Since the dawn of the soysphere, '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 what images they trace and styling a 'jak beyond basic qualities. Most new gems are born out of mountains of brim by sheer chance. After 4 years, I've deicded to take a critical look at 'jakking. I hope this information to be useful to nuteens and oldGODs alike.
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THE TRINITY OF 'JAK:
I believe what makes a good soyjak can be boiled down to 3 main properties: Essence, necessity, and versatility.
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Essence:
Most oldGODs have decent understanding of the essence of soy, so this is mostly for newGODs. 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. 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 soyak, but you should never go beyond one or 2 pixels of variation. Glasses should generally be made with the standard brush size with multiple passes for shaping. Brows depend on the style but should almost never be made with a thicker brush. Use a single standard thickness line or 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) or GIMP if you are a tech autist. You do not want line smoothing or any other raisin.
5) Be angular. 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.
6) Wrinkles. Finding the right balance is one of the most difficult parts. 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.
7) Use 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 and front facing chud as example.
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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, it became a gem. Feral is so influential as 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.
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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 notariety. 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 balance that is hard to achieve but well worth it.
>muh conclusion
bullraisin invented by pseudointellectual faggots because tl;dr
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