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Carotid posted:Any recommendations for making good quality prints of physical art? I've scanned some original paintings that I want to make some prints of. Initially just a small number of prints but I'm considering selling at some point too. Disclaimer: these are US based, save Vograce, which is Chinese. I use Fireball Printing for my prints. You'll need to have a cmyk .pdf or similar for it, and they do give you a proof on request. I suggest going for the proof, since you're working off scans of traditional media, and getting the colors true may take some adjusting. They have a lot of nice paper options and are quite fast- I've never had a single issue with their quality, and they give you fireball candies in your package, which is cute. Catprint also exists, but I've heard mixed things regarding them, and Vistaprint is an option for a lot of bigger stuff, but they're honestly not for the fine artist, mostly focused on banners, business cards and customized swag for things like company picnics. I think Vograce also does prints now, but they're really mostly a merch company for artists doing the con circuit, creating custom keychains and the like. They're also in China, while the rest of the options here are in the US, so it's less worth it unless you want to put your paintings on stuff like sketchbooks- which is a cool idea, don't get me wrong. Sorry, I'm tired and so my adhd is Active and I'm just going to spit all the info at you at once. Peace be with thee, goon friend.
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Jul 30, 2023 04:18
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Also, there are a surprising amount of local printers in the world. I live in a rinky dink lil town, and just found a little print shop less than 5 minutes away. When I break down the shipping cost, the local place turns out better on some things than online shops, tbh. Plus, it's nice to be able to meet the people handling your stuff and actually know you'll get a person if you need one, rather than some useless chatbot. I do suggest looking local first, since you'll be able to go down and actually talk about what's possible and not have to wait for the mail if you want proofs and stuff.
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Jul 30, 2023 04:27
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Carotid posted:Any recommendations for making good quality prints of physical art? I've scanned some original paintings that I want to make some prints of. Initially just a small number of prints but I'm considering selling at some point too. I would also suggest finding a local print shop, if only because of the ability to look at and feel the paper they have to print on. Sometimes things look better on a thicker or differently toned paper and being able to ask for a bunch of different test prints and adjust on the fly is really invaluable.
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Aug 1, 2023 15:51
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DicktheCat posted:Also, there are a surprising amount of local printers in the world. I live in a rinky dink lil town, and just found a little print shop less than 5 minutes away. Chip McFuck posted:I would also suggest finding a local print shop, if only because of the ability to look at and feel the paper they have to print on. Sometimes things look better on a thicker or differently toned paper and being able to ask for a bunch of different test prints and adjust on the fly is really invaluable. For the love of God, please call, or email, and make sure it's fine to drop by first. Used to work at a specialty comics printer, and the owners (and everyone else there) hated it when customers would "just drop by". Everything in the office grinds to a halt, and the already limited staff have to smile and nod at said customer's questions, until they graciously decide to leave, ultimately having accomplished nothing.
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Aug 5, 2023 06:27
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HanzoSchmanzo posted:For the love of God, please call, or email, and make sure it's fine to drop by first. This is a good point that I didn't think of. The printer in my local area is geared towards a lot of general stuff, to the point that they have flyers to peruse while making decisions, but I imagine the above scenario happens just as much, so finding out how they work first is a good idea.
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Aug 5, 2023 12:54
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I'm looking for a tool that I assume probably exists but I really don't know where to look outside of like, sketchup which I haven't used in eons and I'm not sure is good for what I am looking for. Basically I've been wanting to work on a comic book idea I have been kicking around in my head for a long time, but I want it to be pretty dynamic visually, and I worry that my sometimes limited ability when it comes to perspective would hold it back. What I'd like to do is find a 3D modeling program where I can just make very basic models of characters and backgrounds, so I can essentially take snapshots and use them as references. Something that would allow me to pose and move stuff around easily would be great. The more user friendly and cheap/free the better. I have very little experience doing 3d modeling. I don't need anything that advanced. I basically just want to be able to make a rough framework for something so I can fill out the details by hand. I just want something to remove the guesswork with perspective and lighting. If anyone has any recs, or even a better idea for how to accomplish this I'd appreciate it.
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Dec 29, 2023 23:58
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You can do this using Blender and I would recommend spending some time learning to use it in general. Clip Studio also supports simple 3D models and backgrounds.
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Dec 30, 2023 00:14
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I think you are right that I need to learn blender but my god it's intimidating. I've been trying and the learning curve feels insane.
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Jan 30, 2024 20:46
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veni veni veni posted:I think you are right that I need to learn blender but my god it's intimidating. I've been trying and the learning curve feels insane. It's really not so intimidating once you get your bearing. It's surprisingly more logical and natural and well built than basically every other professional art software I've ever used in my life or career. That said, unlike every other software I've ever used you can't really just open it up and start clicking around and get poo poo to happen, which is why you're hitting that learning curve. The first step is a little flat wall that once you get over you're essentially just choosing which scenic route you wanna take. I recommend the donut tutorials by Blender Guru for getting over that initial step, set some time aside and just follow the tutorials and it'll give you the base to use the program and start figuring out how to use it to make what you need. One of my primary uses it's exactly as you're wanting, I set up little blocked out scenes with basic shapes and figures to help me skip tedious perspective line drawing steps in illustrations. But it's also a really fun tool with a 'give a mouse a cookie" aspect where as soon as you learn one thing you realize it unlocks the potential to do other things. The hardest part of blender is just learning the initial controls and shortcuts and where something's are that do the intuitive thing you want while modeling, because they are almost always there you just gotta know to look and how. The blender guru tutorials really do a great job getting some of that initial muscle memory and tool usage and making it feel second nature. My first time opening it I couldn't even handle trying to manipulate the default cube but now I find myself wishing my other tools had blender-like functionality. Give Illustrator to Blender for a year and they'd probably fix 80% of my decades old problems with it.
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Mar 2, 2024 22:20
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Yeah the Blender Guru Donut tutorials is what I was working off of. Very helpful and well thought out, but the problem with using Youtube videos for something like that is that after a few hours I hosed something up and had no idea why it was hosed up or what to do to fix it, ultimately making it so I couldn't continue after working on my donut for a few hours. Was probably something that would have taken two seconds to fix for someone who knew what they were doing but to me it might as well have been quantum physics lol.
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Mar 2, 2024 23:29
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Haha, yeah I remember I had a similar experience at some points. It was a couple years ago so the YouTube comments system was a little better and a lot of my issues were handily resolved by others working it out in the comments. It's hardest to look up problems when you don't know what things are called. Took me several nights and much longer than the video themselves but once it all finally clicked it there was no turning back. I also kept his shortcut thing open while I was learning. It's really a program you'll want to be navigating quickly rather than clicking around for every little thing. Being able to quickly just move or expand things on a specific axis and such is important. I had a newer version than the tutorial he had at the time so I doubly leaned on people being like "btw that thing is actually over there now" or whatever. Some nice folks in BYOB Blender thread (and later in the BYOB discord blender chat) also helped me out after when I was trying to make my own stuff.
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Mar 4, 2024 05:24
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Are there any recommended resources for Illustrator templates that are free, or close to it? I thought this sort of thing was included in my Adobe license, but this no longer appears to be the case. As a musician who needs to create 10-20 posters a year, the spend doesn't really make a ton of sense for me to up my license through them. There are some great sounding links in the OP but some of them are dead.
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Mar 17, 2024 14:03
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I've tried making videos of my backyard garden, and forests, and other green things, and my videos never look even remotely as good as some professional youtuber's. Is it because they have a $5k camera? Or are they doing some video editing to make it more vivid and raise the contrasts?
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Jun 16, 2024 19:39
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Fozzy The Bear posted:I've tried making videos of my backyard garden, and forests, and other green things, and my videos never look even remotely as good as some professional youtuber's. Is it because they have a $5k camera? Or are they doing some video editing to make it more vivid and raise the contrasts? Photography/cinematography almost always comes down to lighting and framing. A lot of professional YouTubers use middle-age GoPros or iPhones. Like, a LOT. Even a $5k DSLR is gonna look like crap with bad lighting, poor white balance, and bad camera motion/stability. Like, yeah, they're probably doing some color balancing in post, but the most important part is getting things right as early as possible, ie, when shooting. So what are you using? What is your lighting situation? What resolution are you shooting in? Do you know basic composition theory and exposure? Make sure you're at the limits of your tools before you go out and spend a pile of money for a slightly faster autofocus or in-camera processing that no one actually uses.
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Jun 16, 2024 20:04
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Hi thread. Imagine I have a Word doc of lots of discrete chunks of text -- say, 100 separate poems of varying lengths. The poems were written in random order, and now I want to put them in some kind of deliberate order, but I'm finding good old CTRL+X and CTRL+V to be a little clunky while I'm playing around with the order. What I would like is an app that would (ideally) let me upload my Word doc to it and then it would automatically turn each separate poem into a drag-and-droppable box. Or I could manually copy and paste each poem from the Word doc into a new drag-and-droppable box. Then I could drag the poems around until I was happy with their order. Pretty simple. But! It would also be really nice if the app let me somehow assign the poems into categories -- like, say I wanted to categorize the poems under Winter, Spring, Summer, or Fall, but I don't know right now which poems should belong to which season. I'd like a way to quickly assign and edit the categories (maybe by tagging or color-coding the boxes), and then have the ability to do things like filter the view to see only Summer poems, or (with one motion) drag all the Winter poems to the top of the list but keep the Spring, Summer, and Fall poems intermixed. And then (THIS IS THE CRUCIAL PART) when I was all done, the app would let me export the poems in their new order into a single new Word doc.  Does such an app exist????
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Jun 27, 2024 17:33
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Rabbit Hill posted:Hi thread. Imagine I have a Word doc of lots of discrete chunks of text -- say, 100 separate poems of varying lengths. The poems were written in random order, and now I want to put them in some kind of deliberate order, but I'm finding good old CTRL+X and CTRL+V to be a little clunky while I'm playing around with the order. You can do this with Word's Styles, Outline, and Navigation. You could, for example, have one Style for your Seasons/sections, one Style for your Titles (or whatever identifier text you want), and one for your normal text, and assuming you have your inheritances set correctly, you can grab a Title from the Navigation Pane and move it and its associated text wherever you want within the larger document. This is how I sequenced my master's thesis, a chapbook, and a full-length book. Take an afternoon or evening and dig into the functionality. It's a little more fiddly than CSS and HTML because eof some menu diving, but once you have a template that works for you, you can use it on multiple projects moving forward.
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Jun 27, 2024 22:23
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Wow, I had no idea Word could do that -- thanks, I'll give it a try!
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Jul 2, 2024 19:14
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I cannot for the life of me figure out how to easily make layers (completely)opaque in procreate. Like, say I draw something and then make a new layer at the bottom to put a background in. It always is gonna show through to some extent, and the only way I can get rid of it seems to be to erase part of the layer.
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Jul 6, 2024 19:43
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I haven’t used it in a while but I remember Procreate out of the box really leans into the “digital paint” skewmorphism. So I’d check the opacity value of your brushes first.
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Jul 6, 2024 19:55
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Yeah it’s most likely brush opacity. But also check what blend mode the top layer is in. If it’s not "normal" it will alter the layers beneath instead of covering them, even at 100% opacity.
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Jul 6, 2024 23:13
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Since I have been drawing more again my YT recs have skewed way more into the art realm. It's enjoyable to see what other people are doing and it's constantly slightly shifting how I work and how I feel about my own drawings . There's so many insanely talented and skilled artists really going into their creative process in clear and concise ways that I think a new artist could really use YT as a free online "art school" in some ways. When I stopped drawing regularly almost a decade ago YT was so different this is all pretty new to me. And there is the other side of it...I'm gonna be honest and sound like an old man, but the vast majority of zoomer art Youtubers are such utter trash that I feel bad that most young people are probably going to these channels for advice (judging by view counts). It's not that they aren't great artists, but the desire to chase clout outweighs the desire to actually help anyone that the former is barely worth mentioning. As a 40 year old I can spot the BS from a mile away, but I feel like if I was a teenager watching this poo poo I'd just want to quit art. Their entire MO is giving these borderline worthless tutorials that basically only exist to flex and then they end it with "see it's so easy you can do it too" while they use heavy editing to make everything look effortless and fail to go into the fact that it took their entire lives and probably a bunch of expensive private lessons to get to where they are at. I mean, I really don't know what young people watch and a lot of the videos I think are great have plenty of views as well, but it just sucks to see clout culture seep it's way into everything so even art tutorials basically become the drawing equivalent of idiots showing off their wealth and being like "you can do it too, bitcoin bro"
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Jul 13, 2024 21:30
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Jul 14, 2024 00:47
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are there any good sources for meetups for folks in the film/T.V. industry?
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Oct 28, 2024 10:58
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I'm sorry but I've become very frustrated, What can i do to use a word processor the does nothing but present what I type. Like I'd like to choose my own font and font size but otherwise be left alone. Is there anything like this in existence or is everything broken complicated garbage that wants to turn "the 24th" with the th being tiny and then making the rest of my writing look like that.
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Apr 1, 2025 18:16
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Have you had a look at something barebones but moddable like Notepad++ or VS Code? Not a lot you can do for bolding, font size, etc., but they're what I use when I need no nonsense text editing. And for VSCode, you can get the bolding/font size/etc by using Markdown, which is super easy to pick up and start using.
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Apr 1, 2025 20:22
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I use Byword for most of my very simple word processing tasks - it’s basically a glorified Markdown editor with a word processor-ish UI.
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Apr 1, 2025 21:10
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Son of Thunderbeast posted:Have you had a look at something barebones but moddable like Notepad++ or VS Code? Not a lot you can do for bolding, font size, etc., but they're what I use when I need no nonsense text editing. kedo posted:I use Byword for most of my very simple word processing tasks - it’s basically a glorified Markdown editor with a word processor-ish UI. I'll check these out, thanks. it's frustrating how difficult it is to just find something that works.
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Apr 1, 2025 23:37
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Sorry I just re-read my post and it sounds dumb as hell. You can use markdown syntax in anything, but VSCode can give you a live preview of what it looks like rendered 
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Apr 2, 2025 16:08
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iA Writer.
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May 12, 2025 07:52
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TextEdit in Rich Text mode? You can probably switch off any automatic substitutions. e: or Bean https://bean-osx.com/Bean.html
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May 15, 2025 14:42
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I wanna do some mapmaking for tabletop games (using Foundry for the table and Inkscape for the doing of it), and Im curious if there's a one-stop place I can go for free textures and tiles and such. Not looking for a tabletop specific resource, to be clear, but I'm. obviously not gonna scoff at that, should it exist. The design resource search engine in the OP sounds like it could be what I'm looking for, but it also seems Dead. I imagine there's overlap with all sorts of creative graphics work here, including 3D design and such. It's also been years since I've done any work of this type, in case that wasn't obvious.
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Aug 16, 2025 12:56
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