The-reconing - Untitled

@dimiclaudeblaigan asked for a tutorial on how to begin drawing. Good news! If you can draw a funky looking stick man, you have already started!

I think that stick people are a great starting point for artists because of the things you can learn from them that will be important later on.

If you are able to draw a circle and a couple of lines, you can easily put together a stick person.

Congratulations! You have started to draw. :)

A stick person is a very minimal artistic representation of a real life person. It is simple yet recognizable, and is widely used in art, media, and signage.

But what can a stick person teach us about drawing people that look more like… well, people? Lets have a look!

By simply adding a few more lines, we can add a pair of eyes and a mouth. Maybe even a little triangle nose! Or half circles for ears. We can now draw a face, which provides a basis for all sorts of expressions.

These simple additions can allow us to explore the wide range of human emotion and individuality.

This may seem like the basics of the basics. But that is what we want! In order to get to the point where we are able to draw complex, elaborate representations of humans and objects, we will need to start with simple shapes like lines and circles and build our understanding from there.

For instance, lets give our stick person some cool new features, such as hands and feet. I chose little squiggly circles to represent hands, and triangles to represent feet.

We can go a step further and modify the body of the stick person to include shoulders, hips, elbows and knees. These parts of the human body are quite complex in real life But here, all we need to do is add a few simple lines and dots to our stick person.

The lines provide some additional structural elements to our stick person's body, which are the shoulders and the hips. The dots indicate the points of articulation - elbows and knees, the places where the arms and legs bend!

Now we can use our stick person to show us an even wider range of human movement, action, and expression.

Our little drawing of a human being is evolving! All it took was adding a few more lines and shapes here and there.

By elongating some of the existing lines and making the head an oval instead of a circle, we can give our stick person proportions that resemble that of a real life human.

By this point, we have managed to add more complexity to our stick person simply by using our ability to draw lines, circles, and other basic shapes!

These basic ideas are the building blocks that will enable us to create more complex shapes.

The next part may be a considerable step up if you are absolutely new to drawing, but I have decided to include it in order to show you how complex objects like the human body can be built from shapes that are a bit more complex than circles and lines.

For example. Two ovals and a rectangle can be combined to create a cylinder.

Six squares can be combined to create a cube, or a box. Here, each square is distorted slightly depending on which way the cube is facing.

Note that the back faces of the cube and the bottom of the cylinder are hidden. These shapes allow us to visualize that which should not normally visible.

A sphere from all perspectives can be represented by a circle. But we can make it more like a sphere by adding lighting and shadow if we so desire.

Cubes, cylinders, and spheres are examples of 'solid shapes' because they consist of 3 dimensions.

Lets see how these solid shapes can be used to compose the human body.

By stacking three cylindrical objects, we can create a torso. Two spheres have been added to form shoulders, while a smaller cylinder forms the neck.

An arm is an alternating sequence of spheres and cylinders connected together. Note that the hand has been simplified for this example.

We can apply these solid shapes to the rest of the body to give us a more recognizable representation of the human form. It doesn't even have to be perfect. And just like that, our stick figure now has a silhouette that is unmistakably a person!

In the above examples, notice that we kept the stick person at the beginning while building up the shapes and solids around it. This is because the stick person serves as a guide for positioning the body and its various parts -> also known as posing.

You can do the same thing to everyday objects! Here, I drew a wine glass by stacking these three dimensional solid shapes.

The cup and its contents are two ovoid shapes that were cut in half. The stem is a very thin cylinder shape. The base is a cylinder with a slightly wider bottom.

Solid shapes help inform us how objects and parts of the human body may appear from different perspectives.

For example, a sphere can be used to demonstrate how the human head appears when looking up or down, turned to the side, or tilted at an angle.

With these examples, I hope I have managed to convinced you that if you can draw a circle and a couple of lines, you can draw a person! You just have to train your eye to recognize the simple shapes within complex objects. Try it with everyday objects as well! Or even your favourite media! A drawing subject can be as simple or as complex as you envision it to be.

Once you have mastered that, there are many aspects of drawing you can explore from here that may require you to seek additional resources or a fellow artist's advice.

Last of all, remember that drawing is an iterative process. Even if you draw something correct the first time, you will need to draw it again and again to get it right all times! And by making small changes like the ones we explored in this tutorial, your drawings will gradually transform!

I hope what I've demonstrated here are enough to provide the basics of how to get started with drawing objects and people, and also to help refresh more experienced artists. :) Hopefully I didn't go too off topic with what was requested, and let me know if there are any more questions I can answer.

Cheers :3

Hey Goblins, uh

Did you know, that you can make an AWESOME journal for your adventures ALL ON YOUR OWN from a cereal box and paper/scraps that you likely have at home/can get from friends or family/you may find around your environment?

They’re called Junk Journals and they’re my entire life.

Im gonna do my best to walk you through how to make one! First, get you a mini cereal box! I use boxes from those cool multipacks of cereal that you can find at Walmart!

And then cut it out so it looks like this! (I already had one cut, so I’m gonna use that)

That “nutrition facts” side is gone become your spine!

Next, find some paper to use to decorate your cover! I was lucky enough to be gifted a bunch of scrapbooking paper, so I’m gonna use that, but you can also use newspaper, paper from books/magazines, junk mail, napkins, paper towels (excellent texture), etc!

Go ahead and glue that paper to your box (to cover the cereal logo) and cut it out! It’ll look like this;

Next you need to find your pages! Again these can be anything! Junk mail, envelopes, receipts, food wrappers, magazine/book pages, scrapbook paper, computer paper, construction paper, ANYTHING. Just grab a whole bunch!

You’re gonna want to fold them in half and cut them to the size of one of the covers of your box, and layer other pages inside of it to make your signatures, like this!

Each signature should be about 7-10 pages. You don’t want them too thick, otherwise the inner pages start sticking out when folded in half. You’re gonna have a LOT of these signatures, as you wanna fill the area in the spine as best as possible. For this one I’m using 7 page signatures. Here’s a pic to show just how much paper you’ll need

Each of these signatures are 7 pages, 6 signatures have only filled about half of the spine, so I’ll need probably 6 more.

Next you gotta figure out how you want them in your journal. Personally, I like to sew them into the spine, but you can also keep them in the spine with rubber bands, so you can have removable pages! (Be weary that rubber bands may break over time! So you may want to always keep extra bands near it to replace in case one snaps. This is why I prefer sewing them in) I find it best to look up on YouTube how to sew in signatures, just because having someone walk you through it where you can see what they’re doing is easiest. If you can’t access YouTube, there’s plenty of text tutorials on how to sew in signatures online, or you can message me! I’m not gonna go too into detail, but here’s the jist;

Okay so I’m a forgetful gob and I hecken forgot to take pictures as I was going along kahshshshsh

But essentially, I sewed in the pattern similar to the one I drew. The dots are where the needle goes all the way through to the back. I also like to use rubber band as an extra mode of support but you can do one or the other. I also like both cuz I can tuck stuff in em between the pages. Since I didn’t take more pictures; I’d really recommend looking up a how-to on YouTube or w/e if my badly drawn diagram isn’t clear enough (heh sorry about that)

Next, I glue fabric to the spine. It spruces it up quite a lot and holds the rubber bands in place, plus it give more support to the spine since there’s gonna be a lot of strain on it.

Only 10 photos per post, so I gotta post this and reblog it with the rest.

“Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) is a 1991 piece by Felix Gonzalez-Torres in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. It’s a spilled pile of candy. 

The pile of candy consists of commercially available, shiny wrapped confections. The physical form of the work changes depending on the way it is installed. The work ideally weighs 175 pounds (161 kg) at installation, which is the average body weight of an adult male. “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) represents a specific body, that of Ross Laycock, Gonzalez-Torres’ partner who died of AIDS in 1991. This piece of art serves as an “allegorical portrait,” of Laycock’s life.

Visitors are invited to take a piece of candy from the work. Gonzalez-Torres grew up Roman Catholic and taking candy is a symbolic act of communion, but instead of taking a piece of Christ, the participant partakes of the “sweetness” of Ross. As the patrons take candy, they are participants in the art. Each piece of candy consumed is like the illness that ate away at Ross’s body.  

Multiple art museums around the world have installed this piece.

Per Gonzalez-Torres’ parameters, it is up to the museum how often the pile is restocked, or whether it is restocked at all. Whether, instead, it is permitted to deplete to nothing. If the pile is replenished, it is metaphorically granting perpetual life to Ross.

In 1991, public funding of the arts and public funding for AIDS research were both hot issues. HIV-positive male artists were being targeted for censorship. Part of the logic of “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) is you can’t censor free candy without looking ridiculous, and the ease of replicability of the piece in other museums makes it virtually indestructible.

WITCHCRAFT!!!!!!!!

destiel speedrun 12 years in 53 seconds

Oh, this is incredible.

Improv swing dance to a Todrick Hall song?

And they killed it!

*thanks to the people who pointed out my oops

HOW DO YOU DO GRADIENTS IN PAINT LIKE THAT???

okay first off thank you for reminding me i was going to make a tutorial

So what you do is take your canvas (any size) and draw a diagonal line across it like so (can be any colors)

(Protip- hold shift while dragging the line tool to get a perfect diagonal)

Then go to the resize panel, resize by pixels, and change the horizontal size to 1 (TURN OFF ASPECT RATIO or it will make your entire canvas super small)

it will make your canvas the skinniest thing on planet earth but now what you do is go back to the resize panel and change the horizontal size back to what it was originally (in my case 576 but it works with everything)

and now you have a gradient made entirely in paint! super clean too

on the right is an example of one made with 3 lines (red, purple, pink) as an example of one with more than 2 colors if you want a smoother gradient. experiment! get wacky with it!

Now obviously with the gradient it gets hard to draw on (especially if you're going to be fillbucketing stuff) so under the cut is a bonus tutorial on how to transfer a drawing to a background (yippie!)

Start by drawing up your whatever on a seperate canvas but one that's the same size as your background

Do note that the way this works you have to make your color 2 on both canvases the same color and one that's NOT used in your drawing, else it becomes transparent- if you want to keep the color 2 white on both, make sure to color all white parts on your drawing with a very very slightly off-white to prevent this

Ctrl + A to select everything on your drawing canvas, then go back to your gradient and (making sure transparent selection is on) paste it in

Move the drawing however you want if it's not perfectly centered, add whatever else you want, and bam you're done

paint has a lot of cool tricks like this and when used it becomes as easy as any other program (save for, well, multiple layers)

I was having writers block and so I took a break and soon enough it was 3 in the morning and I had impulsively sewn together a tiny mouse you’re welcome