Talking about Keith and hobbies a little more, it definitely bothers me where it feels like in popular fanon his only two hobbies are knives and cryptids when in canon he’s shown zero interest in the latter (if anything, I think his personality would gel really badly with conspiracy theories) and the only knife he cares about is pretty obviously because of its obvious sentimental significance to him- he takes to swordsmanship but through the show and the comics the two things he’s wanted to have for himself were 1. a dragon and 2. one of the Olkari mecha walkers and he flat-out ignored what the knife merchant in s2e7 was selling in order to focus on identifying his own knife.
Hobbies Keith does seem to have:
Swimming! Remember he wanted to check out the pool as much as Lance did in in s2e5.
Seems to be pretty athletic all around considering his form taking on the Garrison employees in s1e1 and that he’s later the only one shown taking up independent training (though it’s heavily implied Lance is also doing so in secret)
Explicitly likes the outdoors (s2e4) and finds it peaceful, was basically camping in the desert given how bare-bones the shack is; shown to be very attentive to his environment since as soon as he clapped eyes on the fraunhofer line he immediately recognized its similarity to a rock ridge he’d seen before.
Research- clearly heavily looked into and studied the ‘weird energy’ to try and understand it- even triangulated its position.
This is the part I think wouldn’t gel at all with conspiracy theorists because from what I’ve seen, so much conspiracy stuff relies on bad science and leaping to conclusions and Keith very obviously… doesn’t do that? He doesn’t overlook things, he documents very carefully and thoroughly, and he has a literal supernatural sense of truth sometimes, the idea of holding onto something that’s blatantly false in the presence of solid contradictory evidence is just… not a Keith thing to do.
We see places in s1e1 where he’s ripped stuff off his board, telling us he discarded ideas. And the only time he even suggests what might be responsible for the energy is when they’re standing right in front of an obvious alien machine.
Quite possibly photography- after all he did take all those pictures of the cave markings himself implying he has a decent camera, and since he has physical pictures, he either printed them, or took them using an actual film camera and developed them himself, which takes talent, especially given his limited resources- if he put together a makeshift working darkroom.
OH I WANNA ADD!
Genuinely likes flying/piloting. Especially challenging stuff. Just look at the Hoverbike and how excited he was to chase Rolo through the asteroid field in s1.
Reading. It goes kind of hand-in-hand with the research part, but the amount of books he has in his shack suggests that he feels comfortable around them. Considering how technologically advanced Earth already is, he would have probably had an easier time finding books/articles relating to his research online - he seems to like having a physical copy of them though and doesn’t destroy them for the sake of research. He copies everything down by hand before attaching it his board (the “digitally written” stuff on the board isn’t ripped at the side, they are probably printed articles/copies).
A mild interest in technology. The mentioned mecha walker from the Olkari. Hoverbikes. He has kept the one he has on Earth fully functioning and he has a hoverbike poster up in his room when there are plenty of other posters (or maps) rolled up in the corner. The interest might just be there because of his interest in piloting stuff though.
(there is also an extra photo of a canyon or something on the hoverbike poster - chances are that he took it for his research, it turned out to be useless but he liked it too much to discard of it. or it’s a hobby pic!)
There’s also that stuff from storyboard artists that showed Keith drawing, so I think he likes drawing as well as photography.
Great additions! So yeah, conclusions: Keith is an artsy outdoorsy boy.
Considering the Olkarian Walker, the dragon he was interested by in the comics, the hoverbike and “SICO” poster, I wonder if his interest is specifically in vehicles? It’d go with, as @keiths-stupid-mullet said, his propensity to show off a little with his piloting.
But also learn the difference between an “excuse” and an explanation that demonstrates genuine understanding of the issue and why it’s a problem, or information relevant to whether it will be repeated. Problems aren’t always one sided, and an apology -by classic definition- is an explanation of your behaviour, so the other person understands how and why it happened, or even what the situation looked like from the other side.
I see us conflating -explaining a behaviour- with -trying to excuse it- or -arguing it shouldn’t be changed or worked on- all the time. This gets in the way of healthy dialogue, especially when the unique needs of someone who is disabled, or the unique social behaviours of someone socially or neurologically divergent come into the equation.
For example, if someone is upset because their friend is not socially available to them and thinks that it’s because they’ve lost interest in being friends, the other person apologizing for hurting their feelings is incomplete without explaining the real reason they are like that.
If someone has a disability that affects their ability to remember names or associate them with faces and compensates by giving everyone a nickname to help them remember their real name, and someone is offended because they personally interpret nicknames as a sign of disrespect… An explanation becomes prudent.
This whole “don’t ever explain yourself while apologizing” is highly context specific, and I see it often being touted out of context.
THANK YOU this lack of nuance always irks me so much in apology discourse
lets make 2018 the year people stop writing slapping people as a healthy way to get ones point across in an argument, no matter how well meaning it may be on the characters behalf
theres 100000000people on tumblr who complain abt calarts & its all for very petty personal things, there are some serious fundamental problems w administration, fund distribution, the arbitrary divide between the experimental/character animation programs & the deliberate isolation of the character students from the rest if the school, also sometimes james franco shows up to our school unannounced & its a fucking nightmare
Stumbled across your art recently, and I totally admire your work! As a complete noob to the digital art scene, I'd just like to ask whether you have any tips on colour picking (like for skin tones, under varied/dramatic lighting and such!). I have a ton of other things I want to ask, but I'll limit myself to one question and then try to google the rest, haha/ Thanks for sharing your art with us! ^^
ahh thank you so much! ♥ welcome to the digial art scene friend, i hope you enjoy your stay and ctrl + z
now onto your question! (if you don’t know what layer and layer modes are and how they generally work you should probably google that before you continue reading)
we all perceive colour differently (thx science) and i trust my intuition a lot when it comes to colour picking because of that, and also because i feel like you can make pretty much every colour combination work within the right context. context is key! but still, remember that all of this is about how i perceive colour, so you might not agree with everything i say.
here’s a quick rundown of terms you’ll see around a lot in reference to colours and shading: the hue, which is the ‘colour’ itself, the saturation aka the intensity, and the brightness [or value] which describes how dark or bright we perceive a colour to be.
rule of thumb: when you shade don’t just add black (or white) to your base colours, that will make your drawings boring and lifeless. use different hues and saturation!
now first things first: which skin colour does the character have?
you’ll mostly be navigating in the red to yellow spectrum for the skin tone. so when i pick the base colours i usually start with the skin and adjust the rest of the colours accordingly. if you’re not sure where to begin it might help if you first determine the values (brightness) of the base colours in grayscale.
and here are a few colour variations—i stuck to the approximate values but played around with a lot of different hues and levels of saturation.
now compare 3 and 5: you’ll notice that 3 is very bright and leans towards orange hues, whereas 5 has a pinkish tint.
on the left i gave 5 the hair colour of 3 and in my opinion the pink hue of the skin doesn’t go well with the orange undertone of the hair. you’ll have to experiment a lot to find out which combinations work for you.
ctrl + u is your biggest friend (or image >> adjustments >> hue/saturation in photoshop, the shortcut works in sai and clip studio paint too). play with the sliders and see what happens. i do that a lot myself, because it’s easier to coordinate the colours like that afterwards instead of trying to manually pick perfectly matching ones right away.
for further adjustments i like to use an extra semi-transparent layer on top of everything with just a single colour to add atmospheric light. this unifies the colours and makes them more harmonious, if that’s what you’re looking for. this is about as far as i’d go if i didn’t want to shade the drawing.
if i do want to shade, especially with high contrasts and dramatic light, i darken the base by just adding an additional black layer, here set to 40% opacity. of course you could add a colour layer like the ones i mentioned previously too.
to create an impression of dramatic light you need a high contrast between light and dark areas (1). if i want additional visual intrest i often add secondary light which falls onto the main shadow areas. here i picked a faint greenish blue to balance out the yellow (2). and since light is at least partially reflected when it hits a surface you should add a faint glow that goes across the shadow/light border. i uses a mid-brown with a very soft brush on a layer set to overlay here (3).
for this shading style i like to use the layer mode colour dodge with lowered opacity + fill settings. for some layer modes opacity and fill do the exact same thing (e.g. for multiply or screen). however for colour dodge there’s a big difference:
a lowered opacity merely alters the transparency of the entire layer. that looks pretty awful sometimes, because the bright orange affects the dark of the hair much more intensely than the already brighter skin. but when you lower the fill percentage you primarily lower the amount of light that falls onto darker colours. so the layer’s opacity setting treats every colour equally whereas the fill setting takes their values into consideration. it might be hard to understand if you don’t try it out yourself, so just play around to get a feel for how it works!
and to summarise, here’s a process gif:
colour is an extremely big topic and i’ve only barely scratched the surface but i hope that still helped you out a little! the fastest way to learn is always to try things yourself, so grab a sketch and experiment. 👍
this black woman wore a recording device in her hair during her surgery i guess in case something went wrong and they tried to cover it up or just bc she was nosey and wanted to know if they talked about her, but the surgeons were laughing at her body and calling her “Precious” and she said she’s considering a lawsuit
The doctors did more than make fun of her body. They triggered an allergic reaction because they purposely ignored that she is allergic to penicillin. She had to go to the emergency following her surgery to treat her allergic reaction. All because she had racist doctors. She should definitely sue.
lets make 2018 the year people stop writing slapping people as a healthy way to get ones point across in an argument, no matter how well meaning it may be on the characters behalf
problem with tv animation being so insulated and monopolised is that its turned into a snake eating its own tail- you gotta go to certain places to have any kind of in, and they have a certain style theyve declared to be a money maker, so you cater your art to fit that style, cartoons get more uniform, other styles get waylaid, then on and on you go, all the way down, until you start to lose any sense of uniqueness, and things end up…..extreme
basically it all turns kind of incest-y.
as someone who went to university for animation and realized too late that i had barely any chance of ‘making it’ because i wasnt born in california, its all pretty depressing to think about
the positive side effect of this incestuous ouroboros is that (much in the same way that any female lead movie is hailed as a victory for feminism), even the slightest difference in stylistic choices sets work apart from the rest. You may just be drawing and animating in your own style and be lorded as an innovative creator of your time. It may even help it gain traction as something appealing ‘but different’.
There are also a buttload of counter-arguments and branching topics in these points tho that occured to me while writing
This is gonna sound weird… but as someone who watches a lot of animated shows (and has my entire life) I kinda wanna know more about this. I’m thinking about about how action animation has tended to look very similar for the past decade or so and is that the kind of thing? Just tell me to be quiet if I’m on the complete wrong track.
okay im not the best person to ask because i dont know the specifics of companies and their employment methods or which action animation youre specifically talking about but i can absolutely tell you that while calarts (the institute that is getting a lot of flack recently for its style) doesnt have complete monopoly on american animation, its pretty damn close
im gonna just throw a whole bunch of facts your way because they dont lie and from there you can make your own conclusions–
ill pull out a list of top animation studios worldwide- like this one. bear in mind that it doesnt specify exactly how it ranks these studios, but thats not particularly relevant here; we just need the names.
on this list of 50 well-known animation studios, 22 are based in the state of calfornia. the top ten has 6. this list is international. that is a huge amount of influence for such a small place area of the world. there are even other studios that are based in america, but talking about americas domination of popular media isnt the focus today…
were talking california-the ‘cal’ in calarts.
so, california has big boys like disney, nickelodeon, pixar, dreamworks, and all of these have a very strong, very close relationship to calarts to the point where its almost considered a pipeline, and have ever since, i believe, the 70s.
heres some notable calarts alumni that i remember off the top of my head-
butch hartman (fairly oddparents, danny phantom) john lasseter (just…look him up, itll take less time) brad bird (iron giant, incredibles, ratatouille) craig mccracken (the powerpuff girls, fosters home, wander over yonder) lauren faust (MLP:fim, PPG, foster’s home) glen keane (little mermain, tarzan, tangled)
(the shows/movies next to them arent even the only ones they worked on, just the some popular ones or ones they produced.)
basically, if you look at a piece of american animation, its a safe bet that it was created, written, or produced by someone hailing from calarts. youre also very likely to find another one or two alumni elsewhere in its pipeline (like a said, its all a little incest-y)
how about some more recent stats- as of 2015, 4/6 of CN’s original cartoons were created by calarts alumni. for disney, it was 4/5- damn good odds if youre a betting soul.
so you can see, calarts and the major animation studios have a Very close relationship.
now- this isnt in itself a bad thing! a lot of great, classic shows and movies have come out of calarts alumni- theyve basically built up western animation from its infancy, and its good stuff. id absolutely take more of the level of quality weve been getting recently than nothing at all!
but…as youve said, similarities and trends start to grow, sometimes to the point of sameness. theyve all started from the same place, and over decades established their own styles, brands, and most efficient methods of getting products out there- and theyre the ones that have the money to do so. its happened before, itll happen again, but i do feel it limits what we can achieve and see in animation, which can be very disheartening if you dont draw like the big leaguers do, or, bottomline, dont have the opportunity to work there.
but of course you can make your own conclusions, and say for yourself whether its necessarily a bad thing or not.
(i realize that this was all rather fact-heavy and maybe too pessimistic for ones tastes, so for something more in-depth and optimistic, check out my fellow animation-graduate subatomicbetty’s response. you might learn a bit more about the industry and process!)
fun fact: ironically though, rebecca sugar, a creator people often criticise for having the classic ‘calarts face’ isnt actually a calarts alumni- but that does kind of make my point about its huge influence changing the industry as a whole, doesnt it?
This is gonna sound weird… but as someone who watches a lot of animated shows (and has my entire life) I kinda wanna know more about this. I’m thinking about about how action animation has tended to look very similar for the past decade or so and is that the kind of thing? Just tell me to be quiet if I’m on the complete wrong track.
okay im not the best person to ask because i dont know the specifics of companies and their employment methods or which action animation youre specifically talking about but i can absolutely tell you that while calarts (the institute that is getting a lot of flack recently for its style) doesnt have complete monopoly on american animation, its pretty damn close
im gonna just throw a whole bunch of facts your way because they dont lie and from there you can make your own conclusions–
ill pull out a list of top animation studios worldwide- like this one. bear in mind that it doesnt specify exactly how it ranks these studios, but thats not particularly relevant here; we just need the names.
on this list of 50 well-known animation studios, 22 are based in the state of calfornia. the top ten has 6. this list is international. that is a huge amount of influence for such a small place area of the world. there are even other studios that are based in america, but talking about americas domination of popular media isnt the focus today…
were talking california-the ‘cal’ in calarts.
so, california has big boys like disney, nickelodeon, pixar, dreamworks, and all of these have a very strong, very close relationship to calarts to the point where its almost considered a pipeline, and have ever since, i believe, the 70s.
heres some notable calarts alumni that i remember off the top of my head-
butch hartman (fairly oddparents, danny phantom) john lasseter (just…look him up, itll take less time) brad bird (iron giant, incredibles, ratatouille) craig mccracken (the powerpuff girls, fosters home, wander over yonder) lauren faust (MLP:fim, PPG, foster’s home) glen keane (little mermain, tarzan, tangled)
(the shows/movies next to them arent even the only ones they worked on, just the some popular ones or ones they produced.)
basically, if you look at a piece of american animation, its a safe bet that it was created, written, or produced by someone hailing from calarts. youre also very likely to find another one or two alumni elsewhere in its pipeline (like a said, its all a little incest-y)
how about some more recent stats- as of 2015, 4/6 of CN’s original cartoons were created by calarts alumni. for disney, it was 4/5- damn good odds if youre a betting soul.
so you can see, calarts and the major animation studios have a Very close relationship.
now- this isnt in itself a bad thing! a lot of great, classic shows and movies have come out of calarts alumni- theyve basically built up western animation from its infancy, and its good stuff. id absolutely take more of the level of quality weve been getting recently than nothing at all!
but…as youve said, similarities and trends start to grow, sometimes to the point of sameness. theyve all started from the same place, and over decades established their own styles, brands, and most efficient methods of getting products out there- and theyre the ones that have the money to do so. its happened before, itll happen again, but i do feel it limits what we can achieve and see in animation, which can be very disheartening if you dont draw like the big leaguers do, or, bottomline, dont have the opportunity to work there.
but of course you can make your own conclusions, and say for yourself whether its necessarily a bad thing or not.
(i realize that this was all rather fact-heavy and maybe too pessimistic for ones tastes, so for something more in-depth and optimistic, check out my fellow animation-graduate subatomicbetty’s response. you might learn a bit more about the industry and process!)
fun fact: ironically though, rebecca sugar, a creator people often criticise for having the classic ‘calarts face’ isnt actually a calarts alumni- but that does kind of make my point about its huge influence changing the industry as a whole, doesnt it?
