sometimes you need dialogue tags and don't want to use the same four

For anyone who needs this

!!!!

The Taste of the World: Writing Food as Storytelling

Food is never just food. It’s culture, history, survival, and, perhaps most importantly, a language that characters and worlds use to speak when words fail. The way food is grown, prepared, and consumed reveals the structure of a society—its priorities, its fears, and its memory. And in storytelling, the smallest detail about what’s eaten or how it’s shared can carry a world’s worth of meaning.

When used well, food becomes a subtle but powerful tool. It can reflect emotional tension without anyone saying a word, or quietly thread deeper themes through the narrative. It doesn’t have to overwhelm your story with excess description; it works best when it’s an organic part of the world, shaped by the same forces that drive everything else.

Let’s break down how to think about food as more than a detail, crafting it as an integral part of the characters, the setting, and the stakes.

Moros lies within the heart of a ticking clock. Second by second until the end is to come. The heart of worlds resonates within the deepest recesses of darkness, and influences beyond comprehension, seeping deeper to not only corrupt the darkness but also the light.

Taking place 1 year after Sora’s disappearance, everyone continues to search for him. Unknowing that he is now beyond the veil… who would you find in that purgatory of Quadratum?

Come join and find out…

✦ - ✦ - ✦ - ✦ - ✦ - ✦ - ✦

⚜️Welcome to Kingdom Hearts Moros!⚜️

We are a canon-divergent, plot-focused, literate KH server taking place a month after the ending of KH3. Come join this exciting new plot-driven story as we delve deeper into the chaos. We have:

‼️‼️21+ ONLY ADULT SFW SERVER‼️‼️ 👾 Many Canons Available 🥊 Combat System EASY and COMPREHENSIBLE where you can:

🔊ADDITIONALLY 🔊 🔴 KHUX, KHDR, Final Fantasy, TWEWY, and Disney characters are OKAY! 👌 Join here!

Currently, we are looking for... SORA ROXAS XION

SKULD EPHEMERA

FORETELLER ACED FORETELLER IRA FORETELLER INVI

DEMYX / MYDE

LARXENE / ELRENA ANSEM THE WISE PENCE

OLETTE DATA RIKU DATA SORA

HERMOD HEIMDALL HELGI

HODER SIGRUN VALA

VALI VOR BALDR

VIDAR MASTER ODIN

Plot Starts Officially in January 2025!

I’ve never been great at drawing super realistic art, and I think it’s because it never really held my interest. I just love stylized characters which is why I’ve been drawing them obsessively for over 20 years! Because of that, I’ve got a lot of ideas about how you can approach stylized anatomy - here’s a snippet of a longer video I made on this topic ✨

You can watch the full video here!

really helpful technique ^ once you know how to divide by halves and thirds it makes drawing evenly spaced things in perspective waaay easier:

PSA: if you describe your sexy demons as "smelling sulphurous/like brimstone," that's not just vague mystical words.

Those are real smells.

They smell like farts.

Please know this. I'm begging you.

Some alternatives that both smell dangerous and interesting but not necessarily bad:

* wood smoke

* ozone (sparingly -- this can be nasty. It's the smell electronics make when they break and emit blue smoke)

* salt

* metal

* salty + metallic = blood btw

* roasting meat / burning fat (think: cooking bacon)

PSA to all historical fiction/fantasy writers:

A SEAMSTRESS, in a historical sense, is someone whose job is sewing. Just sewing. The main skill involved here is going to be putting the needle into an out of the fabric. They’re usually considered unskilled workers, because everyone can sew, right? (Note: yes, just about everyone could sew historically. And I mean everyone.) They’re usually going to be making either clothes that aren’t fitted (like shirts or shifts or petticoats) or things more along the lines of linens (bedsheets, handkerchiefs, napkins, ect.). Now, a decent number of people would make these things at home, especially in more rural areas, since they don’t take a ton of practice, but they’re also often available ready-made so it’s not an uncommon job. Nowadays it just means someone whose job is to sew things in general, but this was not the case historically. Calling a dressmaker a seamstress would be like asking a portrait painter to paint your house

A DRESSMAKER (or mantua maker before the early 1800s) makes clothing though the skill of draping (which is when you don’t use as many patterns and more drape the fabric over the person’s body to fit it and pin from there (although they did start using more patterns in the early 19th century). They’re usually going to work exclusively for women, since menswear is rarely made through this method (could be different in a fantasy world though). Sometimes you also see them called “gown makers”, especially if they were men (like tailors advertising that that could do both. Mantua-maker was a very feminized term, like seamstress. You wouldn’t really call a man that historically). This is a pretty new trade; it only really sprung up in the later 1600s, when the mantua dress came into fashion (hence the name).

TAILORS make clothing by using the method of patterning: they take measurements and use those measurements to draw out a 2D pattern that is then sewed up into the 3D item of clothing (unlike the dressmakers, who drape the item as a 3D piece of clothing originally). They usually did menswear, but also plenty of pieces of womenswear, especially things made similarly to menswear: riding habits, overcoats, the like. Before the dressmaking trade split off (for very interesting reason I suggest looking into. Basically new fashion required new methods that tailors thought were beneath them), tailors made everyone’s clothes. And also it was not uncommon for them to alter clothes (dressmakers did this too). Staymakers are a sort of subsect of tailors that made corsets or stays (which are made with tailoring methods but most of the time in urban areas a staymaker could find enough work so just do stays, although most tailors could and would make them).

Tailors and dressmakers are both skilled workers. Those aren’t skills that most people could do at home. Fitted things like dresses and jackets and things would probably be made professionally and for the wearer even by the working class (with some exceptions of course). Making all clothes at home didn’t really become a thing until the mid Victorian era.

And then of course there are other trades that involve the skill of sewing, such as millinery (not just hats, historically they did all kinds of women’s accessories), trimming for hatmaking (putting on the hat and and binding and things), glovemaking (self explanatory) and such.

TLDR: seamstress, dressmaker, and tailor are three very different jobs with different skills and levels of prestige. Don’t use them interchangeably and for the love of all that is holy please don’t call someone a seamstress when they’re a dressmaker

from the How to THINK when you Draw ENCYCLOPEDIA - the world’s ONLY encyclopedia of drawing tutorials , all of which is FREE for EVERYONE, FOREVER - and I post LOADS of DIFFERENT tutorials EVERY DAY on  OUR MASSIVE INSTAGRAM HERE and OUR GIANT TWITTER HERE and on TIKTOK HERE !

PLUS! CLICK HERE for 300 EXTRA FREE TUTORIALS!

Lorenzo!

back in the 00s a single dancing anime chibi gif would feed us for months on end

Here’s the template. Go forth and recreate the dancing anime chibi gif. Revive the old ways.

This fucking thing all over deviantART in the 00s-10s LMAO

The bases on this post are all JPEGs for some reason. That makes them hard to use properly. I will link to the originals and provide some additional ones, along with a tutorial on how to actually make them into a GIF.

I couldn't find the caramelldansen base in this post, but here is a version that should work just as well.

Here is the original lick icon base.

To save these and have them be usable, you have to click the "free download" button underneath the image.

Some other good bases:

Dance Icon

Caipirinha

Run Run Run

You can find many other bases like these through DeviantArt.

How to make them into a GIF:

Step 1. Edit the base however you like (I used MSPaint)

Step 2: Crop and save each frame individually as PNGs (Note for the lick base: It's best to crop them to include the black boarder. This makes the GIF 50x50, which is the standard DeviantArt icon size and can easily scale larger if need be.)

Step 3: Go to ezgif.com/maker and upload all your frames

Step 4: Set "delay time" to 10, then click "Make a GIF!"

Step 5: Right-click the result and save it. Congrats! You used a GIF base!

ID: 1. A collection of early 2000s animation meme gifs and their still images. 2. screenshots of instructions to edit animation meme templates in ms paint and ezgif.com to result in a licking gif. End ID.

tweet

Something like this would be so colossally helpful. I'm sick and tired of trying to research specific clothing from any given culture and being met with either racist stereotypical costumes worn by yt people or ai generated garbage nonsense, and trying to be hyper specific with searches yields fuck all. Like I generally just cannot trust the legitimacy of most search results at this point. It's extremely frustrating. If there are good resources for this then they're buried deep under all the other bullshit, and idk where to start looking.

>:)c

May I present to you, nationalclothing.org?

It doesn't have everything, but it's still my first source when researching traditional clothing from other cultures.

There's also this resource on historical fashion: Claire’s Historical Fashion Reference & Resources

another addition as far as physical media goes there is the encyclopedia of national dress (that i still need to buy myself bc this kind of thing is super important to my sort of fantasy designing) but yes i do agree i wish there was EVEN MORE documentation on this

here are some resources for Indian clothing archives:

The Sari Series: a digital anthology documenting India's regional saree drapes though short films

Purushu Arie's blog; started when he was studying at NIFT, the blogger has gone on to become a leader in the neo-traditional fashion scene in India.

if anyone knows more please add links !

PSPSPSPSPSPSPS CLIP STUDIO IS ON SALE RELEASE YOUR ADOBE SHACKLES AND JOIN THE FREE MASSES OF THE RESISTANCE

OMG AND IT'S A PERPETUAL LICENSE!!! NOT A SUBSCRIPTION

HELLO KINGDOM HEARTS PEOPLE

by popular demand i took pictures of mostly every KH character for hair/facial/expression references for you to use! if you found my previous references helpful, consider sharing this so more people can find it & use these!

please let me know if there is any issues with the link or anything sora lost my braincell: ARCHIVE LINK

yes sora & riku get their own special little folder & full expression sheets

PLUS! I’ve just posted a tutorial on LIPS over on TIKTOK HERE today - hope it’s useful! 

Lorenzo!

for all the artists out there, here are my favorite resources i use to learn!

Files

The Complete Famous Artist Course

Art Books and Resources

Art, Anatomy, and Color Books

PDF Files of Art Books

YouTube

My YouTube Playlist of Tutorials

How to Draw Facial Features

Drawing and Art Advice

Drawing Lessons

Art Fundamentals

Anatomy of the Human Body

2D Animation

Perspective Drawing

Websites

Pinterest Board for Poses

Another Pinterest Board for Poses

Reference Angle

Figurosity

Sketch Daily

Human Anatomy

Animal Photo References

Humanae - Angélica Dass

Fine Art - Jimmy Nelson

Character Design References

CDR's Twitter Account

iamagco's Twitter Account

taco1704's Twitter Account

takuya_kakikata's Twitter Account

EtheringtonBro's Twitter Account

Drawabox

Color Wheel

Color Palette Cinema

Free Images and Pictures

Free Stock Photos

FILMGRAB

Screen Musings

William Nguyen Light Reference Tool

Animation References - sakugabooru

Animation References - Bodies in Motion

>Opens Google Drive links >Multiple Art books >100+ pages long each

This is gonna be good

By LabradoriteKing on Pinterest

this one goes out to all the steven universe girlies out there

This post is just like those "How to Study like a Harvard Student!" Things but for ND people with executive dysfunction who can't even START studying.

(Edit: I reblogged some of people's additional thoughts)

I can't really think of anything else, but feel free to add stuff in the comments.

Disclaimer for the masses, I am not a doctor. These are from my own personal experience as someone w audhd. :)