Posts tagged a good read

nnscribble:

Someone linked this on Facebook, I thought I’d share.

These are pretty accurate, I think, though I don’t really care if you wanna wear something in sauna. It shouldn’t be such a big deal. And I couldn’t care less about hockey, really….

But I hate it when people can’t hold to the agreed schedule and don’t even bother to inform if they’re late or if there’s change of plans.
Also I agree on things mentioned in 1. and 6.

lhuin:

Just writing my thoughts out about something I’ve seen recently.

For the record, I’ve never been one to complain about “style” that much. Style is so much more than just how you draw a certain animal for example, I’ve always thought that it’s like a person has a certain kind of handwriting - they always have their own “style” in what they do. It’s not just drawing one or two things in a certain way, it’s including your own ‘handprint’ in something you do. A much bigger picture so to speak.

I’d never go complain if I saw someone draw an eye or a paw of a wolf the same way I do. I think in general people are really sensitive about this kind of things - I know people are gathering influences from a lot of places, I’ve also been influenced by a lot of people and tried some little things I like about and brought them into my work. It’s about being inspired to try something. It doesn’t mean it’s copying anyone’s style if you gather influences and inspirations from a lot of places. We are even told to try out things that other people do at school. It doesn’t mean you have to try to be that person number 2, it’s about expanding/developing your own skills and ideas. Coincidences also happen.

When you do that, you eventually create your own way of doing things. No one is born with a distinctive drawing style, it’s something that forms over time and from the moment you put the pen on the paper for the first time I’m sure most people have some way of drawing what they’re going to draw based on what they’ve seen earlier - even at this point you might have a “collection” of your own ways of doing things. 

At some point it might remind you (or other people) of something else if you’re heavily inspired by it, but again it evolves and you make it more and more your own. I mean, I wouldn’t even complain if someone tried using “my style” for fun! I used to try a replica of Wolf’s Rain-style in a few pictures/fan arts just for fun.

I wouldn’t say my style is anything super original, but I’ve been told the way I draw things, no matter what I might draw, there’s normally something that gives out that it was drawn by me (and I am always flattered to hear this, mind you). I’ve been working on this all my life (or during the time I’ve been drawing). Like I said, it’s not just simply the way I might do little certain details but the ‘entirety’ of the work so to speak.

That all said, I don’t understand it when people purposefully don’t go through this process and purposefully use all the things collected and created by someone else - all the development someone has gone through, the ‘thing’ that makes the work ‘yours’ even the little details that I mentioned too. (I understand that some people might start this way and it works for them though! Seen a few good examples of when you start with for example GNG style and after a while it doesn’t look like that anymore but again has the creator’s personal touch and mark to it. But speaking in general.).

I do get a bit sad when someone clearly uses what I’ve been working on, it feels like someone’s trying to use my handwriting/signature. Again, it’s not just because a work someone else has made reminds me of something or something I’ve drawn. It’s about looking at someone’s gallery and  you can tell the person has been “studying” my/someone else’s work so much they use all the things that I’ve gathered over time. It’s not exactly that they’re taking influence or inspiration.

I’m grateful when people have been inspired by me and it feels amazing if someone tells me that.

But instead of inspiration it feels like I’ve been collecting some things for many years, and instead of starting their own collection someone takes mine.

It feels a bit bad sometimes, but I still never complain to them about it. Just seen a case of this again, and it made me feel a bit sad. :c I guess I just need to hope it’s a passing thing and they will ‘evolve’ too, but seen also people who keep it up for years and even mix us up. 

Sorry about the unclear ramble, I know style is a difficult topic and like I said I’m not normally one to complain about this kind of things but I just thought I’d write how I feel about the extreme cases. I don’t want to appear overly possessive or stuck-up or anything but just wanted to write something about this topic because it was kinda personal too.

(via perunaprofeetta)

derinthemadscientist:

shatterstag:

you know what annoys me a whole lot about tumblr

is that it glorifies and promotes this antisocial cynical attitude in young teenagers where refusing to relate or communicate with people is a POSITIVE thing

that staying at home on the internet constantly, isolating yourself completely and refusing to talk to people because they ‘dont understand you’ or your fandoms, because you’re a special snowflakye tumblr user who knows big words like  ‘gender binary.’

newsflash that isnt healthy and you’re setting yourself up for a huge  shock when you get to the real world and have to realise that you actually have to communicate well with people to get through university and jobs and a career, not bitch about how your class mates dont understand supernatural slash on tumblr or whatever

… how the hell is tumblr isolating yourself?

Currently, I communicate more on tumblr than anywhere else. The internet is the best tool of communication I have ever encountered and one of the best I can even imagine. I am a 24-year-old microbiology PhD student. I nearly wasn’t. I grew up in a small town with a subpar school and anti-intellectual parents who used to yell at me for getting A-B averages (B-C average was just fine for them and apparently more was showing off, I don’t know). When I first got the internet, I was a young teen who was just getting into fantasy novels, and through yahoo groups (oh god nostalgia), I was introduced to the world of online roleplay. I have never been great at communication, and it was online that I learned how to interact properly, how to share information concisely and how to absorb it from other players. I moved on to forum roleplays with stricter expectations on writing quality. I learned to write. I learned to put my passion in text and make information flow in ways that weren’t boring to read, and it was those skills that gave me A’s in English and that now go into my scientific papers. I was introduced to new writers, and to new people and new cultures from around the world. Through text, I learned to better understand spoken word. I learned to relate better to people in physical space. I used the internet to learn what my school couldn’t teach me and my parents didn’t want me to care about and I slowly accepted my love of science.

I met scientists online. Midway through high school, I was on forums sharing my love of scientists with 50-year-old biologists on the other side of the world. And they were my support network when home life was rough, they were my random advice-givers when I was missing ingredients for a recipe; I was there when their family members died or when they couldn’t find a certain scrap of information. They gave me the courage to go to university against my parents’ wishes. When I couldn’t find a place to stay they, from the other side of the world, found me one.

To keep in touch with my meatspace friends, I used Livejournal, then Facebook. (I resisted long enough to have missed Myspace entirely.) And through those I met new people to talk to and to share our lives and art. And then a friend got me onto Tumblr. I met people who have problems I could help with. I met people who had problems I couldn’t help with, but I knew someone who could. I met people who could help me. I learned about new things and new perspectives, I was introduced to new shows and books and new facts about the world and ways of looking at it. I wrote new fiction, and people read it, and it made their lives better in the same way that their art made mine better. I’d been put onto the DCAU through a roleplay forum and become interested in superheroes, particularly DC’s Earth-16; I found a twitter roleplay group and made new friends, great friends I could share things with — my first real experience with actual “fandom”.

You know what Tumblr is? Tumblr is the place where, last week, I met somebody confused and scared about their sexuality, and I made them feel better simply by sharing my own experience. Tumblr is where a girl in America I’ve never met makes me smile by simply drawing two fictional characters being cute together. Tumblr is what convinced me to read Homestuck, which turned out to be brilliant. Tumblr is where I taught five children how viruses work and what makes Herpes Simplex different from Chicken Pox. Tumblr is where I pretend to be an alien artificial intelligence and make people smile, and where I write fiction specifically to make my friends smile. Tumblr is where we band together to comfort and support a young woman who has just been diagnosed with cancer. Tumblr is where I can scroll randomly through a bunch of random pictures and statements and see somebody express a feeling or opinion or remark on a situation that I’ve experienced, and I thought I was alone, and for that one moment I’m reminded that I’m not. Tumblr is where I can be myself in ways I don’t dare to in front of people who physically live close enough to actually hurt me.

Those kids you were talking about? They communicate more than you ever did at their age. They read more than you ever did. That’s what they’re doing, here. This is their yahoo groups, their collection of forums, their email chain lists if you go back that far. And they do have meatspace friends. They make friends here that they’ll talk to offline too, even if they don’t know them in meatspace yet. This is where they learn to communicate eloquently in text such as in email, which is a vital survival skill these days, especially if they go into academia. This is where they learn concise, novel or interesting ways to express themselves. Don’t be fooled by the local lingo. The trailing sentences, lack of capitalisaion and punctuation, keyboard mashing, etc. is a perfectly consistent form of communication and is no more unusual or crude than any other local dialect. It doesn’t mean they can’t speak ‘properly’ — in fact it requires a good sense of language to sense and follow the structure correctly (and yes, there is structure). It is a word game. Young communicators are experimenting with their medium. That’s what kids (and most adults) do — experiment with stuff.

Teenagers have been drawing away from parents and friends claiming they “don’t understand them” SINCE THE DAWN OF TIME. It is the defining stereotypical trait of a teenager. It didn’t come into existence because they could type it on the internet, and it wouldn’t go away if they didn’t. When I didn’t have internet, I withdrew into books. Some withdraw into religion, or into a small group of 3 or 4 friends and refuse to talk to anyone else. It’s what teens DO. If anything, withdrawing into such a huge social circle is the opposite — it’s opening up to even more people. This site is not a shield against having a social circle. This is a part of their social circle. And there are a lot of things about it that are very stupid, but no more than there are in meatspace, or that there are in any other online tool.

So either get out of their face, or get the fuck off their lawn.

(via zannyblogging)

roachpatrol:

I think one of the most fundamental misapprehensions people have about the value of commissions is that no one really gets told how mass production defrays costs to the consumer. So, when they see the prices for custom artwork online, they expect the retail prices they see in stores, and it doesn’t work like that.

You go to the poster section at wal-mart. There’s an amazing poster there. It’s got dragons. It’s got wizards. It’s huge. It’s, what, 12 bucks? Awesome, good deal. You can afford that. It’s as much as three or four cheeseburgers, dang, that’s some serious amounts of art. 

You go on the internet. Some asshole wants 12 bucks for a crappy sketch of one character sort of standing there. What the fuck? It looks like crap. It’s nothing compared to the poster you just bought from a store. If that dragon poster is worth 12 bucks, this dumbass sketch should be one buck. Maybe fifty cents. That’s if you’re being generous. You don’t even get a print, it’s just going to be a file on your computer, it’s not even actually real! What a rip off.

The thing is, that sketch took an hour, or two hours, or maybe even four hours. The artist drew it for a fraction of minimum wage. Drawing is hard. It took thousands of hours and a really special kind of dedicated self loathing to learn to do that. It might have taken thousands of bucks of tuition money, which means semesters, which means years of early mornings and late nights and maybe even some crying here and there.

Your dragon poster was not made by a guy who got paid 12 bucks. Your awesome dragon poster was made by a guy who got paid hundreds of bucks. Maybe thousands. Because a company paid him, and then turned around and made even more thousands of dollars off that artwork, by selling instances of it to multiple people, 12 bucks at a time. It’s called mass production, and it leaves the general public with no real clue as to the sheer amount of time and effort and skill that goes into every single thing they can buy for the price of a couple cheeseburgers. 

Artists who work on commission don’t generally have the advantage of mass production. Every picture is made new and custom for each client. Instead of charging the hundreds of dollars an hour a professional artist could ask for from a company, we’re asking for just enough to get by, and sometimes a hell of a lot less than that. Because it’s what people will pay, because it’s what they think art is worth, because it’s what a lot of young, naive, desperate artists are willing to agree their art is worth, and because there’s always going to be some kid who thinks they’re being ripped off because they don’t really get what they’re being asked to pay for.

I should have some pithy and clever thing to say here to wrap it up but all I can think to say is basically the whole situation is sad and scary and I hope eventually we’ll all have a better way to deal with each other, and everyone will be a lot clearer on what it takes to do art and to get art. 

Thank.

(via weenyah)