#look how the background is desaturated | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

heartfullofleeches · 1 year

Text

Clown Talk

Yandere Crime Harem + G.N Clown TV-Showhost Reader

Extortion. Aggravated Assault. Murder.

The list went on for the royal who had it all, and lost almost everything in one night.

A well respected and charitable figure in their community, it was a shock to the masses to see local casino owner, and frequent donor to hospitals framed on the five o'clock news for misconduct. Anyone with a good head on their shoulders and a realistic outlook on the world could see straight through the facade. Beneath that mask was a monster - every good deal that person ever committed a cover for their true goals.

Those they had helped plead their innocence. Those they had wronged tied their noose. The documents leaked to the public would tell which party was correct, wiped clean from history before the victor could be declared. Read aloud in court, each word marked a new trial at play. The execution of the rat bastard who got them into this whole ordeal in the first place.

The criminal know exactly who it was. Caught his hand in the cookie jar resembling their safe weeks ago, but they had enough of a heart to let him go for being the one person his little girl had. Not again. Day in and day out they dreamt of how they'd carry out their revenge. Splattering his brains all over the wall. Slicing him into cutlets and having a nice cookout for everyone involved. It was a beautiful dream. The one thing preventing the compete lost of their sanity. Shouldn't be too long now until their people manage to get them out and their hands around that bastard's neck. Only a matter of time-

"Quit mumbling to yourself- I can't hear the TV."

As if this hell couldn't get any worse. A desaturated rainbow flies across the television screen, showering an empty field with stars and hearts that sprout colorful flowers from the earth. The theme song for the show plays in the background; the strums of each guitar string and the voice humming along to the beat drilled into the criminal's head like psychological warfare. While the voice wasn't totally abysmal it still belonged to their greatest enemy. That fucking clown.

"Good Day, everyone! I've missed you all so much, and am so excited to meet all the new faces. Are you ready all for an exciting day of fun and new adventures?"

The few shouts of agreement make their ears bleed more. Needless to say the prison they had been thrown in was a shit hole. Terrible food, hard beds, and televisions that only played one station without interference. That neon haired, colorblock mess of an entertainer had haunted them from day one of their stay; the sounds chasing them whenever they fled to the sanctuary of their cell. Pathetically, while there were a couple naysayers, majority of the prison population had begun to actually like the show. A body hurls into the seat next to them.

"Thank fuck I didn't miss it. You staying this time, Zero?"

Zero's face wrinkles from the frown lines. 4D was a fellow intimate and the biggest fan of the show. A crook booked for various robberies who just like Zero was ratted on by an acquaintance. The nickname came from their tag including the number fourty and they thought it would be cool in unison with the one they forced onto Zero.

"I told you not to call me that."

"I get that you're some big hot-shot and "adults shouldn't be watching shows for kids.", but it's really good when you sit down and watch it. That clown ain't too bad on the eyes either."

Zero resists the urge to snap their fingers as they air quote. "I'd rather flush my head down a toilet."

"Come on! If ya watch it, I'll leave ya alone for the rest of your sentence."

That catches their attention. Armz crossed, Zero looks at the television. The set had switched to that of a kitchen as the clown speaks

"Juno has been feeling better down today, let's cheer him up with his favorite snack! Before we begin, make sure you always ask for an adults help when handing sharp objects or using the stove. Unless you are one yourself. "

With a wink, they throw an apron and go through the steps of making homemade rice treats with the audience. After putting the tray in the oven, they discreetly pull out another one with a full sheet of the treats already made. Marshmallow fluff and melted chocolate chips ooze from their sides as the clown cuts out a heart shaped piece with a cookie cutter.

"And there you go! A simple, fun activity you can do with family and friends, and even get something taste out of it. Juno prefers chocolate, but you can add a number of things to your own and let your imagination run wild."

Great. Now they were annoyed and hungry. They couldn't stand another segment.

"I'm leaving."

4D whines. "Whaaat? That was barely anything. Hey, don't go-"

They grab Zero's sleeve, but are powerless to stop them as they leave the common area and venture up to their room. Over the guard rail of the second floor, they watch the other inmates mindlessly crowded around the television screen and unironically enjoying it. They would've spat at them had it not been for the guard by their cell. Inside the room, their roommate had left the tv on and that same damned show was playing. They go to turn it off only to be cut off by a fake cry of pain.

"Ouch!"

The clown tumbles to the ground, figure looming over them off screen. They come into frame as they grip the clown's arm and helps them to their feet.

"I'm so sorry, Y/n. I didn't mean to hurt you."

"It's okay, Juno. I know it wasn't on purpose."

The two face the screen as the clown speaks.

"Sometimes our friends do or say things that hurt our feelings. Take a breath, hear them out, but there's one important rule. Remember - forgiveness and friendship aren't always mutual. Sometimes people we may think are our friends go too far, and they believe an apology will make everything okay, but that's not always the case. The best thing you can do is forgive - and let go."

The background music is soft. The clown's smile is sincere, but an offshoot of that silly expression they had moments ago. Forgive. That weasel? There's no way in hell they could. He ruined them. Damaged their imagine. The bitterness Zero held was the only thing that pulled them forward. But what would come after they got their revenge?

"That's all for day, folks! And don't forget- you all may be my helpers, but I am here to help you the most!"

The intimate ends up watching the show until lights out. Each episode holds a new life lesson, cushioned by the silly activites prior to them and the songs the clown and their friends sings at the end. Regrettably, Zero finds their lips twitching upwards and a hushed laugh in their chest at some of the clown's jokes. When the clown visits them in their sleep, the dreams didn't seem as bad as before.

The next day Zero finds 4D in the yard. They're hesitant to speak.

"So... Why exactly do you like that clown?"

4D drops the equipment in their hand, looking flustered. "Wow, uh, why do you ask?"

"Just curious. If it's so embarrassing, I can make it worth while."

4D refuses the cigeratte they offer. "I quit. It ain't nothing serious like that, we just... talked."

Zero raises a brow. "Talked? You some kind of nutcase or something?"

"Maybe, but what I mean is I sent them a letter. After all the rush and freedom of the things I did, I was going mad in here. I got no friends, no family. At the end of every episode there's an address so I thought I'd try and send them a letter. I never expected them to respond. Hell, I thought the guards would tear it up and laugh, but neither of those predictions were true. They... helped me. More than anyone ever had in my life. Even sent me a couple things when I hadn't asked. They're all I have."

4D wipes their face with their sleeve. Zero, unsure, raises their hand to their shoulder, but falls short of a comforting touch.

"..Thanks... Take care."

Zero sits in their cell when the next show comes end. They pen down the address on the screen, wondering if they were really going to go through with this. They write out their letter and hand it off to the only guard they trust.

"What do you do, when you've lost everything."

A response comes in a week's time.

"Hey, there!

First off, I want to say thank you for sending your letter in. From the address and the others I've spoken too, I know that you're going through a really tough time. It's understandable to believe you've lost everything, but there will always be a new ladder to climb to the top so long as you try your hardest. You may be in the dark for now, but the sun will shine again for you some day."

Zero loses track of how many times they read the letter. They can see eraser marks from when the writer rewrote their lines. It was the exact same penmanship as when the clown wrote their name on a drawing they had just finished, clearing out the possibility of it being an assistant on the show. Zero crumples the envelope and throws it in the trash, but tucks the letter under their pillow.

When they are released the following month, they're found sitting in front of the community television.

"Sunshine's beautiful this time of day, isn't it?"

"B...oss, I'm sorry, please."

Zero takes another drag of their cigar as his head is dunked into the freezing waters. The silence makes the scenario one for the books, but for some reason the sun just isn't as bright as it was on those dirty screens. They exhale as the bruised male is brought out of the sea once more.

"I forgive you, and now I'm letting go." They wave to the others on the boat. "Drop him. I don't want to be late for the show."

Arriving at the studio, a whiny voice drills from behind them.

"Aw, man- you got front row seats? Switch with your ol pal. Its the least you can do since I introduced you to them."

#Clown reader #yandere oc #yandere #yandere imagines #yandere x reader #yandere x you #yandere headcanons #yandere insert #yandere scenarios #yandere blurb #yandere x darling #yandere writing #yandere stories #yandere drabble

1K notes · View notes

canmom · 4 months

Text

How do you live?

I (finally!) saw Miyazaki's new film 君たちはどう生きるか (How Do You Live?/The Boy and the Heron)! It's been out in the States for a while, and in Japan considerably longer, but it took a while to make its way over here.

I remember at the time it came out, people were having fun riffing on the incredibly cryptic marketing campaign, which consisted only of this rather abstract poster...

In the spirit of this, I resolutely avoided watching any trailers or knowing anything at all about the plot of the film. I picked up a thing or two here and there - I knew to expect some amazing Shinya Ohira animation for example, and you couldn't really avoid seeing the bird with teeth! - but overall, I had no idea.

There's plenty of great writing about this film in English already, such as kvin's fantastic sakugablog piece which discusses the physicality of Ghibli's animation, its weight and springiness, as a throughline. The stuff that kvin talks about really stood out to me as I watched this film. You can likewise read detailed interviews with Toshiyuki Inoue (fantastic interview for sakubutas) and Akihiko Yamashita on fufuro.

First up, the credits of this film are pretty much a who's who of the greatest jp animators of the last 30 years, and they've had some 7 years to cook it, so naturally this film looks fucking amazing. This is absolutely the kind of film that only Miyazaki could direct - its design language feels so familiar and yet it's iterating in all kinds of visually imaginative directions that show that yeah, the old bastard's still got it.

And like, god, man. This film's animation is really something special. Its real-world scenes in particular are full of shots that require an unbelievably strong sense of space, of both subtle and broad acting, the classic Ghibli attention to detail on mechanical objects and everyday tasks. It's full of bouncing and squishing and squeezing and oozing things. It loves to draw crowds and swarms of people and animals. It's the kind of film where any given shot would be the absolute star-of-the-show sakuga moment in just about any other anime film. If you wanted a complete statement of the Ghibli school of animation, it would be hard to do better.

And yet, for all that Miyazaki's known for his tight control over animation and heavy corrections to animators, in this film he had to step back from that kind of role and hand over the sousakkan reins to Takeshi Honda, who steps up admirably - as kvin writes above, bringing in more realist elements to the bouncy Miyazaki style to create a really effective unity that grounds all the big fantastical elements of the film and fills the first act with tension.

Alongside all that excellent key animation, the film's colour and photography departments evidently understand that well-chosen colours and good highlight shapes beat all the digital gradients and overlays you can imagine - the drawings get plenty of form from the strength of the animation, and the flat shading really pops. The backgrounds are as delicious as ever, skyscapes and vegetation and opulent interiors with the just-slightly desaturated and harmonious colours that just kind of remind you that oh yeah, it is still possible to do it this way.

Basically it's a Ghibli film lol. You know how it is.

But what of the story...? What's all this technical magic in service of?

The film's story has something of the feel of a serial story, perhaps reflecting Miyazaki's (in)famous process of working out the film gradually as he draws the storyboards. Certain ideas, like the parakeet empire, arrive in the film rather suddenly and then become fairly central to the plot. There's a clear emotional throughline, but this is not a film that is in a hurry to explain itself more than it absolutely has to. It wants to keep its magical elements numinous and mysterious. I would say, though, it's generally more satisfying in this approach than some of Miyazaki's other later films like Howl's Moving Castle, and resolves a lot more clearly.

So what is it like, About? Well, Miyazaki has been pretty open about channeling a lot of his personal relationships into the film, and a lot of it seems to reflect more or less obliquely on him. It's what they call a 'personal film'. The protagonist's position as the son of an aeroplane factory owner during WWII is straight-up from life. What about the old sorcerer, haphazardly stacking blocks to keep a world alive, and looking for someone to succeed him? The reading's kinda obvious, even if Miya himself says this guy is based on his memory of Takahata. Well, he can be both...

To say more I'm gonna have to delve into the spoiler zone. See you below the cut.

OK so! Let's try and get some thoughts in order.

first, a plot summary type of thing

Our first act introduces us to Mahito at roughly the moment his mother Hisako dies in a hospital fire. This is midway through the war, which is present mostly in the background - now and then we see soldiers marching around, and of course Mahito's dad runs a factory producing warplane parts, not entirely unlike Miyazaki's own father although seemingly a bit higher up the ladder.

We jump forward a little and Mahito's father remarries - to his deceased wife's sister, no less, and she's already pregnant. This is Natsuko, who does her best to play the role of mother, but Mahito still has big traumas and he is understandably not entirely on board with the idea of welcoming a mum 2 who looks almost exactly like mum 1. He moves with Natsuko into a huge old house complex, a mix of older Japanese architecture with a more recent Western wing where the family currently sleeps - and staffed by a small army of colourful old ladies who are eager for any canned meat or cigarettes they can get their hands on.

Also there's this freaky heron that keeps bothering Mahito. It seems to have something to do with a mysterious tower which turns out to have been built by his great-uncle. Mahito visits the tower, but can't make his way inside. Natsuko tells him not to go into the tower.

Mahito goes to school, but naturally they don't much take to the new rich kid on the block, and so after being attacked by his classmates on his way home he injures himself with a rock. (His dumbass dad is like, who did this to you son, I'll fuck 'em up.) For the rest of the movie, he has half his head shaved to accomodate a bandage, which is the sort of attention to detail this movie loves.

The heron has started growing teeth and talking to Mahito, telling him to come to the tower. Mahito is convinced it's a trap, and after a maybe-dream sequence in which Natsuko shoots an arrow to drive off the heron, he steals cigarettes from Natsuko in order to get one of the servants to sharpen his knife, and then constructs a bow and arrow out of bamboo - using a couple of the heron's feathers. Constructing the bow and arrow is shown in immense, loving detail.

In the process, he witnesses Natsuko walk into the forest, and also stumbles on a book: How Do You Live? by Genzaburō Yoshino, which contains a handwritten message from his mother. He looks at this book briefly... and this is about the extent of the connection of the film to the book, beyond thematic parallels.

The maids notice that Natsuko is missing. Mahito tells one of the maids, Kiriko, that he saw her go into the forest, and they follow, finding an old road that gives another approach to the tower. They're greated by the heron man, who is increasingly emerging from the heron's beak to reveal a big warty nose. He's some kind of like... heron selkie or something, a gnome in a heron skin. There's some wonderfully grotesque animation around this guy.

Heron dude taunts Mahito with an illusion of his mother Hisako. Mahito threatens him with the bow - the heron guy is like, do your worst, not realising it's a maaagic arrow. The arrow chases him around the room and pierces his beak, fucking up his magic. At this point, the tower master shows up and orders the heron to guide Mahito. Heron guy sends everyone through the floor into a fantastical world...

Mahito arrives in front of a huge, sinister tomb. He approaches the gate, and a swarm of pelicans walk up behind, crawling all over him and pressing him through the gate. This causes a storm to start brewing, since opening the gate seems to piss off the stones or something...

A fisher woman resembling a much younger Kiriko runs up and chases the pelicans away. She takes Mahito under her wing, explaining that this world is inhabited mostly by dead people, but there are also these little round guys called the wareware, who gain the ability to fly when they eat a fish's guts.

Kiriko, uniquely in this world, has the ability to kill, so she catches fish to sell to the other inhabitants and feed to the wareware; she and Mahito butcher a huge fish. Mahito fairly quickly figures out that she is somehow the same Kiriko that entered with him. She has tiny charms representing the other maids, which serve an apotropaic function.

That night, staying on Kiriko's huge derelict ship of a home, they watch the wareware rise into the sky to be born as humans in Mahito's world. They're attacked by the pelicans, but a fire-wielding magic user called Hisa (hmmmmmmmmmm) drives the pelicans away. Mahito shouts at her not to harm the wareware, but Kiriko assures him that more of the wareware will survive thanks to Hisa's intervention.

Later, a singed and dying pelican explains the pelicans' predicament to Mahito in a scene that calls to mind the animals in Mononoke-hime. The pelicans are foreigners in this world, they don't have anything to eat, so they take it as their role to eat the wareware. The heron man arrives on the scene too, offering to help Mahito find Natsuko as Mahito - coming in to his own as a protagonist more - buries the pelican. Mahito distrusts him but eventually Kiriko persuades them to give working together a try.

Mahito and the heron set out. As they pass through a forest, the heron reveals that thanks to Mahito's arrow, he can't fly and do heron shit anymore - and by magic law, only Mahito can fix the hole. Mahito applies his new woodworking skills to fashion a bung for the hole. The heron tries to stage a top 10 anime betrayal, but then the bung needs more work, so Mahito fixes it, and from that point on, the heron joins the party and he and Mahito are fast friends.

(You might wonder why I just call him 'the heron' and not by a name. He never gets named! He's just the heron man.)

Mahito and the heron arrive at the house of a blacksmith who's supposed to help them find Natsuko, only to find it guarded by big buff parakeet men. The parakeets are splendidly goofy round guys - they remind me of the heedra in Nausicaa. The heron draws the parakeets away, and Mahito enters the house, only to find, uh oh! More parakeets. The parakeets prepare to eat Mahito, who is not carrying a child and therefore fair game unlike Natsuko, but Hisa shows up and burns them with fire magic. She looks just like a young version of Mahito's mum! Funny that. Hisa helps Mahito escape into her house through the fire, and then takes him to infiltrate the parakeets' empire.

In the human world, the maids explain the backstory of the tower to Mahito's dad. It's a weird meteorite that came from space, it turns out, and Mahito's great-uncle built the tower on top of it before eventually disappearing inside. Mahito's dad overprepares in an elaborate getup complete with katana, and goes to try to rescue everyone.

Hisa leads Mahito to a corridor full of doors which open into all the different worlds, including his own world. Mahito briefly glimpses his dad coming to try and rescue him - the two see each other briefly, but the parakeets catch wind of the whole thing and attack, and so Mahito and Hisa have to flee back into the magical world. We see that the parakeet guys turn into regular parakeets when they come into the human world. Mahito's dad becomes convinced he turned into a parakeet.

Mahito and Hisa make their way to the delivery room where Natsuko is resting, waiting to give birth. On their way, lightning starts emerging from the stone - Hisa explains that the stone is sentient and pissed with them. Mahito insists on approaching Natsuko despite this being a huge taboo. They have a heart to heart - Natsuko's mask breaks and she tells Mahito she hates him, while he finally starts calling her mother, as he's assaulted by paper charms that tear at him violently. They part, with Hisa burning the charms to free Mahito, but it's too much and they both pass out.

Mahito dreams of meeting the sorcerer, who stacks irregularly shaped wooden blocks, and explains that stacking the blocks is necessary to maintain the world, buying a few days at a time. The sorcerer reveals the huge flying rock that is the source of his power; he also shows Mahito some blocks, but Mahito somehow divines that these blocks are 'stone for building tombs' and stained with malice. The sorcerer approvingly says this is a good sign for Mahito's ability to succeed him.

While they were asleep, the parakeets have captured Hisa and Mahito. One of them is preparing to eat Mahito, but the heron arrives just in time to save him. They Metal Gear Solid their way through the kingdom while the Parakeet King - a big swaggering guy very like the colonel in Castle in the Sky - goes to press a claim on the wizard, using Hisa and Mahitos' taboo act of entering the delivery room as a bargaining chip. There's some very funny scenes where the parakeets cheer for their king.

Mahito pursues the parakeet king, but the king destroys the staircase behind him, and talks to the sorcerer. The sorcerer is inclined to wave away the transgression, because he wants to let Mahito succeed him, but the parakeet king seems to be bringing him around. I kind of forget how this part went, but the parakeet king goes away from the sorcerer for a bit while Hisa is freed from her prison thing.

Mahito climbs back up with the heron man's help, arriving in the sorcerer's little subplane. The parakeet king quietly follows him, after telling his aides to inform his subjects he was a good king. Mahito approaches the sorcerer, who reveals he has found a new set of blocks, unstained by malice, and again invites Mahito to succeed him. Mahito says that his self-injury is proof of his malice, making him unfit for the job.

At this point, the parakeet king intervenes. Angry at all this sorcerous malarky, he desperately attempts to stack the stones himself, but when they don't stack, he flies into a rage and slices them with his sword. This naturally causes the world to start collapsing, and everyone runs to the doors to escape into the human world.

Mahito has by this point figured out that Hisa is his mum, and he asks if she really wants to go back to their world, knowing that she will very definitely die in a fire not much later. But she is naturally on board with this. Young!Kiriko goes with her, suggesting that she and Hisako entered the magical world at the same time. Meanwhile, Mahito returns to his own time, with Natsuko and the heron. All the various parakeets and pelicans come out through this door too. Old!Kiriko is restored from her apatropaic charm.

As everyone celebrates their safe return (and the appearance of a fuckton of birds), the heron tells Mahito that he ought to forget what happened in the magic world. We skip forward again, with Mahito - now with a baby sibling - setting off to Tokyo. Roll credits!

now let's comment on it

This is not a film that necessarily prioritises an internal logic playing out - new elements enter unexpectedly even quite late in the film. The sorcerer's motivation is murky until late on; the parakeets become major antagonists despite entering only halfway through the film.

There is a certain temptation, knowing how autobiographical this film is, to take it is a roman à clef. Mahito is of course a young Miyazaki; the old sorcerer's concern about finding a successor might be about Miyazaki wondering who should take over Ghibli or if it should just be allowed to die. Under this schema, the parakeets might be Ghibli's legion of fans, or the merchandising empire that prints their designs on every possible product. kvin's article develops this kind of reading, finding some angles I wouldn't have even considered, such as how the idea of weight communicated by the animation factors in to such an allegaroy. It's also something suggested in Miyazaki's own comments about the film, where the sorcerer is Takahata, the heron man is producer Toshio Suzuki...

It definitely helps to know a bit about Miyazaki's background when approaching this film. However, I think it would be reductive to go too far with this kind of reading, and take everything as an allegory for something in Miyazaki's life. The film still has to stand on its own feet!

'Coming of age' is the spin put on it by some outlets, like the BBC. And this is accurate to an extent. The arc of this film is similar to Spirited Away: Mahito starts out sullen and traumatised, but like Chihiro he transitions over the course of his journey in the magical world into the kind of determined Miyazaki protagonist we're used to. On this coming of age angle... well, also like with Chihiro, I don't find the Mahito of the first part of the film especially unsympathetic, his alienation is extremely natural given his situation. Mahito's dad kinda sucks! Living in wartime Japan also really kinda sucks, even if you're the son of a rich dude. But definitely over the course of the film Mahito has a change of heart towards Natsuko, and forms friendships that motivate him to try to protect them. His character arc definitely sees him become 'more prosocial'.

However, there's another angle that's pretty important - the idea of the weight of 'malice', the cursed existences of the pelicans and the like, and the fantasy of building a utopian world that is free of these things. This returns to a theme of Nausicaa, the manga in particular, where Nausicaa discovers that the world she knows - the toxic forest in particular - is actually an elaborate artificial system for cleansing the world of pollutants, that the clean world on the other side will be uninhabitable to her and her people, and that the architects of this system wait in stasis to replace them in this utopian future world. Nausicaa destroys them, commiting instead to an uncertain future.

In Mononoke-hime likewise, we encounter the lepers and former sex workers of Irontown clinging on to the 'cursed' world. Their extractivist project proves incredibly destructive, but the film still regards them sympathetically, and the resolution sees them perhaps finding a new way to live - and San, the feral girl, reconciling herself to the idea of humans.

Here, although the parakeet king forces the decision, Mahito has already declared that he doesn't believe he's fit to oversee a utopia, but instead that his place is in the awful, violent human world.

The film, and the book it's vaguely based on, are titled How do you live? In Japanese, that's a plural 'you' (君たち). There's a lot of ways you could read it, depending on who you take as 'you' - a child asking an adult how to live, or equally a future question of how will you live. This is a lot more explicit in the novel - which I have not read, but here is a summary courtesy of wiki:

Junichi Honda is a fifteen-year-old junior high school student, known by his nickname Koperu, after the astronomer Nicholas Copernicus. He is athletic and academically gifted, and popular at school. Koperu's father, a bank executive, passed away when he was young and he lives with his mother. His uncle (on his mother's side) lives nearby and visits frequently. Koperu and his uncle are very close. Koperu shares about his life and his uncle gives him support and advice. His uncle also documents and comments on these interactions in a diary, with the intent to eventually give the diary to Koperu. The diary writing, which is interspersed with the narrative, provides insight into the ethical and emotional trials that Koperu shared with his uncle. The diary entries, which cover themes such as "view of things", "structure of society", "relation", etc. are in the style of a note written to Koperu.[8]

Thinking like Copernicus that our Earth is a celestial body moving within the vastness of space, or thinking that our Earth is fixed at the center of the universe, are two ways of thinking that, in reality, are not only related to astronomy. Even when we think about things like the world around us or our own lives, the truth is that we are still revolving around them after all.

In the end, Koperu writes a decision on his future way of living as a reply to his uncle, and the novel ends with the narrator asking the question "how do you live?" to the reader.

The author of the novel was a socialist, who had been imprisoned by the nationalist government, and wrote the book intending to impart lessons on ethics. The version of his book published after the war was heavily edited to strip the book of political content. But it's also, perhaps paradoxically, a book that centres on very wealthy characters, aimed narrowly at educated boys, though it became a widely read classic.

Studio Ghibli's films, from both Miyazaki and Takahata, have a habit of being framed as imparting something to the younger generation - something the pair seem to have seen as a mission all the way back in the days of Panda Kopanda. For example, while Grave of the Fireflies is seen as the classic tragic war movie, for Takahata it was also aimed at criticising what he saw as the careless, consumerist generation of the 80s; the stubborn arrogance of the protagonist supposed to reflect on this. It's an attitude that also emerges in their comments about Chihiro. And, indeed, one of the first things we heard about How Do You Live? was that it was aimed towards Miyazaki's grandson - and more broadly towards that generation.

So what does this film have to say to the younger generations? Let's have a look at it from Mahito's POV.

For Mahito, the adults in his life are all pretty complicated. His father is enthusiastic and well-meaning but incredibly oblivious to what his son is going through (we might recall some of what Miyazaki wrote about his father in Starting Point, describing him as basically a grifter). Natsuko is masking pretty hard, trying to play the role of Good New Mum and connect to her newly acquired son, but there's an intrinsic distance. It is understandable that Mahito would want to reject them.

Mahito is... not entirely a passive character, he goes to some efforts to for example fashion the bow and arrow and repair the heron man's beak, but mostly he is pulled around by the plot into a strange world he doesn't understand. At first, his instinct is to retreat, even to the point of self-injury. Once he arrives in the magical world, he has acquired something of a purpose (finding Natsuko), but he gets pushed into near-disaster situations (the pelicans piling up to push him through the gate at the tomb) or stumbles into circumstances where something is expected of him (hey kid, gut this fish!). Gradually though his exposure to this world pulls him out of his shell. He runs into conflicts and injustices that seem intractable - the wareware and the pelicans - and has little power to intervene except to bury the bodies.

Eventually, he gets to carry out his main objective - finding Natsuko - but despite finally deciding to accept Natsuko as his new mother, he finds himself rejected, not just by her but also by the earth. Perhaps feeling responsible for getting her into trouble, his new objective becomes rescuing freshly-damsel'd Hisa. But now new adults want things of him - his great-uncle has decided he'd make a fine successor. Mahito has to make a decision here about what relationships he wants to commit to, what sort of life he wants to build - and he chooses the world he found so alienating at the outset of the film, the one which hurt him by taking his mother, not to the secondary-world fantasy.

It could be a 'this world is all we have' sort of statement, perhaps. But also the last act of the film feels like it gets a bit caught up in Castle in the Sky-style adventure-story beats.

I do feel like some aspects of the film ended up a little underbaked - which is an odd thing to say because it's not a short film and there is so much in it already. But Hisa for example - she's got badass powers and all, but I feel we barely get a chance to get a sense of what motivates her. Why did she enter the fantasy world? She acts at first like she doesn't know Mahito is her future son, but rapidly becomes incredibly devoted to him (in a way that reads a little romancey lmao). So much of her screen time is dedicated to having her convey the secrets of the world that it's hard to get a bead on her as a person.

Likewise, Natsuko - why did she enter this world to have her baby in this special ritual delivery chamber? She clearly knows more than most of the characters, but she gets kind of sidelined after Mahito confronts her, with wizard shit becoming more central. The animation does such a fantastic job of selling her feelings in the first part of the film that it feels like a shame that she drifts away at the end.

The progression of the film feels rather like a dream, where everything is arranged by symbolic significance to Mahito. It makes sense... on a magical level, where the secondary world is shaped primarily by parallels in the real one. So the tiny apatropaic statues of the old ladies protect him because they represent the role the real old ladies have in his life. Hisa has fire magic because Hisako died in a fire. Once Mahito has come to his personal resolutions about returning to the world, the magical one is no longer needed, and it collapses.

This is not such an uncommon role for magic in a story. In Miyazaki's own works, we have Totoro and Spirited Away, where a magical world provides direction or relief to a child's real struggles. Or take for example Okiura's film A Letter To Momo, in which the three yōkai recognise taking care of the grieving Momo as their explicit purpose as spirits. This magical world comes to Mahito to help him come to terms with losing his mother, and reorient himself towards living in a painful world.

Meanwhile, the sorcerer, whether he be Miyazaki or Takahata, is quite a distant figure. He may maintain the magical world by stacking his blocks, may be the authority which factions within it must plead to, but he also rules from afar in a vast empty palace full of long halls and open air spaces. His main company seems to be a big fucking rock, with which he made a 'contract'. He's generally handling it a bit better than, say, Ushiromiya Kinzo - he receives the parakeet king with good humour - but he's a pretty flawed god of his little world. So much of this world seems to pre-exist him, it's not something he constructed. Still, when he shows up, you pretty much have to do what he says.

If this is about Miyazaki's relation to Takahata, it seems like quite a sad portrayal. But 'unapproachable patriarch' does sorta describe their role in the studio from what I understand (c.f. Oshii's infamous article comparing them to the Kremlin).

When it comes to the question of who should succeed Miyazaki, we should probably consider the matter of Yoshifumi Kondō, who was being set up as the next big Ghibli director until his untimely death - which allegedly Takahata was willing to accept the blame for. The mythology built up around Miyazaki and Takahata is double-edged.

Here are some rather startling comments from Toshiyuki Inoue's interview. Inoue is one of the most impressive animators who ever lived in my book, the other star of the realist line besides Okiura. Just have a look at his booru page: iconic scenes from GitS, Akira, Millenium Actress; even in more recent films, he pretty much carried Maquia, and steals the show with his scenes in Miss Hokusai.

And yet even he was intimidated to be working alongside Miyazaki when he first came on board for Kiki's Delivery Service, fresh off Akira:

I believe you’ve always been a fan of Miyazaki’s, why were you scared to work with him? Toshiyuki Inoue: I had heard quite a few scary stories. A lot of acquaintances had worked on Nausicaä, Laputa and Totoro before that, so I knew how scary he could be when he got angry – I had heard stories of people being fired mid-production, things like that. How was it actually? Toshiyuki Inoue: Not as scary as I had imagined. He’d only rarely scream in the studio. But he did get angry. I’d sometimes be called to some separate room and lectured alongside Kōji Morimoto and Masaaki Endō. It felt like being in school all over again.

'Only rarely'. Honestly. Inoue describes how difficult it was for him to adapt his logical, analytical style to Ghibli's stretchy, bouncy characters - and how Miyazaki would disparage him if he, for example, drew a ship inaccurately.

For Inoue, coming back to How Do You Live was something like a 'return match'. He talks about how an older Miyazaki was no longer able to strictly correct the animation, and in general age was limiting him, but he still feels that Miyazaki is fundamentally superior:

Toshiyuki Inoue: I’ve always wished for a return match or a way to redeem myself. But even if I say that, I know I can’t even pretend to rival Miyazaki. I just can’t win. He’s extremely smart and learned, and on top of that, as an animator he always transcends common sense: he’s so talented that I know very well there’s nothing I can do against it. The more I learn about him, the more I realize I’ll never be on that level.

Miyazaki's genius is undeniable, but man... it's not a good mindset to cultivate if you want to find a successor lmao. If even Inoue doesn't feel he can measure up, who the hell could?

Mind you, it does rather seem that Miyazaki had mellowed out by the point of How Do You Live?. Here's Yamashita:

Akihiko Yamashita: As I said, the core of an animator’s job is to follow what the director asks, so whenever I had trouble with that, I’d go see Miyazaki to show him my roughs. He’d advise me on the things that were missing and reassure me about those that were good. He really helped me to gain more confidence in myself.

Reading these interviews underlines pretty hard that we shouldn't get too caught up in the mythology of Miyazaki the mighty auteur. While the story may be all on Miyazaki, and most of the character designs (with the notable exception of Natsuko)... so much of the details of the animation, the stuff that really makes this film land, is primarily shaped by everyone else - Honda in particular, but also the individual key animators who interpreted his scenes. I really need to get my hands on a copy of that Industrial History of Studio Ghibli book to get a less Miyazaki-centric perspective on the studio's history.

I do not feel, having come out of this film, any closer to knowing the answer to that eternally pressing question of how do you live - I guess I'm still working out my answer to that one, and I will be until I die. And maybe that's rather the point. I think this film still carries some of the flaws of Miyazaki's later films - despite having so many iconic scenes, it doesn't quite seem to know where it's going. But I am so glad to have seen this in the theatre (I saw it at the Prince Charles theatre in Soho with friends, the theatre was completely packed!), and glad Miyazaki managed to get this one out before he goes. Whatever happens to Ghibli without its sorcerer, it's been a hell of a thing to witness.

#anime #the boy and the heron #how do you live #studio ghibli #hayao miyazaki #film

201 notes · View notes

licollisa · 1 year

Note

Im so so so so sorry for the dm but I gotta do, how did you do the lighting for these two??

https://twitter.com/Licollis_a/status/1657703869068234754 https://twitter.com/Licollis_a/status/1657631596198125569

(dm wouldnt send on twitter so I'll send it here!)

Be not afraid, for I will reveal my secrets in rendering step by step.

1. After I'm finished with lineart, I added the base color. It's faint, but putting in gradient will make it pop.

2. In order for the whole thing to look harmonious with each other, on top of the base color I added a multiply and overlay layer. The color I use for multiply is usually desaturated, kinda pastel-y. The overlay one is more saturated (see alternative colors below).

3. The result should be kind of dark. Which is what I'm after, because what you're seeing is already shadowed. So instead of adding the shadow to the base color, I'm adding the light.

On top of the multiply layer, I added an overlay layer. I keep in mind where the light source is coming from (see the blue arrows). The color of the overlay can be whatever -- it depends on the vibe you're trying to make (e.g if they're in waterfall, I'd use light cyan).

Also, see that normal layer clipped onto my overlay? It's how I added my "fringe" (aka subsurface scattering). I often use pink. Just line it on the edges of the light.

4. Now I added a multiply layer again, just to give the piece more depth and details (like the skin)

5. Now I'm adding what's called reflective light (google to see examples irl). Basically, I covered the darkest parts of the drawing with something lighter. For this one I just added pastel purple in the normal layer, but there are other layer types to lighten it up!

6. Now, I colored the lineart through clipping. I usually just matched the surrounding colors by adding a darker one (e.g dark red for skin).

Optional: I like to make 2 copies of the lineart, make one red and another cyan, and respectively slide it to left and to right. Sometimes it doesn't even look good tho....

7. Highlights time! To do this I disable the background so it's transparent, click right and choose 'merge visible to new layer'. Which flattens the visible image onto a new layer. Now I can add in these white lights by clipping on top of it!

(It's a lil tricky to do this right with a brush, so I used the lasso fill tool.)

To top it off, I add some sparkes. My simp art is done <33

Edit: I forgot!! By the end of it all you can add a texture by setting said texture into overlay with low opacity (on top of the finished art). In CSP you can add a perlin noise, one of these:

You can use other kinds of textures for ur artwork, like watercolor etc.

#by the way the other art you linked also use similar steps. just simpler.#(multiply over base color. overlay for the light and fringe. low opacity for scattered light. done.)#i hope this helps you and other artists too!!!#happy rendering!!!#art tutorial #lico arting

670 notes · View notes

t4tmetalsonic · 5 months

Text

Christ the new discord update has made the app SO painful to look at. Pure white text on a darker background and no desaturation options anymore? Hell. I have a headache already. The new search function also sucks and I hate how the swiping works now. This is so awful why would they think this is a good idea :(

#genuinely on the verge of tears LOL #if anyone knows how to get the old version back. pls. idk how apk works #discord #fenn.post

186 notes · View notes

spilledkaleidoscope · 3 months

Note

I really like your DE portraits artstyle! Do you have any tips on how to replicate it?

I THINK I've written about it before, but since I am too lazy to look for it...

There is some variation between how the portraits are done - I tend to refer to the Smoker, Glen, Titus and Trant in terms of style.

I think the most characteristic things about these is

Sketchy lines with bold shadows (think nose, neck, eyes). I usually have a brush that responds to pressure (size of brush) and velocity (faster: more transparent; combined with texture this allows me to add a bit of "crunch" if I want to)

noticable difference in detail between face and the rest of the figure

more painterly, often geometric background

color variation! Make your primary painting brush a flat one that has color jitter enabled. I change the settings around as I draw for more variety. It helps if you have a setup where you can make the tip of the brush rotate with your pen (I've had this since december and its very nice).

This also goes for your palette in general. The DE Portraits tend to use lots of different colors even in things that read as grey or white. For example, if you look at the Hanged Man Portrait, his grey skin is actually desaturated purple, yellow, green and blue. There is little to no mixing going on here, so what I do is make a little mixing palette and then just eyedropper colors from there. ALSO don't be afraid of saturated colors and color contrasts! Liz' portrait is done a bit differently than a bunch of others, but the green highlights are notable.

Finish up by coloring some of your lineart or painting over it in places to make it more lively. I feel like the less put together a character is, the more abstract the portrait becomes (I'm thinking of Idiot Doom Spiral or Cuno's Father) (Harry is the exception I guess) (Unless you are like me and refused to look into the mirror LOL)

Hope this is helpful! I learned this by doing some studies, including the Disco Sapphic portraits that are rather slight variations of existing portraits.

buuuut I feel like my "freehand" portraits have become competent too:

#askbox #art asks

115 notes · View notes

soupandcats · 10 months

Note

Sorry abt the big ask, but your colours are always really vibrant and interesting! They seem both saturated and subdued. What’s your general method for choosing them or are there any tricks/layer modes you use?

Thank you! This is gonna be a long one sorry😭

My favorite digital art trick for color is the curves tool! In procreate you press the wand tool in the top left corner (Adjustments) > Curves. I recommend just playing around with this until something you like happens.

Here’s a study I did with pretty standard colors.

Here are some versions of it after moving the curves around.

What I like about this is it’s a really quick way of changing the color scheme that’s more precise than applying a filter. It lets you see how far you can push things outside of what’s expected!

When I first started digital art I had so much trouble with color because unlike traditional, the colors have the ability to be fully opaque. With traditional if you’re doing a painting the paints/colored pencils/etc will naturally mix with one another creating a more cohesive overall image.

Here’s a drawing I did in 2020. As you can see it’s incredibly saturated. When I was picking colors I was working in the most saturated section for nearly every color.

These days even when I’m trying to make something super colorful I’ll force myself to desaturate it more than I think I need to. There are two ways to desaturate something. You can move it towards white or towards black.

Another thing I try to keep in mind is that colors look different based on what colors are around them. If you put gray next to a color it will look like that color’s complement. If you put a warm color next to a cool color they’ll amplify one another making both look more intense. In that same way if I put a super saturated color against a more neutral background the color will look even brighter.

I like this tapestry by Sheila Hicks. See how the orange is glowing against the more muted purples and blues?

Another thing I try to keep in mind is value. Like color it’s influenced by its surroundings. If you place a lighter color over a dark background it will look brighter than over a light background.

So in a piece the eye will be drawn to the areas of highest contrast first. And area that’s similar in both value and hue will recede into the background.

I really am not an expert on color I have so much to learn. I recommend Marco Bucci’s videos as well as the book The Art of Color if you’d like more detailed+accurate info! Color theory is the most fascinating thing I’m obsessed with it.

You don’t really need to know theory to be good at color though! Just playing around and figuring out what you like (I LOVE PURPLE) will make you better!

The most satisfying thing is when you’re making a drawing and you decide to add a little gray or a little orange or whatever and suddenly your piece just starts to SING!!!! (That purple/blue/orange part of the Sheila Hicks tapestry is singing to me it will forever make me happy)

Anyways I hope this helps! 💜💜💜

#ask

316 notes · View notes

anonbeadraws · 8 months

Note

Hey quick question how do you come up with the color scheme for the piece? I get stuck trying to think past what colors my characters have

oohhh, that's a hard one It depends on what you're focusing on, the colours on a character or the colours in their background! Backgrounds are best when they complement the figure but don't melt into them. Using opposites on the colour wheels (red/green, blue/orange, Yellow/purple) is a good place to start, as well as complimentary tones. So, for example, for the pieces below, the background contains a Lesser colour from the figure, but allows the main colours to pop! the pink/red of ahme's skin to the desaturated green, the deep but warm brown against the blue and green of the bg!

For complete pieces, full illustrations, one good way to make the character and background feel more coherent, is picking colours from the figure and incorporating them into the bg. The pink flowery dress becomes the pink of lanterns in the bg, the same yellow of the stars as the characters eyes. And for most character designs, I find sticking to a few base colours and adding one to make it pop, works for me. Brown leather and smoky blue with Gold jewellry, Lilac silk with sage and perwinkle blue! Also, mixing warm and cool tones. All warm and all cool is borin, gotta give it a touch of the other to make it glow! Also, make sure to look into some colour theory, my way isn't the way for eveyone, getting lots of dif info is the best way for you to find how YOU like to colour! Hope this is helpful!!

#anonbeadraws #colours #ask #art advice

246 notes · View notes

jamiekb · 2 months

Text

Exploring the new Welcome Home Update

So here's my journey through the new update and the little details that it has, this will be a very long post and of course full of spoilers.

Look at the new design for the loading screen, so Christmas-y! I particularly love the antlers on Home's chimney.

Looking good Wally! And now we have new little doodles that seem to go with the holiday.

Ok so according to the admins no more bugs so wonder what will be different this time. Onto the news page then

Also I'm really digging the new background

Ok starting the FAQ now and some questions and answers are interesting. So they've been receiving more material covered in goop. They kinda adress in universe the move of the website, due to malicious material and in the code of the page.

And there is one new hidden message in the answers (I think) "The numbers are so hard to read. Sometimes I can't see them" So do we have to look for numbers now?

Took a detour through the stickers and they have new ones! There is Wally making a Home out of snow, sleeping Julie, I think Frank singing Carols to a butterfly, Poppy with a Jello thing, Eddie with a ton of presents to deliver, Howdy with some relatives, Sally as the star of a Christmas tree and Barnaby with a snowman.

Also with the "Welcome Home" banners two are a bit more desaturated now. And now that I think about it there are some stains in the main banner too

Neighborhood

Anyway unto the Neighborhood! Looks so cute although I'll be honest the clock tower is a bit weird and the trees feel a bit more intense at the edges or maybe that's just me

Eddie seems quite normal though now apparantly he has a mother, I'm confident that didn't use to be there. Is it weird that other than Wally hes the only one that didn't add anything new to his home for the season?

I think Howdy's description also changed a bit but nothing alarming. His store now seems to have signs welcoming his family for the holidays.

Checking Barnaby's description they seem to all have a bit more background info, since he apparently left his farm life to come to Home. Ok what does "Barnaby’s middle initial was often rotated in terms of what it stood for" mean???

Poppy is so cute! Is she holding cupcakes decorated like the characters or did she already do that? Ok but her new details feel very interesting: she claims to be able to fly but it's never shown and she never leaves her house to the point of being excluded from some events (like Wally's Homewarming party I guess)

Sallys is fine. She's besties with Poppy I guess and she can shine??? How do you make a puppet shine?? Were they roommates maybe?

Oh Julie got quite a backstory. Named siblings, she has paws and used to live in the forest on the outskirts of Home in a cave with her family. And she hibernates that's too cute!

Great my dear Frank still gets no background info (which is very interesting) but he goes get forced heteronormativity.

Ok and Wally is kinda similar, no background info just very dedicated to Home. And I''l see about coming back to the As above so below page since I can't seem to click it, might just be me. You can still see the goop at the doorstep though

Merchandise

Ok so first off the Merchandise page has a different background to the rest, some colorful static and took a bit to load.

oooh they even changed the layout for the phone since you could hear Wallys call, that's such a cool detail

Maybe I'll go back and see if Eddies or Sally's stories have been changed in the audio or transcipt but I'll stick to the new stuff for now. Now that i think about maybe Sally's doesn't have the bit where the transcript couldnt understand it.

Finally reached the wish book and I love it so much, this is so much work all around! My favorites are the Frank and Wally pillows, Eddie Dear Lil' Mailman's Kit, the Home Clock and specially the tree skirt! I now have to make those cute neighbors

Oh my god the record has the perfect Santa voice. And.. interesting that the ad cuts off when we get to Eddie. I'm not really surprised thought it would do something when it got to him or Frank, still suspicious.

Homewarming Story

The sound editing for all this new items is amazing!

I love the bit of the characters tripping up the narrators, this one just hasn't been able to get it right.

Hey is it me or in this one they've been a bit more insistent that Frank is a bit too literal but in a not so good way, not that much more intense but can't help but notice it. Seems a bit meaner

The return of Walliford!

Good to know Home uses he/him I guess

excuse me the fuck was that sound distortion???

and then it ends kinda abruptly, so that's that...

Where's my Eddie by the way, they didn't ask him and didn't find him while out on the town. I better hear him at some point or I will riot.

We have a code!

Ok so I was skimming the rest of the material before choosing what to listen to next and saw the cereal and craft at the back! So I guess now I have to find all the little drawings in the page and see when come from that

So I did listen to a few more songs, nice to see Eddie and Frank interacting as always, and noticed that in the transcript pages there are some entries for Mistery Audio, which are actually three of the previously hidden videos so that's interesting

Also not all the pages have four drawings some only one, so I've been trying to keep track which symbols i found where in case it matters. Still don't know what they're for just going around collecting them

Ok nvm I was doing things out of order and now that I got to media can see they are mentioned there

So after finally getting all the little things and going back to tumblr cause honestly I didnt really get what to do, I'm guessing it leads to a website, since one of the pages just has www as the code, so I'll try that I guess since I saw that there is a secret website somewhere. If it takes me too long I'll just look it up

Secret website

Nvm I'm too impatient at this point and I think i was missing a few letters so I just looked it up

Ok so that's interesting, so this person is kinda like the one behind the scenes talking to us along with whatever had infected the website before. They mention how the curator got sick (???) but is better now and that they'll try to update this website with the weird things they find

So the phone is one, like the weird glitched audio from Wally. This audio is interesting cause it plays out technically in real life but Wally speaks as if they are living out their lives...

And then moving on to the commercial they are speaking again of being compelled to know more, to see and wait. I'm sure some is curiosity but that can't be all

ohmygod this is more than 20 minutes long, the effort it must have taken Clown and team is monumental

that little animation is so cute!!!

fast forward many commercials and we have Eddie!!! And even a whole hand helping Poppy or something.

god the tobacco comercial of course they would have one

My poor Eddie boy is so anxious and depressed, why is no one talking to you bud? Like not getting him a present is a thing but not even Julie called him to play... and now is he's spiraling and even mad, that's unusual for sure. Also what's with the perspective of his videos, everything is a commercial or in the case of the secret videos it's interactions with other neighbors. This is more like the secret videos that we're seeing from someones POV, but not even that, we're observing him not looking through his eyes

Oh my poor Eddie is certainly going through it, who let them expose him to The Horrors? The horror aspect of this ARG sure has started to pick up speed, even I picked up some anxiety from that last segment

Also I did notice that Frank eventually dropped the Mr Dear for Eddie when he got more worried, almost like hes more worried than for an act that he has to put up huh?

So that was the newest Welcome home update. I can say it was everything I hoped for and more!!! The team behind it really gave it their all. From VAs for the audios to all the visual and graphic artists for the commercials its all so wonderful

#welcome home #welcome home arg #welcome home spoilers #welcome home eddie #welcome home frank #welcome home update #experiencing media #hey this is my stuff

84 notes · View notes

webby-mogai · 3 months

Text

cannultus attraction

[pt: cannultus attraction /end pt]

A cannibalisitc attraction characterized by cannibalism of the attracted in the a way similar to worship; like how one would eat the body of their god.

simplified/accessible

[pt: simplified/accessible /end pt]

Coined by my beautiful friend BA3LZ3BUB on discord. Flag and definition by faem. Formatting and the simplified/accessible flag by me (with faem guidance)

Based on the gendercannibal(link) flag

[cannultus flag id: a rectangular flag with 13 horizontal lines. the 1st, 2nd, 12th, and 13th line are triangular. the 4th and 10th line are wavy, and the rest are straight. line sizes in this order from top to bottom: 2 thick, 9 medium, 2 thick. the 4th line has been made to look like it is dripping from multiple spots. colors in this order starting from the top and reflected after the last listed color: maroon, cream, a darker purplish red, lighter desaturated red, pale yellow, yellowish cream, and white. in the center of the flag is a heart shaped piece of meat with orangish yellow and peach flesh. /end id]

[divider id: a transparent divider with cartoon drawings of a heart, an eye, and lungs in that order. it repeats 5 or so times /end id]

[cannultus simplified id: a rectangular flag with 13 horizontal lines. the 1st, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, and 13th line are medium thickness, the 2nd and 12th lines are thicker, 3rd and 11th are thinnest, and the 4th and 10th are thickest. colors in this order starting from the top and reflected after the last listed color: maroon, a dark purplish red, cream, pale yellow, a pale creamy yellow, cream, and white. in the center of the flag is a heart shaped piece of meat with orangish yellow and peach flesh. /end id]

[divider id: a transparent divider with cartoon images of a brain, a tooth, and intestines in that order. it's repeated 5 or so times /end id]

[banner id: a black banner with a white outline and white outlined text with a drawing to the left on a transparent background. the text reads "READ MY IWC" in big text and underneath it reads "anyone can use my terms but I will block you" in smaller text. to the left is a drawing of Higan drawn by John/TOOBOE squatting with her knees together. /end id]

#cannultus attraction #attraction type #cannibalistic attraction #cannibalism #cannibalism tw #cannibal mogai #cannibalism mogai #liom #mogai #mogai coining #mogai friendly #mogai heaven #coining #attraction coining #mogai flag #liom heaven #liom coining

68 notes · View notes

notedchampagne · 5 months

Note

HELLO I am deeply n irrevocably in love w ur art I was just wondering if you have any colouring/choosing colour palettes tips ? Hearthands

thank you sm!! i really adore color theory its like a mean wife to me. the way shes my everything but she never collaborates. anyway i made a little diagram. kindly note this is just how i taught myself color theory:

im not fond of pre-choosing a color palette mainly because im not sure where to place the colors, so in my head i determine what colors i want and shift them to match the background. this is usually why you can see most of my sketches having a tan bg - id rather have some color to affect my palettes rather than a plain white. its also easier on the eyes

to summarize: "i want an orange against this purple background" 1) pick an orange 2) shift it a little towards purple on the color wheel (this would put it in the red area) 3) is it too bright? darken it 4) is it eyestrainy? desaturate&darken it 5) still looks out of place? shift it more towards purple. heres the process in effect:

so much trial and error. i also use csps hue + color filters to shortcut this very often

#sometimes i will take art i like & play around with the eyedropper tool! so i can see how the colors affect each other relatively #dudele #tutorial #talking back

71 notes · View notes

napoleon-usher · 1 year

Photo

Here’s a coloring tutorial for how to make vibrant single color backgrounds for gifs. This way relies on the color you want the gif to be already existing in the original scene or the background color already being mostly just one solid color. It should also require minimal to no layer masking which normally results in a cleaner coloring. There will be a second tutorial which will explain how to do more complicated manipulations.

For my example, I chose a scene that had yellow and green most prominent in it. Scenes like this can be changed to many other colors so they tend to be very versatile.

I always start my colorings with Levels, Curves, Black Selective Color, and Exposure. This is not absolutely necessary but I prefer this set of adjustments to begin with because it increases contrast and brightness, and helps make colors more defined (which makes them easier to manipulate). If there are other ways you know how and want to achieve a similar effect, do whatever looks best to you. This is the scene with my base coloring on it:

As a rule of thumb, if there are people in the scene that I'm giffing, keeping their skintone looking as normal as possible is my first priority. This is especially important if there is a person of color in the scene so as not to white/light/orangewash them. This tutorial is a great resource for learning how to avoid that so I won't go into depth about it, but I will explain some of the steps I take because the method is a bit trickier for when you're also doing a vibrant coloring.

To begin with, Cal's skin has already been lightened a bit by my base coloring. To start with I use a layer of Red Selective Color to darken the skin tones and remove some of the yellow. The more yellow you remove at the beginning the easier it will be to manipulate the yellow and green background later without affecting their skin. Then a Hue/Saturation layer that desaturates and darkens the reds so that their skin doesn't look unnaturally red.

These are the adjustments I made for this scene. They may need to be further adjusted later, but this is a good start.

The next layers will focus on manipulating the background. The first step is to convert the mix of yellow, green, and minor cyans to a single, less muddy color. The easiest way to do this is changing them all to a more distinct green. In a Yellow Selective Color layer, increase cyans so that it becomes more green. In a Cyan Selective Layer, increase the cyans and yellow. Finally, in a Green Selective layer increase the cyans. You'll see that these adjustments have made the background a much more vibrant and solid green.

If the background color of your original scene is not green like this one, still try to get all of the different colors to become one base color to work off of.

At this point, you get to be creative with what color you want the background to end up being. I have previously made gifs of this scene in a yellow orange scheme. It could just as easily be changed to cyan or purple, etc. Sometimes, in order to end up with a certain color, you must first convert it to one or more other colors.

YELLOW

For a yellow background, use a couple of layers of Green Selective Color and take out all cyans and maximize all yellows. Two to three layers of the same adjustment should be enough. Next add layers of Yellow Selective color, also removing cyans and adding in yellow. This should only need one or two layers, depending on the shade of yellow you want. I personally like a warmer yellow, so I do one layer with Cyan at -100 and Yellow at +100 then a second layer with Cyan at -30 and Yellow +100. These settings will of course change depending on the scene, but the theory is the same.

These are the settings for the group of adjustment layers (in order) that I used to change the background to yellow.

You'll see that you can get vibrant and clean colorings with just a few selective color layers and sometimes even no layer masks. The last step is to check on skin tones again and make sure that the adjustments added did not change the color or tone too much. A good way to check the difference between the original and your coloring is to use the marquee tool and place a small marquee somewhere that will show you both when you use it as a layer mask. I usually group all my adjustments together then use a small circle marquee on part of a face and create a layer mask with it on the group. Then you can see how much everything has been altered.

I always find it very satisfying to see how marked of a difference my coloring has made, especially when I make such drastic changes. It also allows me to verify that I've kept skin tones looking natural and not whitewashed.

I'll demonstrate how to change this scene to a couple of other colors as well. Even if the adjustments might be different for your respective scene, the main idea of what I do should still be applicable.

CYAN

To change it to cyan, I started again with Green Selective Color layers, but with essentially the opposite settings as what I did for the yellow coloring. On your green layers, add Cyan +100 and remove Yellow -100. Two to three layers should be enough. I found there was a bit of yellow that my previous adjustments did not catch, so I put a Yellow Selective Color layer before the green ones and added Cyan +100 and removed Yellow -100.

Sometimes you have to change the order of your layers around to see what's going to look best. If the yellows don't get fixed before the greens, then the adjustments to the green layers will not affect the yellow. Placing the yellow layer before the green ones turns the yellow to green which then allows the following layers to also affect it.

At this point, the yellow and green layer adjustments have made the background fairly close to cyan. To clean it up and get the shade I want, I add a couple of Cyan Selective Color layers.

With Cyan, the more Yellow you remove and Magenta you add, the more of a true blue it will become. The less Yellow and more magenta you remove, the more of a true cyan/blue-green it will become.

To get the shade of cyan I prefer to color with usually, I use a Cyan Selective Color layer with Cyan at +100 and Yellow at -50; then another Cyan Selective Color Layer with Cyan at +100, Magenta at about -20, and Yellow at -50. These adjustments result in this:

At this point you probably get the point, but I'll also explain my process for purple.

PURPLE

Any adjustment that involves magenta tends to be just a bit trickier. The more you mess with magenta, the more it can mess up the quality and overall coloring. Green does not convert directly to purple easily, so I would suggest you start with the Cyan coloring and make your changes from there.

From the adjustments that make up the cyan coloring, go to the first Cyan Selective Color layer and put both Cyan and Yellow at -100, then Magenta at +100. Repeat with the second Cyan Selective Color layer. Then add a Blue Selective Color layer with the same adjustments.

Blue and Magenta have a lot of overlap so if you're trying to magnify the Magenta in your scene and working directly in a Magentas layer doesn’t seem to be doing as much as it should, try making changes to the Blues (and vice versa).

These adjustments give this shade of purple:

As always, make additional adjustments as needed to achieve the shade you desire.

Sometimes I use a Hue/Saturation layer to increase the saturation of certain colors, but most of the time the result I want is achievable by the Selective Color layers. There is also a greater margin of change you can do with Selective Color versus Hue/Saturation. Selective Color gives you the ability to fine tune colors with a lot more precision. Hue/Saturation has a threshold of about +30-40 on the saturation bar before it starts to degrade quality and distort pixels.

Here is the final gif with each color I explained vs. the original scene:

#*tutorial #quintennyson #omgari #uservalentina #userkraina #tuserabbie #tusergabriela #userrobin #usersunny #userfanni #useroli #userbells #supervalcsi #riah.gif #riah.txt

276 notes · View notes