konoko:

elucubrare:

necromancy is literally fine

beautifulfatbagelwithlox:

fujoshi final boss

3liza:

lew-basnight:

3liza:

xenosagaepisodeone:

randomly remembered how on deviantart in the aughts using images as references was treated as an actual cardinal sin. if a pose in something you had drawn by hand was 1:1 with an existing photo or another piece of art, it was considered the same as stealing. there were artists who sincerely insisted that references could only be used for practice and that if you wanted to draw something for the purpose of posting online you would need to have studied anatomy and color theory to the point where you could just Produce that thing from your mind with maybe the help of some general reference photos at best as reminders of what that thing looked like. insane amount of rigor to demand from a userbase of largely casual hobbyists. no wonder ms paint emo furry art is the only thing people remember fondly from that era.

the first thing they teach you to do in actual concept art school like for movies and video games is to immediately start tracing and referencing heavily. I spent about four hours a day doing nothing but copying classical sculpture casts with pencil at a standing easel. the teachers recommended we sell the finished drawings for some pocket money. these are the guys who did concept art for games like BioShock and Infamous. they had a Photoshop brush for everything: chainmail, chains, hair, leaves, grass, fur, sometimes entire chunks of drawings. this shit absolutely does not matter in the real world, ever. the only people who think it means anything are amateurs and hobbyists. Vermeer was tracing his camera obscura in the 1600s. Robert McGinnis, the painter who did most of the James Bond posters we’re all familiar with, traces his opaque projector directly onto paper while manipulating the position of the picture to elongate the figures’ limbs or change the spacing of their facial features. every commercial artist considers this kind of thing a basic skillset for the speed and quality of production they are required to produce.

this whole “bespoke handmade art with NO artificial flavorings” is nonsense, which is evident primarily in the quality of art it produces: bad anatomy, bad perspective, bad composition, bad colors, because none of these people know how to observe and interpret their surroundings

A big chunk of my self-education in learning to draw comics was to take pages I liked from other artists and redraw them with my own characters and occasionally changing the dialogue because it was fun. I spend years learning how the artists I liked did it by copying what they did, so when I drew my own stuff I had a wide base of experience of how panels can work and all the different ways to compose a page. I picked up a similar trick for writing from Hunter Thompson; find a couple pages of a book you really love and retype it exactly as written. You get a sense of how that writer works, how they break up their ideas and how they create emphasis and tension. Appreciating an artform and copying it enhances your ability to do it yourself. I mean how do you think musicians learn to play? They play other peoples music over and over until they can do it effortlessly, and they take that skill along to their next piece

in visual art this is called making a “master copy” (a copy of a master artist’s work) and was a standard teaching tool and independent practice of professional artists universally until the advent of modernism. people still do it, but it’s now extremely difficult to find this kind of classical atelier training (which involves lots of different exercises and not just copying) but it is still the absolute best and fastest way to learn to draw and paint realistically if you, like most of the artists on Tumblr, are interested in drawing human and animal figures illustratively. if you ever want to get good at drawing and painting, like professional good, you need to be doing some of this. every serious professional artist will tell you the same

himynameisemail:

eraserheadbabyboy:

sacrificial1-lamb:

a study on american fields

Large format 4x5 color film

lichenaday:

botanyshitposts:

botanyshitposts:

really can’t get over lichens growing on peoples’ CARS. all this talk of microhabitats and long term stability and preferences about humidity and substrates and how some lichens will only grow in untouched old-growth forests etc etc and there are some of these creatures living on literally the most unpredictable common substrate that changes positions at least twice a day and sometimes travels to completely different biomes. what the hell

some lichens will just be like yeah theres wind going 65 miles an hour here on this aluminum SUV door for many minutes at a time at irregular intervals… sometimes it is dark or light as well or maybe wet or dry, all of no concern to me of course. that’s just how things are when you live on the surface of an object ❤️

source

3000s:

3000s:

i feel like we should be taking advantage of this website in more useful ways like it shouldnt be jarring to anyone when i post my grocery list we literally have a bulleted list function

when they said tumblr could be the next pdf i understood

5weekdays:

5weekdays:

5weekdays:

5weekdays:

my doctor told me i have to do PT this fucking sucks

these exercises are sooo monotonous like i keep walking down the same hallway over and over 🙄

who was that.

the fucking fetus in the sink won’t accept my insurance