I've been really enjoying the Youtube channel Drawfee lately, after spending a couple of years seeing it around and being confused about what it actually is or where to start watching.

So! Drawfee is a group of four artists (plus occasional guests) who draw pictures based on prompts. Sometimes they draw the art live and discuss it as it happens, and sometimes they draw the art in advance and then talk over the sped up recording (a "speed draw"). In either case, they're very cheerful, creative, and funny, and encouraging of each other's art. The vibe is cheerfully bisexual, as is most of the team. There are also extra channels and spinoffs, but I haven't watched much of those.

You can theoretically start anywhere, but some of the videos have a lot of in-jokes and references to previous videos which can be confusing, or are more about the artists as people which can be kinda boring if you don't know them enough to care. I tried starting from the beginning, but while the initial videos aren't bad they aren't as good as the later ones. And there are over a THOUSAND videos.

So in the end I just watched whatever was popular or showed up in my feed and figured out the in-jokes over time.

But if you want somewhere specific to start that's fun and low on in-jokes:

4 Artists Design Characters from the Same Description: Everyone designs a character from the same character prompt. The results show everyone's style and personality pretty well. One of the characters ends up being non-binary and everyone rolls with that.

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Does anyone have recs for anime-ish dollmakers/picrews which allow you to set the fringe/bangs separately and have options for non-straight hair? Wavy, curly, natural, braided, dreadlocked etc, the more options the better.

I'm working on a dollmaker of my own and having a little trouble figuring out a consistent way style that works for all hair types. faejilly happened to link this picrew a few days ago which does straight bangs nicely, but not any other sort. Meanwhile anime characters with curly bangs tend to have the rest of their hair curly in the same style, which is hard to extrapolate from.

I'm going to ask faejilly and tumblr in general but I find it easier to marshal my thoughts on dreamwidth, and some of youse may have links too! It doesn't have to be fully anime style as long as the art has dark lines filled with flat colours.

EDIT: bbgulrot linked me to Black Centered Picrew which also led me to the POC tag on picrew.

Because I had fun playing with the data about my statistics from flamebyrd's bookmarklet when I was doing the AO3 Averages meme.

In short: Hits seem to not be very closely correlated to word count except for very long fics, which I think is caused by people coming back to multi-chapter fics multiple times, eg each time a new chapter is added.

Fanart seems to get about 2/3 to a half of the feedback that fanfic does by most metrics, and even fewer when it comes to bookmarks. But the feedback on fanfic is also more inconsistent, possibly because most of my fanart was posted for exchanges, where you're generally guaranteed SOME feedback. The most popular works by all metrics are long, multi-chapter fics.

And the thing people on the AO3 like least is Mass Effect fic with an unflattering depiction of Commander Shepard.

At least based on the data to hand. YMMV ;)
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Reading this guide to alt text made me aware quite how much longer some of mine are than the recommended length. Their advice for long descriptions is to either include it in the surrounding text or link to a longer description elsewhere. Dreamwidth does have space for a longer description in their image code, but as far as I can tell the only person who can see it is me, which isn't helpful.

So my two questions are (a) Does anyone actually see my alt text and (b) For those who do, what their preferences are. I'll keep doing alt text even if noone chooses it on the poll, you never know when someone might wander past and find it useful, but it's good to know.


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So, this is mostly for my own future benefit because I keep forgetting my own methods. But I'll try to explain things enough that it might be useful to other people too. You should be moderately competent with whatever art program you're using, and have some idea about colours and shading.

My basic philosophy is: realism is boring, and mistakes add texture.


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If you want your colouring to look really great, colour theory is an invaluable tool. Here's a tutorial I found super useful.

But if that's all a bit intimidating and you just want some tips on how to make your colouring look ok without having to learn much theory, then the half-assed method I'm about to describe is a good place to start. I've used a flat anime-ish style but if you soften the shading the same technique works for other styles. Most of my art uses variations on this technique.
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Perspective is hard, and redrawing the same design from different angles is frustrating.
*attempts to learn perspective*
*gives up and learns 3D modelling instead*

These 3D renders are great for perspective and different angles but they're not very pretty.
*attempts to learn digital painting*
*gives up and uses neural networks to process the renders*

These neural networks make everything pretty but it's a pain uploading the render, and I worry the site/app might disappear.
*tries digital painting again*
*gives up and learns how to run and train my own neural networks*

I mean I haven't actually installed the neural network yet, because that would require getting out of bed and installing things on the Windows machine, which I'm not awake enough for today. But it looks like fun :D

EDIT: I am going to be installing packages until I die.

Was going to just comment to lizbee since she was asking me about tablets but WHY NOT GET PROMPTS AS WELL.

So! Art prompts! Original or fannish! No zombies or porn! Preferably something simple because I want to try out the new software, Artrage, that came with the tablet (whatistigerbalm cheers in the distance(*))

And for Liz and anyone else who's curious: it's a medium sized Intuos Pen and Touch Creative from Wacom. Which has been discontinued and replaced with some very similar tablets (eg the Intuos Manga) with no eraser. *clutches eraser* I like it so far! I am a little sad it's not compatible with my old Bamboo pen, since it would be nice to have a spare. Also it has a custom USB cable which will be annoying when I inevitably break it >.>

(*)That is the one you're a fan of, right? It seems pretty nice so far! I only got the older version, 3.5, and not the Pro, but my needs are relatively simple.

I was boggling that I hadn't done one of these since June then looked at my post titles for the last few months and remembered how sick I was for a while there. But I managed to draw some stuff anyway through the fog :) Also I got a copy of Manga Studio 5, which does some lovely lines and painting...that make my computer cry :(

All art has transcripts/descriptions at the link.

Prettiest:

Snow White and Red Riding Hood

Most interesting:
News From The Sea: A little fantasy comic adapted from this short story I wrote. Created for a Comic Books and Graphic Novels course. Transcripts in chapter 2.

As far as I can tell I got...120% for this comic? And that's getting less than half of the available extra credit. lol coursera. But it was fun!

( Person of Interest, Avatar: The Legend of Korra/The Last Airbender, Guild Wars 2, Dragon Age Origins, Mass Effect 2, Red Dwarf, Bastion, Dr Who, Original, Game of Thrones, The Hobbit, Fresh Pretty Cure )

I've been experimenting with making my own water colour textures and want to test out the ones I've made before making any more. So! Please have a look at my current experiments and give me art prompts you think would suit that colour scheme, or that the colours make you think of. Original or fannish, and don't worry too much about having to match the texture I'll be digitally messing with them.

The textures:


1: blue gradient on printer paper.
2: Blue-green gradient on water colour paper.
3: Same gradient with darker blue added.
4: Wet-on-wet yellow-orange swirls. I used cling wrap and paper towels to mess around with the texture.

I started with $1 Dora the Explorer water colours on printer paper. ODDLY ENOUGH THIS DID NOT TURN OUT WELL. Then I read some tutorials and visited the art store. All up the paints, paper and brushes cost me $40 and that was getting the cheapest stuff. This is why I like digital art.