So… this year I "accidentally" changed my content entirely. I've gotten so much of a following from doing Helluva Boss content over on Twitter that I completely switched up my Twitters, and with that site's recent news, I have plans to update the rest of my social media accounts to suit. This will involve (again) moving a ton of my HB content over to here, deviantart, and possibly Tumblr. I'm also contemplating new accounts with a link.tree (sp?) to line them all up.

What I have next on my agenda is to update my commission TOS for the holidays and a rebranded icon/banner to reflect this change. Stay tuned.

I haven't updated this gallery with the artwork I did so far this year, which includes art for Sing 2. I'm just letting some of you who watch me know so that I'm dumping art I've uploaded in other places.

I'm planning on rebooting my deviantart sometime too, since I can't just dump years worth of artwork at once just to catch up. All the artwork made prior to like, 2019 is gonna go on a single folder while only the new stuff will get uploaded. I'm contemplating on using postybirb like I've seen other artists do so I won't have to worry about tediously uploading to other platforms one by one.

Unfortunately, those plans are gonna be put on hold. My spring break is over and I need to get back to working on my thesis. There's a ton of important stuff I need to fix this week.

In the meantime, I'm gonna give what I got so far. Most of it is sketches, but I do have a completed piece here and there.

After deciding to use human characters instead of anthros in my concept for a fantasy story taking place in the colonial Americas, I had a discussion on discord as to why I felt I couldn’t use anthro characters. My opinion is that using anthros didn’t fit the tone or message I kind of want to get across, but then I questioned, “can you really not write a serious story featuring talking animals then”? That’s not entirely true, is it? But what makes them work? So last night I compiled this creative writing list about why a story would work with talking animals. This is largely my own opinion, so take it with a grain of salt.

- Unique psychology, ethics, and/or environments of animals. These stories, under the literary genre of xenofiction, are meant to explore the thoughts and emotions of non-human creatures and the environments they live in. Typically these stories avoid humanizing the animal characters too much in favor of creating a unique animal “society,” often just limiting their anthropomorphism to talking in the same language as the author. However, in more cartoonish stories, the characters may as well be people in four legs, which can be rather jarring.
- Greater focus on fantasy and science fiction. Talking animals may result from magic or experimentation, or they may just be magical or alien races featuring non-human sapients that happen to resemble anthros. However, these speculative aspects shouldn’t be treated as a mere Hand Wave to explain their existence. When the story represents something explicitly not within the natural order, it should be a distinct trait within the setting. Satisfy the reader’s curiosity in some way. (The exception is if you’re deliberately invoking surrealism. See below.)
- Fables. Anthropomorphic animals can be used to symbolize issues that impact human society, often exploring themes of morality, psychology, sociology, and justice through animal-shaped allegories. This goes back to ancient times, with animals being used to drive home a particular message, but postmodern stories take it a step further and explore ways in which animals symbolically reflect society’s faults in terms of equality and social justice. Fables can risk becoming too heavy-handed, with analogies that are too obvious, so this should be treated with care. Fables can be explicitly allegorical with humans and human concepts, but I personally wouldn’t recommend it for long-term storytelling, because it starts to lose subtlety. Sometimes fables can combine Xenofiction to create an additional level of verisimilitude by exploring specific problems that result from the characters being animals, anthropomorphic or not. Usually this comes in form of nature vs. nurture themes.
- Surrealism. Anthropomorphic animals can be played simply for strangeness in an otherwise mundane setting (otherwise known as magic realism), intentionally toying with the willing suspension of disbelief. The setting (not necessarily the characters) subtly questions the existence of anthros, but without really explaining it too much, instead being just enough to feel “off” or even somewhat comedic. The surreal aspect can even be used to create a contrast in tone in a more serious narrative or a theme that doesn’t require animal symbolism, but it needs to be done carefully and purposefully (be sure to have some internal, hidden logic to your own weirdness so that things don’t end up too incoherent).
- Aesthetics. Sometimes, there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about the characters being animals, neither in a storytelling or worldbuilding sense. In visual media, animals can be used to create more diverse and colorful character design, usually in lighthearted or adventure-oriented works. Sometimes the anthro aspect is only skin deep and the characters are functionally human, with their animal appearances being a reflection of who they are. You can even invoke another careful tonal contrast by having said anthros engage in adult topics. However, in this case, the art and character design have to be decent enough to make the look feel justified and that the artist knows what they’re doing. For instance, if you just want a cop-out to get out of drawing humans, even if a more serious narrative would prefer a more justified reason to use animals instead of humans, the design of the anthros would ideally need to compensate for it. Don’t accidentally create too much tonal contrast because your art is just a little too mediocre (ouch, but people who aren’t in the furry fandom want better quality).

I felt that, even though it’s a very loose WIP in my head, the planned fantasy story I had planned didn’t fit any of this criteria. I was hoping to try to turn it into a fable, but the themes I wanted to communicate didn’t seem to fit the style that well, and the story was starting to lose subtlety (even if it’s going to contain very clear themes about colonialism). The more I thought about it, anthros would’ve been just looked a bit too strange and distracting to use in this setting, and using humans would actually work better in communicating that this is an alternate history of the colonial era where magic exists.

Additional advice that applies to almost all of the above: be consistent! At least within canon. Are your anthros humans visually resembling animals, or animals that act human? They don’t need to be too obvious, but it’s not a good idea to leave the readers confused of their true nature. How “human” or “animal” are they supposed to be?

Check out me making a journal months later just to speak about something seemingly unimportant.

Something I’ve noticed in the amount of furries in fandoms of existing IPs featuring talking animals is that they’re more interested if specific popular animals are the protagonists, mostly canids or big cats. Nick the fox, Simba the lion, Fox McCloud, various pokemon... But then you get movies like Sing, where despite being fully anthro (most movies just make the animals talk and little else) none of the protagonists are canids or even so much as carnivores. In that case, discussion has been near radio silent.

Sure, there’s also the fact that the internet really wanted to make fun of it just for having illumination’s name attached (despite that movie actually being slice of life instead of slapstick), but I really think that the animals being slightly “unpopular” played a factor in why it didn’t seem to catch on in the “wide” furry fandom, considering that more critically panned films like Rock Dog and Alpha and Omega* (the critics’ opinions, mind you) have been semi-popular for furries.

So my hypothesis is that “non-furry” media with anthro animals is more likely to get popular with furries if your protagonist is a canine, or some other carnivore.

I know this sounds like a weird thing to observe, but there was kind of a purpose for this journal. See, I think a loose variation of this phenomenon could be a decent tool for worldbuilding in “Insular Beauty” if I’m careful enough. It would really help me figure out what I want it to be.

*and yet I never liked the wolf designs, which is why I didn’t see it.

Maybe the image I uploaded looked more complex than just lineart, or FA finally decided it has an image size limit. If it’s the latter, I don’t wanna have multiple files of the same image just scaled down because I can’t tell apart the thumbnails.

Did Furaffinity actually fix the problem with image compression and resolution? It still defaults to a limited resolution first upload, but it also now displays the image in a more compressed resolution than the full size so it doesn’t awkwardly stretch out the page. It appears it still keeps the high resolution when clicking on “download”.

Is this real and it’s not just the fact that I’m on an iPad seeing this?

I’ve mulled over this list for a while because I wasn’t sure about the framing, because if you know what you’re doing, any art can be appealing. Therefore there are no “absolutes”, as well as the fact that it’s rather subjective. This is just another part of my musings about aesthetics from months ago.

But regardless, here are criticisms I have with quite a bunch of furry art, that don’t have to do with bad anatomy (because that’s a separate can of worms):

-Numerous painting errors like lighting with pure white, shading with black, pillow-shading, and poor rendering... all of which make the character look like plastic.
-Animals being drawn with the same canine head template, which is awkward on species that not even remotely resemble canids.
-Related to the above, drawing different animals with the same body type. Different animal parts can’t hide sameface syndrome if you’re using the same base for all your characters.
-Reptiles with big round craniums that just look a bit too mammalian. It looks uncanny most of the time.
-Hybrids with extremely cluttered and garish designs.
-Skins being covered with brightly-colored artificial patterns (squares, polka dots), which are mostly distracting eyesores that don’t really contribute to the design.
-Fursonas whose designs show no resemblance to the species they claim to be, and the art style is too awkward for the design to be justified with artistic license.
-In fandoms of specific media, furry OC designs that completely ignore the source material’s art style, mostly for the sake of “sex appeal”. A character looking so clearly out of place is always a turn off, no matter how attractive.

Like I said, it’s not impossible to make any “flawed” art look good, but these things are going to be a turn-off for me. Others with knowledge of aesthetics could decide that these could be either personal complaints or genuine criticisms.

I think this portrait is probably the last good color image I’ve made on my iPad. I gotta step it up more.

I always think... ape better than human. I see now... how much like them we are.~Caesar, Dawn of The Planet of The Apes (2014)

The furry “fandom” is not excempt from all the ignorant and self-serving vices that affect modern society.

Willful ignorance. Denial. Threats. Incontinence. Idolatry. A sheer obsession with trying to maintain a status quo. Enabling the suffering of innocent people and creatures for the sake of entertainment. Not caring what happens to those who aren’t famous.

And this is not better. A subculture is still a section of the same society, and the same flaws. People ignore this because it’s not something they want to hear. We try to escape our flawed society through the world of fantasy anthropomorphic animals, but we can’t shake off what we’ve been conditioned or even born with. We’re still only human, and we take our same flaws with us. People don’t like being told of this, so we make our sonas overpowered.

Problems can’t be solved by pretending they don’t exist. We can’t blindly run away, abandoning responsibility and at the expense of other living beings. When we encounter bad things, we need to face them head on and address the root of them. The biggest mistake we’ve made is assuming we can achieve happiness through willful ignorance and letting escapism take over our lives.

Don’t just be a furry, and don’t just be a person. Be a GOOD person.

...Can I honestly take myself seriously as a person who wants to dedicate herself to studying and writing about the arts on a possibly prestigious level, while also being a furry?

The reference of my fursona that I was drawing for days was turning out... bad. And bland. It’s like I completely forgot how anatomy works. I forgot to draw an entire pelvis, for one. It’s just all wonky, and I gotta start over.

Note: don’t attempt to do any art if you’re tired as heck. It’s going to turn out wrong.

This is the most recent of the many “musings” I post on my tumblr, but I’m posting it here because it’s tangentially related to this sketch that I made. I can probably incorporate this to my personal analysis.

The thing about knowing the rules before you break them is that…

I’ve seen artists become hesitant to break the rules after they’ve learned them, and start assuming that the natural realism they’ve been taught is the only correct way to do art. Especially when they receive backlash anyway for not not doing shit “right”.

There are lots and lots of examples, but in the specific example of anthro animals, I’ve seen artists who assume that either making said anthros more realistically human-like or animal-like is the only right way to design them.

But anthros are neither natural or realistic. They’re fantasy. Unless you’re J.R.R. Tolkien, you can’t impose extremely accurate rules on fantasy concepts like you can with nature (and even THAT is questionable).

You can offer tips on how to make anthro art more appealing for your audience, but you can’t completely assert that there’s a single correct way to do things, especially when bias is frequently involved.

(Which probably invites discussion on what is actually “bad” anthro design, but that’s another thing for later).

I have one more vacation doodle to upload and you take so slow to let me submit it?

Well my fucking apologies for my WiFi not being perfect I guess.

All these pictures of single characters against a featureless void are getting boring, even if the reason for it is because I’m using them as reference.

I’ll try to finish a strip.

So it turns out the images I draw on my ipad that I try to upload don't actually have the same resolution on my monitor as they have there.

Something that looks nice when viewed on an ipad actually looks blurry and less sharp when I see them in fullsize on my computer. Is it due to me due to me using 350 dpi on the medibang app instead of 300? I honestly don't know. I'm in the process of checking.

I'm gonna experiment not using my ipad for art, and to make a 1-bit "ms paint-style" image, to see what's wrong with the overall display.

I pretty much resized all those images for nothing tbh.

[EDIT]: I'm inclined to think it's either the website layout's fault, or I'm overestimating the actual resolution on my images. I'm gonna be using 300 dpi just to test out the sharpness.

My iPad Pro suddenly bricked last night, and took all my drawings, software, and WIPs with it. Furthermore, my computer’s been hit with the same Microsoft glitch of the pen tablet scrolling instead of drawing.

Meaning I won’t be back to doing digital art for a while. Ugh.

You’ve been really screwing me up since the hurricane.

Quit making me do irrelevant stuff at 10:34 pm when I was supposed to be working on essays and studying for multiple exams.

I might have to take u to a therapist soon.

But don’t know how to set them up because you don’t anything about money or law...

W elp.

Why do people keep getting porcupines and hedgehogs mixed up?

They look nothing alike. One’s a big rodent and the other’s in the shrew family. One has far longer quills, the other has shorter spikes. Even their faces are totally different. It’s one of my major pet peeves for a character that’s clearly a porcupine get labeled as a hedgehog and vice versa.

I catch myself faving art from over half a decade ago. Jeez

Probably not the first time I might post something like this. Very, very, likely.

I support sexual freedom and I think it’s important for a consetting adult population, but being an adult isn’t a free pass to behave inappropriately, act irresponsible and careless, or disrespect people who feel uncomfortable by unsolicited TMI.

I mean, I know extreme moral panic regarding something like this is also a problem, but.... that’s not cool.

So how do you avoid getting accused of ripping off other similar OCs even though you’ve come up and designed your own characters long before...

*Agressively starts faving all the porcupine pics I've been eyeing for a while*

pfffff