I've been drawing stuff relevant to this fandom since the late 1980's when in high school I graduated to drawing my own anthropomorphic OC's over doing fanart of The Catillac Cats. One of the distinguishing characteristics of my creations was that even though they had defined outfits, I was able to draw them in lots of different clothing (defying the 'limited wardrobe' trope of Western animation). To that end, I did a lot of artwork of my OC's, updating their outfits as "model sheets" every time fashions changed. There being no internet, there was no competition for 'recognition' and as such I rarely did more than ink most pics I did.

Fast-forward through the early era of personal websites, webrings (how I discovered furry) and online galleries such as VCL and YERF. Once I found these as a means of sharing my works with like-minded others, my output dropped quite a bit. Now I could get greater 'recognition' of my works, but it 'needed' to be colored in order to be noticed, and undue influence from Yerf gatekeepers only added to that in the form of including drawn backdrops in almost every piece (I never actually tried to get into YERF--it was notoriously hard to get accepted in, and requirements were constantly escalating--but I followed its newsgroups, and one bone of contention among the mods was applicants to YERF who didn't/couldn't do backdrops. I didn't have to do them--it was just held forth as a mark of quality, and I wanted to aspire to that.

Anyhoo, I still have a lot of un-posted material from "back in the day". And I have enough followers to have some who would be interested in them, but there is a dilemma. While I am extremely fortunate to not need commission income to make ends meet, I am aware of an issue some artists who do, have with their older works--namely that allowing them to remain visible could have a negative impact on the perception of their current abilities by potential commissioners, and thus they'll remove older pieces from their galleries so that only their newest artworks remain on showcase. Sometimes it's not even that--some artists are just 'meh with their drawings once they're done with them. Twitter/X appears to be the ideal place for these artists -- the endless scrolling page format makes it a chore to see past the newest posts, and around the time of the "X" rebrand your ability to rummage through older posts is restricted unless you join the site (and kick in a $ubscription).

I don't see things that way, but there is a glimmer of a point in this. Since my current new (fully colored) artworks only appear roughly once a month, having old works appearing too often could affect perception of what I can do among those not familiar with my body of work, and may skip an interaction or commission with me with a snap judgement based on one old piece they happened across without investigating further. So, in order to display these drawings, I had to come up with a means of presenting them that makes it glaringly obvious that they don't represent my current abilities. What I came up with is what you'll see if you follow -->this link<--, artwork embedded within a standardized title/information frame presenting them as old work posted for historical purposes. The overall idea had actually been defined for a couple of years now, but running across some original 'vintage' artwork (I never threw out my old stuff) right as I was looking for some 'me for me' stuff to do after completing a commission, prompted me to finally "do something".

These pieces will appear as occasional uploads into my main gallery (often preceding a "current day" upload), but will be assigned to their own dedicated space within the folder heirarchy, named the "Ancient Art Archive" and will be numbered as a series as I re-discover and process them for inclusion in this folder. Depending on how many of these I run across, I may even link them comic-style, but that is still up in the air. Who knows, maybe this effort will prompt some artists to consider similar means of presenting their older works. FA has been around long enough that a fair number of creators have passed on, and the only trace of their creative efforts lies on this site. While I plan on being around a good long time, it'd be nice to have a historical aspect to my gallery for interested folks to poke around in and discuss while I'm still around to answer questions about that stuff.