#canary3d-original
Inktober prompt “Dune.”
Pitt artist pen on bristol paper w/ copic blue marker
Inktober prompt “disgusting.” This cartoon slug feels bad about being called disgusting, I guess? Sorry, cartoon slug.
A couple of tries at the “teeth” prompt. The first is Pitt artist pen + tombow grey marker, the second is Tayasui Sketches app on ipad.
Inktober prompt “Blade”
Yesterday’s Inktober prompt was “rodent” but I didn’t have time to draw yesterday. Today’s prompt is “fancy” so to catch up I drew a fancy chipmunk.
Inktober prompt: Radio
Pencil and Copics on Yupo, which is a plastic drawing surface (not actually paper) made for markers. It’s expensive which is why I got a tiny tiny pad to try out.
Prompt: “Bulky”
Inktober 2020 day 1: Fish
Pigma pens & Copic Markers on bristol vellum
Do you ever want to turn a gif (or any image) into a vintage sepia photo? Here’s one way to do it. First, help yourself to my template png, right here:
Instructions are behind the cut!
This template, incidentally, is based on photos of my dad & his friends from 1947, and all of the colors in the palette are sampled from one photo. These wavy-edged photos were pretty normal around that time–these are a college student’s snapshots, nothing fancy.
Ok, so these instructions are for a gif in Photoshop, but you can adapt them to a still image & any image-editing app. (I’m assuming you already know the basics of gifmaking).
1. Drop the template on top of the top layer of your gif. Resize the whole canvas to make room for the border (I use the crop tool for this–just drag the handles outward and it enlarges the canvas)
2. Use the magic wand to select the light border area. Make a new empty layer and fill it with the lightest color in the palette, or whatever color you want for your border.
3. Create a new empty layer underneath your border layer. Pick one of the darker colors in the palette with the dropper - we’re going to use this to colorize with. (We’re not using the hue/sat adjustment layer for colorizing because it’s imprecise)
4. Fill the layer with the color, at an opacity of anywhere from 50 to 100 percent, depending on how much of the original color you want to keep. I filled it at 70 percent opacity for this gif of Wu Xie. 100 percent can flatten it out too much, so I like the effect better with some of the original color in it. Use the fill command’s opacity setting for this, not the layer’s opacity, or it won’t apply to all your frames.
5. Select all of the frames of your gif - frames, not layers - and while they’re selected, change the color layer to “color” blend mode. (Otherwise it just changes it for the current frame, which is maddening.)
6. Ok, all that’s left is to add a tacky shadow effect! Use the magic wand to select *outside* your border on your border layer.
7. On the selection menu, invert your selection, so it has the whole photo-print area selected (the wavy edge area and the “photo” area).
8. Put all of your image layers into a layer group, if you haven’t already. (Select all the image layers and click the button circled in red in the pic) This group needs to stay below your photo effects & border, and below any adjustment layers, as shown in the pic.
9. Click the mask button (circled in blue in this pic) to create a layer group mask – the area outside of your “photo” border should be transparent now.
10. Still on the selection menu, use “modify…border” to change the selection to a border. I’d make it around 10 pixels, but you’ll need to experiment based on the scale of your image.
11. Create a new layer under your border layer, over your color layer. Choose the darkest color from the palette and fill the selected area at 100% opacity.
12. Choose your shadow layer and run a gaussian blur filter. I used a radius of 7 pixels.
13. Put a new layer at the bottom of the stack & fill it with plain white, or with whatever else you want for the background.
14. Delete the template layer, save your PSD file (you DO save PSDs of your gifs until you’re sure you’re done, RIGHT?) and then resize & bake out your gif.
Trying out Clip Studio Paint…I like the “running color edge watercolor” brush quite a lot. I haven’t found a pen preset that I like yet, but I’m still in the early stages of trying everything out. The interface is nice and straightforward; I didn’t have to read anything to get started, which is always a plus.
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Daz Studio is an awesome free PC program you can use to make 3d art, either using resources created by other artists or by importing your own meshes and texture maps. I made a video to go over the basics. That hopefully is embedded right here:
(If the embed isn’t showing, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibgQWW6ZscA to watch the video)
You can get the program at www.daz3d.com. Disclosure: I sell 3d content through the daz3d store, but I’m not advertising my stuff in this video and you don’t need to buy any content at all to enjoy using this program. There are a lot of freebies out there, and if you can paint even a little bit, you can have a lot of fun just modifying the default resources that come with the program.
That said, I do buy an improbable amount of 3d content…it’s a highly addictive hobby, so consider how obsessive of a person you are before you dive in! The amazing alien girl morph & texture shown here are by Josh Crockett.
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Daz Studio IRAY render - benchmark image. My new computer is arriving in 10 days, eeee I’m so excited! So I decided to run a benchmark on my current rig, which is around 4 years old, maybe 5 (I don’t remember when we got it; it started life as my husband’s gaming rig and then I took it when he upgraded).
Dimensions = 1880x1240, rendered in 2 hours & 1 minute, Daz Studio 4.15. Clicky to embiggen.
I didn’t create any of these assets, although I did a new map for the little pictures on her wall. Sci-fi bedroom set by Stonemason, bedding textures by Sveva, clothes by Aeon Soul, body texture by Josh Crockett, hair by Soto, pose by lunchlady, Nebula HDRI by Midnight_Stories, light-emitting shader (on overhead light) by DZfire, all from the Daz3D store.
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I updated my avatars so that both of my blogs match, with different background colors. Commenting as my main blog on posts from my side blog (which is really my main blog, or the more active one anyway) might be less confusing that way…?
This is a test render I did some years back, when I was working on a Pre-Raphaelite shape/pose/expression set for Daz 3d’s Genesis 2 Female figure. Daz makes human figures and they have a heap of artists, including myself, who make mods and add-ons for those figures. I never finished the set because they brought out a new figure generation before I got very far, so I had to scrap it (you can’t reliably sell stuff for the older figures once there’s a new figure).
This is a very prelim render, testing out the face shape and the beginnings of a pose. The fingers are in the default position and the shirt is intersecting them, and the shadows are “jaggy,” but I love this render anyway, because it really captures the look I was going for, which was sort of halfway between Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s Jane Morris pictures and the softer look of William Holman Hunt’s muses.
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Killing Stone Costume Appreciation 1 of 2 (The Yin-Yang Master: Dream of Eternity)
His first scene is very dark and very blue, so I desaturated and brightened it extremely, to show a bit of the costume detailing.
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Qiao Luohan Costume Appreciation (Word of Honor)
Bonus: ultra-convincing disguise, almost as good as Zhou Zishu’s
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(Masterpost) (Pinboard)
Warning! Spoilers for All 50 Episodes!
Songs From The Wood Make You Feel Much Better
We jump right back into the battle, and the show replays the bit where Wei Wuxian chokes the guy out and the guy spits blood into his own nose. Because a stunt performance like that should be seen twice to be truly appreciated.
It also replays Jiang Cheng holding Jiang Yanli’s body, while he (probably) thinks about how basically everyone he ever valued was killed by someone who was mad at Wei Wuxian. Now he is also mad at Wei Wuxian, which he will express by killing someone he values (Wei Wuxian).
Clan Leaders Ouyang and Yao start talking shit about Wei Wuxian and hollering for everyone else to kill him. The crowd encircles him, shouting blame at him while they all point at him, in a sequence that’s effective despite being the world’s most obvious greenscreen compositing.
Note that while everyone is telling him to die and blaming him, none of them is brave enough to actually attack him.
Lan Wangji isn’t with him at this point; he’s off in the background fighting assorted people. This is a reasonable choice for him, but he will regret it.
(more after the cut!)
Wei Wuxian starts fluting and sends black resentment blasts against the general group. Lan Wangji tells him to stop, but he does not stop. So…these deaths can’t be blamed on the second flute, yea? CQL Yiling Laozu isn’t as murderous as MDZS Yiling Laozu, but he’s not NOT murderous, either.
Eventually he gets tired of holding fake blood in his mouth and stops playing so he can spit it out.
Because Lan Wangji is afraid for Wei Wuxian, he loses focus and gets a nasty cut on his arm, resulting in his arm being too weak to save Wei Wuxian.
I’m sure that won’t keep Lan Wangji up at night ever.
Drop It Like It’s Hot
As soon as Wei Wuxian appears weak enough, Yao and Ouyang both reveal their hypocrisy, yelling “take the Yin tiger seal!” You know, that thing they’re not supposed to want or use.
Wei Wuxian flies up on top of a tall thing and tells everyone that if they want it, they can have it, and then he blasts the tiger seal into pieces, sort of.
Everyone goes nutso trying to grab the remaining intact half while it scooches around staying out of anyone’s grasp. Yao and Ouyang both kill living cultivators in their attempt to get the amulet, even though it’s only useable for unorthodox, supposedly evil cultivation. Jerks.
Wei Wuxian does some heartbroken cry-laughing and then decides to kill himself, which, given the conventions of this genre, is both predicable and reasonable of him.
But Lan Wangji doesn’t believe in genre conventions; he wants Wei Wuxian to live, no matter what, and has an ill-timed epiphany about this just as Wei Wuxian is backing up to the edge of the cliff. The same cliff they argued on in Episode 23, incidentally.
Lan Wangji asks, so tenderly, for him to come back. Wei Wuxian continues to back away, possibly thinking that they are still fighting, or possibly just focused on his goal of killing himself. Then he yeets himself off of the cliff.
Help Me, I Think I’m Falling
When I get that crazy feelin’, I know I’m in trouble again
We get this beautiful flying-on-wires stunt where Lan Wangji launches himself forward to catch Wei Wuxian, with a bonus overhead view, and both views are shot from much too fucking far away.
But unlike the camera insanity of the previous episode, the visual composition is beautiful and so the scene doesn’t lose its impact. And the shot of Wei Wuxian falling toward the camera is iconic and wonderful, in the saddest possible way.
When Lan Wangji catches his wrist, Wei Wuxian is so surprised.
He just looks at his wrist for a moment, and then looks up to see who caught him, and is touched to see that Lan Wangji is trying to save him.
We get a nice hero shot of Lan Wangji from Wei Wuxian’s point of view, with a fan in his hair and everything, as this moment stretches out; Lan Wangji can’t pull him up, but won’t drop him.
All the same, Wei Wuxian doesn’t want to be saved, and he tells Lan Wangji to let him go.
But Lan Wangji is not about letting go of any person that he loves. He puts on his best stubborn face and hangs on for all he’s worth.
The impasse is broken by the arrival of Jiang Cheng, but he is not here to help Lan Wangji. He is here to help Wei Wuxian, in the sense that he is going to help him die.
Some might argue that Jiang Cheng didn’t really kill Wei Wuxian, but I think he should get full credit, whether he wants it or not. Knocking someone off a rock so they fall and die is maybe less personal than stabbing them in the face, which was the other option from this angle, but it’s not like prying the rock face apart was going to NOT kill Wei Wuxian.
Also, killing a guy who is in the middle of a suicide attempt still counts, Jiang Cheng.
Wei Wuxian is initially happy to see Jiang Cheng, even after he realizes that he’s is here to kill him. Wei Wuxian smiles and closes his eyes, expecting (presumably) to get stabbed in the face.
When Jiang Cheng opts to attack the rock instead, it puts Lan Wangji’s life in danger, because he’s not going to let go of Wei Wuxian for anything at this point. This truly terrifies Wei Wuxian, and he desperately yanks his hand away, keeping Lan Wangji from falling with him.
Then he peacefully falls to his death.
The last thing he sees and hears in this life is Lan Wangji’s shout of anguish.
Damn, show.
16 Years 13 Years Later
Then we skip forward to the evening after the reunion on the mountain. Wei Wuxian is waking up in Lan Wangji’s bed, for the first but definitely not the last time, and his mask is off. He has some flashbacks to the events of episodes 1 and 2, just to remind us of where we are in the plot.
Then he turns and sees Lan Wangji, who has taken a great deal of care to be as beautiful as humanly possible.
He’s sent a junior disciple out to get some nice white flowers, he’s taken his hair down, he’s used all of his most expensive skin care products, and he’s got his lovely elegant hands out in front of him, playing the guqin.
Wei Wuxian says it feels like the last 16 13 years have been a dream, and Lan Wangji tells him he’s awake.
Lan Wangji is practically beaming with happiness and contentment here, although they still have some stuff to work out.
Lan Wangji gives him the 411 about what happened after his death, and Wei Wuxian asks the awkward question: why was it 3 years before Lan Wangji looked for his body? Lan Wangji doesn’t explain about being stuck in the penalty box, opting to ask Wei Wuxian where he went while he was dead.
Wei Wuxian doesn’t know. This doesn’t, incidentally, mean he was holding out on Lan Wangji all those times Lan Wangji tried to reach him. Inquiry, as I understand it, is for talking to ghosts who are hanging around, and isn’t meant to reach restful dead in the afterlife. Otherwise Lan Wangji would be using it to talk to his mother.
Do You Believe Me?
Then Wei Wuxian peels the cover off of the big unresolved problem in their relationship, asking Lan Wangji: did you really believe me, back then?
Let’s revisit the earlier iterations of this conversation.
In Episode 22, Wei Wuxian promised Lan Wangji that he would not fall into demonic cultivation, and then immediately asked him “do you believe me?”
Lan Wangji responded with the most reluctant of nods. And this face.
Lan Wangji lied, y'all. He absolutely did not trust Wei Wuxian on this topic, but he loved him, so he lied.
By Episode 23 Wei Wuxian knew that Lan Wangji didn’t believe him, and confronted him about it.
And Lan Wangji made the exact same face about it.
It’s ok, Lan Wangji, we don’t believe him either.
Language note: the English subtitles use “trust,” “believe,” and “believe in” at different times throughout the show, but they’re all translations of the same Chinese word, 信. Often, in the Untamed, the same word or phrase will be used in parallel situations, but the English subtitles hide the parallel by using different words each time. This is annoying but is probably inevitable translation is done by a team - different episodes will have different translators, and English has a LOT of synonyms to choose from.
In the present, when Wei Wuxian asks him if he really believed him back then, Lan Wangji doesn’t have an answer for him, because the answer would be no.
Wei Wuxian hears what Lan Wangji isn’t saying out loud, and he ends the conversation, mildly crushed.
Soundtrack:Help Me by Joni Mitchell, Songs from the Wood by Jethro Tull
