A co-worker of mine was standing outside with me during a break from customers to share a cigarette with me, and told me about how he had lost his brother that he was close with some years ago. He told me about how they used to be in a band together with some friends, and how ever since he'd died, he hadn't played any music because he'd been too scared and anxious. I told him about how I'd lost my brother to suicide some years ago.
I went home and pulled out an old tiny wooden box my brother had given me before he'd died. I'd been using it to store guitar picks I'd collected over the years, including one guitar pick that used to be his. I haven't played the guitar since he'd died, my hands are too small to play some of the chords, so I play bass and piano instead.
I went to work the next day and gifted my brothers old guitar pick to my co-worker. I told him that it'd been sitting in a box for ten years unused, and would probably sit there for longer if I kept it there. Told him that I thought he deserved to have it, because I bet he could put it to better use than I ever would. Told him I didn't feel like it was coincidence that me and him would cross paths with each other in our lives, and that it seemed suiting that we had these similar experiences but split in two halves. That somehow, I felt like he was meant to have the guitar pick. I told him that I knew he'd not played guitar since his brother died, but that if he ever decided to play again one of these days, maybe he'd be able to honor both of our brothers by using that guitar pick.
He almost cried. He thanked me. Then he went home that night and for the first time in years he played the guitar.
I don't know what the meaning of life is or what my purpose is, but I do believe that love and human connection is one of the most important things in life. It's finding ways to tell strangers you love them and share experiences with others. I think it's all just about love.
FEMA is doing an emergency alert test on all TVs, radios, and cell phones on October 4, 2023, at approximately 2:20pm ET.
If you live in the US and you have a phone you need to keep secret for any reason, make sure that it is turned off at this time.
Yes, I'm doing this months in advance, and yes, my blog has very little reach, but I figure better to post about it more than less.
Please reblog and add better tags than mine, I'm bad at tags.
oh hey btw, apparently tumblr mobile now has an option to report ads for having flashing lights, if you click the three dots in the top right corner it should show up. not sure how long thats been there but i dont remember it being there at least a few months back, i would venture to guess it came with the recent update but shrug. fucking ridiculous that they cant just not put flashing ads in our faces in the first place, but at least this is an option.
people who dont have issues with flashing lights are allowed and encouraged to reblog
If you're having trouble keeping up with what's going on in Palestine because of US news coverage of university protests, here are some articles you can read and a video you can watch:
While CNN & all the other mainstream media try to paint the university protests as "pro terrorism" (which they're not, they're literally anti-war protests.) Palestinians are being slaughtered by the minute.
Please don't stop speaking about Palestine.
I cannot stress enough to Tumblr staff that they do not need to change the site. Do not try to be like Twitter. Do not try to be like Reddit. Do not alter how this site works.
Tumblr will be the most popular social media site if they continue letting all these other sites implode
Forced to learn how tumblr works because quotev has officially killed itself ☹️ (please tell me terms and stuff i should know) (and explain it like youre talking to your mom about your favorite media)
i thought my laptop was on its last leg because it was running at six billion degrees and using 100% disk space at all times and then i turned off shadows and some other windows effects and it was immediately cured. i just did the same to my roommate's computer and its performance issues were also immediately cured. okay. i guess.
so i guess if you have creaky freezy windows 10/11 try searching "advanced system settings", go to performance settings, and uncheck "show shadows under windows" and anything else you don't want. hope that helps someone else.
Honestly I understand kid tantrums. Like, statistically, this may very well actually be the worst thing to happen to them! They have limited life experience! They're learning!
@dimiclaudeblaigan asked for a tutorial on how to begin drawing. Good news! If you can draw a funky looking stick man, you have already started!
I think that stick people are a great starting point for artists because of the things you can learn from them that will be important later on.
If you are able to draw a circle and a couple of lines, you can easily put together a stick person.
Congratulations! You have started to draw. :)
A stick person is a very minimal artistic representation of a real life person. It is simple yet recognizable, and is widely used in art, media, and signage.
But what can a stick person teach us about drawing people that look more like… well, people? Lets have a look!
By simply adding a few more lines, we can add a pair of eyes and a mouth. Maybe even a little triangle nose! Or half circles for ears. We can now draw a face, which provides a basis for all sorts of expressions.
These simple additions can allow us to explore the wide range of human emotion and individuality.
This may seem like the basics of the basics. But that is what we want! In order to get to the point where we are able to draw complex, elaborate representations of humans and objects, we will need to start with simple shapes like lines and circles and build our understanding from there.
For instance, lets give our stick person some cool new features, such as hands and feet. I chose little squiggly circles to represent hands, and triangles to represent feet.
We can go a step further and modify the body of the stick person to include shoulders, hips, elbows and knees. These parts of the human body are quite complex in real life But here, all we need to do is add a few simple lines and dots to our stick person.
The lines provide some additional structural elements to our stick person's body, which are the shoulders and the hips. The dots indicate the points of articulation - elbows and knees, the places where the arms and legs bend!
Now we can use our stick person to show us an even wider range of human movement, action, and expression.
Our little drawing of a human being is evolving! All it took was adding a few more lines and shapes here and there.
By elongating some of the existing lines and making the head an oval instead of a circle, we can give our stick person proportions that resemble that of a real life human.
By this point, we have managed to add more complexity to our stick person simply by using our ability to draw lines, circles, and other basic shapes!
These basic ideas are the building blocks that will enable us to create more complex shapes.
The next part may be a considerable step up if you are absolutely new to drawing, but I have decided to include it in order to show you how complex objects like the human body can be built from shapes that are a bit more complex than circles and lines.
For example. Two ovals and a rectangle can be combined to create a cylinder.
Six squares can be combined to create a cube, or a box. Here, each square is distorted slightly depending on which way the cube is facing.
Note that the back faces of the cube and the bottom of the cylinder are hidden. These shapes allow us to visualize that which should not normally visible.
A sphere from all perspectives can be represented by a circle. But we can make it more like a sphere by adding lighting and shadow if we so desire.
Cubes, cylinders, and spheres are examples of 'solid shapes' because they consist of 3 dimensions.
Lets see how these solid shapes can be used to compose the human body.
By stacking three cylindrical objects, we can create a torso. Two spheres have been added to form shoulders, while a smaller cylinder forms the neck.
An arm is an alternating sequence of spheres and cylinders connected together. Note that the hand has been simplified for this example.
We can apply these solid shapes to the rest of the body to give us a more recognizable representation of the human form. It doesn't even have to be perfect. And just like that, our stick figure now has a silhouette that is unmistakably a person!
In the above examples, notice that we kept the stick person at the beginning while building up the shapes and solids around it. This is because the stick person serves as a guide for positioning the body and its various parts -> also known as posing.
You can do the same thing to everyday objects! Here, I drew a wine glass by stacking these three dimensional solid shapes.
The cup and its contents are two ovoid shapes that were cut in half. The stem is a very thin cylinder shape. The base is a cylinder with a slightly wider bottom.
Solid shapes help inform us how objects and parts of the human body may appear from different perspectives.
For example, a sphere can be used to demonstrate how the human head appears when looking up or down, turned to the side, or tilted at an angle.
With these examples, I hope I have managed to convinced you that if you can draw a circle and a couple of lines, you can draw a person! You just have to train your eye to recognize the simple shapes within complex objects. Try it with everyday objects as well! Or even your favourite media! A drawing subject can be as simple or as complex as you envision it to be.
Once you have mastered that, there are many aspects of drawing you can explore from here that may require you to seek additional resources or a fellow artist's advice.
Last of all, remember that drawing is an iterative process. Even if you draw something correct the first time, you will need to draw it again and again to get it right all times! And by making small changes like the ones we explored in this tutorial, your drawings will gradually transform!
I hope what I've demonstrated here are enough to provide the basics of how to get started with drawing objects and people, and also to help refresh more experienced artists. :) Hopefully I didn't go too off topic with what was requested, and let me know if there are any more questions I can answer.
Cheers :3
A curiosity test to explain some cultural context, bias, why some things go more viral than others, or simply curiosity.
(reblog if possible for more data).
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tag an artist save a life etc