Random Idea Flew Into My Brain And Obviously I Had To Draw It. What Do You Think They Did.

It would be funny if nuclear waste warning messages become an attraction for future historical linguists.

I mean look at this thing:

A parallel text in 7 languages, with 4 different scripts between them! And pictograms! All designed to be preserved intact!

Me in the middle of any conversation I’m having at any given moment

some little guys appreciation post

Hehe, foreshadowing ;P

How I Made the Colors in Hunger's Bite So Good

first of all: buy my book. buy it and look at the colors. (if you cannot buy the book, ask for it at your local library or i GUESS you can look at these spreads i posted)

we're gonna talk about colors, but more specifically we're going to talk about overlays. if you're an artist you are probably familiar with overlays. we love our overlays. we love to color a picture and then at the very last minute go 'hm. looks bad. i'm going to put a yellowish overlay on it to make it look less bad :)'

do not do this.

i mean you can, and it'll work sometimes, but all you're really doing is tricking your brain into thinking different is better. you've been staring at the image for potentially several hours. none of the choices you made at the beginning mean anything to you anymore. you're just finishing what you started. one of the big reasons you might look at your art and go 'man, this doesn't look that good' is because You drew it and are intimately familiar with it. you know all the flaws and mistakes because You made them and You know what your vision was. one of the great frustrations with art is that the piece in your head doesn't look like something you actually made. you want it to look like somebody else did it, so you can enjoy it as a viewer, not as the creator.

so when you put that overlay on, and suddenly the image looks very different, your brain will go 'this doesn't look like the thing i've been staring at for 2-3 hours! this is different! now it's good!'

and again, sometimes it Is good. but do you actually understand why it's good? or is it just different?

okay so what am i supposed to do smart guy

i'm glad you asked. the trick to making overlays work is to have them on from the start. this requires knowing what mood you want to convey in your scene from the very beginning. hopefully you know what mood you want to convey. you do, right? and i don't just mean happy or sad, i also mean safe, threatened, familiar, strange, soft and harsh. blue is not always sad. green is not always healthy. yellow/orange are not the only way to convey a companionable warmth.

okay did you pick the mood? do you have an idea of what color you want to use to represent that mood? great. i'm gonna use blue to convey the cool, clean white of a ship's maintenance corridor without making things literally white. and i'm going to stick in two characters whose color palettes consist of bright yellow, brown, and wine red. awesome. i definitely know how those colors would behave under blue lighting.

(here's the thing: no i don't.) this is where a gradient map correction layer comes in. i want my page to be Blue. alright. let's make a gradient map that's Blue.

a gradient map is basically just A Gradient with specific colors connected to specific values. you have your darkest values on the left, and your lighter values on the right. at 100% opacity, this gradient map layer will read the value of anything below it and go 'okay this bit is this dark, so it should be This shade of blue. and this bit is this light, so it should be This shade of blue'.

kind of like a hue or color layer except determined by a gradient rather than one color, so it could also go 'this is light, so it's green' and 'this is dark, so it's purple'. it's math. i don't really get it either. but anyway this is probably not what you want if you want your characters' palettes to be recognizable. emery's sweater is supposed to be a wine red! neeta's skin should be brown, and her shirt should be yellow. these are their Key Colors. generally, i want them to be recognizable. so let's lower that opacity down.

nice! you can definitely now see that emery's sweater is red and neeta's shirt is yellow. and everything is relatively balanced. nothing is too saturated, nothing is significantly brighter than anything else. it's all got a little bit of blue in it. but i've skipped the step of actually picking your colors. because here's the thing with gradient maps.

they hate you and want to fight. when working with gradient maps you must imagine there is a monkey sitting on your shoulder dumping paint in every time you pick a color. the monkey has a tube of blue and he is going to put that blue into everything you paint, but it's not normal paint. it doesn't mix, it overtakes. it won't turn something yellow into green, it will turn it blue. it wants everything to be blue. if you want something to look like the color it's supposed to be, you will have to make it extremely saturated under the layer to essentially fight the paint monkey's blue. hence, emery's sweater is a BRIGHT red, so it will look a little more purpley under the blue. and neeta's skin is very orange, so it can be dulled down into a soft brown.

this is the sort of thing you will have to learn by feel, because it will be different with every gradient map, especially if you start getting into weird ones that aren't monochromatic. you want to know one of my favorite maps to use?

i have memorized where on the value scale all of these colors appear. i can color something using only shades of gray when i have this filter on. i am evolved. if you want to use gradient maps effectively, you'll have to get a lot of practice.

anyway this post got really long and i'm about to go to a movie so i'll talk about how to use screen/multiply/overlay layers later. but gradient maps are the main tool i used to make hunger's bite's palettes so unified across scenes. but you can see way above how they work to turn insane saturated colors into the nice harmonies--and the trick is that i'll never see those saturated colors while i'm working. because i have accepted the paint pouring monkey into my heart, and i trust him. except when i'm coloring wick's coat. holy mother of god every gradient map hated that man's purple coat.

There are characters you like but then there are characters you end up thinking about in the middle of the night with a cosmic ache in your chest because they resonate with you so much

fun fact! erin ruunaser’s initials, E.R., also stand for “emergency room”, which is a reference to the place he seems to be spiritually tied to, based on the many bad decisions he makes

2.4.29

Those swords are swinging baby

one of those bright cold winter mornings when best for @comicaurora gang to stay inside

We ALMOST Had Lost TGS Media…

Sage’s Confrontation animatic has been RECOVERED!!!

Original description:

" This is a little storyboard challenge I set up for myself. :) I wanted to board something to music, so I decided to go with the track that originally inspired my obsession with the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde when I was in highschool.

My overall thoughts on the musical are . . . elaborate and complicated, but Anthony Warlow's recording of Confrontation has always been the fan favorite. I've had the song memorized for some eight years now, which actually accounts for some of the weirdness of this assignment. The thing is that I've had it memorized so long that I don't actually listen to it much anymore, and I hadn't recalled just how deep Warlow's voice is, especially as Hyde! XD In the years since I had developed my own adaptation of the original Jekyll and Hyde story, which calls for rather different designs for the characters (i.e. Hyde is tiny! tiiiinyyyyyyy) which I fear do not match the voices nearly as well as I would like. :|

Also I'd forgotten just how SLOW the pacing is for this song early on! Please try not to fall asleep! "

Details of the recovery under the cut!

In 2013, Sage uploaded the animatic to Vimeo. There it stayed for a few years until it was linked in the description of Ch 2, pg. 33, where the scene on the page was said to be a partial remake of that animatic.

Around the end of 2024, the link stopped working. The rest of Sage’s work was still available, but the animatic had been completely erased from the site for seemingly no reason.

My first thought was to use the Wayback Machine archive, so someone in a Discord server tried it and managed to get a link! Unfortunately, the site was slow and you could only see the cover of the animatic.

But by MIRACLE, someone had saved it to their phone for years! As of Jan 14 2025, the animatic was recovered in full!

Special shoutout to @jekylls-crippling-depression for her service to the TGS fandom! Thank you! 🙏