I am in need of at least the following characters:
* one soccer mom (preferably human)
* one mermaid
* anyone else you'll allow me to write into my fish slapping universe.

Not sure yet if this will turn into something but I'm at least going to try. Do beware that this involves fish slapping. Any volunteered character can be both slapper and slappee. Or you may just end up as a voiceless background extra that has nothing to do with the fish slapping going on center stage.

I've been trying to hold off for three weeks now. Don't know how much longer I can keep this up. The struggle is real guys. Please help me live through this month.

I'm feeling a strange compulsion to draw elves, fairies and other things with pointy ears, cute faces and long wavy hair. Yet I face a drought of reference material. So point me to your elf characters and I might just sketch a quick headshot of them.

It was nearly four months ago that I started thinking about using another art site in addition to FA. In my usual slothiness I was going to postpone that decision to a very distant future. But FA's abysmal track record at security appears to have gotten even worse and that made me change my mind. So just in case:

http://thefennex.deviantart.com/
https://beta.furrynetwork.com/fennex/
http://www.transfur.com/Users/fennex

I might try out some more sites later on. We'll see what sticks I suppose.

Also, just in case:
* If you used your old FA password on another site, change your password on those sites as well.
* If you used your old FA password for an email account, every site for which that email address was the account recovery email address might be at risk.
* If your new FA password is one you also use for other sites, what makes you think FA is secure now?

I've been using the same avatar for so long that I'm starting to think people won't recognize me anymore if I change it. "Brilliant," the little devil sitting on my shoulder tells me. "That's the perfect opportunity for some massive trolling."

I wonder if people react differently if I would suddenly start using a female sparkledog avatar? Let's find out shall we.

It's been decided: I'll be holding a drawpile session on Saturday 5 march at 9PM GMT. There are three participants so far and there is still room for more so don't hesitate to comment below if you'd like to join.

I'll be announcing the connection details half an hour or so in advance and then we'll collectively pray to the port forwarding gods.

I was way late to the opencanvas craze because of crappy internet. But apparently there's a new kid on the block that does everything OC 1.1 did and more: drawpile. Basically it's an art program that allows people to draw together on the same canvas.

I'm dying to try this thing out so if you're in any way interested in some kind of pseudo-collaborative doodling session, let me know below and I'll try and host a session sometime.

If you host drawpile sessions yourself or know of other people that host them do let me know as well.

Apparently FA stopped being "the one place where you can reach everyone" quite some time ago. So I've been considering taking up a second online residence somewhere. But I've got absolutely no idea where to go. Deviantart looks like the place everyone can't wait to get away from, Weasyl seams awfully quit, furry network isn't ready for prime time yet, tumblr and instagram look like the cool kids on the block but seem awfully inconvenient for an outsider.

I'm kind of conflicted here so Advise me!. Where do you think I should set up shop? Why? Who are the absolute must watch artists you can't find on FA?

Normally I'd turn to the draw the person above you thread on the forums to distract me but in an "absolutely shocking" turn of event FA has managed to send a cease-and-desist to its own forums.

I still want to be distracted though. So post your characters refs and backgrounds, interesting ideas and concepts, ... whatever you think will be fun to draw. I might pick out some things here and there for a quick five or ten minute sketch.

For those of you who missed me: you may consider this a minor sign of life.

For those of you who missed my art: don't worry, you haven't missed much.

For those of you who worried about me: I'm not as sorry as I should be and I'll probably disappear again some time in the near future. You have been warned.

For those of you who thought me dead: you may consider my resurrection as a sign of the coming zombie apocalypse.

anyways, disengaging hibernation drive in three... two... one...

With FA's spring update I've just realized my own updates are becoming less frequent than even FurAffinity's code updates. That's a situation that might need some rectifying. So please stand by while I attempt to disengage my hibernation drive.

Ironic statistical intermezzo:
about a third of my journals are 'I have returned from hiatus' journals.

Even more irony:
Once when FA had tiny thumbnails I wrote a Greasemonkey script to replace them with bigger thumbnails. Now that we all have bigger thumbnails I wrote one to make them small again: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/129979


Anyway, your irregularly scheduled art updates should resume shortly. I hope?

(quite a fitting topic now that FA is making us experience download speeds we haven't seen since the dialup age)

I realized a couple weeks ago that I'm very near to being into the furry art thing for ten years. So I took a little trip trough memory lane and started delving into old art. I learned a number of things:

1. A whole lot of stuff is nowhere to be found. Most of the missing stuff are just sketches, but there's also at least one missing transformation sequence and almost all the concept work for three comics (Shangdu, Cheegon and the missing cheese, the journal of Henry Lemon).
2. Going through various websites has resulted in a lot of work that was once online no longer being online.
3. There is a mind boggling amount of stuff that was either finished or nearly finished but that somehow never made it online. A whole bunch of inked images and nearly a hundred comic pages in total.

So now I'm considering making a bunch of that old stuff available online for the celebratory ten year mark. There's just one small problem: getting it all scanned, cleaned up, lettered (for the comics) and posted online is going to take a hellish amount of work. So I might have to charge a small sum for access to all this stuff. I'm not entirely certain about the distribution method either.

Ideas? thoughts? Not at all interested in my old work? Let me know so I've got at least some idea idea whether of not I should spend any time on digitizing things.

I'll be back in two weeks

I still remember the early days when I started out in the fandom. Yerf (anyone still remember that site?) had at least two art exchange threads going. VCL had a monthly art compo. Comic jams and art exchange communities where all over the place. There were more artists organizing competitions than there were artists drawing for competitions.


And now?

nothing!


Am I missing something here? Seriously, where did all the fun go? Is this what the rise of community sites like FA did, isolate everyone in their own little walled garden?

I'll be spearheading a slightly altered workflow for chapter 2 of down to earth so I'm looking for an innocent test subject.

What you will get:
1 digitally drawn comic page, flat color. I can work from either a general outline or a detailed, panel by panel script. There will be three feedback moments during the drawing process: after thumbnailing, after sketching, during coloring.
samples: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/1900035/ , http://www.furaffinity.net/view/2032656/

Restrictions:
* I don't do porn
* I'm not very good at drawing techy things. Asking me to draw a giant mecha fight or something similar will probably end in a sub-par result, no matter how hard I try.

But wait, there's a catch:
This offer will only be open to the first person to gift me a copy of Portal (the 2007 game. Yes I'm one of those simpletons that didn't get it when it was free. You can point and laugh now.)

Two weeks! Did I really write two weeks? I meant 20 weeks of course. How silly of me, forgetting the zero at the end.

The comics will be continuing really soon now. No, honestly, I mean it this time. What do you mean you don't believe me?

Leaving on a short vacation. Be back in two weeks.

That's why the next part of the right pond is taking so long. 9 pages and 67 panels on my last count. 4 Pages are finished, 1 is being sketched, 3 other have been storyboarded and the last page I haven't gotten beyond the scripting stage yet.

When the moon is half full is experiencing similar difficulties, but has more of a tendency to increase in page count instead of panel count.

In other words, I've taken a two week vacation and now I'm working on those two. Down to earth will return to a thrice weekly schedule in 8 days.

I'm trying to get back on track with Tempest. My epic 'unicorn versus deranged wizard' magic mayhem comic...
but I've got Erasure stuck in my head.


If the next page of Tempest turns out all pink and rainbowy, you can blame adult swim.

This has come up a couple times so here goes...

Requests
Maybe, if your request manages to inspire me. Chances are small, but you can increase them by putting some though into your ideas.

Trades
Same as for requests: if your character inspires me. Chances of this happening are even smaller than for requests.

commissions
No. Too much hassle, too little gains.

Prints
Ask me for a high-res version and print it yourself.
Note: I draw very small and mostly entirely digital so don't expect to be able to make poster sized prints

Kiriban
Occasionally. I've still got one running for the first person who screencaps 300 pageviews or higher.

Memes
Only once they have gone stale.


Also, a merry Christmas to you all!

Please stand by as I catch up on my internets, go through notes and comments and so forth.

The comics (Tempest, colder still, the right pond) will be on hold for a while longer. That New Year's resolution is pretty much a bust now anyway.

Meanwhile I will keep you entertained with a splattering of random images...

First I would like to wish you all a happy New Year. As for your first bit of useless trivia for 2009: In dutch male cat and hangover are the same word.

I would also like to thank you all for all the watches, favs and comments. I may be too lazy to reply to them but that doesn't mean I'm too lazy to be grateful for them.

And finally for those resolutions: (all of them comic related)
finish what really happened (only one more page to go)
finish the right pond (Transformation fans rejoice, it's not over yet.)
continue Tempest or get the ball rolling on Extinct.
Do at least the first chapter of Whiteout (ohnoes! humans!)

It's going to be a busy year and I'll almost certainly have to do at least one comic page every week if I want to meet my goals. Don't worry though, I wouldn't do this if I didn't enjoy the challenge.

Today I have been on this site for exactly 1 year. And since I'm in an exceptionally good mood right now...

Kiriban at 300 pageviews. First person to snap a screenshot of my 300 pageviews (or the lowest number higher than 300 if no one catches 300) gets free art. Not just any drawing but a full color comic page with backgrounds. I am of course willing to settle on an ordinary drawing if you wouldn't want a comic page.

The kiriban code:
No sex. I'm a virgin and wouldn't be able to draw a convincing fuck if I wanted to.
Likewise for various fetishes.
No pokemon, digimon or any other type of mon.
Humans are perfectly fine.

Remember that screenshot I uploaded yesterday? I've got a first Beta release ready and I need a couple unfortunate souls who would like to do some bug-hunting for me.

What is it?
It's a greasemonkey script that fixes a whole truckload of minor annoyances and inconsistencies on some FA pages, and does a complete renovation of some other pages.

Greasemonkey?
Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows you to customize the way webpages look and function.

Why?
Because I got annoyed with the state of the website. Then I thought that maybe more people could benefit from my solution.

For who?
People with Firefox 2.0 or higher that have some extra time on their hands they don't know what do to with, would like to help me, and won't freak out when they encounter a bug.

Features
- thumbnails in any size you want
- wraps thumbnails so they don't stretch your browser window
- filters
- tooltips in a sidebar
- redesigned inbox
- ...
All of these features are optional and can be disabled at will.

Obligatory warning
This is a beta version. While I have tried to make it as stable as possible, bugs can and will come up. Even though this script shouldn't be able to crash your browser, it may do so nevertheless. And finally, please don't hold me liable for any data loss that may occur on your end because I can not afford a lawyer. :(

Where to get it
direct install link (greasemonkey must be installed)
the website (go for 1.0 beta 1)

And that concludes my wall of text for today.
Any and all questions and comments more than welcome.