Memento Mori

libertybill

Putting you on the spot. Roast the original M16.

The M16, and I mean the original M16 is one of the most important rifles ever made. Now, I know what you’re thinking “thats the most loaded thing you’ve ever said” and I know, because there’s 50 contenders for this spot. The M1 Garand, the AK47, the STG44, the fucking Snider-Enfield, whatever. But here’s why I say that.

The original M16 came out in 1963. It came out in an age of either wood and iron battle rifles and assault rifles, and it had an aluminum receiver and lower, a composite stock and a light weight cartridge that was relatively soft to shoot and killed with the same efficiency of the bigger 7.62x39 and 7.62x51 rifles. The AK might’ve started the assault rifle but the M16 would perfect it.

ArmaLite was a small engineering firm based in Hollywood California by George Sullivan with financial backing by Fairchild Aircraft, mostly made to experiment with small arms designs. George Sullivan would run into Eugene Stoner at a local range when he was testing the AR-5 survival rifle, and was hired fairly soon afterwards beginning a long bevvy of prototypes from ArmaLite. One was the AR-10, a lightweight battle rifle that, while novel, never really gained fame mostly because it blew up in testing with the US. At first, this seems like the end.

Until Vietnam starts to flare up. US Army reports of the M14 versus the AK-47 show that the M14′s heavy recoil was making the full auto feature useless and the bigger magazines meant that soldiers were carrying less ammo then their adversaries. General William Wyman had requested a new intermediate cartridge be developed in 1957, which became 5.56x45 NATO. ArmaLite simply looked at their AR-10 and scaled it down with the help of Jim Sullivan and boom, the legend was adopted originally in 1961 before wholesale use in 1963 and is still going across the globe.

For handling, the M16 is very balanced, everything has been placed where it makes sense. The mag release is right in front of your finger for easy tactical mag drops, the bolt release is right in line with your thumb or for easy “GRUG SMASH BUTTON” slaps. The sights are simple and easy to read, the stock is a good length so even the smallest of manlets can feel comfortable shouldering it. It’s the pariah of the modern assault rifle and is still useful even today, no matter how many fudds and wannabe vets call it a “jam-o-matic” over the XM16′s foibles. It’s good, it’s effective and it’s why the AR-15 is still around half a century later.

bigwordsandsharpedges

>“roast the m16”

>rifle is fine

Source: gunsandgunsaccessories

celtic-tactical

mikestillneedsadrink

I need a Bond and Kincade spin-off.

Seriously, Kincade needed more screentime and the third act was peak aesthetic.

Source: mikestillneedsadrink

celtic-tactical

Source: emperorozark

secretsneverhurtsomeone

Source: silvamonet

neptunes-salty-butthole

bonkalore

Trying to draw buildings

cynellis

yo here’s a useful tip from your fellow art ho cynellis… use google sketchup to create a model of the room/building/town you’re trying to draw… then take a screenshot & use it as a reference! It’s simple & fun!

smachajewski

Sketchup is incredibly helpful. I can’t recommend it enough.

There’s a 3D model warehouse where you can download all kinds of stuff so you don’t have to build everything from scratch.

the-quick-one

reblog to save a life

bludragongal

This is an incomplete tutorial, and it drives me crazy every time I see it come around.

We live in a pretty great digital age and we have access to a ton of amazing tools that artists in past generations couldn’t even dream of, but a lot of people look at a cool trick and only learn half of the process of using it.

Here’s the missing part of this tutorial:

How do you populate your backgrounds?

Well, here’s the answer:

If the focus is the environment, you must show a person in relation to that environment.

The examples above are great because they show how to use the software itself, but each one just kind of “plops” the character in front of their finished product with no regard of the person’s relation to their environment.

How do you fix this?

Well, here’s the simplest solution:

This is a popular trick used by professional storyboard and comic artists alike when they’re quickly planning compositions. It’s simple and it requires you to do some planning before you sit down to crank out that polished, final version of your work, but it will be the difference between a background and an environment.

From Blacksad(artist: Juanjo Guarnido)

From Hellboy (Mike Mignola)

Even if your draftsmanship isn’t that great (like mine), people can be more immersed in the story you tell if you just make it feel like there is a world that exists completely separate from the one in which they currently reside – not just making a backdrop the characters stand in front of.

Your creations live in a unique world, and it is as much a character as any other member of the cast. Make it as believable as they are.

shatterstag

Great comments and tutorials!

I’m a 3d artist and have been exploring the possibilities of using 3d as reference for 2d poses. I want to add a couple of tips and things!

Sketchup is very useful for environment references, and I assume it’s reasonably easy to learn. If you’re interested in going above and beyond, I highly recommend learning a proper 3d modeling program to help with art, especially because you can very easily populate a scene or location with characters!

Using 3ds Max I can pretty quickly construct an environment for reference. But going beyond that, I can also pose a pretty simple ‘CAT’ armature (known in 3d as a rig) straight into the scene, which can be totally customized, from various limbs, tails, wings, whatever, to proportions, and also can be modeled onto and expanded upon (for an example, you could 3d sculpt a head reference for your character and then attach it to the CAT rig, so you have a reference for complex face angles!)

The armature can also be posed incredibly easily. I know programs exist for stuff like this - Manga Studio, Design Doll - but posing characters in these programs is always an exercise in frustration and very fiddly imo. A simple 3d rig is impossibly easy to pose.

By creating an environment and dropping my character rig into it, I have an excellent point of reference when it comes to drawing the scene!

Not only that, but I can also view the scene from whatever angle I could ever want or need, including the character and their pose/position relative to the environment.

We can even quickly and easily expand this scene to include more characters!

Proper 3d modeling software is immensely powerful, and if you wanted to, you could model a complex environment that occurs regularly in your comic or illustration work (say, a castle interior, or an outdoor forest environment) and populate the scene with as many perspective-grounded characters as you need!