Alright wise guy, what are your thoughts on the theme(s) of the first Mistborn book. This is literally an excuse for you to ramble about it, have fun.

VOID I LOVE YOU SM

So spoilers for Mistborn: The Final Empire! If you haven't read it, please beware because under the cut, Here There Be Spoilers (and also beware, Very Long post under the cut!)

The big running theme in The Final Empire is trust. Who can one really trust? Is it worth it to put your life in the hands of other people? What says they won't betray you as soon as it becomes favorable to do so?

Honestly this really is what Vin's character arc in the first book is about. At the beginning of the book, she's trapped in a low-level street gang where everyone is always out to get everyone else. Heck, the second time the audience ever sees her use her powers is when she is helping her boss betray a business partner.

Vin's brother has beaten into her the idea that she can trust nobody, not even him. Everyone is always out to hurt her or take advantage of her, and if she does not prove her immediate worth to her group, then at best she will be kicked out.

This, of course, is not helped by the fact that she is part of the literal slave class! Which is a whole nother essay tbh.

Then Kelsier takes her in and everything changes. There's a scene early on in the book, after vin formally joins the crew, where Kelsier and his men are all laughing and enjoying themselves while plotting their Big Plan™. And Vin, who does not trust any of them, is on the outside, quite literally. She's outside the room, watching them plan, wishing she could be included but not allowing herself to, because at this point in the book she still thinks they could betray her at any time.

I think now is a really good time to mention that being a Mistborn is built on secrecy and paranoia. Mistborn are literally the nobility's assassins. They hide their identities under hoods that blend into the mist so as not to be seen. So their powers cannot be used against them or their Noble Houses. In broad daylight they have to pretend to be normal people, or at best, regular Mistings. They can't trust anyone with the truth that they are Mistborn.

(Heck, even a quarter of their powerset- Copper and Bronze- create mistrust. With Bronze, after all, one can hear the allomantic pulses of burning another metal. Copper, on the other hand, blocks that; the use cases for these two metals lies in paranoia that someone else can use their Allomantic powers against you.)

Anyways! So we've explored some of the different aspects of mistrust in Mistborn, so what's the counterargument?

In a word: Kelsier.

Kelsier shakes up everything that Vin believes about how relationships work. He introduces his crew as something different- despite being a thieving crew, they operate under a principle of trust and camaraderie. "My crews rely on trust," Kelsier says at one point. In direct contrast to the dirty, paranoid crews Vin worked with before, Kelsier's crew is welcoming, understanding, and trusting of her.

But Kelsier's trust isn't just talk, either. When we learn that the crew believes Mare betrayed them in their last heist, Vin asks Kelsier how he could love Mare even though she betrayed him. Kelsier answers that given the choice between loving Mare and being betrayed or never knowing her, he would choose loving her. "I'd rather trust my men than worry about what will happen if they turn on me."

In the same passage as above, Kelsier poses a question to Vin: where has she been happier? with the old crews that we built on lies and suspicious, or with Kelsier's crew, who trusted each other and let their guards down? It's a rhetorical question, and the meaning is clear: Vin and Kelsier both are happier for risking themselves in order to be loved.

I don't think I've nearly done this topic justice. There are a million more points I could pull out and point to, but I want to end with my favorite quote from The Final Empire. It's from Vin, in Chapter 32. She says:

“Once I may have thought you a fool, but… well, that’s kind of what trust is, isn’t it? A willful self-delusion? You have to shut out that voice that whispers about betrayal, and just hope that your friends aren’t going to hurt you... Distrust is really the same thing, only on the other side. I can see how a person, given the choice of two assumptions, would choose to trust.”

I love your fanfics! And I was wondering do you have any tips for original fanfic writing or just writing fics in general?

wow this actually ended up a lot longer than i thought it would, but here we go!

Original fanfics, hmmmmmm....

What I generally do is base things off of my own personal experience. Like all my iida fics are stuff that happened between me and my husband before we got married. Can’t help falling in love fic with bakugo, that was a previous relationship i had (which there is more to that story). Caught with todoroki..... thats how i got out of a ticket with a cop and how i learned that when i half check someone out and half start thinking about what i would do to that fine man in uniform (curse my uniform kink) that i glare/make a suspicious face. and when he confronted me about what i was doing, ready to write some kind of ticket for whatever i was doing wrong, i was so embarrassed that i blurted out that i found him very attractive and what exactly was on my mind and how i wanted to take that uniform off him.... that has happened with a emt too, i missed the green light looking at his bulging biceps after he rolled up his sleeves to write on a clip board.... he waved and i proceeded to squat in my seat and slam my face against the stirring wheel. escape artist cat was actually a dream i had, someone was taking off my cat’s pretty ribbon collars and putting ugly ones on her and i woke up sooooo mad, but i turned that dream into a romance story (reality kuiper was taking her collars off herself cause she was a brat) Stories about yourself, no matter how small you think it is actually has great potential to become a fic.

its also okay to borrow ideas from other forms of media. I do. example, Silk Maiden, based off of  an old batman episode from the early 2000s. its completely okay to do that. I’m not saying copy and paste the exact scenes. Just take the premises and then change it. some examples, like the movie Brave is the Scottish version of Aladdin. the princess who wants to be free and live her life beyond her princess duties needs to get married and she is not having it and wants to change the rules and runs away to find something new. premise is the same but how the story is told is different, one denies every prince and find her own prince in the streets of her kingdom and the other finds a cake that turns her mom into a bear that helps them understand each other and appreciate each other more. a weeb example is isekais. There are sooooo many isekais. japan, Korea, and china are all mass producing isekais right now. the premises are all the same, someone from one world now in another world primarily thanks to magical truck-kun who is probably could be branded as a mass serial killer at this point. I read a lot and i love korean isekai romance novels. I have read an isekai where the character was a villain who then was reincarnated with the memories of her villainous previous life who decided to live her new life by repenting by helping others but guess what? truck-kun came in the form of a airplane crash and she wakes up again in her first life’s preteen body before she became a villain. I’m reading an isekai isekai, author of an isekai met truck-kun and woke up inside the body of one of her characters in her isekai novel. all the same premise but told in a different way. i want to write an isekai for bnha! take a premise and write what you wanted to see happen between those characters if they were in that situation.

same for some fanfics, like you read a fanfic and you like the story that you read but you wished for something more. You like the idea but you wished that it went in this direction or you wanted different  types of interaction, its okay to write your own fic with the same premises. i’ve done that. (side note: but if you are gonna base off of it where a lot of the stuff is the same the give the proper credit where it deserves. no stealing peoples hard work) thats what fanfic was originally made for, fans wanted something more from their favorite works or wants something different (Thank you star trek fandom who started all this). I’ve read a lot of villain deku fics and i was craving a specific type of villain fic where “he really isnt a villain but is one but there is a reason why hes being evil cause it is for the greater good cause of deku’s savior complex and border line martyr complex he’s had since he was a child” with a side of “hero/villain romance”, “surprise quirk” and “badass” and a healthy scoop of “bakugo becomes a better person on his own without deku at UA through the power of friendship cause he has that potential without deku’s constant interference”. no one had what i wanted, so i started writing it myself.

also dont worry about being original. you can write a common idea that everyone sees a thousand times a day, like isekai, and people will love it. focus on how you are telling your story, dont put so much effort in being different. actually, common or typical tropes/ideas help make the story more relatable. two books can be equally as good but one person can like book A over book B because they felt more connected to the characters in it. they could relate to the emotions that were being conveyed. 

now writing tips....hmmmmm well not everything works for everyone but this is what i do

I write notes down, lots of them. I have notebooks full of notes for my fics. some people can just sit there and start writing, but i like notes to keep me on track and remind me of stuff i wanted to add. Writing it down makes it easier not to forget, cause you are just lying to yourself if you think you’ll remember the idea for later. i got dialogue, scenes, plots, random quirk ideas, diagrams, (12) oc profiles, outlines, lists, and a event idea that i have that i want to do some day, all in my notebook. If you are going to write a long fic i strongly encourage that you do this. Outlines are your friend, they are bones of the story Ex:

Hero By Another Name original outline:

meet at a fire, firefighter impresses kiri who will later seek her out

kiri is becoming popular and wants to share the fame

they bond some how(?)

firefighter kiri, kirishima needs to wear a firefighter uniform

firefighter turns out to be a mega fan of red riot

photoshoot

kirishima finds out shes a nerd and is cool with it

firefighter is now popular

camping with baku or bakusquad?

miscommunication

kirishima does a big confession

I always start off with the key things i want for sure to happen. then i start adding to it. I write out the scene i definitely want to see or i can see clearly in my head. i just keep adding to it till its at least three pages long of just outline that has some images, random dialogue i want someone to say or little summaries of the scene i want.

its okay to jump around when you write. there are some parts that you know you need in a story to help it move a long but it can be boring. so i write one scene that i want to happen next and then i think of what needs to happen to get to that point. like how in hero another name where kirishima shows up unannounced to her apartment  and finds out she hoards all his hero merch while not wearing pants.  how do you make that not sound creepy and have kirishima be okay with it? by adding bits of how much of a fan she is through out the story! when they first have dinner together i threw in that red riot shirt to help break the ice and that he would then know that she was a big enough fan to buy his merch and that she admires him and that he is an inspiration for her. then later adding that interview where she talks about how she became his fan shows that she has years of dedication to him as a hero. so when he sees all the merch she has, it would make sense to him that she had all of that and not go “huh, will i be able to leave this place if i enter?”

if you dont know it, look it up. research. i wrote a fic before where the reader was pregnant the entire time, i started at two months to birth. I knew nothing about pregnancy on how it can affect your daily life and what it feels like beyond what health class and child development class taught me. So i looked it up. there is seriously so much that doctors look for during those many ultrasounds cause there are so many things that can affect your health and the baby’s and did you know there is pregnancy diabetes? you can become diabetic only during pregnancy, like after you give birth it can go away or stay, the human body is just tripy. but thanks to that research, people who have had children before left comments going “yessss, i remember feeling that” or “god, this was my sister in this scene, it sucks”. Its that relatability i mentioned before that really helps and it makes the story more believable.

(this is just my personal opinion mainly here feel free to ignore) when it comes to smut, write what you know and not what you fantasize about. im not calling anyone out but i can tell from how someone writes sex that they never had it and they are most likely younger than me. i’ve experimented a lot in my 25 years of life and i find myself going “oh sweetie, thats not how the vagina/anus works” when i read fics sometimes. there are guides online that are very informative and tell you what the feelings are like that you would expect. dont rely on porn too much on how sex works physically, maybe for dialogue. (i think of porn as just live action fanfics for the human mating ritual fandom). its okay to use other smuts as reference tools as well, especially if you dont know anything of the bdsm lifestyle.

beta readers help a lot. if you are unsure of ideas that you have, talk it out with a friend. I sometimes do this for myself or help others with their fics. its actually a lot of fun with a group of people where you just keep shooting off ideas together about stuff and just go all out fangirlling to the point you are rolling on the ground smiling. this can help with writers block or motivate you to keep writing. also having another pair of eyes to look at your fics, not just for corrections but for input on the story can help make it better. someone can see things from a different angle and point stuff out to you, plot holes or things that you can add.

im not sure what else to say other than stuff like format and spacing. sometimes i see people who write too long of paragraphs or there is no clear separation between them. thats killer on the eyes and makes me not want to read at all cause all i see is this wall of text thats just overwhelming. i want to call who ever formatted textbooks cause thats how they do it and it makes it so hard to concentrate on reading and absorbing the info. if i see fics with no clear breaks or long running paragraphs, i usually give up half way cause i just cant do it. its hard to keep track where you are reading and you start trying to focus on it too much that the story is just lost on me. it is hard on people like me who have dyslexia (who ever called it that is just cruel to people who have it cause you can never spell it without spell check and pronouncing it is just ugggh) 

i hope this helps

50 Questions

@the-most-beautiful-broom said anyone could so this, and i was bored and so i am!!

What is the colour of your hairbrush? Like light blue/teal

Name a food you never eat? mayo is obviously evil. I specifically ask to have it not put on a sandwich. aioli can’t fool me

Are you typically too warm or too cold? too cold, that’s bad circulation baby!

What were you doing 45 minutes ago? i was in zoom class. my prof went around and said something nice about everyone, it was really wholesome.

What is your favourite candy bar? hmmm kit kat? also midnight milkways, but i couldn’t eat a full size one in on sitting. 

Have you ever been to a professional sports event? a couple of Mets games!

What is the last thing you said out loud? “no, I was in class.”

What is your favourite ice cream? coffee/espresso!

What was the last thing you had to drink?  water

Do you like your wallet? i’ve been using it for two and half years so yeah ig, never really though abt it before tbh it was a gift

What was the last thing you ate? had a peanut butter sandwich for lunch

Did you buy any new clothes last weekend? the last time i bought clothes was returning a christmas gift so no 

The last sporting event you watched? I’ve caught glimpes of golf when my dad has it on, but before that it was my college’s big rivalry football game

What is your favourite flavour of popcorn? classic butter and salt.

Who is the last person you sent a text message to? my Chaucer gc lmao

Ever go camping? a couple times as a kid with girl scouts

Do you take vitamins? nope

Do you go to church every Sunday? when im home and churches are running on their normally scheduled programming, when its up to me i don’t

Do you have a tan? my body is physically incapable of being tan. and i like it that way

Do you prefer Chinese food or pizza? probably Chines just cause there’s mroe variety to chose from

Do you drink your soda with a straw? if i’m at a diner and they serve it with one, prefer straight from a can

What colour socks do you usually wear? I buy my socks in a variety pack so they’re all dif colors

Do you ever drive above the speed limit? obviously?? i’m from new jersey

What terrifies you? lots of anxieties, few terrors? idk failure? letting people down? the uncertainty of the future? all the normal stuff

Look to your left, what do you see? several pillows

What chore do you hate? yardwork/weeding

What do you think of when you hear an Australian accent? surfing??

What’s your favourite soda? ginger ale

Do you go in a fast food place or just hit the drive-thrus? inside I always feel awkward putting half my torso out the car window

Who’s the last person you talked to? my dad

Favourite cut of beef? ground beef? idk i don’t eat steak

Last song you listened to? All the Sad Young Men by Spector

Last book you read? how i live now by Meg Rossof

Favourite day of the week? I’m a Friday fan

Can you say the alphabet backwards? never tried but i prob couldn’t

How do you like your coffee? spash of milk no sugar

Favourite pair of shoes? if i could live barefoot i would, but my beat to shit red converse

The time you normally go to sleep? 11:30-12:30 range

The time you normally get up? wake up 7:30 out of bed 8:30

What do you prefer, sunrise or sunsets? sunrises feel more special because im normally not awake for them

How many blankets on your bed? currently two

Describe your kitchen plates: green, bowled edges

Do you have a favourite alcoholic beverage? sucker for a champagne b/c thats rare, otherwise basically anything involving vodka. im in college im not picky

Do you play cards? heck yeah, i did a lot more when i was little but ive taught almost all my friends to play poker

What colour is your car? the one i drive is silver-y

Can you change a tire? i know the steps but have none of the necessary tools

Favourite job you’ve ever had? love my writing workshop job at college, but also the data entry gig i had one winter bc it was super easy and paid super well lol

How did you get your biggest scar? only one scar about an inch long that i got when i had a pre-cancerous mole removed

What did you do today that made someone else happy? swept the floors in my house which will make mum happy

tagging: take a page from my book and just do it if you want to! (Yes, i mean you!)

Course Post #8: Sleeping on the Future’s Authenticity

Doktor Sleepless broadcasting on 98.3 Heaven’s Pirates

Warren Ellis’s Doktor Sleepless pushes the biopunk genre to new limits by combining its cyberpunk vision of a futuristic world that integrates technology with biology with anarchist philosophy. Situated in Heavenside, where much of Reinhardt’s is still at play and has created the “grinder” culture, which are “people [who] practise homebrewed extreme body modification” (Ellis).

The series protagonist, John Reinhardt, has turned into the maniacal Doktor Sleepless, his grinder name, after leaving Heavenside upon realizing the lie at the heart of humanistic thought. Reinhardt is a biohacker-turned-bioterrorist, or, Doktor Sleepless, and is a tech genius who has no friends or loved ones. He is particularly interested in biotechnology and biocybernetics that have allowed the transhuman grinder culture to form in Heavenside. Additionally, he is well-trained in computer programming, security and hacking, as we see when he shows Nurse Igor his control over the Apocalypse Bunker. Basically, he is the foil to Tony Stark’s techno-humanistic ideals. He is responsible for many technologies in the future city of Heavenside, such as Clatter, a wireless IM Lens instant messaging system built on soft contact lens that people put in their eyes and allows for cross platform services. Reinhardt is also the creator of Shriekyware, a technology that has manifested the “Shrieky Girl” subculture. Shriekyware is a set of networked receivers and transmitters like two fake fingernails, fake teeth or tongue-rings combined with an IM lens, like Clatter. This technology forms a motion-capture unit and haptic interface that allows the transmission of touch between users, which unifies all its users on the net with the same sensation and feeling, essentially creating a co-human existence. Another of Reinhardt’s technologies that is connected to Clatter are the I.D. Tags, electronic capsules that people ingest that identifies the person and enables one to vote, receive medical care, and make payments on bills. Earlier this semester we read an article by Maureen Meadows and Matthijs Kouw called “Future Making: Inclusive Design and Smart Cities” that hearkens to Doktor Sleepless’s futuristic Heavenside but on an individualistic level. In this article they discuss the possibilities that smart technologies hold in “enabl[ing] the efficient governance of urban public spaces, energy flows, and mobility patterns” (Kouw, Meadows). These smart technologies are various information and communication technologies (ICTs) like sensors, big data-processors, wearable technologies, and even autonomous cars that “will lead to more innovative and sustainable cities and dramatically improve urban life” (Kouw, Meadows). Meadows and Kouw argue for the consideration of different approaches in which all of society can team together in order to create a single vision for future cities. This is where Doktor Sleepless’s Heavenside deviates, as most of the technologies developed by Reinhardt are for the sole purpose of enhancing the individual, not society as a whole. In fact, Doktor Sleepless has become disgusted with how far grinder technology has evolved into creating such a deviant and solipsistic culture.

One of the comic’s prevalent themes is Doktor Sleepless’s Boemerian fatalist philosophy based on Henrik Boemer’s book The Darkening Sky (1966). Doktor Sleepless’s fatalist philosophy and plan to turn Heavenside on itself by awakening grinder culture from its own false consciousness is because he believes that Heavenside is “not the future we were promised... if we can't have that, then we shouldn't have anything at all” (Ellis). Using 98.3 Heaven’s Pirates frequency, Doktor Sleepless preaches his Boemerian philosophy to incite social anxiety and agitation at the complacency and privileged lifestyle that has enveloped Heavenside. In his first broadcast, Doktor Sleepless calls out the Heavenside residents for their obliviousness to the future they’re in, and their complacency:

“Everywhere I go I hear the same thing: ‘Where’s my fucking jet pack? Where’s my flying car?’ . . . You live in the future and you don’t know it. Half of you know where your friends are by looking inside your eyeball, for God’s sake . . . You can rebuild your own fucking bodies at home with stuff you bought from the hardware store . . . The future sneaks up on us. It leaks through the small, ordinary things. You want your jetpack, but you don’t even think about your IM lenses and your phones, were you born with them? No. You’re science fictional creatures. Each and every one of you” (Ellis)

This idea of an absent in the present—the absence of a jetpack and flying car in Heavenside’s futuristic present—reminds me of Tim Richardson’s reiteration of Warren Ellis’s “’science fiction condition,’ [which is] how ‘we can measure the contemporary day by the things that have become absent’” in his essay “The Authenticity of What’s Next.” For Richardson, we could measure change “by the removal or absence or invisibility of things . . . things [that] never even have to exist to register as absent.” The idea of opening a space of vacancy leads him to speculate that “maybe the best way to sell an authentic future is to remove something we don’t notice now, so that an authentic-seeming future wouldn’t be drawn as us with the addition of jet packs, but as us with the subtraction” of everyday tools, methods of transportation or anything else we tend to look as in the rear-view mirror (Richardson). Certainly, the Heavenside residents’s dissatisfaction with their present reality indicates a “futurity that is already upon us as the technology we take for granted, that we’re even bored with, that has fundamentally changed the way we work and live” (Richardson). For Doktor Sleepless, however, it is not so much about presenting an authentic future as much as challenging those of us sleeping on authenticity, or what we think it means to be “real.” For Doktor Sleepless, “Authenticity is bullshit. Never more so than today. We can be anyone we can imagine being. We can be someone new every day . . . ‘You should be happy with who you are.’ ‘Be yourself.’ . . . We’re not real enough. We’re not authentic to our society. Free speech does not extend to our bodies” (Ellis). Doktor Sleepless’s brash words are truly authentic, which is perhaps why it takes a comic book character whose existence is absent in our present reality to utter for them to (hopefully) register into our own individual practice. If, as Richardson speculates that “hacking seems about reuse and—more importantly—repurposing,” then Doktor Sleepless is the ultimate hack insofar as he is hacking, or repurposing, the grinders consciousness, challenging them to abandon their transhuman obsession and gain autonomy from the system of biotechnology. Doktor Sleepless pleads the grinders to “Be authentic to your dreams. Be authentic to your own ideas about yourself. Grind away at your own minds and bodies until you become your own invention.” In the same way, Ellis is pleading with us today to hack our own “minds and bodies” and become our “own invention[s].” Society has always told us who we should be. Michel Foucault and Judith Butler say that the moment we are born we are tossed into power relations and discourses that inscribe us with social norms and regulations in order to be heterosexual, be “manly,” be XYZ, be docile bodies. We are taught to hate others based on the color of their skin or who they love because of deep-seated ideological power structures. Heteronormative gender roles have embedded every facet of society and regulate the free-market capitalist economy that feeds off our own complacency and dissatisfaction with our present future. Cosmetic surgery and body modification offer us opportunities to modify our bodies to our liking according to what society demands of us. Social media like Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat, to name a few, offer us the possibility of creating a copy of our original selves in order to present it to the rest of the world, creating a simulacra where we all play an inauthentic role. Richardson describes an outbreak as “a localized occurrence or symptom of something already in the system more widely. To force an outbreak is to exploit a potential that’s already there.” I believe that in this era of Trumpian right-wing white supremacy, the potential for an outbreak is perhaps as visible as ever but the collective consciousness still fails to hack itself. Yet the collective relies on the individual. I guess then the question is, “What does hacking look like for you?” Perhaps it is our unconscious slumber, our deep sleep to the future’s authenticity, that prevents us from finding any semblance of an answer. Maybe that’s why Doktor Sleepless never sleeps.

Source: http://enculturation.net/authenticity

“I grew up in Heavenside. I know every inch of it… I know it like the face and body of my first love. We’re going to burn it all down. Because this is not the future we were promised. And if we can’t have that, then we shouldn’t have anything at all.” --Doktor Sleepless

hello! i was wondering what program&brush settings you use for your artwork? im new to digital art and i really like the way you colour! Especially those light effects they're so extra cool!

omg Anony you’re such a wonderful being, thank you for liking my art enough to ask me that!

now watch me failing trying to explain things to you lmao. I’m self taught and I’m in no way the best at this, so what I’m going to tell you might still be flawed but this is how I do things o/

hmm it’s gonna be long so I’ll put it under a cut!

1) I’m using Paint Tool Sai for everything in my art but if I still feel the need to, I’ll use Photoshop to correct colors and lighting. for example in this progress gif:

you can see where I decided “no, I don’t like this cold blue feeling” so I went to Photoshop (because it allows changes much easier than Sai when it comes to colors) and I changed it to a warmer purple! you can always play in Photoshop and try to see different versions of your art, different colors will give off different feelings

most of my artworks don’t look the way they do at the end because while drawing I tend to be focused on other things (line, where to place shades, lighting, etc) while when the picture is done I can focus on the feeling I initially wanted it to have!

2) My usual brushes are really basic. also ignore my ugly writing.

Sketch: I use this to sketch because it has a nice and easy flow, I can get messy lines that look good (the latest Brahms Heelshire drawing I did is entirely drawn with this one!)

you can always switch between your brushes depending on what feeling you want your art to have

Lineart: this one has nice, smooth and bold lines. I like to play around with it’s size. I believe it’s the basic one Sai has

little advice: if you’re not happy with your lineart try to alternate heavy lines with tiny ones. for example:

you can see how bold her hair is, but adding thinner lines to the glasses, the folds of her clothes, hair etc. it will create a better dynamic of your picture and will leave the eye of the viewer to run around it! I’m honestly awful at explaining stuff fdkjsnjkfds ofc this is a personal preference but my linework improved since I started to think like this

Base color: this is the color tool sai gives you, I changed my names so I can’t remember its default name. I like it to be bold because when I was little I used to color entire coloring books, so even now digitally I like to color every bit like I’m using crayons haha. time consuming and useless but shhh. basically I put down every base color with this one

Acrylic: now this one is tricky, when I got it the first time I wanted to use it to shade, but using it I discovered it’s much better for blending. after I put down the main colors and shades I just use this one to blend them together and I sometimes paint with it too

Blending: it’s literally the blur brush Sai provides you xDD

now keep in mind that using its settings (the things near the “Normal” option!) you can get different types of blur! always play around to see what looks good in your art. also remember that not every shadow has to be blurred or blended out, there are many ways shadows can look, using both blurred and heavy (cast) shadows in your art will definitely improve it. using real life references might help

Airbrush: the very brush Sai gives you. I’m using this one mainly for lighting. what I do is basically put down a hard light, like literally take a light color and place it where I see fit on the character, then I give it a bit of glow with the airbrush. one thing I noticed is that depending on the surface, the glow will change!

in this one you can clearly see the light on his cheekbone, but then there is a much weaker light on his face, that’s made with the airbrush and then blended into the structure of the face.the glow on the cheekbone and the ear is made with airbrush, using orange and playing around with the layer modes (overlay and luminosity, these are your best friends when it comes to lighting!)

lastly I want to present another best friend for us artists, the eraser

you can make highlights with the eraser too! you can cut the light in different shapes to give different feels and many other things, the eraser is definitely your best friend and not only in erasing mistakes. try to play around with it sometimes

Other things I learned:

try to use a different color for shading, using the exact color but darker will only make your art look dull, lifeless. the same goes for lighting! there are lots of tutorials on color theories and practices out there to help you with it

don’t be afraid to get wild, use oranges, reds, blues, purples in your skin and play around with the layer modes, you’ll see how much more alive it will feel. also don’t be afraid to try different styles, constancy is not the friend of a creative mind. experiment, try things, go out of your comfort zone. make it fun, make it personal. if you like drawing dogs then keep drawing dogs and enjoy it! don’t let labels and others to influence you and your spirit

ik this is obvious but never compare yourself with others. your journey is yours, you have a different hand, a different brain and a different being. this also goes to drawing things others did already! who cares there’s 0284e4895 other pictures with Kitbull already? draw yours, it will be unique and special because it has something from YOU in it, and no one can replicate that not even with tracing

watch people online! of course when you sit down to draw it will be completely different, but involuntarily you’ll learn and exercising you’ll find your own way of doing things. there might be much better ways for drawing lighting than I do, but this is how I feel good and I like to do it!

I know you hear this everywhere but really, practice, daily if you can! in October 2017 I tried to to the inktober challenge for the first time, I haven’t finished it and I was late anyway but I can tell you that trying to draw daily definitely improved my art. now I’m able to draw a picture per day with not much effort (yesterday I was able to draw three pictures with pretty good quality! o/ always start small and be proud of every step!!)

lastly, don’t be hard on yourself. every picture is a lesson, doesn’t matter how it came out. maybe the anatomy is wonky af, but you learned and your brain will remember what not to do next time. try and try and try and never say “my art sucks”, say “this pic doesn’t look how I wanted, but I still like it. I’ll do better next time!”. the moment you start to like your art you’ll see how much it will start to shine hehe

I might come out with more stuff but this is already really really long xD  just be yourself, love your art and enjoy it!! lots of luck for you Anony, I hope I didn’t bore you and this will be helpful for you and others! :D