Learning From The Reblogs Of That Post That There's A Lot Of People Out There Under The Impression That

Lasioglossum xanthopus from the Netherlands, occurs from Great Britain into Asia.  

I rlly love your art! I like to draw too but I'm having trouble with chubby/fat characters. Is there any advice you could give? (Sorry if this is weird or annoying, if so you don't gotta answer it.)

I get this question a lot, and for once I’m going to try to give a proper answer. 

I what most people get wrong is how to distribute fat. People gain fat in different parts of their body, but no one gains fat in only one part. I often see people draw “fat” characters by just drawing a skinny character and making their belly stick out, like in the picture below.

as you can see, the first drawing  looks kinda weird and unnatural, and it certainly does not look “fat”. in the second drawing the fat distribution is more natural, with fat on the characters’ sides and chest as well as the belly. if you want to get better at drawing fat you should practice adding fat to those areas, as well as the arms, face and neck. another thing that makes the first one look strange is how “hard” the fat looks. there’s a really visible border between the “skinny” part of the body and the “fat” part. fat doesn’t work the same way as muscle. fat is soft and doesn’t have any strenght - meaning that unless you physically lift it up its going to hang and sag. a lot of people are afraid of drawing fat that looks fat - as in fat that bulges, sags and gathers in rolls. that is a shame, because you can’t really skip that stuff if you want to draw natural looking fat.

like you see in the drawing above, adding rolls and visible sagging makes the fat look, well, fatter. all I can say is; don’t be afraid of making your fat look like real fat!

obsessed with how this bird is called the purple indigobird…how did he meet the qualifications

Range: Costa Rica, Panama, & Colombia.

that face…..so smoochable….so loving…………

Do you have a favorite threat display pose from a bug? I know its bad if the animal is stressed but also so many mantis ones are just so pretty and silly (up go the arms!), it makes me wonder what other bugs have got goin on

I do love mantid threat displays! My favorite species (Idolomantis diabolica) has a beautiful threat display:

Ahhh I’m scared! Photo by also_sprach_susscrofa

But there are a lot that are super fun, especially the ones with false eyes on the wings. The katydid Pterochroza ocellata comes to mind:

Neat :) Photo by paulcools

Honorable mention to the ilia underwing moth caterpillar who, when threatened, flips onto its back to reveal a startlingly purple/pink belly!

Very “don’t eat me.” Photo by hannahwojo

[Image ID: a series of tweets from Draconian Crackdown @fencuary that read:

Tweet 1: every character design course in the world should force you to draw twenty people in the same mundane profession like bus drivers or auto mechanics or nail techs before you get to draw an elf

Tweet 2: imagine how cool elves could look if they looked a fraction as interesting as Steve who bags your groceries. have you looked at pictures of your aunts and uncles lately? e-sports competitors from a country you’ve never been to? so many awesome faces to look at in the world

Tweet 3: just saying this from the perspective of a guy who could have been saved a lot of frustration from practicing this earlier on as a young artist rather than stumbling through it now, but then again I think I’m learning to embrace the Real so much more as an adult

Tweet 4: since some are taking this as a design prompt (yay), for this to work you have to show the 10 - 20 “characters” to a non-artist in your life and they have to be like, “yep, i could’ve seen any of these people today” and imagine each of them living their own rich/unfulfilled lives

/End ID]

i love feral baby zoomies so much