Year's coming to a close and I wanted to do a bit of a writeup to give some thoughts on where my work's currently at and share my plans for where I want to focus in the coming year!

The Bottomless Butlers - Main Focus
Should hopefully come as no surprise, as they've been my biggest focus for the year, but it's especially relevant to me now since I basically first conceived of the idea exactly one year ago. To give some backstory, around this time last year I was having a bit of a lull in my drawing plans, and looking for something to fully throw my efforts into. The butlers have pretty consistently continued to be an outlet for that over the past year, and I've got a lot of big plans for where I want art for them to go.

When it comes to my art schedule, I'm generally working through a backlog of ideas, some of which are multiple years old. (This is especially true with anything Pokemon related.) The butlers were a really unusual exception; the idea of 'naked butler' basically popped into my head just before the new year, and absolutely everything about them was conceived in the time it took me to whip up those character sheets about two weeks later. It was taking more of a risk than I was used to, given that you never really know how enthusiastic you'll be about an idea once it's no longer fresh, but I've remained pretty consistently interested in drawing them and they'll absolutely be getting the bulk of my creative efforts in 2024.

This is to say, I know it's a bit of an aesthetic shift for me, maybe slightly less raunchy and considerably more structured than anything I've done before, and this is kind of the point. The Obstagang trio was a band of OCs that were never really meant to have as much content as they do, they were just meant as background characters for my Lopunny OC to eventually fuck with (Still gonna happen some day! I swear it!!) and so their whole premise is kind of full of holes I never planned on filling. (Like, y'know, names.) The butlers are intended as something that's really fully my own creation, a distinct setting, cast of characters, and story beats that follow some kind of structure even if it's still not a proper plotline. It's basically just a nonstop character building exercise, no real end goal in sight.

I'm finishing up a six page 'end' to this introductory arc with the butlers, something to tie off the major themes I'm aiming for with Blake's character, and hopefully set up the next major set of comics that's going to focus on Al's dynamic with the butlers rather than Blake. With the heavy lifting of setting up the basic premise out of the way, things are going to get considerably hornier than they already were-- I like drawing Blake, but I think Al's scenes will generally carry a lot more bara-spice with them, and I'm hoping it'll feel like a proper payoff to finally have him coming in with his big dramamine-proportions to fuck shit up. At the same time, I've got way more short, goofy strip-type things planned, and I'm going to push for more of these comics being short and sweet, consisting of 1 or 2 page anecdotes instead of pushing things to 4 or 6 pages.

The Obstagang - Secondary Focus
As described earlier, the Obstagang is definitely something I've found myself burning out on a little bit. A lot of it has to do with my own issues with their designs-- I like drawing Zangoose, but Obstagoon and Lycanroc are genuinely kind of difficult to make work a lot of the time, and I think they're long overdue a bit of a redesign to push them away from their purely canon-pokemon designs and maybe fur-ify them a bit more. This is especially an issue when it comes to all the one-off pokemon designs I throw in-- I'm just not suuuuper sure about how to anthropomorphize a lot of pokemon designs, and I'm left pretty disatisfied with a lot of the results-- it's something I'd just need to sketch through a lot more to really figure out, how to get a fully human-proportioned design like Obstagoon to work alongside the more toony, digitigrade pokemon like Lycanroc or Lucario.

That said, I've got a shitton more stuff planned for the three of them, a lot of which I think should ultimately benefit from the time I've spent away from drawing them. I'd like to think the best is yet to come for the Obstagang, it's just a matter of finding time to draw them more. Ultimately, they're always going to follow this less formal approach to building their characters, fewer clearly defined arcs and not a ton of payoff, but there is a bit of a 'climax' I've got planned for them that I really want to get around to drawing at some point. Not a definitive ending, mind you, just something to tie together their development as characters. I'm looking forward to giving them some air again!

VN Art / Adastra - Winding Down
So with the Adastra art, while it was at one point my peak focus, I think I've kind of drawn all I need to draw for the time being-- after finishing up the last four pages of the "After the Dance" comic (next on the list after I get out this Butler comic this week) I'm not planning on making any more Adastra scenes for the time being. There's still many sundry scenes I love re-reading and have some sort of idea in mind for, and it's still just kind of wild to me how the first VN I read is just so far and away my favorite one, the characters and writing in it and its sequels are just completely my favorite. If development on its sequels ever kicks back up again and we start getting regular releases, I will totally consider diving back in for more, but for the time being fanart for it feels a little like trying to breath life back into something that's just clearly already had its day in the sun, when there's so, so many other projects I'm reading and watching come out on the regular.

So that's to say, I'm not totally done with VN fanart! Really, my main priority this year is speed-- to figure out how to get through a lot of these ideas in a way that's fun and effective story telling, and isn't leaving me with as many 3 or 4 week gaps. The Adastra art I've done has really been some of my favorite because it's just such a breath of fresh air-- pulling from writing and characters so far superior to my own, to really see if I can make something that feels like it does the source material justice. There's a lot of VNs I'm keeping up with nowadays that I'd love to give a bit of fanart to-- not the least of which is TSR, which is just easily my second favorite, like holy SHIT I love it so much, and could easily make a whole other gallery of fan art for in a similar vein.

With all of this, it's mainly just a matter of finding the time, and working through my own personal ideas is something I'm trying to give top priority. Still, I don't like just being totally in my own little bubble of an art world, cuz there's just too many projects I'm following that I want to pay some kinda homage to. Back when I was doing the YCH-tober giveaways, my main motivator was being able to share in some of the OCs other people are creating that I just find really endearing or fun to draw, and VNs are really where I'm finding a veritable gold-mine of that kind of content-- characters with actual viewable backstories and chemistry instead of just people's sonas. Simply put, it's the most fun thing for me to draw, its the kind of context I generally want all my work to have, and it's why I'm still pretty far from wanting to take commissions or collabs or to do a ton of gift art to specific people.

So that's my 2024 in a nutshell! Thanks to everyone who's taken the time to enjoy my stuff, very special thanks to anyone who's leaving comments that give me a glimpse as to how much of my bad writing is actually managing to communicate the right idea with people-- it's the most satisfying thing in the world to see someone pick up on the subtext I put into my comics, haha. With Twitter always seeming to be on the verge of total collapse, I kind of just have to work with the assumption that my biggest source of exposure might just go kaput, so it's always nice to have a place like FA to come back to that just seems to be unshakable for whatever reason.

By some improbable sequence of events, I've created OCs that a few people find compelling enough to write fan fiction over-- I got sent one such fanfic by  xandromeda a few days ago, and found a pretty fun and enjoyable take on the gang and their Boss's far-more-flamboyant cousin.

You can check it out here!

Generally speaking, I give everyone free reign to write fanfic or make fanart about any OCs I've created, if I like it I like it, if it's not my thing then that's fine too. I've basically just given a voice to some very archetypal pokemon so, y'know, go nuts. I don't make journals often, so if you make something yourself, feel free to leave it behind in a comment here for me to find later!

So I've finally shared my latest Adastra comic, and it's basically the longest / hardest I've ever worked on a single furry art project, so I figured I'd make a rare journal post of reflections/tips that I picked up in the process.

I started this comic basically right after finishing the game back in February. I immediately knew it was my favorite scene out of the entire game, I knew that drawing it would take forever, and I had very little confidence in what I was throwing myself into. So unlike most work I do, where I just power through one piece at a time, I decided this would be more of a long-form thing, and this was absolutely the way to go. I hadn't drawn humans in basically years, Amicus's body build wasn't coming easily, and I had a real fear I was going to burn myself out on Adastra long before finishing it. So I scripted it out, laid out an initial set of pages (only six, later expanded to eight) and then just sat on it as I started working on all the other smaller fanart pieces I've now put out.

First major lesson was that I needed to warm up on drawing the characters before sketching things out. I've got character rotations for Amicus/Marco I've never shared, including multiple designs / later redesigns for Marco. I dug up every piece of fan art I could find for Marco, and tried to average out to something commonly understood to be him (mostly leaning on Haps' later drawings of him.) I didn't hold back on changing things later in the process, once I decided my 1.0 marco design was just too bland. More than anything though, I figured out how to draw them through all the smaller, one-off comics I put out over time. Drawing all these moments I hadn't personally written but loved reading, it was pushing outside my comfort zone in the most enjoyable sense. Porn was basically all I drew before that, and a very non-serious brand of it too. I was petrified of how to draw some scenes in this recent comic, I had no confidence in how to get across some of these emotions, Marco crying in particular I was definitely not gonna land if I tried to do it all in one go. So I worked my way up to it with all the smaller stuff, experimented with more dramatic compositions and moods, and gradually pieced together all the sketches one at a time, just sort of jumping around to whatever interested me the most at the time.

Second thing was to reference other comic artists for composition, and to do it a lot. I knew I wanted this to be formatted a little more professionally, so with the page count in mind, I tried experimenting with different panel structures. In particular, I tried to focus on how to make things dynamic, so every page isn't the same few combinations, but also lay the upper limits of how crazy I wanted to get. I thought a lot about when to keep things within the margins vs going all the way to the edge for better effect. Breaking the frame of panels is an effect I still don't think I quite landed, but I'm happy with the couple instances where I decided to do it. The biggest struggle was choosing to expand it from 6 pages to 8, which had to be suggested by someone else, but I absolutely think it helped out with the pacing and gave certain panels the breathing room they needed to really set the mood.

Third, after really solidifying the sketch over several months and just needing to set aside the time to crank out the lineart, colors, and finishing touches, I had a lot of learning to do about the software I use and what shortcuts I can make there. I use a combination of Clip Studio Pro on my PC and Procreate on my iPad for lineart (though lately it's just all clip studio) and for how cheap it is, it surprises me how much Clip Studio can take care of. The Lasso-Fill tool is how i handle basically all my flat / cell shading, a lesser known feature that just makes silhouette coloring ridiculously comfy and saves a significant amount of cleanup time. Clip studio has a sizable suite of comic-formatting tools, but I actually prefer just using a group with a black-outline effect for Panels / speech bubles / sound FX, and add of bit of variation through mesh transform for the latter two. The one comic-tool I do use a lot is all their action-line tools that let you set the intensity / amount of lines, and then transform them after to get just the right position. I also learned with this comic in particular that 1001 fonts user blambot has a huge collection of decent comic fonts, which I used not just for the speech bubbles, but plenty of sound FX as well, and those paired with some font-formatting adjustments before rasterizing the type can give you a terrific starting point as opposed to just straight up hand lettering.

It has to be said that at the end of the day, this isn't the best structure for a comic, following a visual novel script nearly to the letter. There's a lot of enjoyment to be had to illustrating a visual novel, as I hope my fanart's shown, and I think it's a fun thing more people should try if they're feeling art blocked. But, there's a lot of things that get thrown off by omitting all the internal monologing that goes on with Marco, which wouldn't translate well to comic form very well. (As is shown in the very last panel, it's kind of confusing and unclear.) The pacing gets all off, and I think the final product ends up packing way too much into too few pages, where you get this shift from comedic relief to heart break in only two pages. I'm no expert on comics, I don't read very many of them at all outside of the furry sphere, and that's the kind of thing that if I really wanted to be good at comic making, I'd have a massive, diverse collection of. Still, braeburned, purplebirdman, anhes, and chinpow's comics (chinpow in particular is basically my furry-comic idol and I think it shows) all blow me away with their structure and formatting, and go a long way to being a really professional reference point for all those wanting to up the quality of their comics.

Ultimately though, it just really has to be stressed how important it is to draw what you're passionate about drawing. The post-adastra depression hit and, for whatever reason, made me decide furry art was what I wanted all my free time to be spent doing, and I can't express enough just how happy I am that me drawing gay-shit that isn't just porn still appeals to much of the people that follow me. I've always had a passion for shoujo manga, so a lot of my recent output feels like expressing a creative urge I've had since I was about 12 and pulling out issues of Fruit's Basket at the library. I've always got way too many things I want to draw, but I feel driven to work through as much of the pile as is possible, and I'm just glad it's not a feeling that's waned once the Adastra depression wore off.

I'm already starting on the next comic that'll be slightly smaller in scale, a scene from the start of Interea. I've got several other Adastra mini comics planned in the meantime, less canon stuff and more jokey, romancy stuff, I've got things from other VNs I've liked playing that I wanna draw, and of course I've got much more planned with the Obstagoon crew and other OCs. I wanna try to keep it at like a 50/50 sfw / nsfw split, but it will absolutely all be gay as hell one way or another.

 MarrowHyena made a video essay on Adastra and it's amazing!

I saw Keith's Adastra Let's Play back when it started and I made a Let's Play Animated about it that I never posted here. If you like my Adastra fanart, video essays, and/or analyzing/revisiting the plots and themes from that game, I super recommend it. It's chock full of fan art from Haps / me / other fan artists and just does an all around amazing job analyzing the game and why it hits so hard for so many gays. Watch it or put it on in the background, it's a fun ride.

(He's also playing through Echo rn and does a lotta good playthroughs of plot-heavy indie games, highly recommend his channel just in general)

So, another October of YCH giveaway is in the bag. This year, I actually had way more time to put into them, and spent September making up detailed sketches to smooth out the process. I’d say this year went off easier than ever, but at the same time, left me a little let down by what i put out, something I felt last year as well and went into kind of a lengthy hiatus because of it. I’m taking another, hopefully shorter break this year, but this time I’m gonna share my thoughts some. So buckle up if ur curious. This is gonna get long winded, cold, and analytical.

I started making furry porn at the very start of 2018, a little after graduating art school. I’d really never drawn much of any porn before, and literally never drew nor considered myself a furry prior, but as an avid fan of bara porn with a wealth of free time and a shiny new iPad, I decided to give it a whirl. It was honestly stunning when I noticed the third thing I posted got actual traction on twitter— just a silly scratchy comic with some shark dudes, a total brain-fart of a horny-joke, but it gave me a pretty clear image that if I wanted my art to engage with people, this was the way to do it.

I think this is kind of my first hang-up about the stuff I make, is the sorta ‘artistic integrity’ behind making porn and what gets the most interaction. I spend a lot of time trying to psycho-analyze what makes some stuff hit it off better with people than others, and at least content wise, the answer just feels kinda… embarrassingly simple? Like, muscle-bound, big-dick, himbo-dudes paired off with some complimentary personality/body type, in a sweet-heart scenario that targets the feels, it’s a super safe bet for feel-good porn content. At the same time, all my favorite artists just seem so much more inspired than that, and I hate that so often, it seems like they get less noticed because of it. Its been legit uncomfortable watching my twitter follows rise higher than artists who are just wildly more inspiring to me, pulling from their own gay-perspective and reflecting these fantasies and personalities that are horny, sure, but also so captivating and unique to me. My work just doesn’t do that— I really don’t think I’ve put enough into it to get that kind of reaction, it’s all very trope heavy, in-and-out kinda porn, which is intentional, but also kind of a failing, cuz I think it’s the best I can do. And still, I can’t help but crave the validation of making a thing more people like. Sort of a sell-out without the money.

On technical side of art quality, there’s the question of how good I am at drawing furry porn. I think its the scenarios that draw people to my art more than the art quality— Without being too self-deprecating, I’m pretty confident that my art style, experience in drawing furries, and understanding of fundamentals like anatomy and lighting doesn’t really carry the response it gets. I can only get so angsty about it, because I hardly spend any time practicing nowadays, so it’s not that surprising that I’ve kind of qualitatively flat-lined. But, similar to that first shark comic I made that got eyes on it, I think I get a response because I’m an okay porn artist, but the thing I’m actually good at is resonating with the horny fantasies of gay cisgendered furries. Still, I think I saw myself being further along by this point with my technical skills, and that was really the roughest patch of this YCH month— looking through everyone’s ref pics and realizing “Oh no they have great taste in commissions, this is going to be the worst art they’ve ever gotten.” And I mean, it’s free, so who gives a hooey. But I look back on this year’s pieces, which I basically spent twice as much time on as last year’s, they’re really not punching up all that much. Slightly better anatomy thanks to the sketches, slightly more consistent approach to coloring, but still just not doing people’s characters much justice. (Also super disappointing that because I’m so slow, I’m passing on a lot of people with characters that I find really interesting, just too tricky to draw in one day.)

Outside of my own art, though, I have to say that my biggest hang up is really just about twitter being my go to place to get reactions to my porn, and whether or not that’s like… doing more harm than good. When I started, I loved getting the occasional offended normie, seeing some person who’s wandered too far into furry country being horrified by the sight of anthro-pokemon dicks. But the more complicated side I’m seeing over time is that by burying my head in the porn-side of the fandom, I’m kind of missing how many people have a perfectly reasonable aversion to accounts like mine that just make everything horny. I can’t say I fully understand the SFW/NSFW divide of the furry fandom, but I get that it’s not something I should just insert myself into when my WHOLE PRESENCE is so explicitly nsfw. Any post or comment i make outside the nsfw “bubble” comes with all my horny account baggage in tow, and even if I made a SFW account, it would have this shadow of “but how would they respond if they knew what i was REALLY known for.”

An even bigger concern I’ve got, is a sort of un-founded theory that, with all its traffic, Twitter’s probably got a thinner divide than most sites for its users over / under 18. Even with your content being marked mature, you’ve got a way higher likelihood that your stuff is gonna end up attracting minors, and that’s probably my biggest motivator for having just ZERO community interaction outside this one month of YCH pieces— and even then, I shudder to think I might be giving art to some stealthy thirteen year old because realistically, we all know there’s nothing stopping them. (Save for my 200+ blocked accounts with ages listed in their profiles…) There’s a lot of things to like about the opportunities twitter provides by being this hub for just ALL types of content, god knows a lot of full-time artists depend on it, far be it from me to suggest that they shouldn’t have the traffic they have— but with the constant recurring drama of “X artist was talking/rping/sexting with Y minor”, I wonder how many of those connections could’ve been all together avoided on a site that wasn’t just a total melting pot.

Tbh, this was most likely my last year doing the October YCH thing, for all the reasons stated. I told myself the same thing last year, so who knows! But all in all, though it’s a fun exercise, I think the low-quality of work is what really makes the work load not worth it, paired with this uncertainty of who I’m gifting art to/what kinda shit I’m stirring up by doing it in the first place. Sorry if the twitter bit comes off as a hot-take, I’m really not advising anyone change their behavior in any particular way, it’s just something I’m trying to be mindful of going forward since my initial approach was just to go in swinging dicks with reckless musky abandon.

Got a lot of ideas piled up for the future, whenever i get back to posting. Expect the further cruising adventures of a frisky Lopunny— my hope is just that when I get around to it, the effort to improve is more genuine, and shows up in more tangible ways.

For those who don’t follow me on Twitter, I’ve been doing this Inktober-inspired sketch challenge for the past two years where I make porn every day in October, and starting last year I made it 100% YCH focussed, turning it into more of a month-long giveaway. (Results can all be viewed in my Scraps) I’m pulling stuff together for this year’s set of pieces, but I wanted to list out some of my reasons/resignations about the whole thing. I keep my fandom interactions pretty low, and I guess it raises some questions why someone who doesn’t take commissions/requests the rest of the year suddenly starts throwing out freebies in a hurry. It’s kind of an obsessive-compulsive thing, I’ll admit— but I’m trying to come to terms with the image it gives off, cuz it all feels sort of overdramatic for me.

For starters, fursonas are what got me into furries. I mostly do this cuz I love the idea of fursonas/avatars and need an excuse to draw people’s characters; it’s a fun way to brush-up against that side of the fandom, but still leaves me with a clear cut off date so I don’t have to deal with constant expectations. It’s self indulgent, but I love looking through all the submissions— matching them to a sketch is a ton of fun! It kinda strikes me how personal it is on some level, having someone give you this representation of some part of themselves, and then I just add some dick to the mix and it’s a good thing? That’s kinda wild.

Now, on the other hand, I feel like I don’t really get what I’m doing. The whole concept of a “YCH Piece” was something I found kind of strange at first, and I still don’t totally get the appeal. As someone who draws and doesn’t put a ton of stock in his own fursona, I can’t totally empathize with the demand for free sona-art, I feel like I’m not really grasping just how much importance people place on it. Because of that, I get kind of paranoid about how many people I’m disappointing. There’s also the fanboy inside of me that just wants to pick a lot of the more popular characters that get submitted, cuz I like em, and they’re often an easier pick than most. I know that’s a really controversial thing for giveaways, I try and hold back that urge most of the time, but when they’re basically approaching me with an excuse to make fan art, it’s hard to resist.

Being a free-art-machine also makes for kind of a bad example, community wise. Furry art is just a hobby for me— I don’t do commissions, Patreon, ko-fi, etc. No money’s involved. I do these YCH for free because I rely on the creative freedom I get from these being no-strings-attached, and easily drawing in lots of submissions. It’s a personal challenge/labor of love for a fandom I don’t totally understand, I get *absolutely* nothing practical out of it besides practice, so please don’t watch me and think this should be the norm from other artists. Basically, don’t expect artists to work for free, just cuz you know someone else who does under very particular circumstances.

Lastly, just have to say— I’m not wild about the quality of the work I put out during these things. I try to improve, but a lot gets sacrificed for speed, and I don’t work fast as well as other artists do. To anyone who got a piece from me and felt maybe just the slightest touch disappointed by how it looked, you’re not being selfish, I FEEL YOU FAM. It *kills* me when I fuck up someone’s character in these. I hope I can do a more solid job this time around, but who knows!


Anyways, for those who’re on the participatory end of YCH things, what’s the main draw of getting porn drawn with your character in it? What specifically do you look for in a porn YCH piece? Ever felt uncomfortable with a YCH piece?

Putting this out so you can all get access to the files at the actual size that I worked on them-- Apologies if the posted versions were a touch hard to read, was trying to account for Twitter compression!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/k6j91xfgi.....DayHD.zip?dl=0