Masterlist and Clicky Links
🚧Under Construction🚧
Isabol
- Isabol (Original Flash Draft)
- With-No-Last-Name (Revised version of the above)
- Nothing Has to Happen
- Where's the Line?
nikkilbook reblogged
Hello! I was looking for some standing poses yesterday, using all three sites, and I ended up just having to kind of blindly scroll through the “General poses” DA folder and clicking on the “more like this!” deviations in the side bar. I ended up snagging a pose or two from you and a cluster from JoonPubStock, I think her name is.
I was specifically looking for poses I could use for costume design/ideation, where I could draw a fairly neutral front-ish pose that still had a little personality in like, how the hips were canted, arms folded, head tilt, etc, that I could draw and then come up with clothes ideas on like, layered tracing paper or something. Character design lineup/paper doll kinda thing. I think I ended up using one of your OG Sailor Moon poses as a jumping off point, since they are more static, though they had a little too much anime sass for me to use for my character. :(
Next time you’re doing file maintenance stuff, could I request adding “standing” to the list of pose types/subfolders/tags? And, if it’s not too much trouble for the next round of website iterations, being able to filter using multiple tags at once? Like, being able to specify that I want to look at single, female, slim, standing images instead of having to look through each category individually.
Thank you so much for all the work you and your team do, as well as the network of pose artists you collaborate with! And thank you for offering so much of it for free, and for the other tools you’ve developed and shared. As an unemployed, disabled, non-university-student artist, these resources are really, really valuable. I appreciate you!!
I hear you but there's a few challenges with this because *most* poses are standing. It's the same reason I don't tag myself as a model because it's mostly me. But maybe I can still help by directing you to something like my Character Reference Sheet Pack or maybe even some of the standing poses in the free Anniversary Pack. There's also the old 3D model packs which might be *too stiff* for this but could be a jumping off point. The farther back you scroll on in the DA archive the more static the poses will get because I didn't have a camera good enough to catch much movement or action. Here's a few from Shoots 1-25 that might be helpful for the type of thing you're looking to do. I am SO helpful the stock is useful! 🥰 Hope this helps and Happy Drawing!
I hear you on the “most poses are standing” thing. That makes sense. (And thank you for the example shots!) I guess maybe adding a feature to filter OUT things? Like, poses that are NOT floating, sitting, action, etc. The “basic poses” might be a good tag!
(Also, if you ever need a volunteer to help with tagging things, I am. that exact flavor of neurotic. I organize and standardize files or data entries for funsies.)
nikkilbook reblogged
Model: Me.
Photographer: The Remote Camera Trigger.
If you want to help support me and get awesome stuff like early access/polls & pose requests Become A Patron / DA Subscriber or you can check out my Ko-Fi store for exclusive stock!
nikkilbook reblogged
Hi! I hope you're having a great day.
I love your art deeply and love the painterly quality of it. Thus I've been wondering if you have any traditional art you can share? I've seen the watercolor nature paintings you did and loved them, as I also love working with water colors.
Have you every worked with oils, or gouache?
hi, thank you so much for this sweet message 🥺 you inspired me to do a study of a tulip i saw on my walk today! it had a bird cherry bloom inside of it and i found that incredibly charming.
as for oils and gouache: when i work digitally i 100% employ the principles used in oil painting (and other types of opaque paints, as opposed to watercolors), but funnily enough i have always hated working with gouache, and i have never worked with oils! mostly because i was very young and very broke when i was a traditional painter, and oil painting is Expensive. or at least it seemed so at the time 😔 now that i'm considering it though, i think i might try oil painting in the future. could be fun to roll around in real paint!
Oh, wow!! I love the contrast between the like, single (?) cohesive shape of the tulip petals and the more abstract, distinct shapes of the background. I don’t know how to describe it—there are still clear shapes within the petals, but the divisions between them are more line-as-concept then actual line, as opposed to the background where you’re like “ah, yes, this is a watercolor mark,” with the little outlines around the stroke from how the pigment moved as it dried. Whereas the petals are perfectly blended in that there are few-to-no drying lines, but the shapes themselves are crisp and distinct and not feathered into each other, and there are no patchy “yo I had to rework this area a hundred times so the paper is all scuffed raw and fluffed up from where I had to scrub it with my brush and now it’s taking the pigment weird” spots, and it just looks so GOOD. I haven’t messed with watercolor much since high school like, fourteen years ago, but I remember how much I fought with the floral master copy I did. It was sooo hard to visualize the 3D form, cuz it was just a bunch of petals and it just looked like an abstract mess and I have had to work very hard to get my brain to speak the language of abstraction. My dude, I am in awe.
Are there any particular resources you used/would suggest for experimenting with watercolor? I have access to some paints (of like, okayish quality? Walmart and Michaels stuff, iirc) and at least some mixed media and wet media paper if not a true watercolor block. I’ve been staring wistfully out over the foggy moors of my brain for a while, thinking that a good watercoloring would look so good for a particular set of illustrations I want to do, but I’m uncertain where to start or how to get familiar with the pigments.
Also! Regarding oils! A couple of suggestions from when I took my painting fundamentals class.
- For your solvent, try using Gamsol instead of turpentine or the like. Way less stanky, and also WAY less of a potential fire hazard (turpentine and other paint thinners are known to flash on contact with oxygen, so if you use them, get a metal garbage can with a lid to put your paint rags in so you can suffocate any potential flames). It’s super refined, and my teacher once deliberately tried to get it to flash to find out what the threshold was, and when he put a lit paper towel up to it like a wick, the liquid suffocated the flames before the solvent got hot enough to flash.
- You can reuse your solvent nigh-infinitely! Get a couple of jars, plus your fresh Gamsol bottle and your active brush-cleaning solvent jar of choice. When your main jar starts to look kinda sludgy, pour it all out into Jar #1 (my teacher used a glass jar that used to hold like a schwanky peanut butter in it. I used a glass jar with a push-down lid, like for candles, from Dollar Tree), sludge and all. Then you can wipe out the rest of the sludge with a paper towel, clean it with dish soap or the like, and refill it will with fresh solvent. You can toss the paper towel in the garbage, or keep it separate with its other solvent-y friends. Let the sludge settle to the bottom of Jar #1, leaving kinda foggy but still mostly clear solvent at the top. Now you can carefully pour the cleared solvent from Jar #1 into Jar #2, which can now be used to top up your active brush-cleaning jar. Eventually there will be negligible amounts of clear solvent left after the settling, and it will be more cloudy than it’s worth to keep using, and there will be many layers of questionable sediment sludge at the bottom of Jar #1. At this point, put on the lid, and take it to your local landfill/dump/recycling center/whatever and take it specifically to the place where they take things like lightbulbs and batteries and things like that, and hand it off to them. Don’t have it mixed in with other things, keep it separate and hand it off directly. After this, get yourself a new jar and start the process over.
- VENTILATION. VENTILATION IS YOUR FRIEND. OPEN WINDOWS, FANS, RANGE HOODS, RESPIRATOR MASKS, ETC. Also, check to see if you’re on a shared HVAC system with other humans. Gamsol is less fume-y, but oil paint is still oil paint. Be aware of where your air is going after it leaves your space. Straight outside? Or does it cycle through someone else’s apartment? Does it cycle through the apartment of someone with small children? If so, I’d probably go for the “paint outside” or “turn off the AC and use a stove hood or an open window with a fan” routes.
- Apparently the paper towel brand Viva is really good for cleaning your brushes, and a single roll lasts a long time.
- For cleaning your brushes after a session, regular soap will work okay, but I bought myself a bar of “Master’s Touch” brand soap that’s specifically for cleaning brushes, and I like the way it gets my brushes back to how they are supposed to be even if my ADHD kicks in and I forget to clean them right after the painting session. It also helped me keep softer-haired brushes from degrading even while using them with oils, which was nice!
- If you have natural hair brushes, or even a natural-synthetic blend, my teacher said he would occasionally use shampoo and conditioner on his brushes and then make sure they dried in their proper shapes (round, flat, pointed, filbert, etc)
- If you’d like to decrease the open time of your paints and get them to dry faster, my teacher gave us little bottles of something called “Cobalt Dryer.” It says it’s a siccative? Which is not a word I knew. You just add a little drop to your paints while you mix them on your palette. You can also use something like Liquin, which is also a medium (as opposed to a solvent) that you can use to make your paints more transparent. You can use Gamsol for that in the beginning stages of the painting, but too much solvent and the paint will begin to, you guessed it, dissolve. The binder will start to separate from the pigment and it starts to look blotchy, plus it can mess with the stuff you’ve already put down. Kinda like watercolors, I guess?
- The first thing our teacher had us do was make color charts. We taped off little grids of like, 8 by 5 squares? And we’d have all our hues across the top, straight from the tube, and they’d blend into white going down, with the bottom tint being as white as you could possibly make it while still having some of the hue. Then we’d have a separate chart for each hue, where the top line was each color mixed like, 50/50 with one specific hue, and then all the tints below. It made for a really helpful study and reference, cuz when we were doing limited-palette figure exercises, we could pull out the color charts and be like “ah! This will get me a good black, or a good skin tone, or whatever.” Very helpful.
- Before we started into brushes, we did everything with palette knives. The color charts as well as our first object studies. Learning how to get a good, smooth mix, figuring out how to get a gradient between two colors on the canvas with just a palette knife, all sorts of good stuff. Great way to get to know your tools, and learn how to work in big shapes first. My teacher suggested we use a flat knife for blending and then a trowel knife for applying color, for ergonomic reasons, but because of some hand/wrist things I used a trowel knife for just about everything.
- You can get prepped canvas sheets in a block/booklet, just like watercolor paper! Cheaper and easier to store than stretched canvas or panels.
- My teacher used a sheet of tempered glass as his palette. It was tablet-top glass that he’d fitted to the top of his black teacher-mobile cart thingy that he moved between his classrooms and his office. I used a couple of picture frames I got from Dollar Tree, combined with the disposable palette block we got with our supplies. I used the disposable palette to do the messy mixing, and then when I had a good range of colors based on what I could see on the model or what I anticipated (like when we were using the Zorn palette), I’d scrape them up all neat off the disposable palette and put them on the picture frame in a neat little row across the top. I had a whole thing for transporting it to and from campus, since I didn’t have a studio space or a locker and did all my work at home. I used the littler frame for class work, and a bigger frame for homework. In order for the little frame to not smudge up against anything on the way home, I found this plastic folio thingy that was basically just this big empty rectangle about 1.5-2” deep, and I had a friend with a 3D printer make me these doodads that would clip onto the frame to keep it static within the folio and not brush up against the insides while I hauled it places with my funky thrift store luggage-bungee corded portfolio bag monstrosity. (I have joint problems and can’t carry things like a normal human, so I end up with Very Interesting Contraptions much of the time). So I could look at the limited palette we were using that day, and I could preemptively pick out like, a generic skin tone, and a blackish color, and some light and shadow guesses, etc., to give myself a head start when we got to class cuz I’m a slow painter anyway and I wanted to spend my time making a picture and not blending. I could easily tweak colors once I got there. It worked pretty well most of the time—I think James Gurney talks about something like this in Color and Light? I think in the section about gamut painting? I’d have to check.
Anyway, this has been a MASSIVE info dump about everything I have in my head about oil painting. Please let me know if you want me to stop rambling about art factoids on your posts—your art makes my brain go brrrr and this is what comes out. 🫠
nikkilbook reblogged
Hey, can y’all rb this if it’s okay to send you messages asking about your ocs, cause on god I wanna interact with y’all but I am terrified of being annoying lol
nikkilbook reblogged
made david a kin onion 👁️
#nikki actually reblogging#my face#god of stories#loki agent of asgard#cosplay#loki#loki god of shenanigans#made a costume spent three hours on the most basic smokey eye known to man and suddenly acquired black eyebrows#to be fair the 3 hours was probably mostly the eyebrows#I am blonde#and I have fairly straight brows#I do not have sassy arched Loki brows#no matter what my great grandmother’s genes have to say about it#I was following like three different super simple tutorials#but the amount of times I had to scrub black eye liner from my eyebrows was a bit redonkulous lezbereal
nikkilbook reblogged
a little study i did to try to depict Essek looking as realistic (within my style) as possible. you can tell i was serious by the fact that i blacked out his clothes so as not to get distracted from the task at hand /j
i encounter a few persistent issues when i draw Essek; it's not only in him not being a real person that i can't look at to then draw accurately as far as his facial features are concerned, but also in the fact that purple people don't exist. i can't study, from pictures or real life, how skin of that color would behave in different lighting, how the blood vessels would appear from underneath it, what shade the sebum would highlight the nose and forehead with, and on and on and on. i can only make an educated guess, and it takes a lot of mental math each time 🤭 so here i tried paying special attention to the realism of it all, to see if i'll learn something! my art is somewhat (semi-)realistic as is, but there still is a fair amount of stylizing going on, and i wanted to have a bit of fun figuring out where it happens. so far noticed that i tend to exaggerate facial features and make them larger than they would probably be on a real person (noses and eyes in particular), and my art could benefit from more different hues when i'm doing skin, especially green.
very excited to try doing Caleb next \o/
detail!
Oooh, I just had a thought—
So the traditional logic for faces is the yellow, red, and blue zones, yeah? Yellow for forehead, red for nose and cheeks, blue for mouth and jaw.
I remember reading one of my textbooks—probably Gurney’s Color and Light—and he explained that it was because the forehead has bone really close to the surface, the cheeks/nose/ears have a ton of blood vessels, and the jaw has a ton of hair follicles, which, for darker hair, creates a bluish cast!
I also remember my art teacher putting on the DVD extras for the 3D Smurf film, playing an interview/BTS thing from the modelers and animators where they talked about what color of blood Smurfs have. Going by Smurf logic, you’d expect blue, right? Everything they eat is blue, they are blue, To Smurf is To Blue. But apparently, when they rendered that with all the subsurface scattering and the slight translucence that comes from skin, the blue blood looked super creepy and off-putting, so they ended up changing it back to red, and that looked right.
I read a fic recently (I know it’s called zweifacher, but I can’t recall the fic writer at this exact second), where one of the author’s notes mentioned that they were treating drow like silkie chickens, with hyperpigmentation, so their blood was almost black, their muscles and bones were black—not teeth though, because teeth aren’t bones??? madness— and that just seemed really cool to me.
So I guess all these thoughts coalesce into a series of questions:
- Are your drow capable of growing facial hair?
- If not, are they like children where they just have very fine hair that doesn’t grow very long or thick, or are they like, alopecia-smooth except for scalp and eyebrows?
- What effect does white or very pale hair have on the skin when it is shaved smooth?
- What color is your drow blood?
- Does the color of your drow skin influence the color of their organs/muscles/etc?
Something that might be a super useful tool would be like, a flesh orb or something. Make a sphere in Blender or something, and give it material settings so that you could individually set the local color of like, skin, muscle, blood, hair, and bone, and then have a couple rendering presets for lighting scenarios, and then you’d be able to mess around with the colors to find the look you want, and then boom you have your skin tone reference.
Dang it, now I really want one of those, why can’t I just be magically better at Blender
i kid you not this is exactly my thought process! i headcanon that drow have dark purple/almost black blood (which influences the color of the blush, subsurface scattering, veins, lips and mucous membranes), no robust facial hair but hair follicles present at the unnoticeable peach fuzz level (which influences the jaw and the area around the mouth), white bones (which lend slightly yellow-ish cast to areas of skin that stretch close to the bone), and so on and so forth. i've even been working on an Essek 3d sculpt in Blender in the hopes that i'll be able to figure out how to paint it and then stick it into environments for on-demand color references 😂 (it's slow-going because i'm a Blender novice)
high five on having same brain 🙌
Gasp same brain! 🙌🏻
Also, reblogging with the link to that fic—
nikkilbook reblogged
a little study i did to try to depict Essek looking as realistic (within my style) as possible. you can tell i was serious by the fact that i blacked out his clothes so as not to get distracted from the task at hand /j
i encounter a few persistent issues when i draw Essek; it's not only in him not being a real person that i can't look at to then draw accurately as far as his facial features are concerned, but also in the fact that purple people don't exist. i can't study, from pictures or real life, how skin of that color would behave in different lighting, how the blood vessels would appear from underneath it, what shade the sebum would highlight the nose and forehead with, and on and on and on. i can only make an educated guess, and it takes a lot of mental math each time 🤭 so here i tried paying special attention to the realism of it all, to see if i'll learn something! my art is somewhat (semi-)realistic as is, but there still is a fair amount of stylizing going on, and i wanted to have a bit of fun figuring out where it happens. so far noticed that i tend to exaggerate facial features and make them larger than they would probably be on a real person (noses and eyes in particular), and my art could benefit from more different hues when i'm doing skin, especially green.
very excited to try doing Caleb next \o/
detail!
Oooh, I just had a thought—
So the traditional logic for faces is the yellow, red, and blue zones, yeah? Yellow for forehead, red for nose and cheeks, blue for mouth and jaw.
I remember reading one of my textbooks—probably Gurney’s Color and Light—and he explained that it was because the forehead has bone really close to the surface, the cheeks/nose/ears have a ton of blood vessels, and the jaw has a ton of hair follicles, which, for darker hair, creates a bluish cast!
I also remember my art teacher putting on the DVD extras for the 3D Smurf film, playing an interview/BTS thing from the modelers and animators where they talked about what color of blood Smurfs have. Going by Smurf logic, you’d expect blue, right? Everything they eat is blue, they are blue, To Smurf is To Blue. But apparently, when they rendered that with all the subsurface scattering and the slight translucence that comes from skin, the blue blood looked super creepy and off-putting, so they ended up changing it back to red, and that looked right.
I read a fic recently (zwiefacher by VillainIHaveDoneThyMother, rated E), where one of the author’s notes mentioned that they were treating drow like silkie chickens, with hyperpigmentation, so their blood was almost black, their muscles and bones were black—not teeth though, because teeth aren’t bones??? madness— and that just seemed really cool to me.
So I guess all these thoughts coalesce into a series of questions:
- Are your drow capable of growing facial hair?
- If not, are they like children where they just have very fine hair that doesn’t grow very long or thick, or are they like, alopecia-smooth except for scalp and eyebrows?
- What effect does white or very pale hair have on the skin when it is shaved smooth?
- What color is your drow blood?
- Does the color of your drow skin influence the color of their organs/muscles/etc?
Something that might be a super useful tool would be like, a flesh orb or something. Make a sphere in Blender or something, and give it material settings so that you could individually set the local color of like, skin, muscle, blood, hair, and bone, and then have a couple rendering presets for lighting scenarios, and then you’d be able to mess around with the colors to find the look you want, and then boom you have your skin tone reference.
Dang it, now I really want one of those, why can’t I just be magically better at Blender
nikkilbook reblogged
Brother Gregor never spoke and often spooked the neophytes with his appearance, but he was a gentle soul and a phenomenal cook and knew more ways to prepare a fish than the abbot knew hymns
@beerecordings This seems relevant to your interests
Where's the Line?
Prev || Next
Isabol passed him his plate from where she’d finished filling it, and he joined her at the table. Breakfast wasn’t anything too fancy, but it was nice enough. The newlywed cottages were always stocked with enough staples to get the couples started, though most would also have some extras, like a chicken or goat, covered by the dowries.
#writeblr#am writing#historical fiction#fantasy#original fiction#my writing#isabol#autism in fiction#autistic character#anxiety#cottagecore#newlyweds#generational trauma#generational feuds#implied child neglect#implied child abuse#communication difficulties#arranged marriage#a single cuddle session does not a perfect relationship make#these two gonna need many more cuddles and also talkings before they're on solid ground#tristan's family hate tag#prejudice in the community#tristan and isabol against the world#you can do it little beans
nikkilbook reblogged
These are the chapter house stairs in Wells Cathedral. Someday I’d love to do a supercut of every time these show up on screen. Apparently a lot of filmmakers think they’re perfect for their hero to race up or down while escaping the castle, or to have a swordfight on. They’ve appeared in every other Robin Hood movie or TV series, and anything else where they want a medieval castle feel and some derring-do.
I first noticed them in 1984, when Robin of Sherwood ran up them, took a sharp right through a doorway, and met Maid Marion for the first time. I saw them most recently in Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves - and sat up and went “Aww!”, because they might be 700 years old, but they’re also old friends by this point.
nikkilbook reblogged
Model: Me. Photographer: The Remote Camera Trigger. If you want to help support me and get awesome stuff like early access/polls & pose requests Become A Patron / DA Subscriber or you can check out my Ko-Fi store for exclusive stock! Read My Rules Before You Use My Stock.
nikkilbook reblogged
Wooooo Finally finished editing all 400+ images shot with @blumineck examples being the below crazy shots :D
Waiting his review and we can start posting etc!!!!!
nikkilbook reblogged
Model: Me.
Video/Camera Work: Me.
As always Patrons get HD/4K downloads.
If you want to help support me and get awesome stuff like early access/polls & pose requests Become A Patron or you can check out my Ko-Fi store for exclusive stock!
Sometimes, being multi-fandom and having niche inside jokes with your sibling is very frustratinf, because it means that even if I managed to share this with every person in the world, none of you will EVER understand just how utterly hilarious I am being when I say “Wizard Merritt is Akihiko Kaiyaba.”
#sword of truth#the first confessor#sword art online#sao abridged#wizard merritt#when you’re rushed for development sometimes things just happen#sometimes that means 2000 people die cuz they can’t log out and the tutorial npc got yanked#sometimes that means your magical key that unlocks and controls reality breaking and/or altering devices#that also somehow can give certain people the power to bend someone’s will to their own through absolute devotion#turns you into a potentially wildly irrational rage machine#turns you into a heroin addict if you are The Super Special Destiny Cookie#and makes you literally physically incapable of cutting your own hair#but I guess magic doesn’t have patch notes#why Merritt#why the rage it makes no sense#why Terry#I love you man but why#sword of truth: my problematic fav since 2007
nikkilbook reblogged
inspired by boop day, reblog this post if its ok for people to send you random asks and interact on your posts with no judgement. i want to talk to people.
nikkilbook reblogged
it's been so funny looking back at MBC because there are times when the boys just straight up SNAP at the audience like I really said "they are being unpleasant to everyone right now and you personally will feel the depression rage" usually I would not have the nerve to do that
they're sorry btw whoops
Shoutout to the time in Chapter 3 when Blue yelled at me for liking Jackie more than him and my empathy kicked into overdrive and I proceeded to have a crisis over the moral and ethical implications of having “favorites.”