Lately I’ve been getting most of my pep talks from Mister Rogers.
Great. Now I’m disappointing Mr. Rogers.
Nah. Mr. Rogers wouldn’t be disappointed. He hopes for the best for us, but he knows life is hard. And he knows you’re doing the best you can. And he’s proud of you for that.
The phrasing here is important, too. “The healthiest life you can possibly have,” frames it as a necessarily subjective standard. I feel like I rarely see this framed in such an open and inclusive manner. “The healthiest life you can possibly have,” is a construction which empowers you to make the best choices for your current needs, not the best choices against an external, objective demand. Making a choice to set different priorities based on your current capacity is very much within that standard. Not sure he meant it that way, but given all we know about Mr. Rogers’ sensitivity to such concerns, I’m betting its no accident.
yo here’s a useful tip from your fellow art ho cynellis… use google sketchup to create a model of the room/building/town you’re trying to draw… then take a screenshot & use it as a reference! It’s simple & fun!
Sketchup is incredibly helpful. I can’t recommend it enough.
There’s a 3D model warehouse where you can download all kinds of stuff so you don’t have to build everything from scratch.
reblog to save a life
This is an incomplete tutorial, and it drives me crazy every
time I see it come around.
We live in a pretty great digital age and we have access to
a ton of amazing tools that artists in past generations couldn’t even dream of,
but a lot of people look at a cool trick and only learn half of the process of
using it.
Here’s the missing part of this tutorial:
How do you populate your backgrounds?
Well, here’s the answer:
If the focus is the environment, you must show a person in relation to
that environment.
The examples above are great because they show how to use the
software itself, but each one just kind of “plops” the character in front of
their finished product with no regard of the person’s relation to their
environment.
How do you fix this?
Well, here’s the simplest solution:
This is a popular trick used by professional storyboard and
comic artists alike when they’re quickly planning compositions. It’s simple and
it requires you to do some planning before you sit down to crank out that
polished, final version of your work, but it will be the difference between a background
and an environment.
Even if your draftsmanship isn’t that great (like mine),
people can be more immersed in the story you tell if you just make it feel like
there is a world that exists completely separate from the one in which they
currently reside – not just making a backdrop the characters stand in front of.
Your creations live in a unique world, and it is as much a character as
any other member of the cast. Make it as believable as they are.
Great comments and tutorials!
I’m a 3d artist and have been exploring the possibilities of using 3d as reference for 2d poses. I want to add a couple of tips and things!
Sketchup is very useful for environment references, and I assume it’s reasonably easy to learn. If you’re interested in going above and beyond, I highly recommend learning a proper 3d modeling program to help with art, especially because you can very easily populate a scene or location with characters!
Using 3ds Max I can pretty quickly construct an environment for reference. But going beyond that, I can also pose a pretty simple ‘CAT’ armature (known in 3d as a rig) straight into the scene, which can be totally customized, from various limbs, tails, wings, whatever, to proportions, and also can be modeled onto and expanded upon (for an example, you could 3d sculpt a head reference for your character and then attach it to the CAT rig, so you have a reference for complex face angles!)
The armature can also be posed incredibly easily. I know programs exist for stuff like this - Manga Studio, Design Doll - but posing characters in these programs is always an exercise in frustration and very fiddly imo. A simple 3d rig is impossibly easy to pose.
By creating an environment and dropping my character rig into it, I have an excellent point of reference when it comes to drawing the scene!
Not only that, but I can also view the scene from whatever angle I could ever want or need, including the character and their pose/position relative to the environment.
We can even quickly and easily expand this scene to include more characters!
Proper 3d modeling software is immensely powerful, and if you wanted to, you could model a complex environment that occurs regularly in your comic or illustration work (say, a castle interior, or an outdoor forest environment) and populate the scene with as many perspective-grounded characters as you need!
reblogging to save a life
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Look at this amazing addition! This is fantastic!
I tried Sketchup before but did struggle a lot with it X_X Maybe I should give it another try sometime ….
There were a lot of things about Yurio that I hated along the way, but I never hated him. In episode 3 I was legitimately disappointed to see him go, and I think it’s because he wasn’t just full of bluster. His confidence was strangely quiet, and there was clearly a lot of effort behind his determination. That’s far more than I can say for myself. I admired that.
He is also filled with a desperation that I find easy to sympathize with, and there’s a good reason for it.
Viktor, who has been hogging the podium for years, is suddenly absent. Yuuri, who Yurio believes is skilled enough to dominate, is on the verge of gaining the necessary self-confidence to finally pull it off. And Yurio has advanced to the senior division just in time. He thinks that if he doesn’t win it now, now, very now, then he never will.
Yurio thinks this is his only opportunity to be truly competitive with his strengths.
He likely first became conscious of Yuuri because they share the same name, but by series start Yurio already looks to him for inspiration in a kind of artistic arms race. It’s why he got so angry when we first meet him—he felt personally betrayed that this “Yuri” didn’t perform at his best. We also see that Viktor mentioning Yuuri’s retirement just before Yurio’s free skate lit a fire under him, and pushed him to perfection in order to goad Yuuri into returning.
So then we know he’s so good that he will win simply by deciding to spite someone. First of all, goddamn.
Otabek thinks back to meeting Yurio when he says he can’t do what the other skaters can, hinting that ballet has always been Yurio’s core strength as a skater. Otabek will have a long career by virture of his physical prowess, the fact that he threw his weight behind raw athleticism, something that can be maintained regardless of age.
The other side of that coin is that Yurio feels his own time as a skater is shorter than others.
If I remember anything from watching Plushenko at Salt Lake City all those years ago, this is not something most male figure skaters can do. Yurio knows that, and that as he ages his natural grace—the thing his skating is (for now) inextricably linked with—will wane.
He may rarely be the perspective character, but make no mistake, 4 is a Yurio episode. Just because Yuuri is the one speaking doesn’t mean Yurio isn’t also thinking it.
And the cut that immediately follows?
And at this point Yurio has already said exactly what he thinks of himself.
This line is everything that drives Yurio. It explains his aggression, his forward determination, and why he is initially so repulsed by agape. He does not want to admit to his own vulnerability.
(Which I have passionately posited as something Viktor himself desperately needs. Watch that episode again and you’ll see how hard Viktor whiffs when Yurio challenges him to describe his own agape.)
Yurio prefers only to fight, rather than face his fears and failings. It’s why we see him push so hard in his Rostelecom free program:
and why he continually adds elements (like raising his arms) to up his points. He is desperate.
He effectively loses his mentor at the Onsen on Ice competition, and at this point there is no one in his corner full-time. But he walks away emboldened.
… because I’ve always been fighting alone anyway. While Yuuri draws power from the support of those around him (and there are many), Yurio feels he has had only himself to depend on. The cinematography seems to support his opinion.
It’s no coincidence that, wise coach that he is, Yakov reaches out to his ex to help give Yurio the extra push he needs to make something of his extant talents. And from the moment he meets Lilia, Yurio is all in.
This isn’t something he even needs to consider. She’s just put words to what he was already feeling.
As we’ve learned from Yuuri, one’s own opinion of oneself is not usually the most accurate. So whether or not his skills really do diminish from here on, by the end of the series he seems to have a new resolve to fight as long as he can. All because Yuuri fulfilled his end of the arms race bargain and beat Viktor’s other world record.
And you can’t throw shade on someone for that if you do the same yourself. So he even avoids hypocrisy.
And whether or not Yurio believes it himself, his coaches believe he has become more than just a ballet dancer.
So there’s hope that he will remain competitive by continuing to evolve and broadening his strengths.
TL;DR Yurio (knowingly) nearly killed himself for those scores. He earned the shit out of that win and his talent and potential are terrifying.
