The hottest Techniques Substack posts right now

And their main takeaways
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Top Health & Wellness Topics

Black & White Furniture Finishes

The American Peasant • 1836 implied HN points • 30 Oct 24
🪑 Design Techniques
  1. Using wood bleach can make wood really light. It's not the same as the bleach for clothes, and it works well for making furniture look bright.
  2. India ink is great for making wood black. It dries fast and won't fade, making it a sturdy choice for darker finishes.
  3. Finishing with wax can add a nice shine to the wood. It doesn’t change the color, but it gives the surface a smooth and polished look.

How the Little Guy Moved

Animation Obsessive • 19105 implied HN points • 09 Feb 26
🎨 Art & Illustration Techniques
  1. Early game creators borrowed traditional animation tricks like rotoscoping to make tiny, low-resolution characters move in believable, fluid ways even on very limited hardware.
  2. Creators used highly inventive, hands-on workflows — filming live motion, tracing frames, Xeroxing silhouettes and digitizing them — to convert real movement into economical pixel animation.
  3. Good animation decisions, not just better hardware, made the work memorable and durable, so lively motion stayed effective and influential as games moved to newer platforms.

Closing Out 2025

Animation Obsessive • 17222 implied HN points • 19 Dec 25
🎨 Art & Illustration Techniques
  1. Focusing on human-made craft in animation offers a meaningful alternative to generic, AI-driven content and keeps attention on artistic skill.
  2. Highlighting artists who work with materials like oil, sand, paper, wool, or metal pins shows how creative techniques and perseverance matter even when industry and politics make things harder.
  3. Celebrating concrete wins, growing an audience, and sharing work freely during hard times helps sustain the creative community, while planned breaks and continued effort keep the project viable for the future.

Painting with Grains of Sand

Animation Obsessive • 2152 implied HN points • 08 Aug 25
🎨 Art & Illustration Techniques
  1. Caroline Leaf changed animation with her unique style, focusing on painting with sand instead of traditional cartoon methods. Her creativity has inspired many other animators since the 1970s.
  2. Her work, especially 'The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa,' was highly praised and showcased her poetic storytelling through visual art. It's considered a significant piece in the animation field.
  3. Many famous animators, including Kihachiro Kawamoto, regard Leaf's work as influential and beautiful, showing her lasting impact on animation culture.
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Mixing Colors 101

DrawTogether with WendyMac • 1336 implied HN points • 24 Sep 23
🎨 Art & Illustration Techniques
  1. The color wheel is the foundation of color mixing, composed of primary, secondary, and tertiary colors.
  2. Understanding the history of color theory helps to appreciate the significance of the color wheel.
  3. Primary colors (red, yellow, blue), secondary colors (orange, violet, green), and complementary colors play key roles in color mixing and relationships.

How I Painted This Book

Am I Doing This Right? • 1041 implied HN points • 24 May 23
🎨 Art & Illustration Techniques
  1. The book was painted traditionally with watercolor, gouache, and colored pencils.
  2. The painting process involved steps like sketches, painting large areas, adding textures with dry brush, and finishing details with colored pencils.
  3. The post details the process, challenges, and fun moments of painting a spread for the book.

Kitchen Project #97: All about rhubarb

Kitchen Projects • 628 implied HN points • 26 Feb 23
🍲 Food & Drink Techniques
  1. Forced rhubarb is fleeting, so preserving it is key to enjoy it year-round.
  2. Preserving methods for forced rhubarb include making jam, syrup, fruit leather, candied rhubarb, and potted rhubarb.
  3. Each preserving method offers a unique way to savor the taste of forced rhubarb in various dishes and treats.

Education of a Typing Man

Register Spill • 294 implied HN points • 04 Feb 24
🚌 Education Techniques
  1. Experimenting with different keyboard layouts can improve typing skills.
  2. Learning to touch-type with all 10 fingers can boost typing speed and accuracy.
  3. Consistent practice and use of typing tools can lead to significant improvement over time.

One page diary

Austin Kleon • 2158 implied HN points • 14 Jun 22
🎨 Art & Illustration Techniques
  1. Creating a one-page diary is a simple exercise that encourages you to reflect on the best thing that happened each day. It helps you practice cheerful thinking by focusing on the positives.
  2. Using tools like a brush pen and a slow writing method can enhance your diary experience. This slows you down and allows for more thoughtful reflection.
  3. Incorporating video into your diary practice can make it more creative and engaging. Filming your process can help you share your work, even if it's just for yourself.

How I make color brush pens

Austin Kleon • 2218 implied HN points • 19 Apr 22
🎨 Art & Illustration Techniques
  1. You can make your own colored brush pens by refilling exhausted cartridges with different ink colors. It's cheaper and creates less waste than buying new pens.
  2. Mixing inks in the cartridges allows for unique colors and adds fun to the creative process. This can help you explore and discover new ideas through play.
  3. Using colored tape to identify different ink colors is a simple hack that makes the creative process easier and more organized.

A Dark Rum Tea Toddy

Cocktails With Suderman • 279 implied HN points • 19 Jan 24
🍲 Food & Drink Techniques
  1. A Dark Rum Tea Toddy is a complex cocktail made with rum, sweet vermouth, Black Walnut bitters, syrup, and black tea.
  2. This cocktail builds on the basic Hot Toddy formula but requires specific ingredients that may need some planning to acquire.
  3. The combination of high-proof rum, vermouth, bitters, syrup, and herbal tea creates a unique, aromatic, and complex drink that showcases the versatility of the Hot Toddy format.

Prompt Ensembles Make LLMs More Reliable

Deep (Learning) Focus • 275 implied HN points • 15 May 23
🔬 Science Techniques
  1. Reliability is crucial when working with large language models, and prompt ensembles offer a straightforward way to make them more accurate and consistent.
  2. Prompt ensembles show generalization across different language models, reducing sensitivity to changing underlying models and prompts.
  3. Aggregation of multiple outputs from prompt ensembles is complex but crucial for improving model performance, requiring sophisticated strategies beyond simple majority voting.

It's Kadigan Weather

Timeless & Timely • 176 implied HN points • 14 Oct 23
🎨 Art & Illustration Techniques
  1. The world of comics has its own unique rules and language.
  2. Cartoonist Mort Walker's book 'The Lexicon of Comicana' explores this special language.
  3. Walker's book not only names common items in comics but also reveals universal illustration techniques.

61 – A book about sustainable ceramics

Ceramics Now Weekly • 157 implied HN points • 24 Oct 23
🎨 Art & Illustration Techniques
  1. Yuliya Makliuk's book 'Potters Save the World' focuses on sustainable ceramics and environmental responsibility.
  2. Ceramics Now Weekly #61 features new artists and the latest news in the ceramic world.
  3. Various ceramic events, exhibitions, and discussions are happening worldwide, offering opportunities for artists to showcase their work and engage with the community.

A reading list of older articles to get you started

Technology Made Simple • 199 implied HN points • 04 Jan 23
🕹 Technology Techniques
  1. The newsletter offers curated reading lists of older articles to help readers get started in understanding important concepts in Math and Computer Science, as well as tips for becoming a next-level tech professional.
  2. Technique Tuesdays focus on tricks and techniques to solve challenging problems, such as improving code comments and creating good documentation.
  3. Finance Fridays delve into the tech industry's financial aspects, covering topics like tech business models, personal finance tips, and how news from the tech industry affects your finances.

Inhale Insight: The Transformative Power of Psychedelic Breathwork

Tripsitter • 99 implied HN points • 22 Nov 23
🏥 Health & Wellness Techniques
  1. Breath can shift states and induce different experiences like calmness, energy, or even psychedelic effects.
  2. Psychedelic breathwork involves rhythmic breathing patterns to induce altered states and can have physical sensations, emotional releases, and even visions.
  3. Psychedelic breathwork can be safe for most mentally and physically healthy individuals, but certain conditions should avoid it, and side effects can include dizziness, tingling, cramps, among others.

Bowling strikes, bioinspired enamel materials, and unbeatable squash shot strategies

The Strategy Toolkit • 17 implied HN points • 10 Nov 25
🎾 Sports Techniques
  1. To hit a perfect strike in bowling, players need to focus on the right spin, speed, and the oil pattern on the lane. These factors help increase the chances of hitting the headpin effectively.
  2. By increasing the angle at which the bowling ball hits the headpin, players can create better deflection and make strikes more consistent.
  3. Using rotation and the right speed allows the ball to transition from sliding on the oil to rolling properly, which is crucial for achieving strikes repeatedly.

The Art of Lucid Dreaming 💭 🦋

Tripsitter • 119 implied HN points • 19 Jun 23
🏥 Health & Wellness Techniques
  1. Understanding lucid dreaming involves being consciously aware in your dreams, a skill that can be learned with practice and consistency.
  2. Lucid dreaming can offer benefits like gaining insights into your psyche, experiencing a different level of consciousness, and exploring symbolism in dreams for personal growth.
  3. To improve dream recall and induce lucid dreams, techniques like reality testing, journaling dreams, and using dream-inducing herbs can be effective.

Edge 373: Computationally Efficient LLM Reasoning with ReWOO

TheSequence • 413 implied HN points • 27 Feb 24
🕹 Technology Techniques
  1. ReWOO is a new reasoning technique optimized for information augmented LLMs, focusing on step-wise reasoning, tool-calls, and summarization as separate modules.
  2. RAG techniques impact the reasoning abilities of LLMs in generative AI applications, often requiring coordination between LLMs and external tools, which can increase computational demands.
  3. LLMFlows is introduced as a framework for building LLM applications, showcasing the importance of augmenting LLMs with external data like RAG to enhance their capabilities.

The Nose Knows

Weekly Wisdom • 159 implied HN points • 08 Dec 22
🏥 Health & Wellness Techniques
  1. Breathwork is essential since the breath is a constant companion, affecting both body and mind.
  2. Various breathing techniques can be used for specific effects like calming the nervous system, increasing alertness, or improving oxygen absorption.
  3. Understanding the different elements of breathing, such as nostrils, lungs, and techniques like Breath of Fire, can lead to improved well-being and mind-body connection.