WARNING INBOUND WALL OF TEXT SORRRrryyyyyyy

Um. Frankly? Stubbornness. I'm really bad about drawing daily as well though. Do you have a job where you idle a lot? When I worked in a call center, I just brought a sketchbook and pens with me and it gave me something to do with my hands. Really depends on your personality a lot too. If you're a structured person, maybe blocking out a set amount of time where you say, "I will draw for 45 minutes / hour." Also setting yourself mini-goals can help as well. Don't think of getting better at art as something you have to do all at once.

For me, I have sketchbooks that are kind of literally just full of studies. Like, okay, I'm going to draw 500 hands. (It starts out as a good idea but generally ends up being around 300 hands haha. 500 hands is pretty ridiculous. Start with like 50 or even 25.) This will take me a long time and it won't be the only thing I'll draw, but I'll complete 500 hands by x date. Also small incentives like, if I finish 500 hands by x date, then I will do y thing that I have wanted.

My brain doesn't work like this, though. I have severe ADHD and absolutely no internal reward system or self-control. For me I draw because if I don't I turn into a miserable flaming wreck of a human being. Ritalin has been helping with this but I have only been taking it for about a week. I'll let you know if it helps with consistency as time goes on.

There is no magic. Find something you love to draw - something you can't help but not draw. Maybe characters from your novel, maybe Sailor Moon, maybe Avatar the Last Airbender, or, heck, even fursonas or something. Find a thing you love to draw. Now draw that thing. Note where the weaknesses of your art are, learn to identify them or ask someone who can help you to do so. Then, learn a compartmentalized thing to work on, be it hands, feet, eyes, facial structure, anything.

I will also recommend an AWESOME subreddit called /r/sketchdaily - these guys do a topic a day, and you do a sketch a day on that theme. It spares you from going "ohgodwhatdoIdraw?" There are a tonne of resources and stuff on that page too.

Okay, so, here's some encouraging news. You're not in a bad starting place whatsoever. Like, really. This is actually pretty cool. You're showing that you've got some of the fundamentals of the body down, you're showing weight and mass through some basic shading and your line weight. Your lines are pretty careful and intentional and you've tried to convey emotion and even tension in the figure through her pose and her facial expression. Cool stuff. These are good details. If you like, I can redline it (draw lines over it to show you where things could be adjusted) - but you've actually got a pretty solid grasp on anatomy. I really like that the character has an unusual body shape and I love her hair.

To me, it basically it looks like you started maybe from anime or western cartoons and then tried to merge it into a more realistic style. Here's Sycra talking about styles! (All of his videos are super super super awesome. Go absorb them, they helped me out a lot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMUYG1hkY5c

I used to be really vehemently against anime for people starting out because it teaches a lot of bad habits, but tbh, draw what makes you happy, but don't ONLY draw anime or western comics. Young artists start out by drawing "symbols" of things. Like on your character's eyes here. You know sorta what the shape of an eye is, where it kinda goes on the face, but that's not what an eye looks like, and you know that and I know that. That is a "symbol" for an eye. Symbol drawing is super common and I do it too! So, to get away from that...? REFERENCE EVERYTHING If you wanna draw people, you have to know how they're put together and how everything depends on itself in terms of muscles and skeletal structure. My friend Sakky is a stock artist and she does great work for pose references: http://senshistock.deviantart.com/

Looks like you're working in gimp or SAI? (Photoshop's line tapering is butt so, if you're using Photoshop good goddamn nice.) So, I'm sorry, but I have to tear you away from the computer. What I usually tell people who are learning / starting out, is to put down the tablet and go pick up a sketchbook. Get the crappiest thing you can get - some kind of grade school spiral bound newsprint level 50lb paper thing. Seriously. The first thing is letting your brain relax about "not wasting media" because a cheap 2 dollar sketchbook isn't anything special. Get some Prismacolour Ebony drawing pencils and a decent eraser. Then, get yourself a Sharpie pen - one of the ones that doesn't bleed. These will be your tools from now on. These will be your tools for a long while before you get back to the tablet.

Canson makes good quality paper that won't frustrate you and 9x12 is a good starting space. Don't go any smaller for awhile. http://www.cheapjoes.com/canson-classic-cream-drawing-pad.html Noteably, Cheap Joes is an awesome site for budget art supplies, their student / house brand stuff is pretty class as well.

(Also I recommend Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain as a great starting place for doing / learning art. It's written in a very straightforward fashion that shows you not only how to draw, but how to think and see as an artist as well. (Here's a PDF copy:([https://neoalchemist.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/edwards-the-new-drawing-on-the-right-side-of-the-brain-viny.pdf] I learned to draw from this book and I've recommended it to just about everyone who I've met who wanted to learn to draw. It basically guides you through the fundamentals and then lets you fly free a bit on some other things.

SO YEAH. SORRY ABOUT THAT. Of course if anything needs clarifying, feel free to let me know. Thanks for sticking with me through all of that. I'll be streaming on my twitch stream later today for fun to get back into some sketching habits, so if you'd like, come by and say hello!

This is an interesting idea, especially for those worldbuilders like myself who have worlds heavily grounded in realism.

I think it’s safe to say that the more “realistic” you make an aspect of your world (“realistic” here meaning closely reflecting how the concept existed in the real world), the more believable it will appear to your readers. However, the more in-depth you create it, the more it will come to resemble your influences, to the point where the two concepts are virtual copies of the other. It’s simpler to copy intricate details than recreate them. This is good in a world based in realism. Details will be ordered and logical, allowing you to accurately model real world conditions. If you accurately want your Roman-inspired army to remain supplied in the field, it’s best to copy Roman military logistics.

Of course, if you want to have every detail of your setting exactly as it appears(ed) in reality (which is technically impossible), you wouldn’t be setting it in a constructed setting. It is then equally important to determine why you are creating a fictional setting in the first place. What makes you want to create a fictional locale? Do you like not being bound by history, and the freedom to create events as you wish? Do you like creating new sciences, technologies, or ideas? Use why you wish to create a fictional world to make your setting unique, not, in your words, a “rip-off.” In other words, copy intricate details from reality (such as the process and reasons for inflation in a bullion-based currency system), but allow yourself to be influenced by multiple influences or periods when creating macro-level concepts (like religions). It is important though to construct these ideas in a manner that the society at large could logically exist. The whole must be greater than the sum of its parts.

This is only one perspective. It is perfectly fine to realistically model all major elements of a society off it’s historical or contemporary counterpart. Guy Gavriel Kay has written a number of successful novels set in historically inspired fantasy settings, like Byzantium in [The Sarantine Mosaic] (http://www.amazon.com/Sailing-Sarantium-Book-Sarantine-Mosaic/dp/045146351X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1405480068&sr=8-1&keywords=sarantine+mosaic) or Muslim Spain in [The Lions of al-Rassan] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Lions-al-Rassan-Guy-Gavriel/dp/0060733497/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1405480129&sr=8-5&keywords=guy+gavriel+kay). The settings of both very closely mirror their historical counterpart, yet enough aesthetic aspects are changed to create a feeling of difference, of uniqueness. If a certain period or society truly inspires you, there is nothing inherently wrong with your setting being strongly influenced by it. After all, what constitutes a “unique rendition” of a topic from a “rip-off” is ultimately a matter of personal taste.

This is a subject I'm extremely interested in. I've actually been thinking about starting a subreddit with a focus on creating realistic, earth-like ecosystems—inventing individual animals and plants and their evolutionary histories, but maybe also trying to collect generalized rules to help with this aspect of worldbuilding.

I've been reading a book about Australian ecology, called The Future Eaters, and there seem to be some interesting patterns that allow for different kinds of animals to exist. Some things I've gleaned from the first few chapters:

• Highly productive environments (lots of water, lots of sunlight, and lots of soil nutrients—the latter of which tends to happen on younger landmasses, or areas where there has been a lot of volcanic activity) mean that there are more individual plants in a given area, and those plants don't have strong defenses against herbivory, since they can just grow new leaves as needed. These environments tend to allow for large herbivore and carnivore populations. Note that it typically takes thousands of herbivores to support 100 or so carnivores, depending on sizes and metabolisms of animals involves. Most animals you encounter in any given place won't be carnivores.
  
  
• When productivity is lower (usually due to too little water and/or periods with too little light—such as what you get into the arctic and antarctic circles), things change. Plants and animals become much more specialized, which means you may have greater biodiversity, but smaller and more thinly spread populations.
  
  
• When an ecosystem has enough water and light but few nutrients (such as in many rainforests), it can still be pretty productive by having a rapid rate of decay. Basically, these ecosystems recycle their nutrients very quickly.
  
  
• If there's not much water, though, nutrient recycling can't happen as quickly. This makes for very low-productivity environments, where plants are very tough and herbivore-resistant. In these ecosystems, both herbivores and carnivores are a lot more rare.
  
  
• In low-productivity environments, there several tactics animal species employ to keep their metabolisms low. They tend to be smaller. They tend not to be very intelligent. They tend to live a long time and reproduce very slowly (think pandas); or, alternatively, they die shortly after reproducing so that their babies have less competition. They tend to be in low-metabolism clades (e.g., marsupials rather than placental mammals, or reptiles rather than birds, or large insects rather than small rodents).
  
  
• Some animals get around metabolism constraints by migrating. You can get some pretty impressive migrations this way, like wildebeests or right whales.
  
  
• When nutrients are low, carnivorous plants proliferate. They kill for nutrients. Plants that parasitize other plants are pretty common, too.
  
  
• When plants are few and far apart, such as in deserts, they compete for pollinators. These plants tend to have particularly large and bright flowers, they produce a lot of nectar, and their flowering times are staggered throughout the year. This allows for some pretty high-metabolism pollinators, like possums or bats.
  
  
• When determining how productive an environment will be, you have to look not only at its average conditions, but also its most extreme conditions. For example, a place that has a wet season and a dry season won't have both dry-biome plants and wet-biome plants. Instead, it will have plants that must be adapted to both extremes (which tends to be lots of grasses, but not so many trees; trees need more consistent watering). This limits productivity, but it increases specialization—which promotes biodiversity.
  
  
• You also have to look at an environment's stability over long periods of time. If an ecosystem gets wildfires every few years, that's going to put constraints on what can live there. And even if an environment has major changes over really long time periods—e.g., it gets covered in a glacier whenever there's an ice age—that's going to cause mass extinctions every now and then. It takes a long time for an ecosystem to recover from mass extinction.
  
  
• Generally speaking, biodiversity is higher the longer a landscape goes without any major changes. If ice ages—or the periods between them—causes an area to get covered by ocean, it's going to have a lower diversity than a nearby area that doesn't get covered (e.g., Florida is much less diverse than Georgia). The same goes for places that get glaciers (e.g., the Northeastern US is much less diverse than the Southeastern US), or places that turn into deserts.
  
  
• Climate, above all else, determines what an ecosystem is like. Ice ages, ocean currents, rain shadows, El Niño, Hadley cells, and so on are highly worthy of study.
  
  
• Animals can be roughly categorized into guilds. A guild is like a niche or role that a group of species fills. Wolves, hyenas, and thylacines are in the same guild, even though they're not related to each other and don't (or didn't) live near each other. The same guild may occur in different ecosystem spatially, but it will also exist in different ecosystems temporally. For example, ichthyosaurs seem to be the Mesozoic equivalent of dolphins.
  
  
• In a given ecosystem, every niche should be filled by some kind of animal, but generally multiple animals won't fill the same niche (they compete with each other until one goes extinct—which is partly why invasive species are so harmful). Occasionally, new niches may be opened up; for example, when plants colonized land or when birds developed flight. When that happens, you get a sudden burst in evolution. The Cambrian explosion is a good example.
  
  
• All else being equal, amphibians can usually survive in cold environments better than reptiles can. We have a lot of reptiles today, but amphibians have filled those same roles. In a glacial or high-latitude environment, we should expect to see more amphibians filling those niches that reptiles have left vacant.
  
  
• Flying animals (birds and bats especially) are the first to colonize new islands and landmasses, and they tend to be the predominant lifeforms on isolated islands. The first animals to colonize a new landscape have a very good crack at filling all the niches before other animals can. New Zealand is a great example of this, with its very bizarre and diverse array of flightless birds.
  
  
• Marine ecosystems are very poorly understood. It sees some really important factors are nutrient levels, oxygen levels, water temperature, and water clarity.
  
  
• You get a lot of whales and large fish feeding wherever there are ocean upwellings. These apparently happen where wind blows surface water out of the way, drawing deep water (which tends to be cold) up to the surface. Cold water holds more oxygen, plus water from the deep ocean carries nutrients with it. This causes phytoplankton blooms in these areas, which means lots of animals get something to eat.
  
  
• In warm waters, phytoplankton can't grow as well. These leads to very clear waters, such as you often see in the tropics. Where the water is clear and sufficiently shallow, coral reefs can grow. Coral reefs, like many rainforests, have very few nutrients—but they make up for it by having very fast nutrient cycling. (Note, this is why overfishing around coral reefs is so damaging. It robs these ecosystems of precious nutrients that would otherwise get cycled back in.)
  
  
• When nutrients get added to these warm waters—such as from river runoff—you get algae blooms. Algae blooms kill coral, because coral needs very clear water in order to get enough sunlight. Areas around river mouths don't get coral so much, but they get a lot of other animals due to the presence of phytoplankton.

Solaria

If you can imagine it, it's a society.

Genre: Far-future solar-system-centric science fiction.

Summary: It's 7,000 A.D. Thousands of years ago humanity was nearly wiped out by its own inventions, the intelligent machines. Fortunately, the machines that were designed to like people won the ensuing wars and helped to rebuild human civilization. Those machines have since developed millions of times faster than human beings, and they inhabit vast civilizations that are all but invisible to the human realm, but that surround, permeate, and defend humanity's descendants.

The inhabitants of the human wildlife refuge are nevertheless vastly more advanced than our own civilization, having long since mastered robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and genetic engineering to such a degree that trillions of our descendants and their creations have colonized every accessible surface on all the celestial bodies of the solar system. Those trillions of intelligent beings form millions of societies made up of humans, talking animals, intelligent, self-aware robots, pure-software intelligences, and hybrids of every combination you can imagine.

People in the human realm are practically immortal. Aging is optional and people normally make safety archives at regular intervals that can be restored if accidents kill their originals. Psychological factors lead most people to choose to leave the human realm after a few centuries, either becoming pure-software entities or, in some cases, actually choosing to die for personal or philosophical reasons.

There are no races as we understand the term--or, rather, physical appearance is as easily controlled as fashions in clothing, so that there are nearly as many 'races' as there are people. Genders are also fluid and optional. Even species has lost much of its meaning, because intelligent persons can choose to be re-embodied as almost anything they can imagine, and because ancestral humans long ago found ways to transform pets, livestock, wild animals, and even plants into thinking, speaking persons.

If you can imagine transforming a person into something, or transforming something into a person, then there is probably an orbital city or an asteroid somewhere populated with those things.

Themes: Identity; relations among dissimilar intelligences; what makes us human and humane; what we can change or give up and still be people; the vastness of the solar system; what to do with immortality.

Further Reading:

• The Wolf Itself
  
• The Return of the Angel
  
• The Golden Way
  
  
  

  Ymra
  

  
  When the Fair Folk are away, the mortals will play
  
  Genre: Wry noir in a high fantasy world that is flat and perhaps infinite.
  
  Summary: About a thousand years ago the most powerful court of Faery in the world got too big for its britches and trespassed on the last remaining artifact left in the world by the gods that created it. When they did, they awoke the dragons that had, tens of thousands of years before, retired into the deep places of the world and pulled the landscape over themselves like blankets to form mountain ranges. The dragons rained down mountains on the cities of the Faery court, driving those cities into the sea and breaking Faery power forever.
  
  Into that power vacuum the mortal races have swarmed for a thousand years, spreading far and wide across seas once dominated by the power of the faeries. They've carried their distinctive cultures to new places, built new cities and kingdoms, traded in new ideas and imagined new possibilities.
  
  But not all the courts of faery were shattered; just the most powerful one. The other courts remain, and so do other magical powers, including fragments of broken gods, monsters from ancient days, and the wretched, fallen, and terrifying remnants of the destroyed faery court. Moreover, dragons still sleep in the earth, and when a dragon dreams, cities may fall and populations tremble.
  
  Themes: Exploration and discovery; family, friendship and loyalty; human folly; how to be honorable in a world that isn't.
  
  

  The Crossroads
  

  
  If you don't like this world another will be along in a picosecond.
  
  Genre: Satirical urban science fantasy
  
  Summary: The good news is that there really are parallel universes--billions of them, at the very least--and that there are ways to cross into them. The bad news is that science turns out not to exist--at least not the way we thought it did.
  
  Science is based on the assumption that reality obeys a set of reliable fundamental rational laws of nature. It turns out that's not true. Oops.
  
  It turns out that reality is fundamentally chaotic, but that will, emotion, and imagination can influence how it behaves. We've gradually convinced ourselves that science describes a universe of natural laws by constructing such a vivid cultural narrative about science that we've persuaded the universe to behave that way--at least near our civilization.
  
  The trouble is that our universe is just one of billions or trillions. Not all of our neighbors have fully committed to the rationalist narrative. Some of them are still busy with more chaotic alternatives, or they've invented their own more magical narratives.
  
  What's more, there are ways to poke holes in the walls between worlds. Maybe you don't want to do that. You never know what might come through.
  
  Also, the news that magic can actually be made to work isn't necessarily good news. If you can teach the universe to behave rationally, it turns out you can also teach it to behave irrationally, given some creativity and a little determination.
  
  So of course there are various organizations devoted to the project of suppressing magic, in order to keep the universe safe for reality. Well, and, truth be told, a lot of them really just want to keep people from finding out how to do magic. To some extent that's because your typical powerful wizard is more comfortable if there aren't too many competing wizards around. But, perhaps more importantly, too many powerful wizards have a way of unraveling reality, and who needs that?
  
  If you ever wondered why wizards and superheroes only seem to show up in genre fiction, not in reality, well now you know. It's because a bunch of killjoy wizards and shadowy government agencies are keeping a lid on the fun for your own good. And that's why troublemakers like the Merry Pranksters and the Twilight League need to be locked up once and for all.
  
  Themes: Flexible reality; absurdism; conspiracy theories; comic and tragic heroes and villains; satire.
  
  

Hey, I've been on a similar hunt in recent months myself. It isn't easy. But there are three books at least I can recommend you, and from there hopefully you'll find more that might interest you.

The first is a novel, Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James. Its pretty popular, and though I haven't picked it up yet it tends to be mentioned whenever I discuss trying to find more books about African inspired cultures or Africa itself. The Goodreads blurb contains the following;

>In the first novel in Marlon James's Dark Star trilogy, myth, fantasy, and history come together to explore what happens when a mercenary is hired to find a missing child.

>Drawing from African history and mythology and his own rich imagination, Marlon James has written an adventure that's also an ambitious, involving read. Defying categorization and full of unforgettable characters, Black Leopard, Red Wolf explores the fundamentals of truths, the limits of power, the excesses of ambition, and our need to understand them all.

I cut out the actual plot blurb there, so by all means look it up yourself if you're interested.

The second book is between novel and history, in that its a cultural epic along the same vein of the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Secret History of the Mongols. Works written by a culture about that culture's mythical past can tread the line between history and legend, and that's definitely what the Sundiata Keita does. It tells the tale of Sundiata, the legendary founder of the Mali Empire, and how he rose to power and fame. Its a great read, and definitely gives a glimpse into West Africa and how this particular region of it can be the focus for grand tales of heroes and villains, kings and princes and sorcerers.

The last rec is The Royal Kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay: Life in Medieval Africa by by Patricia McKissack, which is a rather short but historically-focused book on the kingdoms of Western Africa. The blurb from the Amazon page reads;

>For more than a thousand years, from A.D. 500 to 1700, the medieval kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay grew rich on the gold, salt, and slave trade that stretched across Africa. Scraping away hundreds of years of ignorance, prejudice, and mythology, award-winnnig authors Patricia and Fredrick McKissack reveal the glory of these forgotten empires while inviting us to share in the inspiring process of historical recovery that is taking place today.

You can pick it up here if you're so inclined, but it could serve as a pretty solid primer on West African culture. Or, at least, a guideline for where to begin, by introducing you to concepts and terms you might not otherwise be familiar with, and helping you to narrow down your search.

Hope this helps!

I always link to the Wikipedia page on world religions in discussions of building religions, because copious example are key to learning.

A quick outline of what I look to answer when I ask the question "What does this religion look like?" goes like this:

VALUES

• What is the culture that this religion primarily operates in? If you take Western Christian beliefs, change the name, and dropped it intro sub-Saharan Africa the resulting traditions look very different.
  
• What are the 1^st level values that are communicated in this religion? These are things like: kindness, respect, honor, obedience, piety, offerings, recognition.
  
• What are the 2^nd level of values? These are practical considerations that affect how people treat each other and cover things like: castes, sexism, sexuality, and business values. These are extremely important in building a community as it will link the tenets of a faith with people's day-to-day lives.
  
• How does this religion view other groups? Does it promote any forms of xenophobia?
  
  DEITY
  
  
• Are the god's real beings or are they symbols only?
  
• Where did the god(s) come from? The book Small Gods by Terry Pratchett is a great stroy about where gods come from and where they go.
  
• What do the gods value? How is this different from what the people value?
  
• On what scale do the gods operate? Local, Regional, Global, Star System, Galaxy, Galaxy Group, Cluster, Super Cluster, Universe...
  
• What is the god's interaction with their believers? Tools, witnesses, sources of power, symbols of their power?
  
• What time-scale do the gods work on? Do they care if they avenge your family 100 years after you asked for vengeance?
  
• What are the long term goals of the gods?
  
  SYMBOLS
  
  
• What are the primary religious symbols?
  
• What do the symbols represent?
  
• How sacred are the symbols in day-to-day life?

There are two cornerstones of culture that are often glossed over a bit too much: food and sex.

Food is so important because it tells us so much-- not just what's available locally or by trade, not just what people believe about nutrition and health, not just how creative or bland they are... but it tells us about their values (some societies forbid certain foods, some foods have religious significance, etc.) Food is integral to ritual, to reciprocity/hosting, to relationships.

Some societies forbid the consumption of pork and shellfish for religious reasons. Some forbid consumption of animals that were not killed in a special manner. Some societies forbid the consumption of horse and dog. The reasons behind these can be variable, but often have roots in the culture's understanding of medicine/health and-- interestingly-- politics. There were societies that were good at dressing food up to look good, but the food was not expected to taste good, and so it was all for show.

Food is not just about nutrition. It's intimately entwined in every facet of society and daily life. Which is why I recommended Good To Eat, because it addresses food from precisely that angle. Another good book to get that angle on would be Savoring the Past which takes it from a European medieval and renaissance perspective.

So you want to get better at worldbuilding? Look at the political and performative role of food in other societies. See what they thought, felt, and believed about food in their lives.

Sex is often glossed over because it's uncomfortable to discuss (and can be difficult to discuss academically) and we often don't represent it in our works. But even if we don't directly represent it, understanding how it works helps us understand the underlying framework of how people interact with each other and what their expectations are.

Sex has so much baggage attached to it: presumptions about morality, value of the person, power dynamics, its role in religion and spirituality, attitudes regarding childrearing, class/economic differences, beliefs about sexuality, and gender roles. It comes loaded with presumptions about who wants it and who should want it. It can be given, it can be traded, it can be bought, it can be sold, it can be mutual, it can be taken. When, where, and how people have sex impacts their behavior toward each other.

There's a lot of correlation between attitudes/beliefs about sex and its role in society, and how that attitude manifests in other aspects of society. For example, in societies where sex is heavily restricted and womens' chastity is guarded by the male ego, you're highly unlikely to see men and women occupying similar professions. In societies where sexual jealously is rare and sexuality/sexual activity is pretty freewheeling, you might see some very interesting communal attitudes toward childrearing (e.g the Montagnais, whose interesting case example is covered in Sex at Dawn.)

Sorry for the long reply, I'm an academic at heart and enjoy discussing this stuff.

Geology/geography is pretty interesting in its own right, and learning about it can help you make your maps more 'realistic'. Granted, that may or may not be what you want, but it's a start. Understanding how rivers form, how glaciers form landforms, and how things like mountain ranges, deserts, islands, and other massive landforms form can really help you make a convincing map that doesn't appear so alien that you have to come up with a whole new set of physics rules to justify it.

I recommend getting an older geology 101 textbook if you're like me and get distracted when you try and read things on the internet. Sure, you can get most of the information online for free, but you can get used, old editions of textbooks for cheap and then you have something you don't need internet acces or even power for. You can get this one for <$20 used, and it's pretty decent. I'm sure there's better/cheaper options out there, but this is what I used in my geology class and it's really interesting.

You don't sound ignorant! There's no magical way to know this stuff.

I use the program Clip Studio Paint. It's a kind of photshop-lite aimed at digital painters and comic artists. It's pretty cheap ($50 I think?) but not free.

If you don't want to spend money, I would recommend Krita! I used it for years, it's a great free option. A lot of people also like Paint Tool SAI.

Art tools (tablets, pens, ect) often come with their own software, but it's pretty shitty (usually pared-down versions of more expensive software). The programs i mentioned are IMO much better options than the stuff that usually comes with wacom products.

If you're interested in starting with digital art, I can recommend this tablet: https://www.amazon.com/Huion-H610-Pro-Graphic-Carrying/dp/B00ZWRSQ4I/ref=sr_1_6?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1511399191&sr=1-6&keywords=drawing+tablet

If you're thinking about getting a new laptop, I would recommend lenovo's 2-in-1s! They work surprisingly well for digital art.

Me too! I love mashups :P

The history I am developing spans from creation to space age for this main world, so I get to experiment with all sorts of fun tech-magic aspects once it hits the higher eras! The 3rd and 4th books, which are in editing, both touch on these subjects. The 3rd deals with the tech for getting around the seal, and the 4th is about the first moon base... with magic!

The first book Branding of a Heretic can be found free at any of these links: Nook, iTunes, Kobo, Payhip, and Inktera, and the second book Naming the Bane is available on Amazon. Just an fyi, the 1st book is entirely fantasy.

Any thoughts, opinions, or reviews would be greatly appreciated!

Honestly I don't think you need to come up with complex religious justifications - just read 1491. There's a lot of knowledge that's been lost or purposefully destroyed, but all across the Americas there were stunningly complex civilizations that largely didn't use metals at all.

It is probable that Indigenous American civilizations had several of the most advanced agricultural systems in the world, politics, philosophy, writing, mathematics, science and astronomy, etc. Architecture and engineering were somewhat different, but still complex and advanced, and their city planning was completely different than Europe's - Tenochtitlan was literally unbelievable to the Europeans who showed up, it was so clean, organized, and beautiful.

Post contact, or if there was no contact, it's very difficult to say what trajectory they would have gone, or if you can have a 'modern' or industrial society that skips metallurgy altogether - I can't really see how that would happen. Then again what do I know.

Yeah. If you did the setting right it could make a really good lesson for kids about the dangers of privatizing everything and how it's insanely anti democracy.

Real cities work through stochasticity and barely controlled chaos. One need only look at the neighborhoods that were cut in half by the interstate highway projects of the '40s and '50s. "The village" in NYC is a great example of a neighborhood that resisted a highway and remained a thriving area to this day.

You might be interested in the work of Jane Jacobs. She would be the ultimate antithesis of the ideas in the link you posted. It would be a good source of ideas on how the players might feel about living in a privatized city.

http://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/067974195X

http://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/067974195X

If you want, the first (and, ah, so far only) book is up for free on Amazon . I also post about worldbuilding on my blog, http://vmjaskiernia.com/

^If ^you ^do ^like ^it, ^I'd ^really ^appreciate ^a ^review, ^please ^and ^thank ^you

You can pull a lot of info from 1491 especially the sections about South America, where the cultures were isolated for millenia before contact with Europeans. I keep going back to this book, would definitely recommend.