This is a beautiful graphic but it doesn’t explain the pros and cons of each fire type.

The Swedish torch is good for an efficient and contained fire, it’s controlled and good for cooking over and produces less light and heat than other fires. It can be difficult to keep going once you burn through the original log

The teepee is your traditional campfire. Good for heat and light not great for cooking, burns through fuel fairly quickly

The star fire is one of the slowest burning and not well protected but provides an even heat good for slow cooking and is excellent if you have limited fuel and need the protection a fire can provide

The lean to is a compact and efficient fire that evolves into a dense and hot bed of coals. The structure creates a good source of air flow which can help damp wood burn. A slightly better cooking fire that isn’t as bright. It also provides protection from wind on one side

The platform fire is incredibly hot and will create a very thick bed of coals but it doesn’t have a lot of air flow and is a little harder to get started.

The log cabin is big and bright and has lots of air flow which again is good for damp logs. You can also use this structure to start a smaller fire in the middle while drying out bigger logs. This fire will crumble into a messier bed of coals that don’t produce particularly even heat for cooking.

The modified leanto is excellent if you need it to perform multiple functions. The side with more fuel will burn bright and hot and the side with less fuel will burn less hot but more evenly and controlled, this gives you different cooking options.

reblogging for writing purposes. the exact reason will come soon enough.

I got a lot of asks about this so I made a tutorial on how I was able to emulate the 80s aesthetic, please keep in mind I’m not an expert and what I put here is just what I personally did. I hope you guys like it and hope it helps

go crazy kids

WELP it only took many hours, many dollars, and several paper cuts, but here’s what I ended up with for stickers!!

I ended up making my own little accordion style folders, so each set of stickers is nicely sandwiched among the (surprisingly springy, yet snug) cardstock accordion.

Bonus: one phase of construction included GIANT PAPER SLINKIES

Genius!

I forgot one more thing! Adding extra details can help make gold pop even more in your paintings. Putting on some well-place highlights, a little blur, and a lil overlay layer makes a world of difference:

I saw a few folks asking about my Virelle piece so here’s a tip:

You can make shiny & glittery gold pretty easily when you use a dappled airbrush. It’s the same process as above, but with a spray of large-to-fine dots. It takes a little more time, but the result is cool.

The standard version of ClipStudo comes packaged with the saturated line tool, which generates sunburst effects. And so we wind up with something like this:

I dont know how this translates into Photoshop, but for CSP users I’ve updated my airbrush pack with the customized brush. Good luck. 😭

How Clip Studio Paint Makes Flatting Your Colors Magical

I didn’t even mention once during the vector layer tutorial that Photoshop stinks sometimes (even though I could have), but I’m gonna bring it up here. Photoshop stinks for flatting. It wasn’t made for it. It was made for photo retouching, not all this illustration business. CSP, on the other hand, was designed from the ground up for comics and then for illustration. You want to flat colors? CSP has you covered. Read below the cut to find out how flatting in CSP is awesome.

Keep reading

Arist Alley Tips: Keeping Track of Inventory

Learning how to keep track of inventory was surprisingly one of the more difficult parts of learning how to Artist Alley – but it’s also been one of the most rewarding! It’s a huge relief to know how much of everything I currently have, and now that I’ve been doing it for a while, I’m able to roughly estimate how much of each product I’ll sell at my next con by looking at my record for cons of a previous size. All of this allows me to plan ahead in restocking my products (and supplies!) so I’m never caught off guard :) 

It’s an involved process, but I’ve pared it down to four steps, and all you need is an Excel/Google spreadsheet and some paper (and optionally, Square inventory tracking). If you’re interested, read on!

Keep reading

The Ultimate Artist Alley Supply List

For first-time con-goers, here’s the list of supplies based on what I used for my first artist alley! Feel free to use this list as a base for finding out what you’d want to use and estimating how much it would cost for you to do an artist alley for the first time.

Also doubles as a packing list for all you veteran artists reading this :) 

Read on for the list!

Keep reading

Some Photoshop Tips

I’ve been getting quite a few asks about the process for the patterns in my stylized artworks, so I decided to put together a couple of tips regarding them. 

Firstly, what you need are

—  CUSTOM BRUSHES  —

Most of the patterns I use are custom brushes I made, such as those:

For the longest time I was convinced making brushes must be super extra complicated. I was super extra wrong. All you need to start is a transparent canvas (2500px x 2500px max):

This will be your brush tip. When you’re satisfied how it looks, click Ctrl+A to select the whole canvas and go to ‘define brush preset’ under the edit menu

You will be asked to name your new glorious creation. Choose something that describes it well, so you can easily find it between all the ‘asfsfgdgd’ brushes you’ve created to be only used once

This is it. Look at it, you have just created a photoshop brush. First time i did I felt like I was cheated my whole life. IT’S SO EASY WHY HASN’T ANYONE TOLD ME 

Time to edit the Good Boi to be more random, so it can be used as a Cool Fancy Pattern. Go into brush settings and change whatever you’d like. Here’s a list of what I do for patterns:

- under Shape Dynamics, I increase Size Jitter and Angle jitter by 5%-15% 

- under Brush Tip Shape, I increase spacing by a shitload. Sometimes it’s like 150%, the point is to get the initial brush tip we painted to be visible.

- If I want it to look random and noisy, I enable the Dual Brush option, which acts like another brush was put on top of the one we’ve created. You can adjust all of the Dual Brush options (Size, Spacing, Scatter, Count) as you wish to get a very nice random brush to smear on your  backgrounds

The result is as above. You can follow the same steps to create whatever brush you need: evenly spaced dots that look like you painted them by hand, geometric pattern to fill the background, a line of perfectly drawn XDs and so on. 

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE

—  PATHS  —

But what if you want to get lots of circles made of tiny dots? Or you need rows of triangles for your cool background? Photoshop can do all of that for you, thanks to the magic of paths.

Typically, paths window can be found right next to Layers:

Now, pick a brush you wish really was in place of that path you’ve drawn and go to layers, then choose the layer you want it to be drawn on. Then, click this tiny circle under the Paths window:

Then witness the magic of photoshop doing the drawing for you while you wonder how tf have you managed to forget about this option for the past 2 years 

You can combine special brushes and paths for all sorts of cool effects. I mostly use them in backgrounds for my cards, but you can do whatever you want with them.

OPENING EMERGENCY COMMISSIONS

I am opening up emergency commissions because I need to buy new winter tires ASAP!!

Above are some examples of the type commissions that I am open for: Monochrome style commissions $20 for a single character + $10 for additional characters.

E-mail me at fonda.hodgson13@gmail.com to talk about commissioning me, and as always I do paypal for payments.

 Please signal boost if you can as it would be much appreciated.

hannah ji

HEY ARTISTS!

Do you design a lot of characters living in not-modern eras and you’re tired of combing through google for the perfect outfit references? Well I got good news for you kiddo, this website has you covered! Originally @modmad made a post about it, but her link stopped working and I managed to fix it, so here’s a new post. Basically, this is a costume rental website for plays and stage shows and what not, they have outfits for several different decades from medieval to the 1980s. LOOK AT THIS SELECTION:

OPEN ANY CATEGORY AND OH LORDY–

There’s a lot of really specific stuff in here, I design a lot of 1930s characters for my ask blog and with more chapters on the way for the game it belongs to I’m gonna be designing more, and this website is going to be an invaluable reference. I hope this can be useful to my other fellow artists as well! :)

@thehungryvortigaunt @aliciasbakery

COMPLETERESOURCES — PSD No. 97 → Download