The Grind & Bind Art Alchemist's Guild
Good day and welcome to The Grind and Bind Art Alchemist's Guild.
An artist's community for the kind of people who don't just paint, they scavenge pigment from rotten leftovers. It's for potters who dig their clay from riverbeds, for weavers who spin their own wool (and probably know the name of the sheep,) and it's for digital artists who hack away at their creative endeavors.
All flavors are welcome to:
- Show off finished pieces
- Share your hand made or foraged materials
- Ask for advice on anything art
- Share articles and how-tos
- Post art memes
- Participate in weekly discussions and monthly challenges
How it goes:
Be kind
Do onto others with kindness, curiosity and civility.
Please include images
Remember to attribute other's work, tag NSFW and Content Warnings if necessary, and describe with alt text for our differently sighted pals.
No AI*
This isn't a community for AI *unless you've built it yourself and trained it on your own work.
Tags are Optional
[Advice Wanted] — "How do you...?" and "Help, something exploded."
[Article] — Selt explanatory. Please include a webarchive link if a site asks for personal details or has a paywall.
[Discussion] — In the huddle of stained alchemists, debates and compliments are equally encouraged.
[Challenge] — Try something new or show off your niche skills. (Mods only)
On Self-Promotion
We all need to put food in the ferret bowl, but let's not talk money here. If someone asks to buy something, please take it to DMs.
!artmarket@lemmy.world and !artshare@lemmy.world are geared toward self promotion if you want to cross-post.
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This is a dark place.
Most art will leave you feeling inspired, maybe even joyful — if not a little thoughtful. Not this art.
This is a place of paint drinking gremlins with caustic burns on our hands and ink stains on our feet. A dark, damp basement smelling of bleach and burning and bioplastics, of empty wallets and ephemeral passions, of education, of science.
Most art makes people better, but this place can only make you worse, poorer, stained, and consumed by the craft.
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Icon drawn by Wren
Banner image taken by Cottonbro on Pexels
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This is a new community, the structure and rules may change without notice. All things are ephemeral. Shoot Wren a DM if you have any ideas or want to help out.
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I've had my ravelry account for 15ish years, but fell off using it after about 2015. Here's a human-generated summary:
The content is a dream; the UI/UX is a straight up nightmare. 😅 Once you get used to it, it's a fantastic resource for fiber artists with a few main components to it: big libraries of information, the ability to track your various projects, and community discussion.
There's a pattern search with tons of filters to help you find your next project, and every designer who wants to get their name out there lists on ravelry. Photos from both the designers and users who have uploaded their project details give you an idea of what the project will look like. Tons of patterns are available for free, but there are loads more for sale as PDFs. There's also information on the different yarns out there (including users who may be looking to sell a particular brand/line/color/lot #) and yarn stores/sellers, both small/local and big box. The local yarn shop search is nice if you're in a far off place and want to bring home souvenir fiber or if you're trying to get an idea of what the fiber community is like in a new place.
The notebook/projects function is really powerful. It lets you keep track of everything about your project: your progress, what size tools you're using, the info off your yarn tags, pattern name/designer/link/images, and any notes you want to add. I treat my projects section like a lab notebook, making notes of any challenges I encounter with the yarn or the pattern, what resources and fixes I used, any changes I made and what the results were, you name it. If someone sees a picture of something I made, I want them to be able to see what I did to get there in the project page.
The community aspect is the big driver, though. Forums for basically every interest under the sun. Some designers have their own forums, which makes finding or getting human help with their patterns easier.
It's really, really easy to fall into a ravelry rabbit hole, same way it's easy to lose hours trawling Wikipedia when you get your hooks into something interesting.
Here's a look behind the velvet curtain (lol some screencaps from my account) for anybody interested:
Amazing, thank you. I should have included some screenshots! I mainly use it for patterns, and I'm novice at best, so I didn't even know about searching for local fibres. Definitely searching that now.