this leaves out the most crucial tip you’ll ever need:

-site:pinterest.*

excludes the entirety of pinterest’s evil domainverse from image search

Reblogging for the Pinterest addition

I think you mean “reblog for the pinterest subtraction”

they just want you to go with them 🥺

This exact thing happened in the 70's/80's in this country when seatbelts were first being pushed for. Reagan literally tried to get rid of them.

There were also examples of anti-seatbelt activists dying in car crashes where they weren’t wearing seat belts like that guy that wrote an anti-seatbelt article and four months later died in a car crash where he didn’t have a seat belt on and was thrown out of the vehicle

Happy Birthday Amber ❤️

the origins of the “what are you two FUCKING talking about??” meme is almost funnier then the meme itself

69 cities in the united kingdom and forty seven thousand pubs

england is smaller than my state and has like almost as many bars as the entire US combined. like it's just 10,000 short of catching up to the US, a country with almost 5 times its population

going to one pub every single day it would take you 130 years to go to every pub in britain

I've plugged our route into Google, who's with me

The more I learn about Britain’s alcohol culture the more scared I become.

it is with a heavy heart that i must tell you this is exactly what it's like

You’d never notice it if you weren’t looking for it, but Ruby’s tattoos grow. The roses beneath her skin flourish, fade, change color with time or weather or how sick she is. As though they were actual plants rather than ink. Because they are, and they aren’t. Like many things from that place, they live in comfortable paradox.

Weiss’ tears crystallize as they fall, tiny bits of Dust. Never while they’re still in her tear ducts, thank the forgotten gods, and always one of the original four. It seems to correspond with her emotions a bit…anger brings out fire, sadness is water, joy air. She doesn’t know what it means, exactly. Perhaps she was kind to the right person.

Blake’s shadow doesn’t quite match the light anymore. It remains at her feet, and she is grateful, because she’s seen what happens when it leaves outright. But it does like playing tricks, leaning in the wrong direction or waiting a moment longer to follow her movements or doubling when there’s no light source to double it. Sometimes she’s the one playing tricks, seizing the shadows of other things with her own, and the source matches the shadow rather than the other way around. It’s a bit uncanny, but useful.

There’s a long, golden, scaly skin slung over Yang’s shoulders now, too big to belong to any Earthly snake. She’s intensely protective of it, lets only her most trusted friends and allies touch it, never lets it out of her sight. The consequences will be dire if she does, she knows. And the first moment she slips it on, slipping skin tight around skin that wasn’t that way a moment ago, they realize why she was so careful. 

If you are clever, and determined, and kind, you can take the girl out of the Shallow Sea. But no matter what you do, you can never take the Shallow Sea out of the girl.

#what’s the point of going to fairy land if you don’t come back a little changed

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

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

https://youtu.be/pMC0Cx3Uk84

https://youtu.be/NBE-RTFkXDk

:3

Reblogging to save a wrist