FA+
Shop
20 years on FA...
5 days ago
General
'Magine that...
I noticed a few days ago that I was fast approaching my 20th year on FA. Not very often any kind of internet-related somethingoranother gets to mark a 20th anniversary. This gallery is very likely older than a decent chunk of the people watching it :D
Looking Back...
At the time of FA's first iteration, I was posting on VCL, which was during that period the fandom's main art site. Yerf (itself formerly SCFA or Squeaky Clean Furry Archive) was next widely-known site, but largely restricted in membership owing to its policy of vetting new artists according to skill requirements (that slowly escalated over time) and its SFW-only nature. I never tried to get into Yerf, but regularly followed their (Usenet) newsgroup postings and tried to incorporate aspects of their skill requirements (backdrops, anatomy, color, etc) into my own artwork.
VCL late into its existence adopted some minimal quality requirments, which mostly boiled down to proving you could present a clean scan of your work. Since this was before the widespread adoption of digital art, paying attention to the condition of the sheet you're scanning, and knowing how to clean it up before posting makes a real difference in its presentation. I understood how to do this effectively, but it seems a lot of artists were mentally "done" with their drawings as soon as they decided to post them. "Meh" aptly describes what these artists must've thought of their uploads. I'm reminded of this when I see entries here with no descriptions, no tags, and sometimes not even a unique title. These submissions feel a lot like Twitt/X and/or Bluesky posts, where you can simply deposit any random doodle with no further involvement. E621 at least lets the community provide tags even if the poster of the source image couldn't be bothered to.
Late in the game when VCL was starting to show its age (no comments or content rating system) I started looking at the nascent websites starting up with more-or-less full gallery features. DeviantArt and SheezyArt were the top candidates for a time. DA fell to the wayside owing to its SFW (ish) limitation and being a general artsite (i.e. not fandom focused). SA looked better owing to it's allowing NSFW...until it came out that the site owner was (allegedly) underage amidst a sudden ban on adult artwork.
Now, looking through my gallery, you'll wonder why NSFW art was of any importance being that there was so little of it in my gallery. The answer is that once it became clear that the fandom wasn't going to suffer any sort of nuclear first-strike from the mainstream media over its tolerance of sexually explicit material, I warmed up to idea of drawing it myself. Now, this doesn't mean such a disaster can't happen, just that if it does, I now understand having a gallery comprised only of SFW work won't shield you from any fallout. The actual reason I don't have a lot of NSFW in my gallery is simply a preponderance of other material (mostly a subset of wet-and-messy fetiish) occupying my inspiration enough so that straight-up porn simply got back-seated. A look at my favorites should prove that I'm not averse to it.
Late in 2005 I opened my FurAffinity presence, crossposting material from my VCL gallery and making use of the one feature added to it late in its life, the ability to add a "comment" link to the description, presumably to the pic's presence on another site that allowed comments. VCL's switch to read-only mode (or was it when they simply stopped accepting new artists?) cemented my move prior to it's eventual closure, and from there it was FA all the way. A rip of VCL's content still exists at vixencontrolled.net, minus post dates and descriptions.
Looking Forward
In the intervening years, we've seen the rise of a number of external spaces where one could upload art. Most of these are mainstream social media sites not specifically centered around artwork. Some artists here chose to migrate partly or fully to these platforms citing a wider reach into a general-public audience not constrained by the furry fandom. This can have its benefits for those who depend on commission revenue to make ends meet. Fortunately (thank <deity>, throw salt over my shoulder, knock wood and all that) I do not, and I'm quite content to stay in the furry corner of the art hobby. I have little to gain by spreading my reach outside of it.
I tend to value being able to easily access older works, as I do have some reverence for them, hence my "Ancient Art Archive" folder (which has a ready supply of stuff to post being that I never threw out any of my old on-paper art). Mainstream social media is not conducive to this -- you have to endlessly doomscroll to reach older works, and the platforms are geared to only making the most recent entries easily accessible. That's assuming anyone finds you -- one of the most common subjects of art-community videos concern the difficulty of getting noticed by casual browsers, much less "The Almighty Algorithim". We won't even get into politically-motivated blowups that randomly erupt all over these platforms when the wrong person sees the wrong thing in your account.
So no, I don't see myself ever getting mixed up in mainstream social media for art exposure. I hope and wish FA a looooong life for that reason alone. While I do occasionally post low-to-moderate-effort sketches on a couple of relevant Discord servers, all of those works will eventually make their way to FA. Some of them are dependent on continuity I want to establish first to give them context. Unfortunately a constriction in my free time has slowed my output greatly. I'm still working on stuff when I can fit it in, but progress is very much like rush-hour bumper-to-bumper traffic. That's also the main reason I never seriously considered Patreon -- I just can't supply content on a predictable-enough basis to justify letting anyone $ubscribe to my output for even a token amount (also why I didn't enable shinies here on FA). I typed most of this up in the early morning of the 12th, and extensively revised it on my phone once I got to work, leaving me to post this from my phone as close to the 6:45:18pm EST mark of my anniversary as possible since I won't be home to do it from my main PC.
[Edit]: I did manage to nail posting this journal right on the hour/minute/second...buuut it was on daylight savings time, which the account creation date does not take into consideration. So if you mouseover the 'fuzzy' date of this journal, it'll read exactly 1 hour past the time I expected it to say.
So, wrapping this looking-forward thing:
Commissions -- completing some existing ones so I can take more (I know some want to commission me, but I try not to stack up more than 2 or 3 depending on complexity).
Comics -- Still in the queue, 'cause some new OC's still need to be formally introduced to and incorporated into my main roster, and they've had sufficient behind-the-scenes development that the end results should be at least modestly interesting to some portion of my audience.
NSFW -- Still on the table, but will likely need commissions to jumpstart them ahead of leaving it to my own motivation.
I noticed a few days ago that I was fast approaching my 20th year on FA. Not very often any kind of internet-related somethingoranother gets to mark a 20th anniversary. This gallery is very likely older than a decent chunk of the people watching it :D
Looking Back...
At the time of FA's first iteration, I was posting on VCL, which was during that period the fandom's main art site. Yerf (itself formerly SCFA or Squeaky Clean Furry Archive) was next widely-known site, but largely restricted in membership owing to its policy of vetting new artists according to skill requirements (that slowly escalated over time) and its SFW-only nature. I never tried to get into Yerf, but regularly followed their (Usenet) newsgroup postings and tried to incorporate aspects of their skill requirements (backdrops, anatomy, color, etc) into my own artwork.
VCL late into its existence adopted some minimal quality requirments, which mostly boiled down to proving you could present a clean scan of your work. Since this was before the widespread adoption of digital art, paying attention to the condition of the sheet you're scanning, and knowing how to clean it up before posting makes a real difference in its presentation. I understood how to do this effectively, but it seems a lot of artists were mentally "done" with their drawings as soon as they decided to post them. "Meh" aptly describes what these artists must've thought of their uploads. I'm reminded of this when I see entries here with no descriptions, no tags, and sometimes not even a unique title. These submissions feel a lot like Twitt/X and/or Bluesky posts, where you can simply deposit any random doodle with no further involvement. E621 at least lets the community provide tags even if the poster of the source image couldn't be bothered to.
Late in the game when VCL was starting to show its age (no comments or content rating system) I started looking at the nascent websites starting up with more-or-less full gallery features. DeviantArt and SheezyArt were the top candidates for a time. DA fell to the wayside owing to its SFW (ish) limitation and being a general artsite (i.e. not fandom focused). SA looked better owing to it's allowing NSFW...until it came out that the site owner was (allegedly) underage amidst a sudden ban on adult artwork.
Now, looking through my gallery, you'll wonder why NSFW art was of any importance being that there was so little of it in my gallery. The answer is that once it became clear that the fandom wasn't going to suffer any sort of nuclear first-strike from the mainstream media over its tolerance of sexually explicit material, I warmed up to idea of drawing it myself. Now, this doesn't mean such a disaster can't happen, just that if it does, I now understand having a gallery comprised only of SFW work won't shield you from any fallout. The actual reason I don't have a lot of NSFW in my gallery is simply a preponderance of other material (mostly a subset of wet-and-messy fetiish) occupying my inspiration enough so that straight-up porn simply got back-seated. A look at my favorites should prove that I'm not averse to it.
Late in 2005 I opened my FurAffinity presence, crossposting material from my VCL gallery and making use of the one feature added to it late in its life, the ability to add a "comment" link to the description, presumably to the pic's presence on another site that allowed comments. VCL's switch to read-only mode (or was it when they simply stopped accepting new artists?) cemented my move prior to it's eventual closure, and from there it was FA all the way. A rip of VCL's content still exists at vixencontrolled.net, minus post dates and descriptions.
Looking Forward
In the intervening years, we've seen the rise of a number of external spaces where one could upload art. Most of these are mainstream social media sites not specifically centered around artwork. Some artists here chose to migrate partly or fully to these platforms citing a wider reach into a general-public audience not constrained by the furry fandom. This can have its benefits for those who depend on commission revenue to make ends meet. Fortunately (thank <deity>, throw salt over my shoulder, knock wood and all that) I do not, and I'm quite content to stay in the furry corner of the art hobby. I have little to gain by spreading my reach outside of it.
I tend to value being able to easily access older works, as I do have some reverence for them, hence my "Ancient Art Archive" folder (which has a ready supply of stuff to post being that I never threw out any of my old on-paper art). Mainstream social media is not conducive to this -- you have to endlessly doomscroll to reach older works, and the platforms are geared to only making the most recent entries easily accessible. That's assuming anyone finds you -- one of the most common subjects of art-community videos concern the difficulty of getting noticed by casual browsers, much less "The Almighty Algorithim". We won't even get into politically-motivated blowups that randomly erupt all over these platforms when the wrong person sees the wrong thing in your account.
So no, I don't see myself ever getting mixed up in mainstream social media for art exposure. I hope and wish FA a looooong life for that reason alone. While I do occasionally post low-to-moderate-effort sketches on a couple of relevant Discord servers, all of those works will eventually make their way to FA. Some of them are dependent on continuity I want to establish first to give them context. Unfortunately a constriction in my free time has slowed my output greatly. I'm still working on stuff when I can fit it in, but progress is very much like rush-hour bumper-to-bumper traffic. That's also the main reason I never seriously considered Patreon -- I just can't supply content on a predictable-enough basis to justify letting anyone $ubscribe to my output for even a token amount (also why I didn't enable shinies here on FA). I typed most of this up in the early morning of the 12th, and extensively revised it on my phone once I got to work, leaving me to post this from my phone as close to the 6:45:18pm EST mark of my anniversary as possible since I won't be home to do it from my main PC.
[Edit]: I did manage to nail posting this journal right on the hour/minute/second...buuut it was on daylight savings time, which the account creation date does not take into consideration. So if you mouseover the 'fuzzy' date of this journal, it'll read exactly 1 hour past the time I expected it to say.
So, wrapping this looking-forward thing:
Commissions -- completing some existing ones so I can take more (I know some want to commission me, but I try not to stack up more than 2 or 3 depending on complexity).
Comics -- Still in the queue, 'cause some new OC's still need to be formally introduced to and incorporated into my main roster, and they've had sufficient behind-the-scenes development that the end results should be at least modestly interesting to some portion of my audience.
NSFW -- Still on the table, but will likely need commissions to jumpstart them ahead of leaving it to my own motivation.
Vix