#doing only one layer of painting with this brush is honestly super fun
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#one punch man#one-punch man#saitama#opm#birblr#doing only one layer of painting with this brush is honestly super fun#one punch man more like#uh#one paint layer
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˗ˋˏ YUCK! ˎˊ˗ | 18+ Only (Part Two)
synopsis: how can you remain friends with benefits with someone who turns his plushies around during sex, pouts when you don't kiss him goodbye, and spends his time occupying your mind when all you want is for him to leave you alone?
pairing: lsm x yn (gn afab)
genre: fluff, humor, romance | m, smut
tags: alcohol/food - reader also briefly blacks out, costume party, cursing, domesticity, fwb, sexual innuendos, showering together, yn un-alives a spider, university au | cowgirl, cunnilingus, dirty talk, fingering, handjob, hickies, love making, pet names, pnv, praise
wc: 11.5k
a/n: hi this is part 2/2 of yuck! thank you all so much for waiting. I honestly had so much fun writing this, and I hope you have fun reading. lmk if I missed any tags in part one or two. comments and reblogs are super appreciated!! pls pee after sex so you don't get an uti ♡ -nu
yuck! - part one
lipglossjun's masterlist
He came to your door unannounced, knocking loudly on your front door and causing you to jump in your seat. Three sharp knocks against the door using his middle knuckles and then a few friendly taps because he realizes he's standing in front of your door and not his resident’s door. The sound echoes loudly inside your lonely apartment but isn’t loud enough to alarm your neighbors because he purposely leans his side against the door to diffuse the sound and vibrations. You can’t blame him for his habit - he’s used to knocking on so many doors in one night that the freezer part of his mini fridge is stocked with frozen sponges in plastic baggies so he can ice his swollen knuckles at night. You don’t even have to look through your peeping hole to know it’s him, but it’s weird because you know he should be on-call today. Still, the knocks are enough to scare you into thinking you’re still dorming in the universities.
He tells you he has an employee banquet a few days before the break and was worried that his makeup might smudge on his suit. He also brought your go-to drink order from the tea shop across campus, punching in your specific add-ons and adjustments into the kiosk before even deciding what new seasonal drink he wanted to try. You had no choice but to begrudgingly take your drink from him while you shuffled to the side of your door so he could come into your apartment.
"I thought you already knew how to do this.”
You see him hold up your hand mirror to his neck to look at the small bruise you left on the side of his neck a few nights ago. He sits cross-legged on your apartment living room carpeted floor while you sit on the ottoman next to him.
“Only for an everyday base routine for my face,” he frowns while softly poking his bruise. “But my neck makeup keeps smudging and I don’t know how to stop it from getting on my clothes,” he admits while he lowers the neckline of his t-shirt, thinking about the stains he left on his shirt collars.
You uncap the bottle you’re holding and spray the cool setting spray on his bruise. He fans the wet product with his hand while you dig through his toiletry bag for his color-correcting palette. You dip his tiny makeup brush into the palette and bring the product-coated brush to paint over his bruise.
“If you want me to stop marking you, you can just tell me,” you suggest to him while brushing another thin layer. You tap your pointer finger lightly around the harsh edges, blending the colors into his skin. An intrusive thought tells you to poke your finger deep into his skin, but you decide not to.
He ooo’s at how you’re blending the product, angling the mirror so he can better see how you’re working.
“But I like them,” he says while you spritz another light layer of setting spray. “They remind me of you,” he softly confesses while you blow on his skin. He finds himself angling the mirror again so that the mirror now focuses on your face.
He giggles at the tingling sensation of your warm breath against the cold product, and he smiles to himself when he sees your concentrated expression through the reflection in the mirror – how you purse your lips and how your eyebrows furrow together. If he weren’t an RA, he would proudly wear his love bites as a badge for everybody around him to see. He wants people to tease him whenever they see the bruise poking out of his hoodie when his hood is down. It’s not to let people know he’s getting it on. That’s just not who he is.
But there is that part of him that wants others to know you’re his. He’s tired of soft launching you on his Instagram. That’s what people do when they want others to know they’re talking to somebody. But you’re just his friend. He’s completely fine with showing you off, but he respects your privacy, knowing how much you hate having your picture taken. It’s also not like his closest friends don’t know about his relationship with you, but if it makes you happy, he’ll take it. He likes what the two of you have. And after all, he doesn't care about the pictures. It’s the person whose plate is almost always pictured across from his, the hand holding the ice cream cone, the second shadow under the street light who he cares for.
The bruises feel sore, but he loves how you automatically coddle him afterward, especially after a heated session. You always have that worried look on your face, your lips pouty and frowny. He remembers the number of ridges between your brows when you ask him how he’s feeling. He always tells you that he feels fine, great even, but you always sigh with a defeated look on your face. You’ll walk to the fridge in nothing but one of his old t-shirts and grab him a cold metal spoon. He doesn’t know if the cold spoon hack works, but he lets you do it anyway. He’ll let you do anything if it means he gets to spend more time with you no matter how prickly you may seem on the outside.
Now, he’s spending more time with you on a lazy Tuesday night. He’s done for the day and doesn’t have any RA duties at night because the university recently handed on-call duties for the campus security to handle. On the other hand, you didn’t have anything scheduled for today and spent the entire day indoors. You’re still in your pajamas – a free shirt from a past school event and old running shorts that you never wore while exercising. There are leftover food delivery containers in your fridge from dinner. You tell him the importance of investing in a tinted sunscreen while pushing up your wired glasses. It’s ironic because he knows you haven’t washed your face today or applied any form of sun protection at all. The closer you lean into him to be sure he understands, the redder his cheeks flush. He hopes his mineral powder is enough to diffuse the blush or at least make it seem like it’s the redness from his acne.
Feeling a little hot, he reaches over to grab his fruit slushie-turned-juice from the coffee table and brings it to his lips. He sucks the concoction through the metal straw, letting the cool liquid settle in his mouth so he can savor it before swallowing. You notice the condensation dripping down his arms before he does, and you wipe it away with the edge of your t-shirt without any thought. Your drink is already long gone, finished within minutes after poking your straw through the flimsy plastic lid, washed and disposed of in your recycling bin. He wonders if the taste of his drink would linger on your tongue if he kisses you. And he wonders how the tangy sourness of his drink would contrast or balance the extra amount of sweetness in your tea.
But you’re done concealing the bruise, already sealed it off with the last layer of setting spray. Satisfied with your job, you plop yourself on the other side of the couch and grab the book you put face-down on the table when DK arrived at your front door. You tuck your legs under you and use the armrest as your elbow support as you resume your novel. DK types the makeup steps into his notes app and quickly cleans up his products, looking for something to do.
DK snakes his head between the open gap between your stomach and your book, putting his head on your chest. You pay him no mind, flipping another page while he thinks of a conversation starter. He relaxes into the feeling of your chest rising and dropping and the steady thumping of your heartbeat pulsing under his ear. He asks you what your novel is about while twiddling with the hem of your shirt, noticing it’s still a bit damp from before.
“Smut,” you nonchalantly answer him. You didn’t know much about the novel, but you borrowed it from your friend who kept raving about it while you visited her the other day. She claimed it was better than sex, but honestly, all you’ve been reading so far are overly detailed descriptions of scenery while the main character stares out of the parked car window.
“But you have me,” he teases you. He lets go of your shirt to poke you on your cheek between each word, “You. Have. Me.”
You swat his hand away from your face and subsequently decide to place your novel on his head to use as a stand. He huffs underneath the book, and you snicker at him, leaning down to kiss the top of his head. You think it’s cute whenever he’s being annoying, throwing tiny tantrums whenever he doesn’t have enough attention. You catch yourself lingering on the thought of what his neediness would be like if the two of you were together.
“I’m too lazy,” you flip another page after letting the thought dissipate. “You’re on your own unless you can find another way to do it.”
He huffs and lifts the novel from his forehead to sit up. He turns to you and untucks your legs from beneath you.
“Continue reading your book. Let me eat you out while you rest,” he tells you while pulling your legs with ease so only your upper back and head is leaning against the couch’s armrest. He rests your legs on each side of him.
“Go ahead, but wouldn’t that be a little boring for you?” you ask him while your eyes are still trained on your novel. Even though you spend a lot of time thinking about him manhandling you, his persona easily makes you forget about just how strong he is.
He grabs a cushion from the middle of the couch and tucks it behind your neck. He asks you if you’re comfortable. You give him a thumbs-up, and he gently pecks your thumb before moving your hand back to your book so you can properly hold your book. His little touches and kisses aren’t new to you, but you think it’d be a shame if his kiss transferred onto your pages instead of keeping it to yourself. You choose to hover your thumb above the pages, choosing to use your hand’s round fleshy thenar to hold the pages.
You lift your hips upwards so he can easily remove your bottoms. He tugs them off you as if he has all the time in the world, folding your shorts and undies and setting them on the coffee table like they’re part of the decoration.
“I don’t think I’d be bored,” he kneels himself in front of you and lowers himself so he’s flat against the couch. He gently lifts your shirt higher so it’s past your belly button and proceeds to hook your legs over his shoulders. “Read to me? Out loud?” he asks you while massaging the outside of your thighs.
You lift your book, looking at him quizzically. However, when you see the tiny fading red mark on his forehead from when you used him as a stand, you can’t help but agree to his request. He lowers his head to your core and quickly taps your thighs twice to tell you to read.
“Now, a black flashy standard motorcycle with matching black chrome wheels pulls into the driveway of the auto shop where your car is currently getting its engine replaced. The steady hum of the engine is enough to have every single mechanic in the vicinity turn their –,” you were doing pretty well at reading until DK, without warning, puts his warm tongue flat against your clit, licking upwards until it reaches your nub. “Ah – h-heads to stare at the bike,” you stumble with the last phrase.
He lets his spit drop at the top of your clit, watching it glide downwards along your ridges before catching it with his tongue like a little game of Plinko. He feels you tense under his tongue, causing him to hum in delight. He mumbles something about you doing good before attaching his tongue to you again.
“One of them whistles when the motorcyclist comes to a full stop in front of the open auto shop garages,” you try to ignore the fact that he’s gently blowing wind to tease you, to hear you stumble across your words. There is no way you are going to cave right when you started reading out loud, so you bite your lip when you feel his soft and open lips close around your labia. But you can’t ignore him no matter how hard you try.
He kisses you deeply, full-mouthed while his large hands lock around your thighs. Painstakingly slowly, he buries his face deeper into your cunt.
“Eungh- O-one of them whistles when the mo- oh,” you moan while your mouth hangs open when he circles the tip of his tongue around your clitoris. You move your novel away to look at DK whose entire face is gone. You can only see his bushy black hair.
He continues to circle his tongue around you while your breathing gets shallower. You feel your arousal building, causing your thighs to close around his head. He looks up at you looking back at him with a lustful expression. He sucks softly on your clitoral hood and pries your thighs open with his hands. He only winks, letting go of your skin through his lips before going back to eating your cunt.
“…motorcyclist can loudly rev his engine,” you manage to finish the paragraph with a little sigh of relief.
“Mmmh. Good job, baby,” he groans, praising you against your cunt.
He kisses the inside of your right thigh while moving your left leg off his right shoulder.
You find yourself frowning just a little bit when you think he’s finished, but truthfully, he’s only moving your leg off the couch so he can finger you while eating you out. He puts his right hand on your stomach and uses his thumb to rub your nub.
“I’ll reward you if you keep reading okay?”
He kisses your stomach and moves your shirt down so you wouldn’t shiver from being cold. If only he knew why you were shivering.
“‘Couldn’t you have driven here?’ you frown at your older brother w- ah- fuck. Fuck,” you jerk in your seat when DK inserts a finger in your cunt. You can feel him smile against you as he drags his tongue against your folds while his finger dips in and out of you knowing exactly how to drag a string of moans from your mouth, to make your legs tremble and shake.
All this, and you’re only half a page into reading out loud.
“…while he reaches between his legs to pass you his extra motorcycle helmet as you approach him,” you read while trying to ignore the fact that you’re gripping your borrowed novel with so much force that you probably bent the matte paperback cover. “He shrugs and passes you the helmet which you – mmm fuck just like that – begrudgingly fit over your head.”
You’re clenched tightly around his two fingers as he curls them in you while sloppily giving you head. You hear exactly how wet you are, how his fingers squelch every time he reinserts them in you, how his coated lips smack against your glistening pussy – devouring you as his life depended on it. You can feel your juices pool around your ass as he uses his left arm to hold you down whenever you lurch upwards. He moans profanities against you, but never at you. When he raises his head to take a break, he makes sure his fingers never stop moving. He always brings you to your high, and you feel so safe with him.
And he tells you you’re sweet. He always does.
Sometimes you’re sweet because he compliments you for doing something for him. He calls you sweet when you’re frowning about somebody criticizing your RBF. You like it when he calls you sweet when he calls you Sweetie. You like it when he says it with flair. You like it when he says it when you show him your project. You like it whenever he says it when you make him take a sip of any of your sugary drinks – the way his face contorts in total disgust, but he still manages to do so with a smile on his face.
He never called you my sweet, but god damn do you wish you could experience what it would feel like for him to call you his. But tonight he describes your flavor as sweet as you like your teas. He can’t stop praising you for how sweet you are, how you’re like dessert on his tongue. And you can’t get him out of your head.
“He leans forward and clicks open the motorcycle’s rear footrests with the back of his boot,” your face scrunches, but you continue. “When he is done, he looks back at you struggling – eungh Kyeom,” you struggle.
He only grips your thigh tighter as he alternates between fingering you and pausing so he can kiss your cunt like he’s kissing you during sex. He flattens his tongue against you and twists it so he can tease your hole. You’re whining and speeding through the last few words of the sentence, desperate to have him in you.
“Whoa. Whoa,” he temporarily detaches himself from you to grab onto your forearm as he raises himself above you. His lips glisten from the wetness, and the color of his flushed face compliment the color of his sore lips. “Slow down baby,” he tells you and kisses your cheek, “Wanna hear your pretty voice, okay? Just read and relax.” He strokes your hair and brushes away the strands covering your eyes, “I’m not going anywhere.”
But you don’t relax. How can you relax when he grips your hips, fingers dipping into your pelvic bone as he shoves his nose against your clitoris, sticking his tongue into your cunt? He bobs his head while he tongue-fucks you, nudging your nub and making your pussy throb even when he briefly comes up for air.
Your vision blurs as he continues to build your high, ignoring you as you continue to call out his name. The words on the page are replaced by stars when you tell him you can’t take it anymore. Heart racing and muscles tightening, you cum while his tongue is in you. And he laps you up as you convulse around him, back arching as you continue to come. He drinks what’s left of you like he’s drinking ice cold water at midnight – you’re insatiable. You moan his name into your book once more, hiccupping as he brings your left leg back on the couch.
“Yn,” he whispers as he removes your book from your face. He puts it on the coffee table without breaking eye contact with you. “What did you call me?”
You don’t hear him as you’re still struggling to catch your breath. Your pussy is still pulsing without pause. Everything is hazy, but you can see him reaching over for something in his cosmetics bag. You close your eyes, still undeniably horny and wanting more.
There is a little bit of shuffling and then the sound of a few light things dropping on the floor. He reaches under you and scoops you up as if you weigh nothing. You briefly remember him telling you about hitting a new PR where he could lift someone a little over his weight. But he brings you to your bed, only switching on your nightstand lamp.
He sits on the side of your bed while he strokes your cheek.
“Yn,” he whispers again while leaning closer to you. “Do you remember what you called me?”
You blink twice at him before slowly realizing. Your lips part in realization, and he only smiles at you.
He opens your nightstand drawer and pulls out a condom and your bottle of lube. Your fingers automatically fly to cover your lips in horror, but he only chuckles at your expression while he positions himself between your legs and leans over you. He coats his wrapped dick in the lube and rubs the remaining gel around your vulva. You whimper at the coldness, and he wipes the remaining bits on his thighs.
He leans over you again and rests his elbows on the sides of your face. He asks you again, gently, if you remember what name you called him.
You nod your head, breath hitching as you stare at him. It’s unfair, you think, to look as pretty as he is under the ugly yellow light your lamp emits. But he looks at you with so much care in the world, and you feel thankful that you’re spending your Tuesday night with him. You thank his lame excuse for intruding on your time for yourself. You thank him for spending time with you, for looking after you, even if he isn’t yours at that moment.
He aligns himself at your entrance while waiting for your answer.
You whisper it almost inaudibly, barely believing yourself as you let the word leave your mouth.
“Say it again,” he instructs you.
“Seokmin.”
You’re not sure if the two of you should have come up with one of those contracts you always read about in books when you first started the relationship. Maybe you should’ve learned from Lara Jean – a binding relationship contract written on notebook paper and signed in pen. There would be a couple of items on the list, a few weird ones, and then a majority of the items being standard ones. Standard item number one? No kissing. Standard item number two? No staying over after sex (sub-line: No cuddling). Standard item number three? No meeting unless it’s for sex. Maybe a weird item would be the option to try pegging. However, the last item on the list? No developing feelings for the other party.
If rules are made to be broken, but contracts signed by people older than eighteen are legally binding, then you would’ve been in jail by now.
His lips are locked against yours, groaning your name as he wraps your legs around his waist. He nibbles along your jaw as he makes love to you, slowly pushing deep inside you so you can feel his balls lay flush against your ass, feeling all of him in you. You call his name through a choked sob, your hands roaming around to find something to grab. Anything.
Your fingers find the back of his head, and you pull on his hair. And he flips like a switch, immediately pounding into you over and over again, praising you and calling you his.
Tonight, the rules have definitely been broken. And you’re starting to realize this isn’t the first offense.
.
“Okay so, I didn’t want to take it off because I wanted to see if my makeup would smudge, but I did it because I knew I was going to get hot.”
“Omg he wanted to keep his shirt on. He’s so quirky!”
“Stoppp,” he laughs while he passes the showerhead to you. “I can’t believe you’re the only person who tried to tell me a joke during sex.”
“It’s because I’m the only person you’ve ever had sex with,” you stick your tongue out at him while you rinse the body wash you previously bought with DK off your body.
“You too,” he retorts while turning around so you can rinse the soap off his body for him.
He grabs your shampoo from your hanging wire basket and plops a dollop into his hand. He tells you to look up while he lathers it in his hand before he brings his hands to massage your scalp. His fingers feel amazing while he massages you, so you close your eyes in the process, hoping to keep the shampoo out of your eyes.
He thinks you look like one of those dogs from the pictures you find online where the owner sticks a metal head massager on their heads. Your eyes are closed in contentment, and there’s a lazy smile on his face that he only gets to see so often. He can’t help himself but sneak a little kiss on your lips while he piles your hair into a mountain so that you look like that one guy from the first Incredibles movie.
You open your eyes to look at him, but you see that he’s purposely looking away, pretending to be interested in something else. You try to follow his eyes, but your eyes land on something dark crawling down the wall above DK’s head.
Being you, you blatantly point out the descending spider, and DK screams, slips, and crashes onto the tiled floor. Your bath products tumble down after him. You sigh, knowing you’ll have to clean up the mess and drive him to school tomorrow instead of sending him off tonight.
.
“Aww you care for me,” Dokyeom coos while you fuss over the ice pack on his ankle.
“I’m just making sure my Sybian isn’t too damaged,” you scoff at him.
You thought you would spend the night with a cozy book in bed while you wait for your face mask to dry. However, you find yourself blow-drying DK’s hair, letting him borrow one of your old t-shirts, and nursing his badly bruised ankle. It’s a wonder how he somehow didn’t end up spraining it after that nasty fall. You could’ve sworn you heard the cartoon swishing sounds while he tried not to slip.
Not to mention, he somehow talked you into cuddling with him in bed through several lame excuses.
Q. What if I fell off the bed?
A. Fuck, then pick yourself up I guess.
Q. What if I sprained my dick?
A. We have toys.
He wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Although, you have to admit it feels very nice to sit in bed with him with his left arm around your waist while the two of you silently scroll through your phones. He leans his head on your shoulder and hugs you from the side. You tilt your phone towards him so he could watch you tap through your friends’ stories. You can tell he’s more needy than usual, probably from climaxing more than once in one night and then undergoing the shower incident following right after – he screamed while you crumpled the spider in a wad of tissue. He’s latching onto you like a parasite, but he does give you good dick so you think it’s more like a symbiotic relationship. The way he’s clinging to you makes you think it is what it feels like to be trapped under one of those large teddy bears you can buy at warehouse retail stores.
He asks you if you’re going to the party on the weekend after you tap through the story of a mutual friend. You tell him you are.
“Be my date to the party?” he asks you.
You think he forgot you always go to parties with Jun and Chan.
“No thank you,” you politely decline his request, “I don’t do party dates.”
He pushes himself off of you, “Why not?”
“Because all of my past dates always left me for their friends and I would just spend every single party alone,” you grumble thinking about how many times you ended up taking care of drunk people you didn’t know because you ended up being sober the whole time.
“But I wouldn’t leave you.”
“There!” you exclaim while pointing your finger at him, “That’s what they all said to me.”
He frowns and crosses his arms, kind of upset you would think he would ever leave your side.
“Date or not I’m still not going to leave your side,” he grumbles while slinking down so he lays on the bed. He turns his body away from you to sulk.
The ice pack falls off his leg and tumbles to the ground. He continues to lay on the bed, not doing anything to pick it up so he can ice himself.
You know how stubborn he can be, especially when his pride is mixed in the equation. Part of you is proud he is sticking through being moody by refusing to move. However, you know how soft he is. If his future kid got a paper cut, he would probably end up crying harder than his kid. His kid would probably end up consoling him. His ankle must feel like pins and needles are sticking into it without the icepack, and he can’t do anything to distract the pain because his phone is out of his reach.
“Kyeom,” you gently shake his body. “You have to ice your ankle.”
He only shakes you off and brings his legs to his chest.
Usually, you would smack him with a pillow and call him dumb, but you think he’s suffered enough damages for the day. You know if you continue asking him to ice his ankle, he would just ignore you. So, you think either climbing on top of him or tricking him into breaking would be better choices. You choose the latter.
“Sigh,” you say out loud, pretending to talk to yourself. “If DK is sleeping then that means I’ll have nobody to cuddle with while I talk about my slutty costume choices.”
You see him slowly turn his head to look at you in the corner of your eye, but he quickly averts your gaze and turns his head back to its original position. You find yourself smiling at his action. He’s like a literal child. A puppy.
“Aww I thought Kyeom wanted to cuddle all night, but I guess I have to go to sleep because he’s asleep,” you tell him while leaning over him to check on him.
You see he’s pretending to sleep. He squints his eyes shut. His lips are poutier than usual, pressed in a thin line to probably stop himself from speaking.
“Maybe I’ll go sleep on the living room couch by myself so he can be more comfortable by himself,” you slowly move off the bed by trying to cross over his body.
“Noo,” he wails while sitting up to grab you. He immediately yanks you back down, trapping you in his arms. “How slutty is it, Yn? HOW SLUTTY?”
.
You have your morning lab in a few hours, but you’re standing alone in your dark kitchen with your head stuck in the freezer. The only source of direct light comes from your freezer, and you’re glad you’ve lived in your place long enough to navigate in the dark. The green digital clock digits flash on your oven. It’s getting close to 4:00 am, but you can’t sleep.
The icepack, or more like a water pack at this point, left a giant wet spot on your carpet while it thawed. It now sits in a lumped form in the side door, wedged between a frozen loaf of bread and some microwavable pizza bagels. The coldness of the freezer feels nice on your skin, but it’s not enough to make you feel numb.
You feel hot and stuffy, and your mind has a million thoughts running around at once. You make him tell you why you should be his date to a stupid costume party, and he tells you he likes you. However, his dumbass knocks out immediately after while he’s still holding you tight in his arms. You’re left alone with your thoughts and a pounding heart while you wait for him to finally let go of you when he is asleep.
Truthfully, you want to tear your hair out. It’s not like you couldn’t wake him up to make him tell you whether or not he finished his sentence. However, you think you’ve already tested his patience enough in one day. You would trust his “I like you” more if he told you while he was drunk, but telling you and then immediately knocking out? You really don’t know if it could count as a confession.
So now you whisper scream into a frozen bag of mixed vegetables while you think about everything that happened this night. You think about him showing up at your door. You think about the hickies he leaves between your thighs. You think about the way he kisses you after you moan his name.
“Seokmin,” find yourself whispering his name.
You don’t understand how this name is so different from the others, but your fingers softly touch your lips as if you just whispered something you weren’t supposed to say.
“Aww I get it. Jane Goodall. That’s so cute.”
“This is NOT a couple’s costume. I am clearly a hiker,” Chan angrily grumbles at the passerby while dumping another scoop of ice into the glass fishbowl on the kitchen island. He takes out his red handkerchief to wipe his hands and places it around his neck when he’s done.
“Why are you annoyed that people think you’re Jane Goodall? She’s one of the greatest scientists of our time. Do you not appreciate our women scientists? Women in STEM?” Jun asks him while he pops another sour gummy worm into his mouth. He licks the sour and sugary coating off his fingers one by one and wipes them dry on his monkey onesie.
You grab the bag of gummies from the table and dump the rest into the bowl. You tap and shake the edge of the bag until all of the remaining sugar falls into the bowl. Jun quickly plucks a worm out of the bowl before Chan turns around with a bottle of blue curacao in one hand and a bottle of coconut rum in the other hand. Chan insists on making fish bowls at parties for the three of you to share because he refuses to drink the jungle juice Jeonghan and Joshua make for parties. No matter how many times the two show Chan how they clean the giant clear plastic storage container they use for the juice, Chan absolutely refuses to drink from it. He argues that it’s a breeding ground for bacteria from people scooping the liquid with their cups, but Jeonghan dumbly replies that the amount of alcohol in the jungle juice should be enough to kill the germs.
By the time you’re done saying hello to some friends, Chan is already done making the bowl. He takes off his sunglasses and hangs it from his blue and grey colored top, looking at his creation with satisfaction. He swirls the bright blue concoction with three straws and tops it off with a paper umbrella toothpick he found in Jeonghan’s kitchen cabinets. Bon appétit.
The bright blue concoction stains your tongue, but it gives you a really nice buzz before you know how its aftereffects will hit you like a giant tsunami later. However, any precautious thought about getting too drunk and waking up with a massive hangover gets thrown out the window when Chan reminds you that the reason why the three of you took a ride-share cab is that you wantedto get fucked up. So the three of you smile and continue drinking.
.
The three of you are about two-thirds into finishing the fish bowl when you see DK and his friends stumble through the front door. DK’s dressed in the same slutty fireman costume he wears – the firefighter suit hanging low on his hips with the shoulder straps dangling, the hose on his shoulder, and the white tank top decorated with streaks of ash. You see Jeonghan greet him with a jello shot in his hand. The firefighter takes it from him and swirls his tongue around the perimeter of the jello, loosening it from the tiny container, and knocks it back swiftly in one go. He passes the container back to Jeonghan with no amount of blue raspberry flavored gelatin remaining on the inside. And all you can do is stare at him with your straw in your mouth while your friends attempt to play Jenga in their buzzed states.
It’s not long before you take your eyes off DK and realize that you finished the rest of the bowl by yourself. You tap in while Jun taps out of the game so he can happily scoop the slimy gummies out of the bowl and into his mouth. The tower looks jagged enough that one knee bumping against the table leg can easily knock the tower over. Shrek places their block on top of the tower with a shaky hand and sighs when the tower doesn’t topple over. A vampire bites their lip as they remove a side piece from the middle. You hold your breath as they slowly wiggle the piece loose, frowning when they successfully take it out of the stack and add it to the tower.
All eyes are on you as you hover your hand next to the piece that you want. You think if you take out that specific piece, you would make the tower a bit more balanced when it comes to how it leans. It also makes it harder for Chan to pull out a piece because he would end up shifting the balance if he pulled a block. Everything is in your favor – from the EDM song shuffling to a club song to your friends watching you silently – there is nothing that shouldn’t rule in your favor.
However, somebody behind you shrieks your name, and the tower topples. A few filled shot glasses are immediately placed in front of you, and everybody’s phone cameras are pointed at you, waiting to record you taking the shots. You sigh before bringing the first shot up to your mouth. You didn’t even get to touch the Jenga piece.
The perpetrator who stands behind you cheers the loudest every time you tip each empty shot glass over your head. He raises your hand in triumph and hugs you from behind your seat. The tsunami that’s been building up in the distance crashes. And by the end of it, you’re good as gone.
.
He tells you that no matter how comfortable his shoulder may feel at that moment, you do need to sit up and drink some water. And DK, for what seems like the nth time, hands you a bottle of water to drink.
He thanks the person who passed him the water bottle and stops for a minute. He points at him while scanning his outfit. “Hiker,” he finally decides on his answer.
“THANK YOU,” Chan yells at him while slapping him repeatedly on the back, unaware of his own strength, making DK flinch a little. Chan drunkenly decides that DK will become the fourth person to drink from his fishbowl. He drags Jun, who is chatting up Trixie from the Fairly Odd Parents, with him to the kitchen to make a fresh batch.
DK is the type of person to make you forget, but not in a forgetful type of way. He makes you forget about your troubles. He makes you forget about the resident knocking on his door while the two of you hide in bed together. He makes you forget you’re at a house party in a room full of people. At that moment it’s just you leaning on his shoulder with his arm wrapped securely around you. None of you are hiding the fact that there’s something budding between the both of you. It feels nice, liberating even.
“Hi baby. You doing okay?” he asks you after making sure you drank until the waterline hit the top of the plastic label despite him being extremely drunk.
“I like it when you call me baby,” you mumble while falling back onto his shoulder, feeling yourself slowly sober up.
“Yeah?”
“But don’t tell anybody or else I’ll have your head,” you turn your head and glare at him.
“I’m not sure if that was a sexual reference or maybe you’ve been reading too many isekai mangas that Jun sends you,” he chuckles while laying your head on his shoulder. He almost sighs in relief when you don’t blame him for you losing Jenga earlier.
He gives an okay signal to any passerby who asks if you’re doing alright.
“You weren’t by my side the whole time I was here. You’re a liar. Slutty liar.”
“I’m horrible aren’t I?” he kisses the top of your head.
“The worst.”
You never knew what “a beat” indicates in screenplays. You didn’t get why the screenwriter would want to indicate a pause. Nothing that you experienced in your life ever indicated a pause in the conversation. But now you understand. There are so many things you want to say, things you’re too afraid to say. You have questions for him, but you’re also happy he’s on your side. Maybe a “beat” is a filler. This pause in the conversation, you staring at him – eyes trying not to waver to his lips – it’s a mutual understanding between the two of you, something that makes up for what words cannot say.
“I need to pee.”
.
Now is definitely not a good time to be confused about whether you need to pee or if you’re simply horny.
Tonight the two of you are sloppy, bodies pressed against each other in the quiet hallway of a house party. Someone occupies the hallway bathroom, and you’re leaning with your back against the wall. DK stands in front of you with his left forearm leaning against the wall in the space next to your right ear. He kisses along your jawline, nipping the base of your neck. The softness of his lips caresses your skin, blending into the waves while you slur your moans. He hushes you by covering his lips over yours. You prefer him closer to you so you reach behind his head to pull him into you. His mouth opens, and your tongue glosses over his. He meets you in the middle, circling his around yours and groaning when you tug on his lower lip with your teeth. Your hand roams across his chest, and he pushes into your thigh, grinding against you. Both of you are too drunk, too lost in each other to care if others are looking.
He pulls his head back and looks at you with a hooded gaze. He can’t believe the sight in front of him and the ache he feels inside of him. He leans his head against the side of your ear, nipping softly at your lobe before talking to you in a low voice, “I want to pin you against the wall with your legs wrapped around my waist while I whisper every single thought I’m having about you into your ear. I’m going to fuck you so hard you won’t be able to walk out of this party without me supporting you. Everybody passing by will see how well you take me while you beg for me to pound into you deeper and harder. Then, you’d have to say goodbye to all of your friends while trying to keep my cum from leaking out of your sore pussy. I want to be able to open your legs and see it seeping out of you while I fuck it into you again in the car.”
Another beat.
This time it’s different. You feel your knees buckle underneath his body, sliding slightly down the wall. You look at his face hovering over yours, practically begging him to kiss you again. Anything. But he doesn’t. The two of you stay silent while you hear cheers from the living room. Then he proceeds to pull away as if nothing happened between you. He has the dopiest grin on his face. He cheeses at you – tiny wrinkles at the edge of his eyes and his pearly whites in full view. You’re still struggling to process the stream of consciousness he spoke into your ear.
“I like your pizza costume,” he giggles while poking your costume, especially the edges of the crust that hang off your shoulders.
“I bought it because I thought it might humor you,” you mumble while he takes your hands in his.
You see how much he’s gushing with happiness. You think he’s so cute, happy that your costume has such a positive effect on him. But you’re slightly annoyed that he’s able to move onto a different subject so quickly while you’re still stuck on the last one. You want more.
However, he tells you he really likes you and leans in to peck your cheek. When he pulls back, the bathroom door opens, and out steps Lee Jihoon who immediately grabs DK by his left ear and drags him away from you. “No fucking in the hallway,” he reprimands his friend.
DK only smiles at you while he’s being pulled away by his ear, too drunk to care, two finger hearts pointed directly at you.
You can only stand next to the vacant bathroom, now soberer than ever and seriously turned on.
You wake up on the floor next to your bed and slowly push yourself off the carpet, feeling the soreness in your body. You look at the carpet indents in your arm and then your surroundings. You notice your bed is empty, and Chan is asleep in his extra set of clothes, sprawled on the floor near your bedroom door. You can’t remember what happened in the latter half of the night, but you can at least deduce that all of you were at least sober enough to change out of your costumes and get ready for bed.
Your body is sore from sleeping on your floor, and you still feel pretty groggy. Still, the sweet scent of something coming from the kitchen is enough to convince you to walk outside instead of moving onto your bed to sleep some more. You stand up, knees cracking loudly, and you cross over Chan to exit your bedroom. You think it’s Jun who’s cooking, but you see him in his monkey onesie, passed out next to your rack of shoes near your entrance with a spare blanket covering him.
At least he has a blanket, you think to yourself. You woke up cold and with nothing covering you.
You see him standing in front of your toaster, wearing the extra set of clothes he keeps at your place. You see him place waffles into your toaster, minding his business while he hums to himself.
“Why are you here?” you approach him and stand by his side. You can see used wine glasses in the sink and opened chip bags you don’t remember buying sitting on the counter. The four of you probably continued drinking after arriving at your apartment. You hope there’s nobody else sleeping in your place.
“I dunno,” DK shrugs and proceeds to greet you by pulling you into his arms while he stands behind you, keeping a close eye on the frozen waffles.
You don’t get how he can look like he didn’t spend all of last night drinking. He looks completely refreshed with the kind of glow, an aura, you have after a good workout…not that you ever experienced what it must be like. He just looks like one of those smiling actors in fitness commercials.
You can feel his chest rumble against your back as he tells you he’s sorry he couldn’t cook something better for the four of you because he’s been living in the dorms for years. He honestly hasn’t touched a stove since he went home last summer. However, he did perfect cooking frozen food in microwaves and toasters. It’s the least he can do. He also quickly adds that he’s sorry he’s cooking all of your frozen waffles and would gladly reimburse you. You tell him to fuck off. There’s no way you would ever make him pay you back for making breakfast. He should know that by now.
The toaster pops, scaring you a little. A long yawn follows, and DK chuckles at you rubbing your eyes. He removes the waffles from the toaster and tells you to close your eyes. You dumbly follow, believing he’s going to kiss you when he cups your face in his hands. Instead, he rubs the inner corner of your eyes with his thumbs. “Eye boogers,” he says.
“Gross,” you watch him flick them to the ground.
“You thought that I was going to kiss you, huh,” he teases you while adding more frozen waffles into the toaster.
You grumble at him and stand to the side, leaning against your fridge. Your arms are crossed, and you watch him go back to humming the song he was humming before. It’s the same song playing from the speakers when the three of you decide to bring DK back to your apartment as there was no way he would have been allowed on campus in his state. It was partly Chan’s fault for getting him so fucked up – he couldn’t find regular vodka for the bowl so he replaced it with some Everclear he found tucked away under the sink. Jun tells him he really needs to stop snooping in Jeonghan’s cabinets. That’s when your memory starts to clear.
“Do you happen to remember what you told me before Jihoon dragged you away?” you curiously ask him.
You expect him to deny the memory or laugh at your sudden boldness, but he tells you that he knows better than to drink to the point where he blacks out and loses his memory. He would also like to stay true to his word, all of it.
“If you’re going to fuck in the kitchen, at least give us the waffles first,” Jun groans from the hallway.
DK winks at you in response, but you don’t know if he was referring to his second confession or if he promised the reality of his sexual fantasy. Before you can clarify, Jun appears in the kitchen, opening the dishwasher to grab a ceramic plate.
It shouldn’t be this confusing. DK told you that he liked you twice. You’re also pretty sure you like him. Nevertheless, it’s DK. He tends to joke around and switch from topic to topic. He throws words of affirmation at everybody he talks with. He confuses you even when you feel like you shouldn't be confused.
“God Yn. You can’t be doing this to me.”
He sits upright, and his hands are positioned to his sides, tightly gripping his bedsheets.
You use his thighs as your support as you ride him, slowly bouncing up and down so he can watch his cock appear and disappear into your cunt.
You feel him twitching in you as you let soft moans float out of your mouth as you arch your back more and lean your head back toward the ceiling. You make sure you gyrate your hips switching between circular and back and forth motions as you continue to fuck yourself on his cock. He wonders how your soft mewls would break into staccato moans if you were to continuously bounce on him, letting lust cloud his thoughts.
Then you lean further backward, practically grinding on him. He feels your ass rub against his balls, and he does everything he can to restrain himself from rutting himself upwards into your cunt. He knows your thighs are tired as your breathing gets heavier and the way you grind against him gets messier. You sit on him, your whole body trembling and twitching from pleasure simply from the feeling of him fitting so snugly inside you. He feels so warm today, so good, stretching you nicely as you tell him all he needs to do is to sit there and look pretty. You reward him by sitting upright, guiding his hands from behind his back so they rest on your ass. He kneads them roughly, feeling your skin fill the spaces between his fingers.
Your ass cheeks feel sore, and you can’t stop panting when grind on him, rocking him so crudely that his bed begins to squeak. You bring a hand in front of you to start rubbing your nub, and high-pitched whimpers instantaneously escape your mouth. Your soft circular motions increase speed, attacking your soft flesh and making you forget he’s in you.
“Hng Seok,” your face is scrunched in pleasure, “Fucking myself feels so good.” You smirk at him as you ride out your high, knowing very well it would piss him off. You can tell he’s already a little upset you’re fucking him in cowgirl when he doesn’t get to do anything but sit there.
Annoyed, he brings his right hand upwards and brings it down quickly against your ass. The crisp slap rings throughout his empty room, and he feels you clench around him as you gasp out loud. He slaps your ass again, finding deep pleasure in watching you pulse and quake around him and hearing you moan.
You lift yourself slightly upwards, having regained some energy, and reach under you to grab the base of his shaft. You watch his face contort from annoyance to surprise to pleasure as you stroke him, squeezing and releasing incrementally as you simultaneously fuck his upper half.
You can tell he is about to cum when he starts reaching for your face. He wants to make out with you, to dig his fingers into your back as you suck his neck. He moans your name, cavernous and gutturally, and tells you you’re doing so well. His sweet, sweet baby. The way you’re fucking him makes him go feral.
Just then, there is a knock on his door, and he immediately pushes you off of him, practically hopping off his bed so he can run to his door barefooted and naked. He tells them to wait a minute as he’s wrapping something up.
You sigh, quickly following behind him so you can hide in his closet, already used to having his residents show up out of the blue. You hand him his sweater and a pair of shorts before climbing into his closet and closing the doors behind you.
You hear him open his door a minute later. You’re not sure what the topic of their conversation is as everything sounds muffled. You hear DK tell them that he has to grab a few things first, and then he’ll meet them in their room. He closes his front door and opens his closet.
He looks worried. You observe it must be something important or an emergency as he doesn’t bother to make himself look presentable or deodorize the smell of sex lingering on his skin. He tells you he’s sorry and that he’ll try to be quick. He kisses you on the forehead before leaving with his stuff. However, he tells you you’re welcome to leave. And you sit there in his closet, alone and naked, the spot on your forehead burning. The motion-sensor lights in his bedroom turn themselves off, and you know you’re fucked by the way he gave you a choice to leave instead of telling you, begging you, finding stupid ways to get you to stay like he always does.
Your feelings are hurt, and you’re pathetically close to tears. Why is it that every time you look at him or talk to him, it feels like you have to stop yourself from having your confession burst out of your mouth? “I like you” always feels like it’s sitting on the tip of your tongue, and you’re too scared to confess to him.
It’s dark inside the closet, but you’ve been in his room enough times to know what’s hanging above you and sitting beside you. His business shirts are hanging above your head. On the other side of the closet, he has his pants. They’re organized by fabric type and colors. The jeans hang on the far right side of the closet. The sweats and athletic tights are next. Then he has his business pants. Dark colors are on the right, and light colors are on the left. His clothing hanger hooks are always hung over the closet rod, never under. Yet, at this moment, everything feels so foreign, like you’re a new person in a new place. But it’s because you are a different person now – a person who has fallen for their friends with benefits.
The metal front door whirs and clicks open. You can hear the automatic lights flicker. He tells you he’s alone and that you can come out as he sees your stuff in his room. You’re not replying.
“Shit Yn,” he opens his closet to find you still sitting in the dark closet, staring into nothing. “Aren’t you cold?”
You shake your head.
“Did you go pee? You should go pee,” he says expressionlessly. There’s not an ounce of care present in his suggestion.
He leaves your side and stalks over to his bed, throwing himself on it. He loudly groans into a pillow to rid some of his stress. You can only climb out of the closet, your jaw clenched. “I like you! I like you a lot” is still in your mouth, taunting you, threatening to escape.
“Is he done yet?”
“Bro he literally just started. Have a little more faith in Chan, okay?” you mumble at Jun while looking at your phone. You lock the screen and place your phone face down on the table.
Today is a day for firsts. It is the first time Jun and you are trying the café across the nice-looking residential building near campus. It’s the first time you try an iced mint mojito coffee when you usually have its alcoholic counterpart. It’s the first time Jun had a professor cancel class this semester. It’s also the first time Chan hooks up with somebody he met on the dating app Jun set up for him. It’s also the first time you’ll openly admit that Jun somehow has the most “game” compared to the three of you. Strange universe.
Jun knows something is bothering you. Your comebacks have become snarkier, yet you’ve been more lenient with whatever he does around you. He once told you to pay for the three of your dinners, and you passed him your credit card without saying anything. And it’s not like DK hasn’t been becoming less of the topic of your conversations - you’ve been quieter. And he doesn’t know what’s going on because he’s scared you might punch him. So he doesn’t ask you and only looks around the café’s nice interior, choosing to count the number of glossy white honeycomb tiles on the wall.
“How can you walk up to somebody and ask them out even though you don’t know them?” you blurt loudly at him out of the blue.
“Me?” Jun dumbly asks you. He already forgot the tile number he was on.
You nod your head while you bring your drink up to your lips.
He leans back into his chair and crosses his arms.
“You know how blunt I am.”
You nod your head, recounting all of the times he was called out for his bluntness.
“I think you already know how I can sometimes rub people off in the wrong way because I accidentally say things that I don’t mean. Sometimes people like you understand me and sometimes people don’t. I guess it’s like people liking you? Sometimes people will like my bluntness and sometimes it comes off in the wrong way. So I think it’s the same for liking people? You either like somebody or you don’t? So I’ll ask anybody out as long as I’m interested in them because the answer is always a simple yes or no.”
You’re so confused.
“You literally jumped from one topic to another. I literally could not follow you at all,” you blink.
“Well I’m sorry,” he throws his hands up in defeat. He’s not used to giving helpful advice nor is he used to having people go to him for advice. He wonders if he should start counting the number of chairs in the café.
He remembers an interaction he had in front of your apartment building last week. He was surprised that DK would call him and ask if he could meet him in front of your apartment. Jun told him that Yn is home and that he could just knock on your door, but DK unequivocally rejected his idea and told Jun to come. Jun saw him walking back in forth in front of your apartment building sign with a bunch of ugly roses in his hand, obviously stressed out of his mind. He asked him what was wrong.
“I dunno. I think they’ve been avoiding me for some reason,” DK tells Jun once he feels calmer with the older boy around him.
“But they’re literally wilting, bro,” Jun tells DK with clear judgment in his voice. “Some of the petals are black. I’d avoid you if you gave me wilting roses,” he points at all the petals with darkened tips and wrinkles.
“Yn will like them,” DK insists. “They think they look cool like that.”
Jun brought them to your apartment for DK, not wanting to ask or press him for more information. Although, he would have to admit it was a bit confusing to have DK ask him to deliver the flowers for him. Albeit, you are pretty scary when you’re mad. You were pretty enthusiastic when you saw the flowers in his hand, but you immediately slammed the door on him when he told you they were from DK. However, you did open your door again to let him use your restroom.
“Do you like DK but you’re having trouble figuring out whether or not he likes you?” Jun cautiously approaches you with his question.
You nod and spill your troubles to your best friend. You tell him about the two times he told you he liked you and about the day you hid in his closet. You tell him about the roses – how he didn’t text you or leave you a card so that you don’t know why he bought the roses and why he couldn’t deliver them himself. You tell him about the “not a date” dates and how he calls you pet names.
Jun tells you it sounds confusing, but it’s actually pretty normal to fall for your friend with benefits especially if you have a strong emotional connection. That’s how normal people fall in love. He feels for you and understands how confusing it must be for you when the two of you have basically skipped the dating part and landed in the married for thirty years part of the relationship without being in a relationship.
“But isn’t it tiring have to hide?” he asks you. “How many times did you have to hide because of a resident? How many times did you have to fake not knowing him or not liking him whenever you saw somebody flirting with him?”
“Too many times,” you admit. It’s exhausting.
Jun only nods and grabs his set of keys from the café table. He pulls out his wallet from his back pocket, “Lemme buy you dessert while I pay for Chan’s ‘congrats on your first hook-up’ cake.”
You stare at your friend, “You aren’t going to give me helpful advice?” You’re dumbfounded.
“Who do I look like to you? Yahoo answers? Reddit? If you want helpful advice, suck it up and tell him that you need to talk to him and talk. It’s going to eat you alive before your future cats get to eat you.”
Fuck. Jun’s right.
Today is a weird day for firsts.
“But I literally just nutted,” DK tells you while you storm into his dorm.
He’s shirtless and is wearing those grey sweatpants that ride dangerously low on his hips. He looks like he just woke up from a nap, his hair messy and matted. A bottle of unscented lotion sits on his nightstand.
“Did you want to shower or do laundry with me later?” he asks you, letting his door shut behind him. He follows you to his bed. “Did you want to get dinner with me? We have a while until Chan’s night class ends. I know you usually wait for him so you can walk home with him.”
You sit on the edge of his bed and pat the space next to you, telling him to sit next to you. He sits next to you and looks at you with a worried expression.
“I’m going to be honest, I don’t think I have it in me to fuck right now unless you find a way to help me get it up,” he confesses while scratching the back of his ear. He’ll say anything to fill the awkward silence, but he’s glad to see you after being out of touch for a week.
He sees you frowning, and his breath hitches when you turn to him.
“You confuse me DK,” your voice wavers. “I like you so much, but you keep on sending me mixed signals by telling me you like me and then acting like nothing happened. And then you’re so kind to me, and you call me those names while constantly treating me like I’m in a relationship with you when I’m not.”
“Oh, Yn,” his lip quivers.
“You don’t understand how much I like you, how much I want to stop being friends with benefits with you. But you confuse me so much. Your kindness is confusing and I wish you were meaner so I wouldn’t have fallen for you…why are you crying?” you slap his bicep.
He flinches in pain from the slap because he’s still shirtless, but the tears keep running down his face.
“I’m sorry,” he cries while clutching his arm. “I thought I was being straightforward with my feelings, but I hurt you instead,” he wails, “I’ve started liking you longer than you could imagine.”
You don’t know how to react to him crying while confessing, so you awkwardly get up and walk over to his mini fridge to bring him one of his frozen sponge packs to ice his arm.
.
You kiss him back before closing his large metal dormitory door behind you. His keypad whirs and clicks its automatic lock into place, and you make your way to the hallway elevators, giddy on the inside.
You make your way past all the bright green dormitory doors and stop in front of the elevators. At the side of the elevator is the large classroom bulletin board with DK’s stupid laminated face smiling at you. This time the board is sky blue. You can recognize the clouds glued onto the board anywhere – they’re sheep repurposed into clouds from when he did the board about sleep facts. Hot air balloons decorate the board. Expensive cardstock letters spell the title: Love is in the air, and so are STDs! You snicker at the tiny rips in the blue background from students ripping off the taped condoms to use for themselves before stepping into the elevator.
Your phone in your pocket buzzes when you step out of the elevator and exit the dormitory. You pull out your phone while standing outside. It’s a text from DK. He says he’s been waiting for a while now, but he wants to be a bit selfish tonight. He asks you if you’re free this Friday night even though he knows your schedule like the back of his hand. He sends another text to let you know he’s horny again, but he missed you. A lot.
Stepping to the side to let other residents in and out of the dorm, you make your way along the front of the dormitory so you stop under his window. You see him looking out to check if you made it out of the building. You wave at him and hold your phone up for him to see while giving him a thumbs up. He triumphs when he realizes you're agreeing to go on a real date with him, and you laugh when you see his figure disappear when he trips while jumping. He comes back to his window with a shirt on this time. He waves goodbye to you, and you wave back with a large smile on your face. This time the smile doesn’t drop.
#seventeen smut#svt smut#dk smut#seokmin smut#dk x reader#seokmin x reader#seventeen x reader#svt x reader#dk imagines#seokmin imagines#seventeen imagines#svt imagines#✏️ ━ himbocoups
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One nice thing about drawing the same character over and over is that it lets you see your progress. I feel like I’ve made a fair amount!
When I drew that first picture in September 2014 I was 32 years old. I’d always wanted to be able to draw, but just never got round to it or knew how to get started. Like a lot of people, fandom is what inspired me and gave me the push I needed. It’s the most amazing feeling to be able to draw now, to be able to get down what’s in my head, to make things I love and am proud of. I know I still have a lot to learn but that’s where the fun is!
If you’re one of those people always thinking ‘wow I wish I could draw’, here is how I did it:
I worked through the book You Can Draw in 30 Days by Mark Kistler, which a friend recommended to me (if I'd known then about the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards I'd have used that too, but I didn't. It's good though)
I filled up a couple of sketchbooks with terrible drawings, mainly figure studies from quickposes.com and bad drawings of my blorbos
Finally thought I had something good enough to post, posted it, received so much support and love that I carried on, and I honestly cannot thank all of you enough for that
Kept drawing and drawing, making myself do the things that were hard or that I thought were above my skill level (harsh truth: you will never get better at the hands if you don't draw the hands)
After a little while I thought 'I wonder if I can use my iPad as a drawing tablet', and started using the Procreate app (then about £4, now about £10 I think, still a flipping bargain), first with my finger, then with a stylus that came with my iPad case, then with a slightly better stylus I bought on eBay, then two years ago I got a better iPad and could have a Pencil which is AMAZING
I have also recently taken two Procreate courses on Domestika which taught me a lot of things about drawing in general and Procreate in particular and I should probably have sought this information out sooner! They were Atmospheric Scenes in Procreate: Paint with Color and Light by Ramona Wultschner, and Female Character Portraits in Procreate, by Natalia Dias, and I would recommend them both
And I kept drawing a whole bunch and my friends were super encouraging so I just kept going and didn't stop
I have tips! Things I've learnt along the way
If you use Procreate, look up and learn about clipping masks, alpha lock, streamline, liquify, Gaussian blur
Don't worry too much about brushes, I mainly just use the hard and soft airbrushes and two versions of round marker (one with low streamline for sketching and one with high streamline for line art). I have a spotty one for freckles and that's about it really for what I use 99% of the time. People will try and sell you brushes by making you think you'll be able to draw like them if you have the right brushes but you won't and you don't want to draw like them anyway, you want to draw like YOU
Use more layers than you think you'll need, you can always merge them later
You will suck at first. You will suck so bad you will want to cry. But you have to be terrible, it's the only way to get to not terrible. The only way you STAY terrible is if you give up
Just when everything seems awful and everything you draw is crap and you don't ever want to draw again, that is when you must KEEP GOING and PUSH THROUGH because you are about to level up. Persevere just a little bit longer and soon you will be staring at your own hands thinking 'HOW'
Drawing is a learnt skill. There is no such thing as Talent, just people who've spent longer learning and practicing than you have. Eight years ago I couldn't reverse park my car, either, and then I got a new job where it was really handy to be able to reverse park in the car park and now I'm really good at it. You can improve at anything if you're willing to put in the time! GROWTH MINDSET!!
#my art#drawing improvement#learning to draw#artists on tumblr#artblr#YOU CAN DO IT I BELIEVE IN YOU
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do u have any tips for digital painting for people who like.... exclusively have experience in only lineart and simple cell shading ? i rly want my art to look like that but it always turns out horrible when i try to paint. i simply don't know how to blend colors i guess
this is going to be kinda long since im not very good at explaining things so i'll just run through my drawing process when im working on a digital painting!
first things first tho, im still learning to get the hang of it myself since im also super used to working with lineart/cell-shading rather than painting. so as time goes on my process will probably change as i learn new things!
first, i start out with a sketch of what i'm gonna be painting. i'll use one of my ocs as an example
when im working with lineart, i usually put the lineart layer over the sketch but when i'm painting, i tend to put the layers i'll be working on underneath the sketch! i do this cuz since i wont really be doing much defined linework, and it makes it a lot easier for me to do the next step which is:
blocking out shapes!
under my sketch layer, i'll block in shapes of color corresponding to my sketch, this works as a guidemap for me and usually each block of color gets a seperate layer to avoid getting frustrated while trying to work on areas where they intersect. (for example, the face, the bangs, and the back of the head are all separate layers to make it easier to avoid blending things i dont want to blend, like the face with the hair)
now here i start to work on each of the separate layers ive made, and i work on blocking in shadows. i usually clip layers together to avoid overlapping any unwanted things
at this point my process isnt super straightforward and i honestly havent exactly figured out what i do here definitively but i usually start working smaller and more focused on specific layers and work my way through the painting usually with one or two brushes. mainly, i use these two brushes, one for blending and making strokes, the other for VERY small details (i use clip studio paint so depending on what program you use and what you want out of your painting, your brushes may vary)
at this point im SUPER unsure on how i actually do what i do but i DEFO recommend studying other peep's art and using references to get things like hair and clothing textures. you'd be surprised on how some super complex-looking pieces tend to use less blending then you would think!
a tip when it comes to blending: i know it's super tempting to blend everything but from messing around with this style for a bit i can say that sometimes less is more! while blending is fun, it can sometimes lead to the colors or certain parts of the piece feel 'overblended' in which it might lose it's defined shape. although this is something that you'll learn to work through as you learn new ways to approach it!
now here is my final stage in where i might spruce things up a bit using layers to alter the colors and make things look a bit more unified and cohesive! honestly my fav step since i try out different layers that might bring out certain characteristics in my art!
also before i end this i wanna say that this is only the process i use and that you might use a completely different approach to it but if you find anything here that might be helpful, don’t be afraid to try it out and experiment!
and honestly… i think that's it? i tried my best to go through my process and hopefully people can see and try out what might work for them! idk if any of my points came across that well since im not very good at explaining but YEAH SORRY THIS GOT LONG OOPS
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How To Make Your Own Clown Doll ! (A Guide)
Hello good people !!
I have made a few clown dolls before, and someone submitted a question asking if I followed any guide for them or had a guide myself. I sorta made it up as I went for the first doll, but I have learned better methods of doing things since then!
Here is my guide on how to make some dudes for yourself!
You will need:
Fabric for the body - I used an off-white fleece for the torso and limbs for this one, but have previously used a thin off-white sorta cotton fabric, which works better if you want floppier/thinner limbs!
Fabric for the clothes - Use whatever you want, honestly! I used some cool stretchy silver-metallic fabric for mine but have previously used cotton and polyester patterned fabrics !
Polymer clay - I used Sculpey III for this one, but for my previous two I used some other kind of Sculpey that was very very light and airy, which made it hard to sculpt properly without squishing it! If you want to add any detail to the face shape, use some firm polymer clay !
Posca pens (optional) and acrylic paints - Acrylics are used for the base coat on the head. I used the paints for the details too previously, but used posca pens on this one which was much easier to do the face details with! Either works just fine, though : )
Faux fur - for hair! If you want a bald clown or one with just a hat without hair, you don't need this!
Decorative trims and such - I used some pink frilly elastic trim, blue dotted non-elastic trim, white elastic frilly mesh, buttons, a silver bell and some blue velvet ribbon for this guy! You can literally use whatever you want (ribbons, bows, pom-poms, lace, etc) to make your clown look cute!!
Varnish - Use spray varnish if you can! It'll help prevent the face paint from smudging (all 3 of mine have had this happen using varnish with a brush). It is possible to use varnish with a brush on them but be careful with it! I used sculpey gloss varnish.
Tin/aluminium foil
Basic sewing supplies (needles, thread, pins, scissors)
Steps
1. Make a ball out of the foil, a little smaller than the size you want the finished head.
2. Cover it in a layer of Sculpey and sculpt the face shape you want. Include a pretty thick neck with the base at the bottom WIDER than the rest of the neck. This will be how the head is anchored to the body!
3. Bake the clay, let it cool, and sand it down so that it is nice and even without any finger-prints!
4. Paint a base coat on it with acrylic paints!
5. Paint/draw on whatever face details you want using acrylics or posca pens! Let your creativity flow!!
6. Varnish it!
7. Draw out the body pieces (torso and limbs) on your body fabric. You'll need two torso pieces, four leg pieces and four arm pieces. Honestly there's no method to what shape to draw, just draw what shapes you want them to be! (Remember to reverse each second piece though so that they match up when sewing them together). I used a rounded rectangle for the torso, and chose to make the legs on mine very long!
8. Cut out all the pieces and sew them together with the CORRECT sides facing INWARDS and the WRONG sides facing outwards. Once sewn, flip them inside out. MAKE SURE TO LEAVE THE TOP SIDE OF THE TORSO UN-SEWN TO INSERT THE HEAD!
9. Almost fully fill the body with plastic pellets, and only partially fill the limbs (I filled them about 1/4 full)! If you don't have those, use dry rice like I did (or dry lentils) or sand! If you use sand, ensure sure you make your stitches REALLY close together so sand doesn't come out of any gaps! If you want the limbs to be chunkier, fill them with more pellets OR stuff the rest of them with poly-fill or cotton wool!
10. Insert the neck into the torso and sew the opening tight around it, like this! The wide base of the neck stops the head from coming out : )
11. Sew on the limbs! The stitching doesn't have to be perfect here since the clothes will hide it!
12. Make the clothes! You can make whatever kind of clothing you like; I just made a baggy little jumpsuit sorta thing for my guy! To do this, I laid the clown out on the fabric and roughly drew the shape for clothes around him based on what I wanted! Flip it, lay it down in the fabric again and then trace this to get the second jumpsuit piece!
13. Use the same method of sewing the pieces together with the CORRECT sides facing each other so the WRONG sides are facing outwards. Then turn the clothes inside-out so that the right sides are now facing outwards! MAKE SURE TO LEAVE OPENINGS FOR THE HEAD AND LIMBS TO COME OUT THROUGH!
14. Put the clothes on the clown!!
15. (Optional) Glue fake fur on the top of the head in the style you want it! I used hot glue because I didn't have anything else, but fabric glues and all-purpose glues would be good too! If you don't want hair, just skip this step!
16. (Optional) Hat!! Cut out a wide triangle shape, sew the opposite sides together and then sew a circle to the base if you want a pointy hat like my dude's one (I don't have photos of this sadly but I'm sure there's a tutorial out there of how to sew a cone)! Then glue the base to the top of the head.
16. And finally, add all the trims and extra bits you want to make them look super cute !!! I just sewed on some ribbon to the base of the hat and around the ankles, sewed some frilly elastic trims around the neck, added a little silver bell to the hat, sewed frilly trim around the wrists and ankles and then sewed two buttons onto the front of his clothes!
And then, your little clown is done !!!
I hope this comes in handy to anyone wanting to make their own clown dude!
I would appreciate any reblogs and such of this to help spread the clown joy !!
Have fun !!!
(Small note! I would appreciate if you didn't copy any of my clowns directly! Please use this as more of a guide than an exact tutorial to make this specific clown! Being creative with yours is much more fun!! :•D)
#clown doll#aesthetic#circus#kidcore#ooak doll#clownblr#clowncore#sculpture#doll#clown#circuscore#clowndoll#porcelain clown#small but knowing clown#ooak art doll#art doll#artdoll#tutorial#clownart#clown art#sewing#custom#art#plushie#sculpted#ooak
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Hi ^^
First of all – your Art is INCREDIBLE!!!
I especially love your use of colors and textures :) Everything is so bright and colorful, but still cohesive. And your images are so clear without being overly detailed! It’s all literally perfection!!!
I like to draw digitally as well and your art-style is a huge inspiration for me. So I wanted to ask if you have any work in progress videos or pictures? Or if you could explain your process in general? Like, are you using a sketch layer underneath, with how many layers are you normally working, what kind of brushes do you use or any tips overall to improve digital painting?
Of course you don’t have to answer this (kinda a lot of questions, sorry 😅 ). Just know that I adore your art and that you’re helping me on my own art-journey just by sharing your work with the world – so, thank you!!! <3
Hey!! So first of all thank you so much for everthing you said about my art, I really appreciate it! But also omg thank youuu for this amazing ask like this is for real the kind of ask I've always wanted to get, where a total stranger is interested in my process XD So yeah don't worry about asking a lot of questions, they were great and I loved them!
Also I'm super flattered that my art has inspired you in your own digital art journey and I hope the stuff I say here can also help somewhat! This will get pretty long so sorry in advance everyone for making you scroll so much cause for some reason the read more option doesn't work on mobile :/
But anyway to answer your questions!
Sadly I don't have videos but I do have some pics I'll share. This is actually my second attempt at answering this because before I was going to use some WIP pics of the Majid drawing as example but then I didn't want to because it was in black and white and color is kind of one of the main things I like to emphasize in my art so I wanted to talk about it in the example XD Then I started a couple new drawings and was taking pics of those but I got super artblocked, but luckily I just finished one out of the blue that I can use. Okay so... I started answering this, again, and it was getting way too long and rambly so I'm gonna try to keep it simple this time and maybe I can elaborate more another time if you're still interested/ if anyone else wants know X'D
My process in general: I always start by making a simple basic background to work on, just fill it in and add some blotches of color. Then on a new layer I just start painting the subject, no sketch, so again just laying down some colors (I usually take whatever color in the bg is closest to skin tone and adjust the new color from there) and I just start blocking some shapes in aproximately the right places to start defining where things will be and how they fit together and just go from there. It's hard to explain it more cause that's kinda it, I just paint until things look like they're supposed to or at least visually appealing enough XD I add or adjust whatever colors seem necessary along the way (in this particular drawing I left the darker values until way too late which I don't recommend) and just refine and refine and refine things and add as many or as few details as I feel like, working on everything simmultaneously bit by bit.
Layers: like I mentioned before there's no sketch, and I try to use as few layers as possible so usually I'll have about 3-5. One for the basic background, one to three (though sometimes I merge them) additional layers for more background effects/colors/value fixes that I usually add later in the process, and I try to have just one for the subject. Sometimes I have one or two more if I'm feeling too hesitant but I always merge them in the end.
Brushes: I only use one brush at 50% opacity the whole time for everything. It's a squarish/rectangular brush that has some sort of jagged edges and a bit of a watercolory texture.
Tips: so this part is especially hard cause like.. I feel like any tips I could give are only applicable to drawing portraits and even then it'd be for doing it in the particular way that I prefer.. Like for example I could say it's best to work on every area at the same time and never spend too long one thing before moving on to the next but.. some people actually prefer finishing the eyes completely before moving on to the nose for example you know? So honestly the main thing I'll say is kinda to just experiment with a lot of methods and styles and see what works or doesn't work for you. Something that I think always helped me a lot was watching speedpaints of people who were more skilled than me and had a distinct style, just literally watch how they did their thing and every once in a while I might notice something I'd be interested in trying for myself and yeah with practice and experience you just kinda figure out what kind of things you not only like seeing but actually want in your own art. Like years ago I used to sketch but then I saw enough videos of people painting without sketching that I wanted to try it and I realized it's just more fun and makes more sense to me that way. So yeah try lots of different things and see what works for you and what you want to incorporate into your own art style!
Some more standard digital art tips I could give I guess are like.. the thing I said about not spending too much time on just one area (if it applies to your prefered process XD). Flip the drawing every now and then to catch stuff that's off. Stay zoomed out as much as possible and when you do zoom in for details always keep an eye on how the bigger picture's looking. Take your time finding or arranging a good reference pic that really inspires you cause it'll save you time and frustration later. And aaa idk I could say more but I don't think it's that informative or helpful, and all of this is probably really basic obvious stuff anyway and this is long enough as it is so yeah I'll leave it there...
I hope any of this can help in some way or that I've at least answered your questions in a satisfying enough way haha And finally here are some of the WIP pics I took. Where you can see some parts of the process. I did a lot more after that last pic but yeah at that point it's just about fixing little things, refining and adding details, but there you can see the color adjustment thing I usually do as the very last step (though not for this pic). I don't always have to do it, and there are probably times when I shouldn't, but I almost always like to do it anyway and that's why my colors look so exaggerated and bright XD I usually make the midtones more red and/or magenta, the shadows more blue, and the highlights more yellow (and sometimes a bit cyan) but if you wanna try something like that it's definitely fun to experiment with the different color possibilities ;u;
And yeah that's it for now! I'm sorry this is so long, and this was the short version lol I hope you like the answers at least a fraction of how much I loved the questions X'D
#asks#asks and stuff#sorry for the late reply#ugh this is so long sorry#but seriously I love questions#feel free to ask me stuff lol#I apparently also love to talk X'D
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so i do a lot of shading like this in my art (or try to) and i asked if anyone in my discord server wanted a tutorial.... and they said yes!
so im gonna do my best to explain how i shade things under the cut....
(i use clip studio paint but honestly this should work in any art program i think)
1. FIRST- have your drawing. have Layer. I usually have three layers at LEAST when im doing this- and i keep them stacked in this order: top is lineart, middle is flat colors, and bottom is the background.
the purple circle shows the icon for making a layer into a clipping layer- IMPORTANT
the pink circle shows the icon for locking transparent pixels- helpful! it makes sure you don’t “go outside the lines”
(in case you’re curious this is my csp layout)
2. create a new layer above your flat colors, and press the two little squares. this makes a clipping layer! it basically makes a mask of the layer below it, and you can draw whatever (in this case shadows) and it only follows the filled in areas of the layer below it. so if i drew a bunch of yellow stripes on the clipping/shadow layer, it would only follow the form of the werewolf flat colors and not anything else. i hope that makes sense!
3. decide where your light source is coming from! ngl i totally draw a little sun to remind myself where the light is coming from in a piece.... in this case the green shows where i think the light would be hitting the werewolf, and therefore i would draw shadows opposite/adjacent to that. im not the best at explaining lighting though, so heres a good reference.
heres another.
4. SHADING TIME..... so for my shading i just use the default pen tool in clip studio. g-pen, i believe. Stabilisation!!! between the two pink stars!!! use it. its so good for lineart, and for drawing smooth, non trash lines and shapes. it has Saved my life. the higher the number, the ‘slower’ your brush moves, and the smoother your lines become. i tend to keep mine around 60-70 but play around with it....
i usually shade with a bright annoying color so i can tell what im doing. (purple usually), as shown in box one. thats your foreground color. 2 is your secondary (background) color, i dont usually mess with it and leave it white. hitting box three turns your current pen into an eraser version of itself... i use it a lot! dont forget about this box
i usually tend to think of shadows as shapes.... in the werewolf’s eyebrow/spot/thing you can see where ive drawn a line.....
and then filled it in! i dont normally use the paint bucket to fill in areas... just the pen. it gets too hard
hair/tufts are the fun part!!! you can see that ive drawn solid chunks of shadow in the werewolf’s mane....
...then i click square three to turn my brush into an eraser and carve out little details
here are some more examples of that... i use it a lot. A LOT.
go wild. go crazy. sometimes i dont think my shading follows like TRADITIONAL physical rules of the laws of light but just. dewit
5. SO YOURE DONE SHADING..... if you refer back to your Layers window, you’ll see a drop down box that usually says normal and a slider.... knock that slider down to like. 50, or 30 (what i usually do). this lowers the opacity on the shadows layer so you can see through it kinda. the drop down box is the layer styles... play around with it!! you can do some really cool stuff with overlay/multiply/etc and make your shading layer super funky.....
if you hit the lock transparent pixels button, you can color your shadows differently if you want! sometimes ill duplicate the shadow layer and color it differently and run it through the gaussian blur filter... it can make it look a little softer and less hard.
usually in my art, when im done i merge all the layers together so you just have one layer left. i duplicate that layer, run it through the gaussian blur filter and drop the opacity down to like.... 20 maybe so everything looks soft. on this picture, i duplicated the werewolf layer (without the bg) and did a motion blur on it to make it look like he was moving....
.... and here he is after dropping the shadow opacity/adding other little details and running it through 5000 filters
i really hope that gave you some kind of idea on how cel shading works!! i am by no means the master, but if you have questions or tips please don’t hesitate to ask me ;a; im really not good at explaining things lol
thank you for reading!!! <3
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Headcanons of what would be the children of boys with MC ???
Aaron:
Probably more than two, but they'd have a gap in between. Two sets of twins. And in full moon Aaron would be apprehensive.
Three boys and one girl, maybe? He is a very present father and the kids absolutely adore him! But they wonder where daddy goes in full moon... You tell them the truth, but hey, they're worried!
One day, however, Aaron turns and goes for his usual hunt in the forest, but then he hears something faintly familiar in the woods. Yelling.
"Aaron! Aaron!" He sort of knows who this is. It's his mate. He is wary, but stays put until you're in sight... With two cubs. His eyes widen comically and he snorts, jumping in surprise. He sniffs the air wildly and realizes those are his cubs. He accepts them, nodding at you and turning his back to you. You sigh in relief, knowing you can count on him, but god... They're going to eat the shoes.
You thought the other two were normal children, until Ivan yells your name into the distance and when you run to see them, well. There are four little holes on Ivan's hand while he holds a diaper. You can only sigh. Good luck, mc.
The third boy and the girl are the little bats. The boy is a little weird but that's how Aaron likes it. Hehe. Like, he's just so cute! One time he'll be right here in daddy's arms, and in the other... Huh? WhERES MY BABY? HE TELEPORTED.
And the girl! Oh, she's so sweet! Once Aaron danced for her and when she swung her fat little arms, she created a shockwave that made him fall on his bum! That's it, daddy's little warrior!!!!
He's a great dad and he'll train his kids from the beginning. He's gentle yet strict, and your kids seem to love training with him. He also likes reading with his kids and teaching them about nature and how to hunt in their human forms. (The kids like it bc the actual rewards are fruit for the cubs and frozen bunny blood popsicle for the vampires.)
Raphael:
Just a little boy.
He's tiny, and no talk him bc he angy. Yes, he's got some bite to him. He likes wearing big hats and he paints. Biggest garden assistance for Vlad. (He likes Aaron more. He has a plan of owning the garden when Vladimir dies, but he doesn't know yet... ToT)
He's very educated and supportive of people with disabilities and he learned to paint with different textures and layers so his daddy can feel his work!!!! Raphael cries every time.
Raphael is comprehensive and tends to pay his head way too much every time he does some "oopsie". He also supports his kid and teaches him how to do stuff without seeing because he thinks of the day his kid will have to fend for himself and walking at night in the dark wasn't good when he first started.
Raph trusts his kid with the boys, but Aaron and Vlad are his go-to if he can't spend some time with his kid because he knows they'd only do what they think it's best for the kid. He also eggs his son on when it comes to exploring and running around. No sun though!
(You often catch him walking around during daytime. Y'all just Do. Not. Know. How y'all can't see where he is hiding until you realize this kid can literally conceal himself anywhere. Also he's very good at not burning himself so you stop worrying at some point and he'll just start sleeping during day)
Was he doing that just to scare Raph? Oh, he'll see what's scary. No kisses tonight >| |(
He's also extremely protective of his kid even though he tries to get him to see the world. A minute late and he'll be lectured severely, so please step in sometimes or they'll fight and raph tends to cry. It's gonna take him time to realize his kid can handle himself because he's fragile in your vampire's eyes.
Beliath:
You can see her ANYWHERE. She has two beautiful curled horns and an extremely ravishing purple hair full of curls. She isn't stoppable. She's confident, smart, social, a business woman! She's five! she's not only Beliath's daughter. She is fashion itself.
Beliath is her number one fan, supporter and manager. He'll spend the rest of his life moisturizing washing combing and zipping things up and down if that means his daughter is the most ravishing kid in this city.
One day you'll wake up panting to your kid sitting in bed looking at you as if she was a psycho though. You were dreaming just now of your kid waving at you. Yep, she's got her daddy's powers. A few months later, she's going to be itching her back like crazy. Beliath is going to be jealous because hey! He had no wings! >:(
One day he'll wake up with her appearance all twisted and then she'll create the sickest illusions like a goose head and a penguin wearing glasses. You'll have a lot to teach.
Beliath scolds her A LOT and she gets grounded A LOT because she's him but smaller and they fight a lot over how she should learn how to be humble and try her best instead of just thinking she's the best but she won't listen bc... She's the best?
She's the greatest performer ever. Knows how to dance and that's what she does the most. Another party animal for you. Now turn them Barney songs on!
For some reason, she absolutely LOVES Raphael. I think it's because he's got shiny outfits and he's chill so she can brush his hair however she likes AND read her books for him. Lives rent free on the library reading princess stories and complaining about the princes.
Vladimir:
A boy. He's shy, sweet and super articulated. His hair is blonde and he loves to wear nice clothes. Another one who'll bicker with his dad like he's talking to a kid his age.
Also he can hipnotize others in a specific way that turns him invisible when he wants and he can be persuasive, but it's hard to develop your powers when your dad is always complaining about the millions of cars you left on the floor and you're grumpy so every time you hide on the walls and turn invisible he complains and you go "tch, old hack" and he hears you. Tough life, grrr.
Even though they fight SOMETIMES, all they talk about when they're together is cuddles, studying and gardening. Vladimir is the actual mom if you wanted to be addressed to as the mom, just forget it lol, if not it's fine, you have a mom for your son.
He grounds your kid and talks it out calmly because even if they fight, your kid is a very good listener and he knows when words are well-meaning.
They sleep together a lot like two old grandpas and you have the advantage of Vladimir not knowing about modern cameras. Have fun!!!
Your kid ends up growing up to be an ABSOLUTE gentleman. He's funny, smart, handsome and really educated. Momma owl Daddy is proud!!!
Ethan:
IT'S A BOY AND A GIRL. BEWARE. HELPAJDHIAJDIAJD
They're trouble. Trouble.
Ethan yells, rips his hairs off, jumps and rolls on the floor but these kids, they're absolute raccoons! The girl literally can control minds Neil style and the boy is a tracker just like his father.
Honestly they're smart, but they just like to use it to make his dad go crazy!
They love each other tho, they rarely get in trouble and they behave when you say so. They're scared *laughs evil laugh*
Ethan teaches them many things and since he can't fight so much, he sends them to train with whoever they like. The girl usually hangs into Beliath's sleeve and they get along super well. He teaches her hand in hand and the boy goes with Aaron because his tracking skills are developing. Sometimes he takes both of them and teaches them knife combat and how to be a good medical support because again, being a vampire is tough.
The boy likes embroidery and Ethan thinks he's weird because he makes some sick Dinosaurs but he tells him to go off. He likes how well made they are.
The girl enjoys violence fighting more so she trains extra hard.
Ivan:
This is the sweetest kid of the bunch. Your little girl. Is the shy baby you see clinging to their companion's shirt/pants in the street. She likes gardening herself, not with anyone else. She plants some flowers in a space Vladimir didn't use and she shoos everyone off, but gently bc babygirl is never mean... Until she finds out she has fangs
She's going to run to you crying and pull her lips up and squint as if struggling and then BAM, fangs are out! You'll have to explain with Ivan what's going on. She understands *sniff*.
Ivan is head over heels for her. They read together, they play board games and she's extremely skilled at every single one. She loves to pursue education on her favorite themes and she likes fiction.
Little girl also loves fashion and she wants someone to teach her how to sew. If you don't know it's okay, she'll put extra effort in learning to teach you!! "You'll see, we'll be sewing in no time, I'll teach you too!"
Sometimes you wonder if you're being a parent right because she just doesn't get grounded. You speak once, she never does it again. Is she really Ivan's daughter? "Hey!" "Shut up, go back in the hole or I'll use the stick!" "Ouch, stop!"
She turns very aggressive when she fights though, to the point where you're worried about the others when they teach her, because she fights like her life depends on it and she doesn't hold back until she overexerts herself. Turns out your daughter can use some sort of gravitational field and if you don't stop her, she might send one flying or pull them right into her clutches, so be careful.
Overall 100/10 great kid. Ends up designing hundreds of clothes and lives her life peacefully.
#moonlight lovers#sfwbunny#moonlight lovers headcanons#moonlight lovers fanfiction#bunny's writing#ml aaron#ml beliath#ml ethan#ml raphael#ml vladimir#ml ivan
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My approach to flat colors + limited palette drawings
This is a follow up to this post i made about how i go about figuring out a color palette for my limited palette drawings. an anon asked me about my actual technique of finishing them so this is gonna be an explanation of how I work in a limited palette with flat colors. I ended up with these thumbnails for a sketch last time so we’re gonna work from here and I’m gonna sort of walk through how i got to the finished version
first things first: every part of this process is just developed as a result of me messing around. take my advice with a grain of salt and if you think you know a way to do something better/that makes you more comfortable. go with that over what I say.
I’m honestly a little surprised when people express confusion about how i draw like this because it’s SUPER simple - literally all you’re doing is just stacking solid color blocks of shape. its very imprecise despite how sharp everything ends up looking.
First things first is that you want to decide how you will be handling your edges throughout the duration. Do you want your shapes to be ultra-sharp and precise, or do you want a little bit of a wobblier, grainier edge? Both can look good but it’s VERY much a matter of situational basis. i’ve been favoring looser and grainier shapes so that’s how i’m going to be working on this.
on the left here, you can see the shapes made with precise rectangular selections and an untextured pen, on the right, freehand drawn shapes and a grittier pen. There’s something immediately pretty different feeling about them. So play around with that first - its not something that’s fun to change halfway through! But lets step back a minute. It helps to work large to small. The two biggest shapes here are these orange chunks and everything gets stacked on top of them so i’m gonna do that first.
Now, a key feature of what i do: clipping masks. almost all digital art programs have them. What a clipping mask does is it constrains the pixels of a layer to the transparency of the layer below it. Here I have the light orange layer, and then on top of it the buildings and billboard are clipped to the orange. Most of you probably already know this and I’m overexplaining a bit, but there was a time when i didnt know how clipping layers worked and someone had to explain it to me.
now you’ll notice the shapes of the buildings are rough, and sloppy. here’s the fun part: since this is all about stacking shapes, only your exterior edges matter. this all gets filled in. be as sloppy as you want when you’re making your shapes. in fact, the outside edges get trimmed out a bunch to when i do this - i go in and erase them clean. Don’t be too finnicky about drawing perfect and precise! its a waste of time. As long as the silhouette is what you want, the interior can be a nightmare.
Working this way, it’s important to keep your layers stacked in a way you can make sense of. Right now there are four layers here: the background dark orange, the two main orange rectangle shapes, and then the buildings on one layer and a billboard on the other. I rack up a LOT of layers doing this and it makes it annoying in some aspects, but being able to freely recolor any one chunk without losing my detail is a key aspect of this.
So, I block those out
Next, I do the same for the smaller chunks that are still main shapes. There are once again, a lot of layers here. The top layer is the hair - you can see the head showing through it. The head and arm underneath the hair, same layer. Then the cup. Then the light green pieces of paper. Then the dark green ones.
The cup is technically farther forward than the head and arm so you would think it’d go on top, but the point isnt to recreate the foreground and background hierarchy with layers so much as it is to group things in a way i can work with. The cup goes underneath so it can be grouped with all the other objects on the table.
now, i just go and fill in all the shapes. i forgot to do the blinds but i get them later. you might notice a lot of these shapes are pretty rough, which was harder to notice before they were filled in. Now that I can see better, I go in with an eraser and clean up the edges until they’re the shape I want
sometimes erasing leaves little bits of ‘noise’ around objects like on this napkin here. i like to keep a little bit of this noise for texture, but if you dont like it make sure to get rid of it! if you’re working very crisp this will stand out a LOT
Next up is to add some detail onto the objects
I flipped the canvas here because the head shape was wrong - the ears were uneven and i wanted to fix it. I want to go about adding detail onto the billboard and buildings. i do all detail with clipping masks - but the objects are clipped to another layer and so nothing can be clipped to them. instead, i unclip them and just erase by selection for the same effect
all of the text on the papers is clipped to the papers below it. the buttons are clipped to the phone. the yellow photos and card are actually another independent layer on top, in case i want to recolor them separately. im indecisive and end up recoloring things a lot. For the most part these objects are starting to become recognizable as more than just shapes
i go in an add the details on the background and character now. theres some more stuff on the table. the lines of the face and ears are on one layer, and the flats of the eyes below that. Here’s what each group of layers is, and what they look like on their own
The background/bottom chunk. Just the table, window, and shirt.
The middle bit. All the stuff on the table and the blinds.
Finally, the top, which is just his head and arm.
now this stage is the bare bones of the drawing. you can more or less tell everything that’s happening. it reads. but its very much lacking in something - it doesnt have a ton of depth or interest. and adding that additional detailing, the dept and interest, is where stuff starts getting REALLY tricky and subjective.
im gonna take you to a much simpler scenario to show the sort of options i go through at this stage
ahh its our dear friend, sphere casting shadow. this is, more or less, the kind of image we have. you can tell whats happening but it’s lackluster. there are TONSSS of ways frm here that you can go add interior detail to a shape once it has been established. here are some quick and SUPER rough examples
from top left to bottom right: flat cel shading, softer airbrushed/gradient shading, halftone, and a textured brush. Each of these has their strengths and weaknesses. They can also be combined.
for example, here’s the solid cel shading being used to contain a gradient/airbrushed detail. This image - probably the single oldest piece of my art i still willingly show people - is entirely colored with gradients being contained in cel-shaded chunks. It has a sort of soft, luminous quality but without losing its crispness.
here’s a super quick bust with some variations of stuff going on. obviously this is no masterpiece but you see how different types of detailing can interact with each other and be used to distinguish materials too.
With the mob psycho comic I did, the detailing that wasnt line was done using a variety of halftones of different shapes layered on top of each other
by contrast parts of my ace attorney comic use a textured brush and have a sort of blended, papery feel
any of them can work for pretty much anything as long as you are using it with intent. practice around. mix styles of finishing together. find a comfort zone. the more you do it the more intuitive it becomes and at the heart of it this process is a very intuitive way of drawing because of how far removed it is from realism.
Now here is the trick - light and shadow.
Everything up to this point has been very flat and adding detail helps but there’s only so much that can accomplish. To get HEAVY light and shadow you need to think about things differently. I think if there’s any part of this process that’s complicated, its this one.
To truly get the most out of your palette, you need to pick chunks of an image to be in higher/lower light and then either ‘step up’ or ‘step down’ the colors in that chunk. here’s what I mean.
Here’s our ball with a beam of light on it. Everything Within the beam of light is one step in our limited palette lighter than anything outside of it. Here’s how I go about doing this: the shape of the beam of light is below everything else. Then, once I have the shape blocked out, i select it. With that selection in place, i go to EVERY SINGLE LAYER that’s effected, lock the opacity, and recolor that chunk. So what’s going on here is that there is only one more layer - the beam of light, below everything but the background, and the rest of this effect is just caused by every layer above it now being two-toned following the exact same silhouette. THIS is why it’s so important to keep your layers separate - if the shadow and highlight had been painted onto the base directly, i would not be able to do this without significant effort.
This works with all of the finishing techniques I talked about above
A combination of cel shading and half toning, all stepped up to give the appearance of heavier light on one area.This is also how I go about rendering transparency in this style. All of my layers are fully opaque and I allow the colors to do the work of conveying transparent material
Here’s our ball with the patterned/textured brush shading, being viewed partially through a window
it’s obviously not a very representational way of working, but as long as your audience UNDERSTANDS what you’re trying to convey, then you’re executing it successfully.
So with that, now we’re gonna go and finish this drawing.
For this one, I decide a big central shadow is necessary. In the original thumbnail, he was backlit, which I still plan on doing, and that wouldn’t make sense without casting a shadow.
I’ve had to change the colors of some objects entirely in order to get this to work right. This is what I mean when I call this an intuitive process - some stuff felt weird, so I changed it. This also involves a bit of problem solving. The newspaper is now unable to be separated from his hand. Sometimes changing the color of an object makes that object look better, but ruins its relationship with the objects around it. It’s up to you to learn how to adjust and finagle things until you get it where you want.The paper he has and the napkin underneath it also all blend together now.
The next few parts of this process are REALLY just trial and error, where I toss a bunch of spaghetti at it until it works. It’s hard to decide what to screenshot, because I don’t know what will or will not be part of the finished drawing. To that end, you can watch the recording of this drawing here. This video isn’t edited at all so it contains a couple of minutes of really shitty sketching, and then all of the color thumbnailing work i did in the last post. Actually getting started on these final colors begins around the two minute mark. It is also sideways, I am sorry I don’t know why.
Now, here you can see where I’ve more or less worked things out. His hand’s not on the cup anymore because my friend pointed out it didnt have an arm attached to it. I added some halftoning to make a gradiating effect in the sky and on the table to give the impression of a sunrise. His eyes are different but as of posting this, I don’t like them and am probably about to go back and change them again. The Cup now has a shadow and some rim lighting. His hand is in shadow. The stain on the napkin is big enough to define the edge of the paper on top of it.
Little things like that.
The more you draw like this the more the way you need to think about your space becomes natural. I hope this helps and I wish you all the best of luck!
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allow me to rant about the only thing that has been in my brain for the past two months and that is doll customizing babeyyyyy
i know there’s a 90% chance that you wont give a Shit about any of this but here we go anyways
SO first you gotta choose a doll. preferably one with a high range of motion to avoid creating new joints or having annoying limitations like not having elbow joints for some fucking reason. what the fuck mattel. give monster high dolls back their ball jointed shoulders and elbow joints. smh
the most common dolls ive seen used as bases are monster high and ever after high. most customs ive seen are highly stylized so the stylized face molds work well for those types of dolls but dolls like barbies are good for when you want a more realistic face-ups.
once you’ve got your base picked out you gotta wipe that bitch’s face off with like. acetone or nail polish remover or something strong like that. you can also use acetone to shrink doll heads which is cool as hell imo. n e way once the face is wiped you gotta chop off the hair and remove the hair plugs from the inside. ive seen this done several ways but the easiest and most common way ive seen is to dunk the head into boiling water for ~30 seconds until it gets squishy and malleable. once you’ve got the head back, you can use pliers (i think tweezers would work in a pinch) to pull out the hair plugs which are kinda icky because theyre covered in glue and other gross shit. ew
now you must decapitate the doll. dunk em back in the boiling water to soften them back up then just tug the head off. the neck pegs look funky and are usually a different color than the body so thats cool ig
once the head’s off, you can start the face-up which is basically just giving the doll a new face using stuff like watercolor pencils, acrylic paint, gouache, and a whole lot of other stuff. hell ive seen people use person makeup on these dolls.
next,,,,, hair. there’s about twenty million ways to do hair from gluing yarn wefts to sewing to rerooting with purchased nylon doll hair or yarn wefts but i’m gonna talk about the most common one ive seen which is rerooting and gluing.
before you can reroot, you need doll hair. which, as i mentioned, can be bought at stores like the doll planet or made at home with yarn in literally any color. have fun with it! make rainbow hair or something idk
to make homemade wefts, you take some acrylic yarn, cut it twice as long as you want the hair to be (keep in mind you can cut and style the hair once it’s been rerooted), fold them in half, and tie it to something sturdy like a wire coat hanger for the next step.
once you’ve got your yarn tied to your hanger, use a pet brush and brush the yarn until it’s wispy and looks like hair. then take a straightening iron and iron the weft flat. then remove from the hanger and boom. hair wefts. ta-da
to reroot the wefts onto the head, use a rerooting tool (which can be as simple as a needle with the eye cut at angle) (just google it please i’m shit at descriptions)) to poke small sections of the hair into the head. you can use the pre-existing rooting holes for your own reroot as they’re usually pretty reliable. to reroot, take a small length of you doll hair (about 10-15 strands), loop it in half, and put the middle of the loop into the reroot tool. poke the end of the tool with the hair on it into the pre-existing hole and remove the tool. the hair *should* stay in and fill up that plug!! also remember to plug thickly at the hairline and part of the hair where it's most noticeable. it doesnt matter as much in the center of the head as that’s not usually visible on the doll. once you’ve rerooted, squeeze in strong glue through the neck hole and squish around the head to make sure it covers all the plugs and secures them in place. then pour hot water onto the head to make the hair lay flat for styling later.
also, you can reroot yarn directly into the head to make thicker, more textured hairstyles. and since the yarn is thicker, you dont need to glue the inside of the head for the hair to stay in place!!
if youre not doing body modifications (which are also cool as hell) then it’s time for clothes but clothes are boring and i like body mods more so i’m gonna rant about them instead
the material ive seen most doll artists use is apoxie sculpt, which is like play doh on steroids. it comes in two parts which you gotta mix together for some reason. why dont they sell it pre-mixed. what was the reason. also once it’s dry it’s super super strong and you can sand it, drill into it, paint it, and all kinds of stuff. very nice and i want some for myself.
you can use hand saws and drills and shit to whack off doll limbs to make stuff like digitigrade legs or new joints. also dont be afraid to use other mismatching doll parts when customizing like heads and bodies and forearms and hands and shit. it literally does not matter if youre gonna recolor the doll anyways so have fun with it. make frankenstein’s doll if youre feeling spicy
accessories my beloved. stuff like tiny beads and clay baubles and shit will literally transform the entire doll plus they’re adorable and multi-purpose
i suppose i must talk about clothes now. ah well. you can find great clothing patterns if youre new to customizing on other customizer’s etsy shops and probably google although those will probably be lower quality than paid pattern pieces. and keep in mind that if it exists as clothing irl, you can likely make it doll-sized. there are literally no limits to your clothing options as long as you can execute your idea.
the once all your components have been made, you can assemble the doll again!! and finally see what all the parts look like together!! very cool 10/10 stars.
ight that wraps up my doll rant. i could really go into more detail on certain parts but thats a whole other rant for a whole other day smh. sorry for fucking flooding your inbox ender ahaha……………. you asked for this
little did you know that dolls have been one of my favorite things since like ever. if i can read a 25 chapter long fanfic i can read this B)
mattel definitely fucked up by completely ruining MH doll designs and just stopping EAH, alot of their profits most likely came from people who collect and customize dolls and by changing MH doll designs/Stopping EAH dolls they 1. most likely lost a small (or big if we're not jus talking people who customize dolls) part of their profit and 2. made it harder for doll customizers to make dolls/get commissions out rather quickly because they probably have to waste more time making joints or learning how to make joints.
EAH/MH dolls (specifically MH dolls) had AMAZING MODELS because there was so much variety with height, face shapes, etc (my favorite molds had to be the short/tall dolls and the cat molds because of the tails) and doll customizers really went all out with enhancing a molds unique features. The only "downside" abt MH dolls is that they (or atleast most)(from what i remember)) had slimmer faces but wider eyes while EAH dolls have wider faces with slimmer smaller which left a canvas for the face and not the eyes (and vice versa for MH dolls)
I've never seen any videos where a barbie is customized (maybe because i absolutely despised barbies at the time) so I'll definitely have to check those out but they seem to be good for realistic makeovers. I've seen like like semi realistic makeovers for EAH/MH dolls that were pretty good too tho (pretty sure mostly EAH dolls since yk MH dolls were used for creature makeovers while most EAH dolls weren't)
yeah i was always amazed by the head shrinking with acetone. honestly i still am?? idunno i have no idea how that chemical bullshit works. Ive seen a few of uh makeovers that just pain over the face (in multiple layers ofcourse) but that's usually when they're painting the entire body a different colour (again usually when they're turning a doll into a funky little baby man). I've also seen a few that just chop the hair off and take out the hair plugs yk without uuh like softening the head or just go straight for the hair plugs after taking off the head (i used to do that it was funny to me??). i always really liked when they used watercolour pencils or just colour pencils in general to draw/sketch on the face cause like wow ur drawing on ur doll without ruining it?? kinda epic maybe even poggers and pogchamp?? oh god my brain is failing wjshsmsj.
Watching them putting the hair back on the doll was, other than the face stuff, was the BEST part for me. Favorite type of hair was iuuuuuh was either thick yarn or brushed out yarn. Literally worship the people that would reroot the hair, theyre the most patience people on this earth!! it's literally insane but i guess that's what happens when you've been doing that for years? you guess kinda get used to it. when they put glue into the head does it just become stiff?? like it's just a clump of dried glue or does it like..hollow out again??
dude you literally cannot convince me most of the supplies used for doll makeovers. APOXIE CLAY LOOKS SO FECKING GOOD. its edible and i will die on that hill. The body mods are literally so amazing!!!!! it's so impressive how theyre able to imagine certain features THEN LIKE ACTUALLY MAKE IT LOOK ACCURATE TO WHAT THEY WANTED TO LOOK LIKE AFTER LIKE ON TRY (or many yk trial and error is very necessary for..everything). Absolutely loved when doll customizers would saw off a dolls legs and use different ones or just completely get rid of the torso to use a different one. it's like uuh that one big guy that's mismatched and sewn together. very cool. The accessories are so fun!! just small little details you seen really need but can add because it's your feckin doll!! I used to be absolutely obsessed over the doll clothes i would find on etsy, so much so that i started sewing shitty shirts and dresses for my uh "customized" dolls (they were absolute HORRORS idk WHY my mom let me feck up my dolls like that).
Thank you for this!! i haven't been able to talk about any of my interests for a while and this just really made me happy!!
Question fer u my fellow MH/EAH enthusiast: what was your favorite MH/EAH movie/episode and doll series. Mine was The fusion dolls (MH obvi) and that MH movie "Haunted" cause we got to know more about Spectra :D
#YOOOO LONG POST?!#long post#:) hehehe#this was very fun to read cant wait for ur next fanfic length ask#asks :D#theoreticallyjasper
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In It For The Long Haul - Chapter 4
Violence warning. Mac’s POV.
MacCready followed the boss as they crossed the bridge into Sanctuary. It had been a week since the Pip-Boy incident, and she seemed to be doing far better. He had been worried that he would lose the job because he did not think before he spoke, although it would not be the first time. That was how he lost his first caravan job. Being stranded in the middle of the wasteland was not fun.
They were coming back from helping Starlight with raiders. For whatever reason, the northwest Commonwealth was a hotspot for them. He did not complain though. Taking care of raiders was well paying, even if the settlers did not actually pay them. The raiders in this area seemed stupider than the average, making it more like free target practice than work.
He smiled softly as Dogmeat bounded up to them to say hello. He would not admit it, but he was starting to grow fond of the dog. He watched as his tail wagged wildly as the boss greeted him. She had asked him why he called her that, and not by her name. He had simply shrugged and said that was how he addressed all his bosses. It was true, but it served a purpose as well. It was to help prevent him from getting too attached. After all they say naming something creates a bond.
He wandered off towards the house as she left to greet the settlers. He did not particularly care for them, and they did not seem to mind him being distant.
Inside his room he sorted through his newly acquired gear. Other than the safe he had pushed into a corner, it did not look like it belonged to him, or anyone really. The lack of personalization was another thing he did to keep from getting attached. He did not know how long the job would last, though he hoped it would be for the long term.
He heard a knocking on the door frame. He turned to see the boss standing there, arms folded.
“When you’re done, we gotta go,” she said.
He raised an eyebrow at her, “Already?”
“Yeah. Tenpines needs help… again,” she explained. He could hear the frustration in her voice. This was the third time they had requested help in two weeks. She seemed to like helping people, but this was a bit much for her apparently.
He sighed, “They should really think about moving at this point.”
“No kidding. Sturges was going to send some turrets to Starlight, because of how close they are to Lexington. Might have to send them there instead.”
When he was ready, they took off. The sun was about to start setting when they left. Normally, he did not like leaving that late in the day, especially this time of year, but Tenpines was a short trip.
When they got there they were greeted by terrified farmers. Whatever had happened was worse than the usual.
“What’s the problem?” the boss asked curtly. For once she was straight to the point.
She must be pretty damn annoyed, he thought.
“Super mutants.”
That explained a lot. Even though pay would be reduced, he would never complain about taking down super mutants. It would make his life easier in the long run. Besides, it was easier to deal with raiders. At the very least they could be bribed or threatened into submission. Super mutants on the other hand, not so much.
“We were barely able to hold them off last time. We need your help to defend ourselves.”
As callous as it was, he was honestly surprised they had survived at all.
“We’ll take care of them. Do you know where they’re coming from?”
“No, but they should be coming back tonight.”
“Alright. If you need us, we’ll be over there,” she said, pointing to the ruins of an old house.
It did not offer them any shelter other than keeping them up off of the ground, but the lack of walls allowed them to keep watch of their surroundings. They spread out their bedrolls to act like cushions as they sat there waiting. He had not been alone with her like this in over a week. They had managed to get back to Sanctuary by nightfall in the days prior. They spoke to each other, obviously, but it was mostly jokes, snarky comments, and stuff related to the old world he did not understand. They had not had a proper, sit down conversation in over a week. He wanted a way to pass the time, and having a talk like that seemed the best way to do it.
“Do you know the story of Hercules, or rather, Heracles and his twelve trials?” she asked suddenly.
“Uh, no? Who the heck is that?”
“A hero from an old myth. It is, or was, one of the most well known.”
His curiosity piqued. He raised an eyebrow at her, “You're point?”
“We’re just waiting around, right? I’m trying to find a way to pass the time,” she explained. It seemed that she had read his mind.
“By telling me about some old myth?” he asked.
“By telling you a story.”
She then proceeded to tell him the story of the old mythical hero, and his most famous legend. She painted a fantastical picture with her voice. The setting was vivid, and the people came to life. The way she spoke made everything seem so real. He could not see the things she described, but he could clearly envision every word that she said. He was completely captured by the story.
He looked at her in amazement when she finished. She had a good voice in general, but he did not expect her to be such an amazing story teller. He wondered how she learned to tell stories like that, if it had anything to do with the vault. The more he learned about her, the more confused he became.
“Damn, Boss. Didn’t expect you to be a storyteller.”
She merely shrugged in response.
Before he could say anything else he heard a noise in the distance from behind them. He stilled completely, staining to make the noise out. Then he realized what it was.
“They’re coming,” he said as he readied his rifle.
She nodded. She grabbed her pistol, and edged past him. They waited with baited breath. The voices grew louder and louder. He stared through his scope, eyebrows furrowed together. The moment the first head popped into his field of view, he pulled the trigger. The bullet buried itself in the mutant’s head.
The ensuing roars of fury chilled him to the bone. As stupid as they were, they were not a force to be messed with lightly. He felt panic rise in his chest when he saw how many of them there were. Counting the dead one, there were a dozen of them.
How the hell did they manage to survive? he thought.
The three with sledgehammers rushed towards them. Two of them fell quickly. MacCready was barely able to take the third before he raised the hammer to slam it down on the boss's head. He could see the fear in her face veiled behind steely resolve.
Bullets rained down on them. Most of them missed, but he felt one graze his right arm just below the shoulder.
The fight lasted for what seemed like forever. When it finished he felt his body sag with relief< which was short lived. He heard footsteps coming from behind him. He whirled around to find it was just the farmers.
They proceeded to thank them profusely, just as they had last time. When they left the boss noticed the darkening cloth on his arm.
“You’re bleeding,” she said, reaching out slightly.
He pulled away slightly, “I’ll be fine. It’s just a graze.” He did not want to go through the hassle of dressing the wound with one hand.
“It’s still an open wound. You could get an infection.”
“I’ll be fine. Besides, it’s kind of hard to clean up a bullet hole with one hand.”
“I’ll do it for you,” she offered.
“Didn’t know you cared about me so much, Boss,” he teased.
She rolled her eyes in response.
“You can’t keep me alive if you die. Especially to something stupid like an infection. Just let me clean and bandage it.”
He sighed in resignation. He sat down and leaned against one of the barely there walls.
“You're going to need to take off your duster and you’re button up. If your undershirt is a short sleeve you can leave it on,” she explained as if he had never been patched up before.
He shrugged his first two layers off the wounded shoulder. It was too cold for him to take them off all the way. He rolled the sleeve of his undershirt to give her better access to the wound. She reached out with her left to steady him. He jerked away when her fingertips brushed his shoulder. They were far more calloused than he had been expecting.
“You okay? Did that hurt?” she asked, raising an eyebrow at him.
“Your fingers are just rougher than I was expecting,” he confessed.
“That’s what happens when you play guitar,” she said simply.
That caught him off guard. Not only was it rare for someone in the wasteland to be able to play an instrument, she was actually talking about herself in a way other than her thoughts on the situation on hand.
“You can play the guitar?” he asked before he could stop himself.
“Yeah. I’ve been playing since I was ten.”
“Well, damn.”
There were so many other things he wanted to say. A lot of questions. Despite his curiosity, he held back his tongue. He was so intrigued by this mystery woman. Probably too much.
Chapter 3 Read it on ao3
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Hello there! Procreate user here, I got a collection of brushes from an artist I follow on ig, there are some brushes that are really good in there. If you have any questions about procreate I think I could answer them! Have a good time touching things and discovering what they do in it, it's really fun and full of things,I even discovered something a few days ago and I use it since June.Sorry for the bad english and bye!💖 (I'm very shy bc this is the first ask without anon) Much love, -Echo
thanks!
(also could you please tell me their @? 👉👈)
honestly, my main question about procreate would be "why the fuck doesn't tapered end work on ANY brush except the one i miraculously made and now just keep duplicating and editing to get different tools". like, i didn't do anything differently with that one (i think), but it's the only one in which it works. so that's pretty weird. i'm learning stuff slowly!
i'm beginning to like my current brushes, plus i REALLY like the finger shortcuts (undo, redo, full screen, erase layer), that's super convenient. like i don't have to tap the buttons, i can just tap/smudge with two/three/four fingers and it's done- it's already become automatic for me. so i'm starting to like it! tbh i probably should just dowload some brushes to get it to work better. (the only standard brush i like in it is the soft blend, it makes my painting-style pieces much easier and smoother).
(also shush, your english isn't bad at all! it's really good for not being your first language, too! and i really hope i'm not making you nervous or coming off as intimidating or anything, i'd hate if that were the case :( cause believe me, i'm awkward as hell too.)
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I feel like today was a lost day but I know it actually wasnt. It just felt like a weird day. And I just had a guy I used to work with at ships come on my facebook and make me upset. But I unfriended him so whatever. He's just the type to like. Keep going. Like Im half expecting an email from him. Lets home not.
I slept okay last night. And I woke up around 9 feeling okay. I just laid in bed for a long time playing on my phone. But eventually I did get up and I did make the bed and I did go get a shower and washed my hair. Made me feel a lot better about myself.
I sat with James and he read and then went to go do laundry. Somehow he fills our entire laundry and I have like 4 things in there. I dont understand how he makes so much laundry but he is working in a kitchen so it makes some sense.
We had a nice morning. I had some of the leftover pizza. But I was unsettled. I changed my outfit like 5 times. I just couldnt get comfortable. James called the bike shop and my bike was ready to pick up. So it was decided we would walk there and then go to the BMA because they had a bunch of goats eating the overgrown hill. A program they have called "Goats on the Slope" incredible.
It was chilly today. Like surprisingly so. I knew it was going to be a little rainy so I brought a raincoat but I ended up wearing it because I was cold more than anything. But it was a nice walk.
We ran into Mr Will and he said he's going to come by tomorrow to check out a weird thing in our bathroom closet. It wasnt to bad of a walk. I thought we had to go a differnt way but James showed me a secret staircase and we were there quickly.
We waited outside, as no one is allowed in the shop. There were two other people there. The one got his son's bike quickly. The other was a woman and they came out and said they had bad news, they had realized one of the spokes on her bike wasnt fixed correctly. And she was like oh thank god I thought you were going to say you threw my bike away. That made me laugh.
My bike was ready though! I havent ridden my bike since basically feburary. So I was a little nervous about my stamina but it ended up being fine. Well not as bad as it could have been.
We left and biked up to the museum. I had to stop once because my breaks were rubbing and I was like fighting my bike. But we sorted it out and that was fine. I did scream at a driver who decided it didnt matter that I had a green light. But soon enough we made it to the park.
I was very out of breath though. I was overheated and shaking. I was uncomfortable. I had to sit down.
James took our bikes and I went and sat on the stairs for a few minutes and drank some water. But man. I was uncomfortable. It was scary hyperventilating like that. I do not do well with hills.
But once I was calmed down We walked over to see the goats. They were very cute. I hope to go back before they leave and I hope they are all eating the brush and having a great time. Only 2 goats were out of their little trailer. But I was glad we still went.
James still had an hour until he had to be at work. I asked to go down to the bottom of the hill, I wanted to see how much brush the goats needed to eat. And so we did that. We got in a little argument about our ballots. Because I feel overwhelmed by it and I have asked for help but he just keeps telling me to fill it out and that isnt helpful! But finally I just said that this conversation was not helpful and we would table it. I didnt want to be upset.
We sat on a wall and I enjoyed looking at the park. We talked for a while. And James said we had time to walk him to work if we left then. He would even have time to get a sandwich and a coffee. So off we went.
It was a nice walk. Long but wasnt bad. I like that part of town. It is amazing to me how different the different neighborhoods are here. Its super redlined and generationally influenced. And Hopkins is a huge influence on the neighborhoods they occupy. And there is a lot of nature is that part of town.
It was a nice walk. And soon we were in Hampden. I held our bikes while he went in Royal Farms and I people watched for a while. I thought about going to get a thai tea but the idea of going inside a cafe didnt feel good. I dont know why. Maybe next time.
I said goodbye to James once we got to the restaurant. And off I went. I was happy to bike. I had a podcast. I was in a good mood.
I followed the jones falls trail and its such a nice little path by the water. It reminds me of penny pack. I ended up parking my bike w Ihen I saw this bridge (James called it Hippy bridge when I texted him about it) that the fence was tore down on and was covered in graffiti. I climbed down the hill and sat on it high above the water. It was neat. I hope I can get myself to go on more adventures like that.
I took my time getting home. I stopped at a bench before a big hill. Took my time. Got home in one piece.
I took a break when I got back here. I was overheated from the biking. But once I cooled down I felt a lot better. I chilled for a while. Laid with sweetP and read. But eventually I decided I wanted to go for a drive.
I saw hi to Kimberly in the hall. And then drove out to Target. Lots of terrible drivers. It was rush hour I guess but people were just so mad they had to wait and kept trying to go around people? Obnoxious. I just enjoyed the drive.
I went to target. Enjoyed wandering around. Picked up a few things. Got poptarts that are cinnamon pretzel flavored. So fancy.
After I finished there I went to the art store to buy spray paint. To paint my bike. But I knew that was going to be a production.
I had five guys. It was fine. But I have had five guys way to often lately. So I think I will be taking a break from that. But I sat in the car and ate and watched the sun set. Saw someone throw a cup out of their window. Terrible trashy behavior. I hate people who litter. Especially from their car. You are going to go somewhere with a trash can!! What is wrong with you!!!
I headed home after that. And then the sun was down and I was like. Very Unmotivated. But then someone upset me on facebook so to distract myself I started stripping the paint off my bike.
This took forever. And honestly I could do more. But I worked on it for 2 hours. I used a blade and there are so many layers. My bike is so fat. But it was fun doing the work. I hope to paint it tomorrow but I think its going to have weird lumps. Well see how it goes.
I have been hanging out since I finished cleaning up all the paint and trash. I just washed my face and had one of those poptarts. I think I am going to drink water and wait for James. I am very much ready for sleep.
I hope you all have a good rest of the night. Take care of yourselves. Goodngiht.
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IT IS FINISHED no seriously, this took ages. First couple of days were fine and motoring along with progress, then I was laid out for a week-ish with health problems. Then once I was well enough again I was back to being fixated on finishing this piece of my lad Joshua here for another handful of days, so I’m super glad this is done now.
More talk about the painting, details and process under the cut:
Art Entry 01, Joshua Rook, Junior Deputy of Hope County. Regarding the painting’s execution, stylistic choices, practiced methods, and speculation on further experimentation for skill and stylization.
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Honestly I thought that the uniform’s large swatches of green fabric would be more difficult than it actually was. Turns out that was the easier part compared to the shoulder patch and metal badge. x’D The metal badge design is based off of and inspired by a custom-ordered cosplay badge design I found while looking for references, in this post here (link,) from v-i-d-e-n-o-i-r’s blog and Far Cry 5 cosplay. There are some differences in the painting’s rendition above, namely I flattened the middle section and made it all concentric polished metal instead of painted and the great seal rendition in the middle doesn’t have silver lineart either. Those choices are as much for aesthetic reasons of eliminating the blue ring so it was all a fairly simple mono-material-looking surface as it was for simplifying having to forego painting the foreshortening that a spherical dome might entail. Also just because the rest of the metal turned out looking good enough that an additional bit of shiny metal seemed like it’d fit right in for this. That being said, the badge design that inspired this one is rad and awesome looking—and I totally didn’t realize it wasn’t quite like the badges from in-game assets until after I’d painted it. x’D So, I decided to stick with this one since it’s simpler and has cleaner lines, and less engraving to pick out highlights on. Metal is very hit or miss for me to get right, so I’m very pleased with how this one came out! :D I think I did well on that one.
The shoulder patch originally I was looking at real world references and ended up changing the shape once I actually looked at in-game references on Staci and Joey—who I discovered have slightly different details on their uniforms, like the font for their name tags—Staci’s has an old-timey-looking-font with serifs, Joey’s is a non-serif more modern-style font. Some pictures have them having different buttons on their uniforms either in color or shape (the former being exported assets, the latter being in-game gifs/screenies/etc.) This is also how I learned that the little landscape with the shovel, pickaxe and plough/plow are part of the great seal of Montana. I had no flipping idea that was what it was, looking at the patches in-game. The cosplay community does some great work for that, for which I’m grateful. I ended up looking up references of what the state seal’s design was so as to see the smaller details, and to find out what the motto meant ”Oro y Plata,” meant, leading to etymology googling adventures from there, as usual. All important details to paint though I think here, since Joshua’s deputy uniform is symbolically significant to him and will remain so throughout his story as part of his internal conflict for a couple of reasons.
One thing I knew I should’ve done from the start, and reminded myself to do, was the fact that I should paint all skin sections at the same time, so as to ensure they all came out the same shades. I did not do this. x’D I’ll have to actually try to do that next time honestly. Same with the hair sections, while I like how they came out, I do feel the differences between the three major segments in terms of brushwork is not as coherent as I’d like, even if beard hair is not necessarily similar in how it lays to scalp hair, particularly with length and such taken into consideration. Still, not bad. Could’ve used more refs for the backlighting and figuring out how the highlights would fit best on the ponytail, but I think the hair curves turned out nice there in particular. Overall, Joshua’s hair ended up messier than I’d thought with how the locks all end up looping this way and that across his head, but it does actually fit him well as a character for his hairstyle to be messy and loosely held together, but functional. It did end up longer than I’d intended, so we have him likely ending up with a nerdy Jesus hairstyle when it’s down. x’D (Thanks to @undead-gearhead for that mental imagery, I shall take great amusement in that should I get around to drawing Joshua with his hair down.)
Aside from that, I think I’m slowly improving on figuring out how to paint glasses, though I’m thinking in the future I should test more layered reflective light on them or something where the frames are in contact or close to skin, particularly around the glasses’ bridge across the nose and such.
Then there are the other deviation details added—like using dark green instead of the black for the uniform accents. The faded black looks great in-game, but I do think the buttons pop more against dark green instead for this painting. I’m a little bit surprised how well the button-placket section came out, Clip Studio Paint crashed when I painted the first rendition of it, sadly losing all that work. I thought it’d be okay but turns out it didn’t quite get to auto-save that recently enough, but the second go around turned out quite well I think, possibly better. I was originally planning to try to put more textured brushwork across the flat sections of the uniform material, but decided to skip it for speed—I’ll test that elsewhere perhaps, though I think it came out well with the watercolor brushes layered on top of one another like that as is. Among the other smaller details, there’s some tweaks and such for how Joshua’s eye shape, eyebrows, nose shape, hairline etc came out compared to references of Greg Bryk in his role as Joseph Seed. I think Joshua did come out looking like he’s obviously related to the Seeds as I was hoping for, but I’m kind of on the fence that people would look at him and automatically assume it’s Joseph specifically that he’s descended from. I hope so, but either way, that’s how he’s written in-fic. x’D
Overall, I would consider this painting a success, though as usual I do wish it’d been faster to finish. I do think this was good practice for detail work, and metal shading, also: buttons. Still haven’t figured out how to paint lips with more pink or red tones, I don’t like the way they look when painted sadly, unless it’s lipstick. That may end up being a stylistic element perhaps, along with how I paint the lines for fingernails and other such details. Fun fact: I have to leave the shading on the eyes for last, or else my brain goes “The eyes are done! We’re done! Call it a day.” I’m not sure why, but so far, leaving them as flats until the end seems to work a treat for keeping me focused on finishing the rest of the work with less mental dissonance.
Now if only I could figure out why despite knowing I should do all the exposed skin portions at the same time, I don’t follow through on that naturally as far as inclinations go. Maybe it’s a layer organization thing and perception of wanting, say, the cloth to be done first before working “down” to the hands and such in the sense of working from the head down? I’ll have to think on that some more and test things in the next painting. Perhaps color coding the order of layers to paint will help? CSP does have a nice layer-icon-color function that I’ve dabbled with here and there. There are so many brushes, I really do need to test out more of them, I use, what, four or five total, but primarily somewhere around two or three. Hm, but what to do with texture, and how to utilize it so?
Hmmm, as far as personal appeal for methodology goes, I might prefer to use textures in select pieces for more emotional emphasis? If I can figure out how to do that in a messier speed-paint style of things. Rougher textures for conflict, for example. That sounds like an interesting idea to explore, I’ll have to remember that for a later piece. Maybe more heavily textured brushes will also help with the mental itch to refine things to a cleaner-level of refining instead of leaving it in a more organically rough state. Hm, maybe it’s a “mental texture” aversion or something, as far as an interplay between the brush’s texture and the flow of the linework/brushstroke. Perhaps more uneven brushes echo that in a complimentary fashion to better allow less mental discomfort for me personally when trying to paint in a faster, looser fashion?
Honestly, very tempting to go try that out sooner rather than later on some art ideas I have, but I’ve been missing my writing very much of late with two time-demanding paintings back to back. So, ideas for a later time to experiment with.
#Far Cry 5#FC 5#Far Cry 5 AU#FC 5 AU#deputy joshua rook#my art#ofravensandgenesis's art#art talk#chatter#writing about art#writing about fanart#queue
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cristalcarrington’s icon tutorial!
a little treat for day 28 of my filmuary challenge!
i’ve honestly lost count of which one this is, but welcome to another icon tutorial! here i’m going to breaking down my icon creation process step by step. i currently am a mac user and all my previous tutorials have been windows orientated (which unfortunately were all lost in the great url loss of 2017). my process hasn’t changed much since then, but i have picked up quite a few new go-to tricks and i’ll be sharing these tips in this post!
anyway! here’s what you’ll need-
photoshop (i currently use photoshop cc so be aware that options and tools may not translate onto other programs/versions of ps) and yes, i do pay for my photoshop but if you’re in need of a decent, safe download i might be able to point you in the right direction so hmu
patience (believe me some of these icons have taken me a painfully long time to create) just don’t feel discouraged if things don’t work out perfectly right away!
a creative mind. please be aware that this tutorial is only for educational purposes. under no circumstance directly replicate my icons! the one involved in this tutorial is clearly fair game, but please try to take creative liberty with your work. what i’ve found a lot of fun is incorporating bits and pieces of what other people do into my own work.
further resources
if you need more reference/help, here’s an icon psd for you to have a look around while reading the tutorial or instead of the tutorial. again, please do not re-upload or redistribute.
please consider reblogging this if you’ve found it useful. or checking out my resources!
starting off
so today, i’m going to tackle a screencap for my ongoing filmuary challenge!
i tend to get my screencaps from google, so for this i literally just googled “mirror mirror screencaps” and selected a image from google images. when i’m not feeling lazy, i tend to go through the whole movie (great screencaps can be found at screencapped or kissthemgoodbye)
my first move is to open the screencap in the photoshop on it’s default canvas. the one i’ve chosen is normally the sort of screencap i’d go for-- one that has a central focus on the character and allows me to get a solid outline.
i tend to avoid screencaps that cut off the top of the characters head. i also tend to gravitate towards scenes that look easy to colour; if you choose overly saturated screencaps or screencaps that are too dark/light, then you will find it difficult to colour while conscious of the screencap quality.
base colouring
i then duplicate the screencap.
and then i set that duplicated layer to screen.
i like to make my icons super bright so i repeat this. it will vary depending on how dark the scene is. i prefer to do this to the screencaps as i find that it preserves the quality of the cap.
alternatively, you can use a psd-- my favourite as mentioned in previous tutorial is @blairsfelicity‘s icon psd which you can find in her tutorial here. my new method is just a whole lot lazier and i’ve been really enjoying the way my icons have turned out.
outlines
now here comes the menial part-- time for the outline.
remember to add a layer (unless you want to break your own heart by doing it directly onto the cap and being forced to start over (which i would NOT recommend by the way, crying over a screencap is as demoralising as it sounds)).
i vary between using the pen tool and a brush/eraser for my backgrounds. i like to shake it up depending on what i feel like doing or what the screencap would best fit. it also completely depends on whether i’m feeling particularly lazy or not-- if i have time to burn, i’ll use a brush. if i’m in a rush, i’ll use the polygonal lasso tool and refine my selection area with masks.
in this tutorial (due to my boredom of doing things over and over, this beautiful filmuary) i’m opting for the brush method. but if you want me to talk through polygonal lasso process which is a lot quicker and really streamlines the process-- then feel free to drop me a message and i’ll be happy to make another talk through.
i like to use a brush for my erasing, on 30-50% hardness. i like to use a diffused/low hardness so my icon doesn’t look too sharp and the background and model seem to go with each other more. i’ll go for a small brush size when it comes to detailing (for example, when it comes to profiles, hair etc).
once i’ve outlined the model, i select the area around her with the magic wand tool and fill in the selected area with either a brush or a fill layer. then i merge the outline layer with the new colour layer.
(these two examples are from another icon process bc im dumb and forgot to take screenshots)
there will be a full little line around the model once you’ve merged the layers. i just tend to fill it in manually with a brush.
now here comes the fun part-- the colouring.
make those colours pop!
as you can see, the screencap has a lot of colours, but we need to make them pop. i take one of the colours, make a new layer and just paint until it’s vibrant and bold.
once you’re happy with your colour selection, set the layer to soft light and adjust accordingly.
i tend to go for softer brushes when it comes to facial features. the lips, to make them a darker colour, i opt to set the layer style to multiply instead of soft light, and paint over the lip shape with a light pink/red.
i always like to highlight the eyes to aid contrast in the screencap. i also like to fill all eyebrows in with a black (set on soft light) as well as the lashline, just to add further dimension and contrast to the model.
prepping the icon
this is what my screencap looks like with the colouring complete. as you can see, each colour is on a separate layer. this is so i can adjust/duplicate each colour accordingly. once i’m happy, i place everything into a group together.
i make all of my icons on a 100x100px canvas.
i like to edit the screencaps on their original canvas as it helps with the quality of the screencap as well as allowing me to outline accurately.
i just drag the files from one tab into another.
and then you can size it appropriately.
my next step is to select the same colour as the background and to paint over the white strip at the top of the icon. i do this directly onto my outline and then merge the two together. you now have the foundations of your icon to build onto!
final touches in the colouring department
there is honestly no direction that i could give you when it comes to these final colouring steps.
i like my icons to be very bright, so i target the contrast with levels and brightness/contrast layers. I like to also turn up the vibrancy to make the colours pop even more.
my preference is for the skin to be very neutral, so i try to combat the saturation of the skin with colour balance and selective colour layers (as well as another step i will explain later in the tutorial)
as you can see above, i place the final colouring all underneath the background layer as this makes it easier for me to place textures later on.
if you have problems with the model’s skin appearing too saturated, i’d recommend taking a solid fill layer of a black/white/grey and setting it to colour. place that layer just above the screencap and adjust it so it combats any saturation you might be experiencing.
textures and finishing touches!
clipping masks are honestly a god send for me.
you can find them by right-clicking on the layers and selecting clipping masks. as you can see above, i use clipping masks to place a green texture on top of the icon’s background. i then layer above that by using further clipping masks, adding other textures and even layers to adjust the colouring of the background.
my favourite place to find textures are livejournal and deviantart-- soaked on livejournal is my go-to at the moment and i really enjoy evey-v’s icon textures. i also have my own resouces/textures that you can find here!
once i’m happy with how the icon looks, i copy all of the layers together and paste them under the background.
this is a super lazy way of sharpening the icon-- an alternative method is explained really well by @jennifergarner (aka the god of icons) on her icon faq page. i have used this in the past but after filmuary i’ve found a few little tricks.
i then just sharpen the icon and adjust the opacity of the sharpened layer depending on my preferences.
and then there we go---
my chosen export settings are just to go for PNG every time. this helps preserve the quality of the icon and help it look super clean and tidy for whoever wants to use it.
and with that, that’s a wrap up of my tutorial.
for other tips and tricks, here are some of my asks that i’ve responded to;
do you have any tips for cutting short/curly/messy hair?
hey, would you mind sharing a psd icon?
what are some of your favorite icons textures?
can you break down how to use different types of textures?
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Artist’s Software Surfing P2 - Inking
This time around I’ve created a better sketch similar to the ones I made for the first part of this exploration series and I have tried different tools in different programs to see if I can learn anything new or find any inspiration among this heap of brushes I’ve accumulated. @o@ Lettuce begin!
Artist’s Software Surfing P1 - Sketching
Artist’s Software Surfing P2 - Inking
Artist’s Software Surfing P3 - Colouring
Artist’s Software Surfing P4 - Painting
Corel Painter
This is the program that is inspiring this journey through different tools and brushes, so most of my time in here is experimentation.
“Liquid Ink” - Dry Camel
I probably should have read the manual on “liquid ink” layers and why they are important, but this time I just jumped right in and started using the tool like I would an inking pen in CSP or Paintstorm. I was surprised how nice it felt, how it would cleanly fill in spaces up to the shadow line I drew, and the subtle texture if I made a light stroke. This “Liquid Layer” system I guess means it changes the behavior of the pixels however, and erasing was a little wild and the ability to pull ink from what would be considered a “blob” was really neat. Fun tool, depending on the style you are going for. Happy accidents happened with this brush so you have to be willing to relinquish a bit of control. My only gripes are, I can’t flip the canvas with this layer type, eraser was more of a hindrance than a help, and cross hatching or shade lines work a lot differently with “wet” ink than I’m used to.
“Artist Favorites” - Scratchboard
This is one I actually remember from back in the day, and when I googled “Inking in Corel Painter” this one came up in a few people’s lists. If you are used to inking on the computer with some stabilization, this is just like those other tools you’ve used. Great line width variance, smooth lines, easy to control, easy to erase. It’s basic, but you get the most control out of it, meaning no happy accidents or unexpected behaviors.
“Natural Media” - Smooth Croquil
This is that awkward moment where I admit to never having used quill tipped pens. I know they are a favorite of many veteran inkers who still work traditionally. I guess it’s on my to-do list. That being said, I have no frame of reference for the expected behavior of this pen, but I actually really enjoyed working with it. This was the “Smooth” version, meaning it had more stabilization in the stroke, but I was surprised at the nice hatching I could get. Would not recommend for filling black solid shapes, but the more “drawing” portion of the inking process, this would probably be my go-to for artwork with big shapes and long, sweeping lines.
Sumi-e
Though I tried many of the options in the brush box, I ended up being pretty disappointed with this set. I never like using digital sumi-e brushes, the usage is just too different considering the traditional brush shape, but the texture in here just makes the artwork look pixelated. I included it just as a special mention. Won’t use it again.
Photoshop, Kyle T Webster’s Inkbox
Lord, I swear I saved past this point of this draft several times and some how Tumblr really dropped the ball. I still have the artwork, but I’ve lost all my immediate first-impressions of the almost dozen Kyle’s Inkbox variants I got to mess around with. A real shame, so I’m going to simply do my best and group them up, as I noticed some patters with some of them. Also, I hadn’t updated in two years and they’ve added a couple of important features I thought Photoshop was missing, like brush stabilization and symmetry drawing.
Nice, Scratch brush with decent texture and line width variance :: Pocketbrush 1, Badass Brush
Personal favorites :: Thick, chunky, expressive, and fun to ink with: Belgian Comics, Fountania, Guelph inker, Seth Comics
Interesting, but impractical :: Brush Beauty, Copier Rat, Fountania Brush Pen
Everything else, as far as I can recall, was just standard smooth pen with a touch of texture.
Paintstorm
Out of the box, this program doesn’t have much. It’s basically your basic round brush with stabilization settings. It’s very fast, however, and the customization is easy and fun if you want to add some texture to your ink pens. The toggle for turning your ink brush into an eraser is as easy as pressing E which makes for some nice hair push-and-pulling. Rewarding to work in, but very basic out of the box.
Krita
So, similarly to Photoshop, I hadn’t updated Krita in a handful of years and some of the features have been updated. It feels a bit better, I am able to mirror view and rotate the canvas just like I like to. I still struggle with the interface a bit but I’m sure I will get used to it with time.
I didn’t find many default pens that I liked or were unique enough to remark on so I just ran with the... (jfc is that really the name?) ... “d)_Ink-7_Brush_Rough” because of its bit of texture that’s revealed more as the lines thin. Figuring out the stabilization options was hell. It took a lot of fudging the sliders and making assumptions on the difference between “Distance” and “Delay” and why those mattered. Most programs just have one slider for brush stabilization. In fact, they all do. Not sure all of these options are necessary, but have at it if that’s your thing.
Clip Studio Paint
Not much out of the box here either, but the customization options are always nice. One thing I do want to mention for inking in CSP is the Vector layer option. You can create a “vector layer” then draw on it with any subtool and to back and edit those lines later. Or you can draw with the Figure tool and adjust lines there. Honestly this feature makes doing linework, especially for hard surface objects, super easy breezy and clean without removing the organic feel in areas that need it. I noticed Krita had vector layers as well, but like I mentioned before I just don’t have a whole lot of experience with that program so I’m not sure if it works the same way.
Well that about wraps it up for inking software, Kyle T Webster’s brushes in Photoshop coming out on top for this particular drawing. o7 I think I’ll do basic colouring next (comic book style). Hope this helped!
Artist’s Software Surfing P1 - Sketching
Artist’s Software Surfing P2 - Inking
Artist’s Software Surfing P3 - Colouring
Artist’s Software Surfing P4 - Painting
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