A tutorial on meatspace I made for my patrons last year! Making things exist in the same space believably is a difficult process, but hopefully this will help drawing softbodied subjects interacting together a little easier!
When I asked Ms. Dyer if she could tell me which industry served as Glitterex’s biggest market, her answer was instant: “No, I absolutely know that I can’t.”
I was taken aback. “But you know what it is?”
“Oh, God, yes,” she said, and laughed. “And you would never guess it. Let’s just leave it at that.” I asked if she could tell me why she couldn’t tell me. “Because they don’t want anyone to know that it’s glitter.”
“If I looked at it, I wouldn’t know it was glitter?”
“No, not really.”
“Would I be able to see the glitter?”
“Oh, you’d be able to see something. But it’s — yeah, I can’t.”
I asked if she would tell me off the record. She would not. I asked if she would tell me off the record after this piece was published. She would not. I told her I couldn’t die without knowing. She guided me to the automotive grade pigments.
He also did not want me to visit his glitter factory. The jovial Mr.
Shetty told me over the phone that people have no idea of the scientific
knowledge required to produce glitter, that Glitterex’s glitter-making
technology is some of the most advanced in the world, that people don’t
believe how complicated it is, that he would not allow me to see glitter
being made, that he would not allow me to hear glitter being made, that
I could not even be in the same wing of the building as the room in
which glitter was being made under any circumstance, that even
Glitterex’s clients are not permitted to see their glitter being made,
that he would not reveal the identities of Glitterex’s clients (which
include some of the largest multinational corporations in the world;
eventually, one did consent to be named: thank you, Revlon, Inc.), and
that, fine, I was welcome to come down to Glitterex headquarters to
learn more about what I could not learn about in person.
oo that reminds me…..ominous plant mystery #45133415: so u kno those lepidodendrons i was talking about in the last post? giant 100 foot tall prehistoric megaflora that went extinct when the swamps dried up as the continents split? apparently it’s actually common to not only find fossils of the trunks of these plants, but also to find fossilized spores (these plants had spores in a hard outer shell, but plants hadn’t evolved seeds yet). because these were somewhat protected they fossilized pretty well.
i was talking about them with my uni’s paleobotany dude (a retired professor) a couple months ago and he was like “you know whats weird about lepidodendron spore fossils? we find them all the time and we never find any embryos.”
apparently, when paleobotanists dig these spores up and cut them open, they can’t actually see any fossilized embryos of these giant Units despite the outside being perfectly preserved. the common explanation for this is ‘well, maybe fossilization was favorable of protecting the outer coat but not protecting the actual plant inside’, but he’s skeptical of this. “you would think,” he said, “that someone would find something. we’ve found them in all kinds of environments. you would think that of all of them being dug up, someone would find at least one that survived fossilization.”
so yeah theres an entire type of massive prehistoric plant that was extremely common 400 million years ago, thats literally responsible for coal, that we’ve found thousands of fossils of and continue to find all the time…..and the embryos are missing.
A tip for blending when painting digitally: use a transition color! I quickly made this when my brother asked for art advice while I was working on a painting for my best friend. (I was watching a lot of makeup videos to pick out her gifts).
