#anyway I'm having so much fun on krita | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

tickfleato · 6 months

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how to make cool blobby turing patterns in photoshop

i'll preface with i learned the basic loop from skimming a tutorial on youtube, but as someone who prefers written tutorials i'm sure many would appreciate one! also, the second part of this is some of the visual effects i figured out on my own using blending modes and stuff.

i'm using photoshop CS4 on a mac so some buttons and stuff might be in different places on windows and newer photoshop versions but all the actions are the same. my canvas is 1000x1000 pixels.

UPDATES (i'm hoping these'll show up whenever you open the readmore?)

it's possible to do something similar in krita using this plugin, made by the love @arcaedex

it's also possible to do this in photopea, a free browser alternative to photoshop! the results are pretty much identical.

FIRST off you wanna get or make a black and white image of some kind. it has to be one layer. can be noise, a photo, a bunch of lines, whatever. here's mine, just some quick airbrush lines:

now find the actions tab. idk what it looks like in newer versions of photoshop but you probably won't need to dig!

hit the little page thingy to make a new pattern. once you hit 'record', it'll record everything you do. the little square 'stop' icon will end it.

now you want to do a high pass filter. you can mess around with the radius to change the size of your squiggles, but the tutorial had it set to 6. experiment!

now add the 'threshold' adjustment layer. i use the adjustments tab but i think there's also a dropdown menu somewhere. keep it at the default, 128. merge it down. (control or command + E or you can right click it like some kind of weirdo)

and finally, the gaussian blur! the radius of this affects the shape and size of your squiggles as well. i like to keep it around 4.5 but you can mess around with that too.

after that, hit 'stop' on the action you're recording, and then repeat it a bunch of times using the 'play' button, until you have something you like, like this:

WOW!! that was fun!! and only a little tedious thanks to the power of macros. anyway, here's some fun layer blending stuff i like to do. it's with a different pattern cause i made this bit first.

anyway, using a black and white gradient (or a grey base that you do black and white airbrush on), make a layer with the vivid light. this will make the blobs look thicker or thinner.

then, for cool colors, do a gradient map adjustment layer over that:

and finally, my best friend, the overlay layer. just using a gradient here bc i'm lazy, but feel free to experiment with brushes, colors, and blending modes!

NOW GO. MAKE COOL SHIT WITH THE POWER OF MATH. AND SEND IT TO ME

also these are not hard and fast rules PLEASE mess around with them to see what kind of weird shit you can make. here's a gif. as you can see i added some random airblush blobs in the middle of it, for fun.

#photoshop #turing pattern #tutorial #photoshop tutorial #abstract art #reaction diffusion pattern

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birthrightversemain · 3 months

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Why introduce myself with just text when I can use memes amirite lmao

Anyway sup everyone, I'm Artemis! I pretty much made this blog for my fic Birthright so I can post memes, art and the occasional snippet. I'll be real w u guys it'll be mostly memes. 98% memes lmao. Very unserious stuff basically. But hey we're here to have fun while I proceed to torture these guys in text format.

Also huge shoutouts to my bestie and wife Kat for editing the first two memes on Krita for me while she signed the divorce papers because I pledged my forever loyalty to what she calls my 'BDSM mistress', the ol' reliable MS Paint. If you're reading this, she has taken the brain cell in the divorce

#hazbin hotel #hazbin hotel memes #hazbin hotel fanfic

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shadale-s-safe-space · 1 year

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just curious, whta app/program do you use?

Okay, since I'm not the type of person to stick to only one art program/app and whatnot, here's my short reviews of every art program I ever used and the ones I still use.

PaintToolSai1/2 - pretty useful for people who don't own a drawing tablet cuz it has an amazing curve tool. Otherwise, I try not to think abt that abomination of an program.

GIMP- ummmmm..... it exists. Def not for drawing, more for photo editing or fixing ur art

Photoshop [multiple vers] - OK everyone sees it as a Lord and Savior of art. I say it's overloaded with so much stuff it can be overwhelming sometimes. Also better off fixing photos and drawings on it if you're not a professional.

FireAlpaca - making small animations on it was actually pretty fun, simple, easy, I'd recommend it to any beginner who doesn't need complicated tools just yet. But wants to try out new things and experiment.

IbisPaint- a lot of people use it and prase it, idk the damn thing never clicked with me. Especially after the "glitch that erases ur drawings with a square" thing, Tried it, now I avoid it. Nothing interesting abt it.

Medibang [currency use] - Currently wondering when they're going to treat the Pc verson and the app verson the same. A lot of stuff that are on pc are not in the app so lookout for that. it's alright, great for me and my lineart and comics and stuff. Kinda gets overwhelmed when folders get introduced for the drawing. But he's a champ yo, alright for paintings but not perfect. (Unfinished drawing)

Sketchbook [currently use]- alright for paintings, not so much for lineart at least to me. Some brushes are so overpowered that the app verson struggles to render it properly. (One of my unfinished paintings in it)

Krita [currently use] - It's okay. As I stated way before, I'm in a love/hate relationship with it. It has everything an artist would need, but the damn thing crushes on itself way too much . Bro is so overpowered he struggles to find balance in his life. Eh but I love it anyway, I used krita since the proper launch when it had nothing but few brushes and stuff, when it looked like a SAI copy or sum. Amazing to think that it was inspired by GIMP out of all things. (Fast animation I made in it)

Have in mind there are lot's more programs and apps out there. It depends on what you need from a program and your own skills, and lot's of other things.... they all have their strong and weak points, that's for sure.

#murder drones #murder drones oc

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pathos-p · 1 year

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"Weirdly Specific Artist Ask Game" but i got tagged in it so i am gonna answer all of them 'cause theyre fun

questions by @/i-like-eyes

thanks for the tag @king-chook!! ^^

1. Art programs you have but don't use

i thiiink i have a license for clip studio paint that came with my old wacom tablet but i never rly used it. also used to have krita installed for the longest time but just always felt off to me idk why. don't currently have it installed anymore tho

2. Is it easier to draw someone facing left or right (or forward even)

to their right is a bit easier i think. not smth i consciously notice, mostly i'm just thinking abt when im doodling on the margins of stuff they usually are looking to the left of the page

3. What ideas come from when you were little

uhhh idk tbh, i dont think much of my art draws from that

4. Fav character/subject that's a bitch to draw

cityscapes !!! i love cities they r so pretty and cool looking but goddamn theyre so hard to draw

5. Estimate of how much of your art you post online vs. the art you keep for yourself

80-20? i post everything that i finish. basically the only stuff that doesnt get posted is sketches i give up on

6. Anything that might inspire you subconsciously (i.e. this horse wasn't supposed to look like the Last Unicorn but I see it)

hmmmm not that i can think of rn...

7. A medium of art you don't work in but appreciate

watercolour !! i've tried it a few times and Struggled but i love seeing ppl's work in it

8. What's an old project idea that you've lost interest in

so many animatics ..................... also many comic ideas ..................... i get so many ideas that i just never start on or start and only do a little before losing the hyperfocus/fixation and just Cannot continue them. it sucks

9. What are your file name conventions

usually the character name, maybe a bit of description of what theyre doing... idk not much of a convention to it

10. Favorite piece of clothing to draw

hmm i like jackets :)

11. Do you listen to anything while drawing? If so, what

yes, usually music. sometimes random youtube videos like stream highlights or video essays.

12. Easiest part of body to draw

uhhh hair? maybe idk. hard question bc it varied a lot depending on what kinda style and just. sometimes smth is hard in a particular drawing then easy later idk

13. A creator who you admire but whose work isn't your thing

i cant think of anything i will edit it in if i think of anyone

14. Any favorite motifs

in my drawings i dont feel like i use any much. mostly i pull motifs from whatever im doing fanart of lol. in music, i like religious motifs (but not like. ones abt christ or bible stories, rather heaven, hell, god/divinity, angels)

15. *Where* do you draw (don't drop your ip address this just means do you doodle at a park or smth)

at home pretty much exclusively. in bed lol

16. Something you are good at but don't really have fun doing

idk i feel like the stuff im better at is the stuff i like bc i practice it more for fun lol

17. Do you eat/drink when drawing? if so, what

not usually

18. An estimate of how much art supplies you've broken

surprisingly little. mostly bc i do more digital art lol

19. Favorite inanimate objects to draw (food, nature, etc.)

weapons and nature. especially ice for nature

20. Something everyone else finds hard to draw but you enjoy

i cant think of anything ill add it if i do

21. Art styles nothing like your own but you like anyways

i love rougher styles, like ones with a lot of visible brushstrokes and bold lines and shit. so cool. idk how to make it look good lol i dont have the confidence in my lines for it

22. What physical exercises do you do before drawing, if any

none... probably i should change that

23. Do you use different layer modes

yeah, often i use a multiple layer for shading then a variety to colour adjust at the end

24. Do your references include stock images

sometimes

25. Something your art has been compared to that you were NOT inspired by

cant think of any

26. What's a piece that got a wildly different interpretation from what you intended

there was this poem i wrote about capitalism and how shit it is and someone thought it was abt interpersonal relationships/smth along the lines of a breakup. i rly didnt mind it tho i thought it was cool bc the emotion was not far off, the sense of betrayal and abandonment. just a very very different subject

27. Do you warm up before getting to the good stuff? If so, what is it you draw to warm up with

no lol

28. Any art events you have participated in the past (like zines)

i ran a zine (digital only) for the dimension 20 zine jam! and also made art+writing for others in that :D also was part of a polygon yt fanzine a while back

29. Media you love, but doesn't inspire you artistically

spider-man (not the MCU, mostly tasm and a few of the comics)

30. What piece of yours do you think is underrated

IS IT BAD TO SAY A PIECE THAT GOT QUITE A BIT OF POSITIVE ATTENTION ?? maybe

i rly like the cj comic i did i am genuinely so goddamn happy with the result so . even tho it did very well by the standards for the fandom its for and my current follower base it is underrated

alternatively this one https://www.tumblr.com/pathos-p/704380503765221377/tridential-sovereignty?source=share bc it didnt get all that much attention on any social media site but i think its cool !!

(mostly only using recent ones bc i dont wanna dig back further esp onto my old twt acct, too much work lol)

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dashawfrostart · 3 months

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This Week In "Time & Again" #12: It's Alive... Alive! Honest! And A Little Sour, And A Bit Sweet!

Guten Fhtagn! It's been... a while again.

(this is just a colourful teaser for you now, because it feels silly to make a post that starts with a wall of text - even though I personally love walls of text. Keep reading and you'll find out why those weird empty rectangles are here! And as I often do: there's an animated GIF in the end of the post!) Lately, life has sucked me into a giant cycle of great and lush eventfulness. Kinda as if I hopped into a funnel and then swirled around a bit. I might even say it was fun (haha, fun funnel 😁 What, not funny?.. Lame?.. Aah, well then). So, below goes a straightforward chronological report on what happened to "Time & Again" during this long looooong period of my blogging hiatus.

2 weeks ago I've actually spent only a few days working on "Time & Again" - much less than anticipated. As I always say, life usually takes away so much time from art!.. 🤣 However, it's always a choice. Because I'm not drawing 24/7; never did, and perhaps never will - because otherwise I'll never go birding, among other things. And birding is love. Birding makes Frosty happy. I wanna see more nuthatches and northern flickers around me, preferably every day, when possible. Too much to ask? Yes! But life is always about setting priorities straight and meticulously balancing the things you love and want to do. Because something always goes first, and something other goes second (third, fourth, etc.). So that is what I'm trying my best to do here.

But that was only half of the problem. The other half of the problem was about my futile endeavour to relight the creative spark that was seemingly extinguished over the course of the previous 2 weeks - perhaps due to the reasons mentioned above in this post. I'm always very hesitant to take breaks as I work on my projects, because it breaks immersion - and getting back into the mood again might pose a serious challenge. That is exactly how some of my novels/stories failed to see the light of day in the past. Now, since the work on Chapter 5 is nearing to its end - yes, it's almost done!!! - it's just very disappointing to slow down and having to look for the spilt marbles on the floor (however, Lothar, personally, will definitely benefit from at least TRYING to find his own marbles 🤦‍♀️ dear goodness, that man is indomitable). The work still went well, but without excitement I previously had. And I perpetually have serious problems trying to figure out a personal cure for the "lack of spark" issue: not even once in my entire life have I found a resolution that works wonders like a panacea for me in situations like that.

That said, with all of the distractions and not-exactly-creative events with myself in the epicentre, I managed to keep my word and created a Krita forum thread featuring majority of WIP screenshots from Chapter 5, which you can view following that link. Now, my only objective in this regard is to keep updating it 😁 (what I'm kinda failing at recently)

While not being exactly productive with "Time & Again" - that is only up until this week (read ahead) - in the meantime I have reconsidered a couple things that are related to the artistic part of my existence. One of the decisions was to take down the links to my DeviantArt account sometime after this post goes life. The reasoning behind that decision is as simple as an egg: because I don't post anything on DeviantArt anymore. And I keep forgetting to do it anyway. And I keep forgetting simply because it doesn't really matter. In the recent years I perceived DeviantArt to be nothing but a sort of a personal sketch/art dump simply for the sake of gaining more exposure [not really - read an UPD note ahead]. Let's be honest here: DeviantArt is not a good place anymore. It used to be awesome in 2008-2010 or around - for me anyway. But nowadays... Not so much. I don't think I want to delete it yet, for I still want to pop up, perhaps, once or twice a year and dump all the new artworks in there for the future archival purposes - and in case if somebody might be still interested. But for now, I view my DA account as an almost completely dormant collection of trash masterpieces of yore. So I will stop promoting it for the reason of it being obsolete like the morning dew beneath your feet in its current state. (holy effing smokies, that song was very difficult to find to provide a link to! 😱) [UPD 2024/03/12]: my aim with this was originally a bit off - which I realized only now. Aside from it being a random artworks dump, my decision to keep my DeviantArt account alive was precisely for linking back to it: meaning, I was thinking about uploading artworks on there in order to specifically use them in my posts and on the websites. So, yes, it is a relatively dormant collection, but also a convenient stash of art things to utilize elsewhere (thank you, id Software, for teaching me this word! 🤣). I'll see if that really works out in the future tho.

There's also something else that I don't to reveal just yet, and I'll keep it a secret for now 😉 I must try something before I jump to conclusions.

HOWEVER!.. This last week has changed the tides considerably, in my favour. Again, having only a very hypothetical and a rather unclear clue on why that happened - what, I must admit, mesmerizes and puzzles me to a great extent - that long-longed-for spark I thought I had lost along the way somehow magically returned back to me after I spent a few hours (and 2 days in total) of writing an arch-important "Notes & Commentary" section for the reissue of all the previous "Time & Again" chapters that is nigh (here, I teased ya. Now live with it 😎🤣). I really like "Time & Again". Even while it's still incomplete. Even if Lothar is just a stubborn a**. Even if a certain other character has quite funky fetishes. Even if Jeanny is perhaps dealing with her own little pinky demons. I really like "Time & Again", and I really enjoy its style, so revisiting the whole thing for the sake of writing additional materials for it quite possibly worked in a positive way on my spark. I love you, my spark. Let's keep it this way for as long as we can from now on. So now the work goes quite well, and I feel very good about it. There's still something troublesome that needs to be dealt with... but that'd be a painful tale for yet another post.

And, of course, I experimented with some Krita stuff again - for it seems, Chapter 5 really marks a period of great technical discoveries for me.

For example, finally, after all these years 😅🤣, I learnt and made a very good use of the toggle "All Layers" and "Current Layer" settings of Contiguous Selection Tool (that'd be your Magic Wand tool, ya Photoshoppers around - including my past self). That helped me to speed up flood fill of the certain areas. Speaking of flood fill and all, I experimented more with the "smart fill" as well. In the previous post, I was dreaming about an advanced AI algorithm to automatically recognize and colour the characters according to a user-prepared colour pallete. I might be exaggerating a bit, but flood-filling flat colours on every page felt almost stupefying - and, in short, not fun. I've read a little about the potentials to automate the process in Krita and have discovered a few neat tricks that I might use to speed up the process of colouring of the next Chapter. But right now - that's a story for another day in the future. And at last, let's talk about the backgrounds. I find it that the backgrounds that are just, let's say, "placeholders" and don't contain the surroundings of the characters are sometimes challenging. And in Chapter 5, there's gonna be plenty of those - because oh boy do I love long conversations! (strong self-awareness and self-mockery go here) And most of these conversations don't even require detailed environments for the backgrounds! Because people are just friggin' talking! And their surroundings don't matter on those particular panels. I've looked through quite a few graphic novels and comics at the local book store to get extra inspirations - but very often I see that the artists simply fill the panel with a solid colour. Completely flat. I must admit, I'm deeply hesitant to do the same, because I like at least a little texture on storywise-insignificant solid colours. It gives... depth.

So this is what I've been doing so far (and yes, you guessed it now! the picture in the very beginning of this post is very relevant here!):

While the "flat solid colour" on the background just seems... too flat, I decided to utilize a gentle gradient as a base, and then to apply additional brush strokes on a separate layer with special blending mode in order to create the effect of imperfection and ever so slightly visible texture to it. After a few sessions of trial and error, and thinking about how it feels and if it matches the mood of the chapter, I ended up using a couple of watercolour and splatter brushes together, in black, and the layer blending mode that I figured worked best for me was Soft Light (SVG). As illustrated by the following GIF:

And LAST (but as usual: not the least, but I won't cover "the least" in this current post for now, for the post is already a fatso - typical, innit?!), I've learnt how to use Filter Layers for the quick colour correction on the go. And this might be extremely useful in a long run for the future chapters of "Time & Again". I might cover this in one of my next posts.

That should be enough for now. So let's summarize: I most certainly did NOT disappear because "Time & Again" ceased to exist, or because I've been abducted by aliens, or because I got carried away giving belly rubs to pinky demons, or anything alike. I disappeared BECAUSE I was working hard on my story, even though at times it didn't go as smooth as I wanted to 😉.

Well, folks, let's wrap it up for today, and see you next time in another blog post! Take care! You will see Lothar in action again soon enuff! 👋

#TimeAndAgainbyDWF #This Week In Time And Again #graphic novel #krita

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iamjustbread · 4 months

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I uh, was going to just start a new Stardew save to do a Perfection run (because I haven't done so yet) and I wanted to make my farmer Cale so I did that,, now I'm opening up youtube tutorials and Krita to make a reskin mod of the villagers to be LCF characters -w-'

This always happens maaaaannnnnnn

Aaah... Anyway this is going to be so much fun. I'm thinking of replacing Eliott with Clopeh because, extra speech pattern? Kinda Clopeh-core. With everyone else I'm going to struggle with, so then I thought "what if I change the lines to match the characters as well?"

And then I get into the tutorial of "what type of character dynamics do I want to make in this mod?" Because that would mostly determine who I would swap with who. For example, which lcf character do I want to have the Maru and Penny dynamic? Which lcf characters do I want to have the Maru and Sebastian dynamic???

Aaaah, shit this may become bigger...

Well, I'm going to start with replacing image files for now. I'll make a doc to decide physical dynamics for now (I'm not reprogramming pathings ain't no way) and see where this project goes

This is what happens when my usual writing/entertainment device breaks and I'm left with my gaming laptop.

#bread.text #modding thoughts #nothing technical me just crying

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litlesushiroll · 9 months

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Florum! (or Flo for short)

Honestly, another piece I didn't really know what to do with until I actually started- I do think I'm getting better at showing the atmosphere in my pieces now and using Krita! :D

Anyways, Flo basics: He's originally a horror sans- until a glitch happened with his and others aus. (You can't really tell in this cause his hand is blocking the area)

He lives with Gleam and Esphi, which I won't explain at the moment, but they are basically family because of a incident and have no one else. (ahaha the accident is totally not because I just wanted them to be a family nope ahahaha-)

ANYWAYS- yep he's just existing because I liked horror and flowers and brain went YES.

So the flowers absorb blood, keeping him clean and neat. Flo has no way of controlling the flowers, but they don’t get in his way so it doesn’t matter much to him. Funky little thing- although Florum is a plant lover, he loves setting things on fire. Often, Flo would use his vines to use fuel for a fire because they needed to trim the plants or just because.

His attacks are just basic Horror's attacks but they have flowers- that's it.

I like this a lot- I don't think I've had so much fun just jotting down the lore of one of my OCs before :D Hmm, I'll probably need to write about Esphi later when I do draw them and random lore dumps?

#sans au #sans oc #undertale au #ut au #undertale multiverse #au undertale

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nottheangelserafin · 10 months

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me and my frien losing braincells pt.3 because apparently it's more fun to spend over over 10 hours on drawing every oc except for the one i promised i will draw

(for context Shouxien is one of my ocs and his outfit is like almost impossible to put on without help so me and my friend were joking around ab how would he put it on (i put him into his bodysuit tho)

also better quality Shouxien drawing because discord image compression is a bitch

it's not rlly the best quality and if i were to put it on a "how much i like my drawings" tier list, on a scale from S to D it'd be in like C or B tier only because i'm proud of how the pose came out. the rest is... ew

i'm not rly gonna beat myself up over it tho cuz i'm still getting familiar w krita because i wanted to try out smth new and i like it!!! if i put more effort into this i'm sure it'd be better :3 and also i drew this with a mouse so.... yeah. it was excruciating. lmao anyways i'll be making a youtube channel soon and i have to draw myself a pfp and stuff, but it's not rlly a big big passion project of mine sooo if anyone is actually interested in my speedpaints and stuff you've gotta wait a sec cuz i've got a lot of stuff going on rn and yeah. i'm rambling again XD

that was a big speech for someone with 4 followers

goodbye see you in like a month *fades into black*

#i feel like i'm talking to the voices in my head whenever i post smth #but that's just how it is when u have a small acc i guess lmao #art #oc #oc art

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glueghost · 1 year

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back in august/september 2020, i started making youtube videos (as glueghost) again - i left glueghost a year prior because i was a stinky piss baby who took my lil funny videos too seriously

since starting my channel, i've redesigned my lil mascot like half a dozen times... well, i would get other people to do it lol

i won't show any of the old designs here out of respect (and one out of disrespect) for the artists - sorry for being an idiot back then

but one day while doodling ideas in MSPaint, i drew these:

all of these little doodles would eventually be my twitter and youtube banner (with some minor tweaks and adjustments)

now you're probably not thinking: "hey, these lil guys aren't ghosts at all!"

anyways i wanted to reveal this new design in a funny way, so i actually learned how to animate in Krita to make the lil animation for this video:

youtube

here's the animation in gif form for fun

i mean looking back it's kinda not good - but i'm happy with it nonetheless

a year or so later i decided to update the design a little bit:

at the time my hair was getting longer, and i kinda went through a "summertime never ends" phase - warmer, more vibrant colors - and i made the hawaiian shirt design all by myself 'cause i'm a big boy

but then i shaved my head, it got cold outside, and i had another identity crisis, so i made this:

but i was getting tired of MSPaint and wanted to try out Krita again, so i made this:

this is the shortest living mascot design on my channel - only used in two videos lmao

i went back to the summertime design shortly thereafter

and of course i can't forget about this lil goober

i don't really have much else to say - it was fun to kinda look back on these past two years here. happy holidays to you and yours

before i go to sleep lol, here's a never-before-seen doodle of what was going to be my channel icon:

#ms paint #doodles #glueghost #like and subscribe #art #i'm still not sure how to use tumblr but i am learning #Youtube

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canmom · 3 years

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Animation Night 48 - Independent Web Animators... 2!

It's hard to believe we're approaching the big 50... and in a few weeks I'll have managed a full year of Animation Nights every Thursday.

This week, I'm returning to one of my earliest themes: the independent web animation scenes we first visited in Animation Night #10. Last time, we went on a bit of a historical survey of the classics: the Newgrounds flash scene of Xiao Xiao and Bitey, the charm of SamBakZa's There She Is!, the wonderful body horror fractals of Cyriak, and the most recent stylish generation of indie animators on youtube like Felix Colgrave and Vewn. Check that post for the full list!

Well what's happened since then? Many of these animators have dropped new videos, and I've been introduced to a few more. So I have some pretty sick stuff to show... we'll get to that in a minute!

At the same time, the sword of Damocles has fallen: Flash player is now officially killed off - with lossy, high bandwidth raster video apparently considered preferable to building a secure, backwards-compatible swf player, as far as the powers that be are concerned! Sure, the actual software, now called Adobe Animate, still exists (competing with others like Toonboom as general purpose vector animation software), but while before just about anyone could get their hands on a pirated copy of Flash, the present version is locked into Adobe's subscription ecosystem...

(for more, see Nathalie Lawhead's v good writeup on the death of the Flash website)

Is this going to prove “good” or “bad” for web animation? Who the fuck even knows lol. It's definitely a very different scene these days: Flash has given way to genuinely free tools like Blender Grease Pencil, Krita and OpenToonz, and for those who can afford them, pro tools like TVPaint and ToonBoom. These tend to enable much more sophisticated animation workflows, but you also face a steep learning curve.

The economics has also changed a lot: nowadays people can devote themselves to it full time if they can attract some kind of Patreon audience. The way that shakes out is that a lot of today's web animators are doing much more “technically impressive” stuff than anyone could do in Flash back then, both technically and often narratively (NG's 5MB limit was a pretty harsh creative restriction)...

youtube

But something was still lost, I feel? Precisely because the technical standard was not especially high, the old Flash scene was a kind of supportive ecosystem where people could experiment without (much) judgement. Money was not involved, which meant that essentially everyone there was in it for fun - and that's a barrier for entry, admittedly. Still, that world meant someone like Felix Colgrave could get started with shorts like the one above, and find an appreciative audience, long before the days of ‘Double King’. Today, it feels like the pressure is heavier: everything has to be oriented towards self-promotion on the wheel of Content, to build that same Patreon or Youtube audience.

Of course, there's no point wishing for a more innocent internet... or pretending that, without nostalgia goggles, the majority of stuff on NG back then wasn't kinda shit lmao.

Luckily, there are efforts to preserve the old Flash videos! The Internet Archive has a clever WebAssembly-based flash player alternative, and an impressive (if hard to navigate) collection of Flash videos. Another substantial archive is maintained, using the original Flash Player in a special sandboxed browser, as BlueMaxima's “Flashpoint”. Meanwhile, Newgrounds have batch converted their entire database to raster video, and still seems to have a healthy community producing original animation for their weirdly gamified rating system - some of it, like Gooseworx below, is indeed really good. This won't save the stuff that's not part of these big archives, the swfs on obscure self-hosted websites, but it's not all gone!

Anyway, that's my little soapbox over! There are many ways things are much better for indie animators who can't afford to go to animation school. For one, there's so many more good, free resources now than ever before - to name a few who've helped me, check out *deep breath* [Toniko Pantoja] [Striving For Animation] [Dong Chang] [Studio Bulldog] [Howard Wimshurst] [Aaron Blaise] [Ian Hubert]... and there's an abundance of less centralised ways for people to get a start like Multi Animator Projects and animation memes. Not to mention the influence of the sakuga fandom giving people lofty inspiration... it's still an exciting time!

And who knows, maybe one day the Grease Pencil user community will be as vibrant as the old Flash one.

So who are we watching today then? Let's reel em off!

the returning stars...

the ppl we saw last time have not stopped animating...

youtube

Felix Colgrave, the extremely talented Australian behind Double King, dropped a new video called Throat Notes full of his usual surreal, psychedelic imagery! This one's about bugs.

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Gooseworx is the person who got me to look back at Newgrounds, by making some really perfectly timed videos with a great sense of weird comedy and squishy, bouncy movement. Her Little Runmo we saw last time, but now she's dropped a much longer sequel to Elain the Bounty Hunter in Elain Gets Adopted! Can our triangle girl get out of being a human(...ish?) pet?

youtube

Jonni Phillips is hard at work on her feature-length film Barber Westchester (which may stretch the definition of 'indie' since she's now leading an outsourced animation team lol), but for now we can watch all of her wonderfully disconcerting lead-in series Secrets and Lies in a Town of Sinners! She has a really distinctive style, leaning way into extreme exaggeration and the 'boiling' lines effect (where every drawing is drawn twice and rapidly alternates between frames). Totally slept on her last time, I want to give her a proper showing this time around!

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Vewn (Victoria Vincent) made a little short about a monkey since last we saw her - but I also want to show a few more of her previous stuff we didn't cover last time! She remains one of my favourite web animators, with a brilliant ability to ratchet up a sense of alienation and tension and an amazing way of using distorted perspective.

the newcomers...

and meanwhile I got familiar with some more animators...

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Worthikids is one of the people who’s really flying with the possibilities of Blender grease pencil to combine 2D and 3D animation - and he's just a plain good character animator, especially for expressions, with a great sense of humour. We’ll check out his Bigtop Burger series about a travelling food truck run by clowns, and his recent short Wire in which a different group of clowns battle vampires. Clowns seem to be a thing for him.

Joel Guerra also recently made big waves with his ENA series, with a wonderful aesthetic taking after early CGI and clipart as a context for surrealism. Most of these videos feature ENA wandering around talking to various characters while we soak in the ~vibes~...

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Howard Wimshurst is the host of a discord server for indie animators I've taken to hanging out in, but of course he caught my eye in the first place for tremendously impressive full-figure animation, along with really strong storyboarding and textured brushwork like Encounter.

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Toniko Pantoja meanwhile is a CalArts grad whose educational videos are some of the most useful out there (if sometimes a little meandering!) He mostly works in the mainstream industry but occasionally releases very cool original projects like this!

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Studio Bulldog are a tiny four-person indie anime studio, who appeared on the scene recently with some cute short films and very informative videos on the anime production process in English.

DawnOfNSSD, aka @bionicie on here, is out pioneering the genre of Bionicle stop motion erotic/fight animation. Their work is fascinating, and does some very clever little technical things (most stop motion animators have little interest in martial arts, sadly, since there's clearly a lot of potential!) - and honestly like, the absolute vision of it! Titty bionicles!

Shingo Tamagawa is an skillful key animator with credits ranging from Gundam Thunderbolt to 3-Gatsu no Lion, but he made an enormous splash in animation circles last year with his beautifully coloured short film Puparia. This film exhibited a level of drawing precision that would be hard to match for big studios with entire cleanup departments, and incredibly beautiful, moody atmosphere shaped by precise, manga-like drawings and a richly saturated colour palette. No wonder it made waves!

The old school...

We covered most of the main hits last time, but we gotta include at least some NG stuff right? Last time we covered the main ones - Bitey of Brackenwood, Animator vs Animation, Xiao Xiao, There She Is! - but we haven't quite covered all the good stuff yet...

Madness Combat by Krinkels is technically not in the 'stick figure fight' subgenre, since the guys are like little raymans or something, but really who cares about the difference hehe. It's a sprawling series on one very straightforward premise: a little guy kills a lot of other little guys, then probably dies. Well, these things became wildly popular because Krinkels had a decent sense of fight choreography and timing out the fights to the beat, which made his stuff stand out among all the stick videos. It's all about rhythm! I'm not gonna show too much of this because they are basically 10+ years of the same video getting gradually more elaborate, but we gotta give it a nod!

vimeo

Nathalie Lawhead is best known as a game developer, but early on she was part of the Flash scene, with projects like the Rotfront Sovietoblaster music video and Alien Invasion. It's so wonderfully energetic and such a perfect encapsulation of its era that I gotta show some.

The Older School

Now, this playlist might not go very far. I haven't timed it out, I'm running late as it is. If it turns out these are so short we're done in a couple hours, I have a plan B: we'll check out some of MTV's Liquid Television block, which (alongside other similar festival-type presentations like Spike and Mike's Festival of Animation) is where you'd take your work before there was a Newgrounds: a collection of original, boundary-pushing short films. For me, it's most notable for incubating Peter Chung's Aeon Flux, which started this whole thing! You might say that Animation Night owes its existence to Liquid Television. Unfortunately, it remains available only in VHSrip form, but hey, that just adds to the flavour.

Animation Night 48 will start very soon indeed, like more or less right now at twitch.tv/canmom. Hope to see you there for an Animation Night the way we used to do it! There's so much different stuff I'm sure I'll find something you're into :D

#animation night

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