/soy/ - Soyjaks

Floweyjak works

>>14001749 (OP)
>why some soyjak bang and be gems

'teens have generally taken a hit-or-miss approach to 'jakking. They have a good understanding of what makes a soyjak a soyjak, but I feel they are pretty directionless in the images they trace and styling beyond the basics. Most new gems are born out of mountains of brim by sheer chance. After a few years on the site, I've decided to take a critical look at 'jakking. I hope this information to be useful to nuteens and oldGODs alike.
THE TRINITY OF 'JAKKING:
I believe what makes a good soyjak can be boiled down to 3 main properties: Essence, necessity, and versatility.
Essence:
OldGODs have decent grasp on the essence of soy, but here's a refresher and some less well known stuff. A 'jak should have the following qualities in this order of importance, but even gems can make minor deviations:
1) No antialiasing. Use a 100% hardness brush, no interpolation when scaling, and export as a png. An antialiased 'jak cannot be easily edited and is doomed to be coal. 2) Stubble and glasses, no ears. Head hair should be used extremely sparingly, if not exclusively for edits. 'plier is an example of where it can work, but avoid it.
3) Resolution and line thickness that is close in proportion to soyak. Despite what retards will tell you, a slight change in line thickness is ok for certain things, as seen in the original soyak, but you should never go beyond one or 2 pixels of variation. Glasses should generally be made with the brush size of the trace outline with multiple passes for thickening and shaping. Brows depend on the style but should almost never be made with a thicker brush. Use a single standard thickness line or add shaping as with feral-like brows. Stubble can be a slightly lower thickness if you want a 'plier-like look. Experiment.
4) 'Jaks are not made by drawfags by design. Use a mouse and a drawing program like MSPaint (the original), Paint.NET, or GIMP if you are a tech autist. You do not want line smoothing or other raisin that comes with modern programs. Be coarse. Don't make outlines, eyes, noses, glasses, etc be overly smooth and rounded. 'Jaks are not supposed to be incredibly refined. They resemble an impromptu sketch.
5) Wrinkles. Finding the right balance is one of the most difficult steps. 2 forehead and mouth wrinkles are a good place to start. They don't necessarily need to follow the trace, just make them important. They should complement the emotion you are trying to convey and only that. Things like eye wrinkles for the sake of them will never look right.
6) This is not a checklist, and you WILL study other gems as reference. Unspoken rules an nuances could be talked about all day, but you will learn if you just become familiar with 'jaks. Don't be afraid to occasionally steal small parts like eyes and mouths if you cannot capture the essence of soy, take chudjak as example.
Necessity:
This a major quality that I see in every gem, and I don't know why any 'teen has ever brought it up. A gem is born out a necessity to represent an emotion or variety of numale. Smugjak has many coally qualities as a 'jak, but because it represented an underutilized emotion so well, xe became a gem. Feral is so influential partially because xe is the ultimate representation of rage. Soyboys display a wide range of irrational emotions and unappealing qualities. Tapping into one specifically creates a 'jak better suited to an opponent. P.S. I thought it went without saying, but jaks must be modeled after effeminate and pathetic males. Anything masculine is going to be self insert coal. I think Cobson has irony poisoned a lot of newGODs into thinking otherwise.
Versatility:
An unedited 'jak needs to be versatile. This means leaving hyperspecific 'jaks to edits. Doingsomethinspecificjak will always be coal as it will never have widespread use or notoriety. Particular soy actions usually aren't suited to be baked into the 'jak unless they incredibly common. Finding the right balance between representation and avoiding nicheness is a tough but necessary balance.
>muh conclusion tl;dr bullraisin invented by pseudointellectual faggots

No they’re all coal because there’s a million soyjaks that portray the same few emotions. Why use a shitty nuvariant traced of an angry man when you can use feraljak that already exists?