of the lead professors of the project).
Glaze is designed to protect artists’ STYLE--which a bunch of ai people have been deliberately fine-tuning their models to mimic (and specifically of current living artists--small or big).
It currently does not protect against composition/trace-like theft (as seen when run through img-to-img) but that would be protected by copyright anyway while STYLE is not.
The University Team has stated that they are dedicated to continuing to improve the tool, like fixing bugs (like overheating older computers by taking up lots of energy when Glazing--it currently runs on CPU so they’re trying to change that to GPU, I believe) and expanding the type of protection given to artists (like working against img-to-img theft).
It currently only works directly on your computer (phones not advised due to current overheating issue, no tablets, or iPads, and no website runthrough since that would be insecure to breaches/scraping/hacks)
It currently works best on painterly artwork, but can still be used on other forms (team is working on improving this)
IT WORKS BY calculating the changes each image needs for the best protection against style theft by AI, and adds tiny changes throughout the piece, so that your style will, for example, confuse the ai into seeing van gogh. But the ai thieves will see a regular image in your style, feeding it into their model labeled as your work (thus starting the “data poisoning”).
Do not post the original unGlazed piece of your artwork after posting your Glazed version (obviously)
The Team worked directly with over 1,000 artists that were being impacted by the ai theft. Because the team listened to those artists, Glaze accounts for regular art thieves too (i.e. Glaze can’t be removed/cropped etc. like signatures or watermarks when reposted. It’s just part of the image, so even if it ends up on another site and scraped, the Glazing is still in effect)
When you run your artwork through Glaze, no information is sent back to the Team. (Aka, no scraping on their part. The app receives information from the Team (like updates) but no information from you is given to them through the app. Basically Team servers ---> You and NOT Team servers <--->You) One-way data street.
Brief misunderstanding happened over an open-source license for the front-end part of the app. (Used open-source coding for front-end, not knowing that code’s use-license states it is only for other open-source uses, not closed-source (the back-end code of the app is private to prevent counter-counter measure developments)). The Team took down the app until they replaced the front-end code with code written from scratch by the team. They are now not in violation of that open-source license since they are no longer using it. (you have 30 days to remedy a license breach once informed; they did so in 2)
The Team is currently in touch with Japanese artists to better expand the tool for use to protect their art styles
From what I understand of it, Glaze is an AI tool designed to be anti-AI (Think Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2: one Terminator robot vs. all the other Terminators 😂)
You can download it from their website and also contact them through email there with any questions, problems, or bugs. The website: https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/
writers wishing they could draw whats in their head 🤝 artists wishing they could write whats in their head
🤝
writers wishing they could write what's in their head
🤝
artists wishing they could draw what's in their head
Artist Asks
I’m making an artist ask game that I hope my art friends will reblog so I can pester them >:)
1. Show your most recent wip
2. 5 favourites of your own work?
3. Least favourite things to draw?
4. Favourite things to draw?
5. Anything you haven’t drawn yet but want to?
6. Which artists inspire you right now?
7. Favourite works of all time excluding your own?
8. What do you like most about your own work?
9. What are you currently trying to improve?
10. What’s that one thing that inspired you to make drawing your consistant hobby?
11. Favorite comment you’ve ever recieved on your work?
12. Show your favourite drawing from this year
13. Show your favourite drawing from last year
14. How has your art changed over the years?
15. Biggest artist pet peeve?
16. What’s the most daunting part of your process? Ex, planning, sketching, lineart, rendering etc
17. What inspires you?
18. Do you have any larger projects you’d like to pursue? Like comics, shortfilm, a series etc?
19. Favourite character(s) to draw?
20. What works have you drawn fanart of?
21. Weirdest thing you’ve ever drawn?
22. When is your prime time to work on your art?
23. Do you listen to music or watch shows while you work? If so, what’s your favourite?
24. How do you deal with artblock?
25. Based on your recent reference searches, what would the FBI assume about you?
a poison type pokemon trainer I designed last year! she’s a makeup artist… in a hypothetical game she’s an NPC you run into periodically that gives you new player customization options if you beat her
My next art show is in Portland, Oregon. March 3-26, 2023 at Nucleus Portland
Another Harmony doodle. At this point I need to just start a collection.
oscarthefrump
#every time I see this picture I am briefly overwhelmed#this piece of art outlived its context and milieu#but. but. in reality there is no such thing#because art is made anew with every glance. it comes to life. awakens laughing#and time compresses. softens. the past is not so much a mystery if we remember we weren’t the first to dance.#this is what art is for#this is what it can do#it doesn’t only speak to us of our own humanity#it reminds us that humanity is shared. this girl isn’t dancing in a mirror. she is dancing with a friend.#paintings don’t simply show us the world. they help teach us how to live in it. (via @robotmango)
This will get no interaction because I’m posting it half an hour from midnight but I painted a mushroom while drinking cordyceps juice
Morning reblog tumblr come look at my spores
This will get no interaction because I’m posting it half an hour from midnight but I painted a mushroom while drinking cordyceps juice