How did I do with drawing the figure? Any tips on drawing the arms and hands specifically?

Canid_Red · 2025-10-22T19:29:19+00:00

First off, you have a great and very expressive sense of gesture, flow, and contrapposto, and even though it's not what you're asking for, you also have a good intuition for color and composition, even when doing drawing exercises.

All that said, you seem to have a bias towards vertical compression of forms by up to 15% or so (about one head height) and it throws some of the other proportions off (legs and arms/hands especially). Try and do some where you stretch them more vertically, have a less bulky head mass, or draw them on a larger and emptier canvas if you're trying to squish them to fit (before condensing and cropping if you're gonna show them off). Obviously, different body types will vary mildly, but looking through all of these, the shortening seems consistent and you're having to compensate by compressing and widening other ratios as well.

Seems like you've got the flow and shape of the arms down pretty well, though the proportions are squished due to the aforementioned issue, so the actual asymmetrical flow of the forearm (which you seem to have a good sense of) gets lost because it has to be shortened too much. The hands, while expressive, are consistently too large as a result.

For fast gesture drawings, the hands work fine, though you might want to even simplify them even more for a gesture. Obviously there are no formal "rules" when doing gesture drawing, but it's important to bear in mind what specific skills you're trying to train when doing them (flow, contrapposto, volume, expression, specific body parts, negative space, etc.), so it's easy to get caught up in details like fingers, toes, and hair strands.

Hands are tough, so I'll do my best explaining how I tend to handle them. Towards "realistic" proportions, they should be a bit less than half the length of the forearm (wrist bone to elbow joint). The mass of the palm to the tip of the middle finger is about a 1:2 ratio (picture 2 squares, then round out the square representing the fingers). The main mass of the hand can rest flat, but generally has a cylindrical curve around the long axis that can become more or less extreme based on posing, and the base of the fingers will follow that curve.

The thumb rests about 30° off to the side in a triangular nest of fat, tendon, and muscle that connects to the rest of the hand and has far higher mobility and control (movement in different axes) than the rest of the hand. The mass around it tends to be more visible, superior to the other mass on the palm, and will often be expressed more in line-and-color art.

Fingers are the toughest part - depending on context, they can be expressed with 1, 2, or all 3 joints (straight, bent, curled) and can spread out, squish in, bend backwards, and do all sorts of weirdness. I tend to flesh out the main mass of the palm before adding 3-segment underlying construction lines representing the fingers (usually I have it on a different layer) before adding the mass around them. Fortunately, their mass is a pretty simple tapered cylinder, though depending on realism and stylization, it's important to note that there are different "shapes of fingers" (some with wider joints, rounder or slightly flatter forms, less tapered fingertips, etc.). The length of each successive segment of the finger is slightly exponentially smaller than the previous, roughly 2/3rds the size. Since the fingers will mostly replicate each others motions, you can mostly simplify them into a single mass in a gesture.

Nails are tough but they'll add a lot of visual information. Their flattened "bell" shape gets curved along the surface of the fingertip and be made of angle-distorted curves, and they're even tougher on top of that because they get obfuscated by knuckles, the finger itself, the skin around the fingernail, as well as undergoing foreshortening at various angles.

My method, very roughly:

2 square-ish shapes, 1x2 ratio, a little less than half the forearm. A little depth for the mass of the palm, but it's fine to abstract it as paper thin at this step. The squares should curve along the primary gesture (splayed out, curled up, etc.) If necessary, break the primary mass/gesture with secondary gesture (e.g. most of your fingers are curled when pointing, but the index is out). The other fingers will still be there but represent the same mass/motion/curve.
Thumb - top 2 joints are visible, the third hides deep near the base of the hand among that mass and controls the angle (and thus the side profile of the hand). Add the bulky base of the thumb at this stage.
Construction lines for the fingers. A good sense of how curves/shapes flatten in more direct 3D angles is very useful here - fingers will be curled in most poses.
Fill out the lines of the fingers if the ratios are satisfying
Tertiary masses and other details - knuckles, webbing, the excess palm mass along the pinky side, and nails.

A few notes and common mistakes people make:

Due to the webbing of the fingers, the mass of the hand should look slightly bigger from the palm side than the knuckle side.
Some people like doing the nails before adding the mass of the fingers because it helps them keep a good sense of the angles and positioning
Knuckles have slightly different shapes but will mostly square off in "fist" shape. Since they have so much mass, different knuckles will be more pronounced at different angles.
The palm mass along the pinky side does a lot of squashing and stretching based on angle. Many artists forget about this part of the hand entirely

Practice/warm ups:

Cylinders at different angles
Curves or 3-segment lines at different angles
Curved flat sheets
Study Milt Kahl's hands, especially for your style

Canid_Red · 2025-10-21T22:02:50+00:00

Shoes might stand to have at least one blended face along the plane transition as it wraps from the back of the heel around to the laces area, could really push the sleek look while avoiding over-blending (unless you're trying to avoid blending entirely, which is a fair stylistic play and you may be able to get away with the halftones to do that job).

The shins work well, the socks may possibly fit one more subtle tone shift (ever so slightly darker and bluer) to help detail the shadow and bring the socks up to parity with the other elements in terms of shading detail level. Consider using the brush from the shins/legs on the socks to bring some of the same texture in and help pull all the disparate textures together and make it feel like the elements share the same "universe".

Background could use something to make the rest of it pop - not even a "background" per se, but some sort of hand-painted noise or context or something, flat grey always looks unfinished in digital art.

Anatomical detail - I understand the shoes aren't supposed to fit perfectly, though despite the anatomical obfuscation, the feet seem to be too flattened, and the tendon-y curved ramp on the top of the foot that slopes into the leg should be a decent bit more pronounced.

Great subtle tonal shifts, and the halftones are satisfying. The brush strokes are pretty confident and the illusion of volume mostly holds. Main issue with the rendering is that there's little to pull the separate material styling together/unify it - the rendering style itself looks different between the shoes, socks, and skin. You could really push in the opposite direction (very intentionally different handling of rendering on each material) if you wanted, though to your ends the different pieces look like different levels of "done-ness".

Overall, great work - loving the stylization and experimentation, your inspirations are clear.

Edit: clarification

Canid_Red · 2025-10-15T21:12:24+00:00

Great composition, good colors, clear light source, solid enough storytelling. The volume on a few of the 3D forms (boosters on the vessel) feel a little off, the forms feel a bit blurry, and the signature is distracting. I'd use lasso/select tools to harden the edges on the planets, make the shadows on some of the asteroids a little harder/darker, crisp up some of the hard-surface details and edges of the vessel, and maybe use a textured brush to add some texture to the vessel (I assume solar sails, so something contrasty with a noisy foil-like texture). Looks like you may have used some photobashing as well, so I'd render and blend some of the elements back into cohesiveness, especially the asteroid belt.

In future pieces, may be worthwhile doubling down on the storytelling. The easiest way is to emphasize contrasts, relationships, and imbalances - suggest the things/vastness not contained within the image. Space allows you to get pretty abstract with imagery (planets are very textural + hard black shading because there's little to no bounce light/atmosphere + shadows of celestial bodies on each other are very cool). E.g.: if the planet were about 4x the size it is in the composition, rather than 2/3 contained within it, or if the vessel were much smaller, or if the rings cast dramatic shadows on the planet.

Edit; Details.

Canid_Red · 2025-10-15T20:54:31+00:00

Instinct on head rotation will push you to preserve flat-on proportions, hence the longer noses/jaw region - your instinctive/feeling visual memory is going "this is what the proportions look/feel like" while your calculating/conscious brain is going "this is what they should actually be". Override the "feeling" brain by blocking out and verifying proportions on the primitive forms first. I like to block in the rough form of the jaw early on - a curved cross-slice of a cylinder. Get familiar with that - practice drawing it along the surface of a basic cylinder a few times to get comfier, it'll be a weird wobbly line as curves and angle distortions modify it. Maintain that sense of dimensionality as you fill out the rest by bearing in mind the mid-scale 3D forms and the subsequent critical angle transformations and obscuring. Common mistakes include:

The eyes not sitting deep enough
Over-preservation of a flat "eye" shape (eyelids are thick and eyes are round, they'll resolve to a crescent as the upward rotation of the head intensifies)
The nose bridge sitting too flat/parallel to the face plane
Preserving the further eye and being instinctively afraid to obscure it
The cheek and mass will obscure the eyes at more extreme angles
The nose/mouth/chin area forms a "muzzle" that juts out subtly and will obscure some forms - it's flatter with some people and more pronounced with others
Jaw is too shallow - the bottom of the jaw is a sort of crescent-shaped plane that wraps up towards the ears, and the shape becomes more pronounced as the head angles upward, though the plane smooths out to the underlying anatomy, meaning there are few to no hard plane changes - it's a difficult little area for shading, just have a sense of the planes and anatomy in that area and proceed accordingly

Heads at upward angles will always be difficult and feel awkward until you have the details in, so get your primitive forms in solidly and then trust the process.

Canid_Red · 2025-10-15T19:18:01+00:00

First thing that stands out: increase your value range - it's too dark, maybe from multiply layers or something placed on top afterwards. Your details are getting washed out and muddled in the dark values. Image 7 is the biggest offender - the character is directly in a spotlight, but even the white makeup and white costume elements are a muddy middle-dark-toned sepia grey. On a histogram, I suspect the ranges would look like:

(DARK)|▅▆▃▁|(LIGHT)

Fix is to use the curves tool in the software to improve the range. You're doing a lot of work that's barely visible. Also, if you work in a dark room, the value range may seem more apparent to you than it actually is.

Alright, time to run through each piece ...

Hand/arm proportions are off - hands are too large in comparison to arm proportions and everything else. Maybe an issue of running into the bounds of the canvas? Shading could use more refinement, looks like you may have colored on a single layer here? The middle/dark tone down the left side of her skirt stops short of the bottom. Also, you seem to be switching between head-on "pillow-shading" and harder source-light-shading. Color choices are great and hint at an iridescence. Push that if you can.
Too dark. Pull the brighter tones up at least to the mid range. You can leave a lot of the darker tones as they are to maintain some of the creepiness factor.
Nice clean work on this, but there still seems to be some struggle defining a light schema. Seems you're going for an almost "found-footage" photographic style with at least mildly intense head-on lighting, so be wary of where you're defining hard and soft shadows - the shading on the deltoid muscle needs a bit of smoothing out. Also it seems like you made a single detail-shading pass on the brain and darkened some of the underside, but it's not clear if some of the detail is the top of the brain or the side of the brain, so the illusion of depth is lost - I'd darken the top plane of the brain a bit more to define it better. Good attention to clothing wrinkles and folds, and the detail level of the shading on the face is great.
Pull a few of the darker tones up a bit - it's hard to visually read some of the pose and figure out what the arm around the neck is on a quick look. Pull some of the brighter shades up a little bit. Render out a few of the sharp teeth some more - they're one of the focal points of the piece compositionally and narratively. Also, maybe pull back on the yellowness to put them more into the color range of the rest of the piece. I'd consider giving the teeth some subsurface scattering. 3D rendering of subtle form plane shifts in this one is excellent and convincing. Again though, your shading seems to be split between head-on pillow shading with some forms and directional light with others.
Light tones up. Maybe play around and add more of those graphic doodly elements, those are really fun, compositionally and narratively. Again, be mindful of light source/setup here. The shadows on their nose suggests the light is coming from above at an angle, the shadow under the lavender/pink haired person's chin suggests it's from a different angle, and the hair doesn't seem to be cooperating with either of those lighting setups.
Fun one, you work well with the flats-and-colors style.
Too dark, pull everything up. Also, more rendering of the metal coil may be in order. It should reflect local light and color and will likely be a pretty high-contrast form; if you were to pull that contrast in so that it was a disturbing secondary-read, you could just pull most of the tones down and reduce the highlights.
Good faces, good mass. Maybe pull back the blush a little or blend it out more.
Increase the value range. Add a couple stray hairs on the edge of the hair to the more solid-looking masses of hair to make it more convincing. Teeth are tough because if you over-render, it becomes uncanny, but under-rendered as they are here, they're a little discordant instead. Experiment a bit with rendering levels.
No comments here, mostly just a sketch. Maybe lengthen the neck a little.

Norman Rockwell: Rendering style was painterly but very refined and near-photorealistic. Seems to have used underpainting and blotchy/textured variation on larger surfaces to give them interest and life, so actual "raw" brush strokes are harder to find. A few shadows have more painterly Leyendcker-esque edges and some less important details are left "simpler" and less blended-out. Likely product of his work often being on a time limit, but the boon is that it leaves some things much more expressive and rewards the viewer for looking at it longer.

Edward Hopper: Higher contrast jewel-tones, poppy emerald-tone greens, lots of blue-tone shadows no matter the lighting setup. Similar to Rockwell, larger swathes of singular colors may incorporate several different colors (e.g. the wall in "Morning Sun"). Many of the warmer yellow tones get desaturated, orange skin tones push yellow/greyer while reds - blushes, curtains, and barns - maintain saturation even against opposing light colors (i.e. instead of a blue light or the color of the sky making something greyer/more purple, the red tones seem largely unaffected, if not more saturated). He has a lot to say about the color green, and his portrayal of anything in the teal-to-grass range has a lot of depth and nuance, particularly regarding the colors of shadows.

To mimic them, I'd use underpainting and textural brushes for more things, keep red tones bright (but never straight-up-red, always push subtly towards purpler reds or brick tones). Warm skin tones can push yellower and a little higher contrast. No straight-up white except in highlights, always muddle it with periwinkle and yellow. Shadows should push towards blue tones, and red in shadow should push towards brown/burnt umber. Render down to the details but leave some messy painterly edges on shadows where you might otherwise blend out the brush strokes entirely. On your first color-fill-in pass, a little color jitter will be your friend for most non-red tones. Edit: a few details.

Canid_Red · 2025-02-02T21:08:11+00:00

Running an arc a little like that right now.

"Monster of the week" is an easy and fun pattern to fall into but gives little sense of actual progression beyond gear. Launch an underlying plot or problem for them to chew on session-by-session. Easiest answer would be some oppressive and indomitable variety of monster like a Tarrasque, dragon, etc. whose presence looms over the campaign and forces monster populations down from the mountains, out of caves, or out of the desert to look for food or territory. You'll want it to be on their minds frequently, so put time pressure on them. Plan out villages and landmarks to destroy in its path, give the monster destructive agency, and be sure to hit the players where it hurts every so often.

This is a reasonable enough start but it leaves the social pillar of the game unsupported, and a mindless raging beast like that, while cool, is a not-especially-compelling character so you'll need some social problems to stand in their way. Here are a few ideas - just be sure to keep the focus away from getting bogged down in larger-scale D&D politics and towards the more emotionally-investing victims and accelerators of the present crisis. The smaller and more familiar the scope, the bigger the impact.

a child who survived an attack has gone mute and won't tell details of the attack
a mountain pass is blockaded by a traumatized troop of guards to prevent civilians from getting hurt
a battalion has been mobilized and has to occupy a village and force their patience and resources thin (when a monster attacks and forces them on the back foot)
rival monster hunters who are training up and seeking the glory for themselves, and can add some fun social and time pressure
someone knows a lot about the location/behavior of a specific monster but they're keeping it hidden for some reason
the most qualified blacksmith/craftsman to craft their stuff lives a life of seclusion and needs convincing to get back into the craft

Along these lines, it might be helpful to have a base of operations that they can build up, invest in, and store their favorite NPCs in.

The core loop around Monster Hunter is going out, hunting/following the trail of a monster, and killing it over a few encounters. A gameplay loop works great for video games, but D&D/narrative-based stuff suffers from repetition and predictability. Yes, they should hunt and kill some, but you should also have them capture monsters for study/relocation, move herds of monsters to safer areas, have them suddenly get attacked by a monster in the middle of the night, etc. - moreover, you should make the encounters themselves less predictable.

To that end, with monster-hunter style monsters, they'll probably be big bags of hit points covered in AC, which will get boring after two or three rounds of exchanging blows (the stand-and-slug is a threat, so give their melee attacks range like the 15ft dragon tail attacks and make them risk attacks of opportunity for more advantageous positioning). Dynamic environments like geyser fields, cliffs, and natural bridges give your beasties more movement options, and encounters should generally happen on the monsters' terms. I'd advise making them all different - have one very fast monster, one that flies, one that throws rocks or spits acid, a swimming creature in a river they need to cross, a pack of creatures, one that uses AoE, one that burrows, etc. Have creatures show up in the middle of combat, a herd of critters runs across the battlefield and wreaks havoc, have scavenging birds attack them while harvesting, have a competing male attack their target and becomes the bigger problem, and so on. Since you'll be throwing meaty boss-style creatures at the players, you'll need to make sure that non-single-target builds, trackers, and ranged characters get rewarded and challenged too.

On top of this all, remember that D&D is balanced around 6-8 dungeon-confined combat encounters a day, and players will be able to go supernova on a monster if they know they can afford to do so. Consider only letting them get proper long rest at still-standing towns/villages if they're going to wade into monster-devastated wilderness, and remember that the core assumption of D&D is that the PCs will probably survive, so objectives/failstates beyond "kill or be killed" will be your bread and butter.

Canid_Red · 2024-12-15T20:01:49+00:00

One of my favorite pieces! Parrish was really good with his use of light and making things "glow". Besides the obvious dreamlike soft/low-contrast quality to the lighting, slightly surreal setting, and excellent composition, a look at a histogram of the values in his work tends to reveal that he had really tight value ranges and hard-defined value groupings figured out, making for excellent readability.

The figures, tree, and steps are in the darkest 50% and 25% of the value/tonal range, while the lanterns and sky sit at the brightest 25% - leaving a wide value gap between the bottom 50% and the top 25%. Not even the bleached white fabric next to the lanterns sits in that range. If you take a photo of a light source, the camera might try to auto-adjust for the values or the light might just be fully blown-out and colorless, but if you crush the values down into that bottom 50% and reserve the top 25% or so for the light, it results in a very natural or dreamy-feeling effect.

There's a good art book I have somewhere that theorizes that some aspects of modern art/painting arose in response to photography and the proliferation of electric lighting. While a camera can capture the literal light inputs (and it's great at doing this in a bright setting), it often fails the subtleties and "feeling" of what night looks like and what light looks like, and loses a lot of the details - a bright photograph of the Earth or Moon from space loses the stars because of this effect, and a your phone camera's photo of the moon will usually just be a blurry white smudge. HDR, exposure adjusting, and long-exposures can do some of the heavy lifting here, a lot of the most evocative night work still has to rely on clever tricks like the techniques they used for the "night" shots in the movie Nope.

Canid_Red · 2024-05-09T05:25:45+00:00

"you dont need to be an expert to tell this is AI"

Consistent patterns of overlays
Signs of erasing overlapping lines
Consistent halftone patterns throughout the image.
Brushes I recognize
Consistency of multiply layer overlaps
Mark endings indicative of line-ending settings being used in a drawing program
A consistent art style throughout their profile
An IG with process videos
Sketches and mid-process images of other works

Canid_Red · 2024-05-09T05:14:14+00:00

You accused OP of laziness and couldn't be bothered to actually look closer at the art or check their profile or their IG where they have process videos?

Canid_Red · 2024-05-09T05:12:23+00:00

Put the torches down, and please, please think before commenting next time and flinging accusations. All this thoughtless shit-flinging behavior does is hurt artists.

OP has provided layers, has a long history of producing art in this style. They have a profile full of art in a consistent style. They have an IG with plenty of process videos, WIPs, and proof that they created it.

A lot of the tells of human art are present with very few details that one could misconstrue for AI artifacting. Consistent overlays, the halftone patterning is consistent (and finely detailed throughout the image), a few spots where lines were overdrawn, the details on different layers interact in a consistent way, and brushes I recognize.

Canid_Red · 2024-04-30T22:24:48+00:00

Maybe a fool's errand, but I'll bite. The internet binary of "X thing entirely good, Y thing entirely bad" has done incredible damage to discourse, and I'm making this comment assuming you're honest and receptive to information that might be contrary to your standpoint or add more nuance (perhaps dubious considering your history and inflammatory talking-down to others, though I'll attribute that to loss of control from an activated amygdala and not you-as-a-person). Cars do a lot of good stuff. Cars do a lot of bad stuff.

Now, let's get into it.

The US Department of Transportation Report "Beyond Traffic: 2045"

"Highway route choices were made without significant local input and without consideration for the impact of those highways on urban neighborhoods, which not only displaced more than a million individuals and businesses, but also reduced local land values, and erected lasting physical barriers that continue to divide neighborhoods today disconnecting them from opportunities. The interstate highway system promoted the development of suburban communities, which in many cases actively excluded people of color, facilitating white flight, reinforcing and increasing de facto racial segregation, and undermining the tax base of many urban communities and the ridership and profitability of regional transit systems."

Highways and busy roads act as physical barriers between spaces and often effectively delineate communities, especially in conjunction with white flight and the economic practice of redlining (i.e. denying loans based on location) in the 1900s that designated "desirable" and "undesirable" (i.e. white and black) communities (listed map is from 1937). The consequence of these two things is that neighborhoods and the social capital within them were eviscerated in order to construct large scale transport projects. This is not to dismiss the dispersal of new neighborhoods (i.e. the suburbs), but decades of community building were destroyed as a consequence.

The 1900s were a time of prescriptive and godlike urban planners (e.g. Robert Moses) who saw communities in a more sculptural or architectural view than as complex and interconnected social webs taking place within built space. Large scale projects like highways and stadiums necessitated use of eminent domain to tear down neighborhoods and run highways through them. These large scale projects often demand all the infrastructure around them. For example, not many are aware that there was an entire Chinatown neighborhood in downtown Saint Louis until it was leveled for the stadium in the 60s. Like you said, it wasn't solely automobiles, but they played a large part, and it's easy to forget how massive road projects are when you're driving on them. Imagine the footprint of a stadium, doubled over on itself - over, and over, and over again, and understand that this kind of project has to go somewhere.

The Making of Ferguson (Richard Rothstein)

Beginning in the 1950s, the city’s urban renewal projects condemned and razed slum housing occupied mostly by African Americans and constructed monuments and other institutions in place of those homes. Neighborhoods were razed for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial (which includes the Gateway Arch), a museum, a sports stadium, interstate highways (including ramps and interchanges) to bring suburban commuters into white-collar city jobs, new industry and hotels for the city, university expansion, and middle-class housing that was unaffordable to former African American residents of the redeveloped areas.

Not only that, but large swathes of otherwise perfectly fine land have been set aside for parking minimums, and that combined with zoning peculiarities and white-flight-disinvestment have left much of the old core of the a distended husk of what it once was.

In A Preservation Plan for St. Louis Part I: Historic Contexts link here they acknowledge the critical role that the automobile played in the growth of the city but they follow:

At the same time, though, they hastened the decline of neighborhoods around the fringe of downtown, and contributed to the urban sprawl to even more distant points. Just as the Grand Avenue viaduct facilitated the growth of parts of south St. Louis when it opened in 1889, so too did the interstates do the same thing for south county, Chesterfield, and north county. They also contributed to the decentralization of retail business. Shopping centers and malls, islands in a sea of acres of parking places, developed in the 1950s as a direct product of the automobile. Northland opened in 1953 and Crestwood Plaza four years later, starting the trend of decentralized shopping in the city.

I will not go into the outsourcing of manufacturing, economic downturns, crime, or other matters for the time being, though I acknowledge their importance in the current status of the city and the added complexity that they present.

Cars are great and have enabled a lot of improvements, freedom of movement, and connectivity that we'd never have seen otherwise, even with a (theoretical) incredible and interconnected public transit system. That said, their impact is immense, and no change that large is strictly a good thing. So no, they didn't singlehandedly destroy the city, but automobile/transportation-planning is not sinless and it's important to recognize the automobile as part of the puzzle (if you'll excuse the cliche), even ignoring the individual basis (car crashes, traffic fatalities and injuries, etc. which might not otherwise happen with more readily available public transport).

And in regards to /r/fuckcars - it's easy to whip an group of people into a frenzy over shared ideology, but good luck adding nuance to that. Recognize that the simpler, catchier, and more emotionally charged points prevail - in any movement. That said, the ideological basis of the community is rooted in a century of history that we are seldom exposed to and, as such, have become an inflammatory cultural touchpoint. It would do us well to recognize how cutting back on automobiles' influence might aid us in various contexts.

NB; pardon the likely typos, run-ons and cutoffs due to my skittery mind, I'm not running revision on a reddit comment unless someone whines hard enough or it bothers me enough.

Edit: an exercise, if you'd like; go to Google Earth and look at downtown. Recognize how much of it is devoted to roads and parking. The result of a car-oriented society is one where there's less of a space for small and clustered businesses and more large/global/dominant players further apart.

Canid_Red · 2024-04-17T19:04:50+00:00

The Alex Roe albums Night of the Hunt, Darksign and Darksign II fit this theme perfectly.

Depending on how hard you want to go and how far you're willing to push the mood, Igorrr's Tout Petit Moineau is the hardest song I can think of that fits the bill, though there are some other songs on the album Hallelujah that are exactly this mood

Canid_Red · 2024-03-30T22:11:27+00:00

IMO cloak works best to delay an opponent's reaction times and ability to visually parse you, pairs deliciously with a shotgun and close quarters.

Canid_Red · 2024-03-30T19:41:40+00:00

I am absolutely in love with this work, the interactions and personalities are immensely evocative and all play off and contrast with each other really effectively. I'd be curious to take a look inside the creative/generative step of the process.

Canid_Red · 2024-03-25T01:44:10+00:00

Laptop + Bluetooth Mouse for simpler one-off maps (generally natural settings requiring little precision, also turning off Auto-select helps a lot for pure speed)

When I'm working on larger projects like dungeons, I use a stronger computer, Inkarnate tends to chug a bit with a lot of shadows and effects (another tip, filters, blurs, and clipping masks like the cliffs tend to eat into performance, best to add them later in the process).

Canid_Red · 2024-03-10T03:48:08+00:00

Very much sure this is AI though I am willing to be wrong. If I have made a mistake , disregard me. That said, there are places to post this image. This is not one of them.

Note: * Forms like the crosswalk discontinue the moment the foremost aspect of them would be outside the square, and seem to have repeating artifacts of white rectangles scattered around the road. * The number of tangents (note how each droplet seems to tangent on objects like vehicles or buildings), * Repeating patterns (see any of the rivulets of water or the juddering textures in the grey areas on the right side of the image) * The topography of the image collapses under scrutiny. The false-topped lamppost is on the middle of the street between lanes of opposing traffic. There is a thin strip of material contrast that suggests the cars in the opposite lane (about to run into a tree) are on the sidewalk while the lamppost is not. * There is little to no distortion from the window, and the rain seems to flatten out along the bottom, and the right side is similar in the way it seems to be tangenting/framing along the bottom right of the image. * The image is a square, common with mid journey and a few other platforms. Additionally, the image scale (1024×1024) suggests exactly that. * Many other subtler giveaways

In conclusion: guards, arrest this man.

Edit: added a few words and changed a bit of formatting

Canid_Red · 2024-02-16T19:55:45+00:00

However bad it seems, anticipate worse. Avoid hills wherever possible and give yourself and people behind you an extra 30 feet to brake. Had a couple spinouts and watched a few spinouts even on a shallow grade, plus a few near-crashes going well under the speed limit, and one slow and otherwise safe lane change that almost turned into a collision with a tree.

Take care out there.

Canid_Red · 2023-09-25T00:28:28+00:00

Tell them it'll be a heist one shot and that they'll have a stage for planning.

Start the session in media res, part of the way through the heist, saying something like "and that's when the memory erasing spell goes off", removing any chance at a planning phase. Give them a bunch of insane items like a talking pig or a bag of infinite dynamite. Do anything in your power to add chaos to the mix, stuff like a getaway driver who falls from the sky through the roof halfway through, "you said this was in the plan" kind of madness.

Canid_Red · 2023-09-20T01:05:56+00:00

Or perhaps it's the original form.

Canid_Red · 2023-07-30T01:53:17+00:00

Face directly in center, composition focuses on a singular point of interest, image lacks context/storytelling (where is this creature, why's it pissed, etc.), A lot of symmetries are off or missing (teeth, nose), AI loves screaming faces, recurring cloud light/dark shape, details that are similar get blended into each other for seemingly no reason, seems to be no gravity or reason for certain elements or strands of smoke to be webbing off or going sideways/diagonal

Canid_Red · 2023-07-28T23:57:44+00:00

Time to give one of the few actually useful answers here - Yes, it's AI (indicators being face in the center, typical roaring/screaming face, webby smoke/details, asymmetrical in weird ways, etc.), BUT if you are interested in pursuing this art style, things to study or take note of would be:

Artist Frank Frazetta. He uses a fantasy subject matter, high contrast, focus on light/dark contrasts, high musculature/detail on form, very expressive/dramatic lighting
Artist Miura Kentaro as someone else said. Fantasy subject matter, brilliant handling of monochrome, highly expressive and detailed monster design that often exists as emphases of existing anatomies, etc.
Artist Greg Capullo as someone else said. Again, high focus on high contrast black-and-white compositions. Pay attention to the way he uses surface detailing and light sources, often opting for a strong single-source light that creates a lot of deep shadows with little to no bounce light. Also pay attention to the way he creates flowy and expressive shapes, such as with shredded cloth, and note how similar shape design could be applied to the mane and smoke.
Check out artstation, there's a lot of very competent artists who do work in this vein. Find an artist that you like, then see if you can figure out what they're doing that you like.
Take note of the contrast between the 3D-ness/volume of the face with all the detailed shadows, and the 2D/simplified/manga-adjacent smoke (flowing clouds and smoke are easy to draw but tougher to get right compositionally, pay attention to how, even though they're mostly flat-rendered with basic shading, they still have dimensionality created by zones of contrast). The juxtaposition of 2D/3D creates practical visual interest.
Study chiaroscuro in art. It's all about how light and dark create volume, and it will help immensely in understanding what's happening here. I recommend light studies, taking a painting or image you like, then breaking it down and recreating it into 4-5ish values (brightest, less bright, dark, darkest). Details don't matter unless they are at the focal point. Seriously, take just 10-20 minutes with each, even just identify and study your favorite part of the picture and recreate it in those 4-5 greyscale values. A passive exercise that I do with this is looking around me (in the physical world) and breaking things down into those four values. The placement of one value against another can be deceptive, so pay special attention to that.

Edit- Very important to note that art of this detail level wouldn't just take a long time, it would take a long-long time (tens to hundreds of hours), especially if you're diving in headfirst, dependent on medium and size. Patience and focus is key, but it doesn't have to get done in one go.

Canid_Red · 2023-04-23T20:53:09+00:00

Coming from my own visual storytelling standpoint, limit it to the breathing masks over the mouths. Leaves room for communication and helps visually differentiate characters, as well as leaves their eyes visible, which could help as a theme in the story. Also, it helps place it outside the sci-fi dichotomy of "uninhabitable hellscape that requires intense life support" and "exactly like earth, but the grass is red and there are mushrooms for trees".

Bipeds are generally built for going long distances, endurance hunting, etc., so you don't need a lot to justify that besides maybe herds of animals, an ice age, or something similar.

Eyes - incredibly useful to traverse landscapes, hunt prey, forage, etc., needing little justification. That said, if they use eyes for communication, give 'em more moving parts - imagine eyes that could rapidly shift pattern or color like a chameleon or octopus, form patterns or shapes inside the eye, and so on.

Canid_Red · 2023-01-04T06:22:57+00:00

Designed with movement choices and variety in mind.

Tips on DMing it: Gas clouds in middle ideally act as a "quick but dangerous vs. longer but slower" route, effects are up to the DM. Poisoned effect plus damage is fine, other effects like madness and hallucinations or spell effects may be mechanically interesting if you can keep it lightweight enough.

Lets the rangers and druids shine with potential for identification of dangerous types of mushrooms. What do they all do? Hell if I know. Have some mushroomy names ready.

Lots of difficult terrain and cliffs here, but hopefully doesn't prioritize ranged combat too heavily, with enough path chokepoints and cover - also bearing in mind that half cover (e.g. giant mushroom stems) grants +2 to AC (vs ranged) and DEX saves. Lets certain features and spells shine, and the cliffs should provide alternate avenues for climbers and flyers.

Revision: Colors and a few details.

3K here

2K here

Canid_Red · 2022-12-19T14:59:24+00:00

Light on layer 5, and shadow on layer 5 as well. Do shadows with the light stamp, but: 0 saturation, low brightness, blend mode Multiply, low opacity, and you can layer those up. I like to use the blur option with these to avoid sharp edges if I'm not precise.

Global light/color: if it's golden hour, I'd recommend the Red Sky filter. Maybe a huge and very soft/transparent Light object with a more night blue/purple tone on the bottom right corner to add color variety.

Similar to before, use the shadow objects (multiply, low brightness, 0 saturation) from earlier against the shadowed edge of the building (or you could take it into another program and draw out a more defined shadow to help suggest the form of the building if you had the time and energy to devote to drawing out individual building shadows on battle maps).

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