In the past two weeks I've been staying with my lovely friends in Baltimore so I could attend Bronycon for the first time, and also meet a lot of my US friends as well as some friends that came from overseas! It was a wonderful experience, I hope that perhaps next year I could go again too. ;v;

I even got to try out Pokemon GO on my friend's spare phone, it's too bad that once I go back to Canada I won't be able to play anymore until it's released there. The whole release of this game is a mess. XD

It's going to be a long drive and so, even though I wanted to open commissions today it looks like I'll have to hold off until I'm settled back at home, or else a lot of messages will go unanswered for a bit. I'm working on a new adoptable batch too but I've been distracted over the trip so that will be a while yet as well.

Also, in regards to commissions I'm thinking of not offering custom animated icons anymore (the $100 one). The slots for those do get filled and that makes me happy that people want them, but to work on animations in photoshop is a huge pain and is often triple or more the effort of the templates I offer. I also feel that after all that work, I don't think people have been satisfied with the final product which has been putting me down lately. A lot of requests for what the animations should be have also been really complex lately and I don't know how to regulate that, almost every time what I have to animate is just skirting the edge of FA's icon filesize limit and it's not exactly easy to explain to people why I had to compress their icon or "make it uglier" in order for it to even be usable on FA.

I do also have Flash and can technically animate in that, but the reason why I've been reluctant is because I don't know enough about exporting icons and compressing them to be confident in using it. I had even considered still keeping them open and just charging even more for them to make it more worth my trouble, but I feel that also raises people's expectations for the final product (and rightfully so if it's a lot of money). So I don't know, perhaps the best thing to do for now is to just let it go and if anything, focus on making more templates that people can pick from. I've been considering offering just blinking icons or icons of multiple scrolling expressions (like something you'd see in an rpg) as well, or even just static headshots for a cheaper icon option.

Feel free to let me know your thoughts on this if you'd like!