Boy, time does fly when you go on hiatus from art, huh?
Anyways hello people of DeviantART. I wouldn't have ever imagined myself in this position but here we are. I've been using this site since 2009 and two site re-designs later many of my friends and artists that I've supported from the first few years of being on this site have either vanished into radio silence, relocated to other sites, or moved onto other, better things (or so I hope). It's honestly saddening seeing this place as a shell of its former self because the site's higher ups don't believe in "If it ain't broke, don't fix it", or because they lost interest in making art.
And I'll admit I'm one of those people. While there were some years where I was more generally active (Pre-2013, 2014, and 2017), other years were either posts of minor projects or WIP's and nothing really substantial. I think the whole trying to build internet cred through DeviantArt and having most of your motivation fueled by said cred, along with the comments/favorites you would get, was what lowered my motivation to keep producing art and soon I stuck to commissions to power through designing my OC's when I myself wasn't inspired enough to pull out a pencil and do character sketches 24/7. Any time I tried to assemble a new character render as you saw with Chouko, something would get in the way. And after a combination of a global pandemic canceling the conventions and other public spaces I used to motivate myself, on top of having recently lost a plethora of my files to a hard drive crash/failure in September 2020, even more of that motivation was killed off from losing my WIP's and being mostly stuck creating content for a game that launched in November 2018- causing my progress on Toshi to slow to a halt and take roughly seven months to finish up.
Needless to say things have been a mess and I had to reorganize parts of my current Aozora's Adventure project to remove some clutter, which I went over in the series' official blog late last year. Plus there's been a conga line of IRL issues clogging up my personal backlog of things to get to, which include finally learning game development and programing. Getting back into the swing of doing art and spritework is also a goal of mine, and the Super Justin art I posted was a test to see how I could do with character artwork (In short, it took me about four to months to finish due to lack of focus, and since the Super Justin character doesn't mean much to me nowadays outside of one or two communities). My goal is to go back to making art of Aozora and his buds, including newer renders of the main core cast for a new, personal website that I'm currently planning on.
I would love to be more active here but both Twitter and Discord have sort of become my main social spaces after DeviantArt steadily changed and changed. Since my main Twitter account is cluttered with retweets and memes, I'm thinking of launching a new Twitter account solely dedicated to my artwork and whatever future developments occur with my creative works. Until then, I'll be spending time reorganizing my personal life and getting some of these non-art projects of mine finished up.
Hey there. Since I got the thought of getting more characters from my endless selection of ideas developed I decided to update the character design inspiration document some more:
Yup, I had to give this a bit of an overhaul since an attempt to reach out onto Twitter in the form of a tweet ended up going completely south when it attracted what felt like the wrong audience for the job. Thus I added some more details to make it more clear on what kind of content I'm looking for in character designs, art style and all.
Hopefully it doesn't come off as too mean-spirited, I don't mean to brush aside so many artists but for new designs made from scratch using provided references I'd rather them closely replicate sort of what I can make, give or take a few.
Well it's 2021 and I'm still away from this site doing other things for the most part. You may recall if you've been to some of my other sites including my blog that I had a major hard drive failure on my Mac in September 2020. It completely wiped all my WIP's and it took me six months to get a replacement computer as well as a few more months to get some of the programs I commonly used.
Currently the priority still lies in my Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart racers and many of them have a long ways to go so I don't feel "ready" to go back to doing standard art just yet, and even then the pandemic has been a huge de-motivator. That said I still want to start on something later in the year and my mind has been tossed between two different groups of characters since I never did any modern art of anyone in either group. There's also a few other characters I've had on the mind and wouldn't mind drawing "just for fun" even if they don't lack the highly detailed and fleshed out backstories or designs of the Aozora characters (provided they aren't kept private). Either way I still want to try and be productive beyond SRB2Kart and other minor projects especially if I don't start working on game development stuff later in the year after I get a new PC rig or upgrade my current one for more modern needs.
While I continue to plot out what Aozora characters to give full art of next and grind through a few other things I'm still looking around for artists to commission to design the more recent concepts in the roster proper. This process has not been on the forefront as much as you'd expect considering how much money I had to spend to get my new Macintosh and the lack of that creative oomph I need to really get myself going (especially with the pandemic still going strong out there). Still, I would like to find more artists to collaborate on character designs with, if there's any still on the site and the dA forums.