Anyone have any experience with these things? Here’s one that I found for a reasonable price on Amazon: https://a.co/d/aJs06Eg

I saw one over the weekend and it was a larger device with four blades and intended to be mounted over people’s heads and plugged into a wall outlet and I was intrigued enough to look closer into these devices to see if there was anything that might be useful for a convention table display that I could mount on my cubicle panels. The trouble is that all the search results that I’m coming across are of a similar nature: Asian imports where the reviews say the instructions aren’t in English and the item description doesn’t give enough breakdown for me to know what the electrical requirements are. Since this would be used at my convention table I would want to get something relatively lightweight with a USB power cable that I can plug into my portable battery power bank rather than going into a wall outlet. I do have a cable converter to make a USB cable compatible with a barrel jack (https://a.co/d/dejaLUI) but I don’t know enough about electrical details to be sure that any fan display I might buy will be properly powered from my battery bank and not suffer a short circuit in the process. What I would *LOVE* is to find a store that sells these so I could see them in person and ask questions from a sales person but again, all search results point to these being Asian imports so I’m left with questions. Maybe someone reading this can offer some advice?

Thanks in advance!

I've been thinking about mortality more than I would have liked over the past year. People die all the time but it seems that there were a lot more people who passed this past year who I knew personally and to some extent that's had me wondering how much more time do I have to be here and to enjoy the company of friends and family I care about. My uncle Dave passed in March 2024 and that was hard, but perhaps harder is the news that my step-sister Heather died just yesterday, apparently while sleeping and of natural causes. I met her when my Dad started dating her mother when I was 12 or 13 and even back then she just felt different. She was real. Genuine. Unassuming. And so incredibly friendly. She had all the best attributes of your favorite dog that you just wanted to hug and have around because she was so affable. You got the sense that she *listened* to you and heard what you had to say. In my own life I so often feel like I need to hide aspects of my personality and life, but Heather had a way of just *being there* and was happy to share your company and making you feel welcome. I never felt self conscious around her. I don't know how she did it, although I've been blessed to know her mother very well and her mother's parents too for many years so I know that sense of caring and interest in other people came from receiving it from her family.

Reading the outpouring of love for her since the news got out of her passing has been wonderful but also hard. She touched so many people's lives so deeply and truthfully. I'm seeing her from a perspective I hadn't appreciated before. She genuinely cared for people in such a simple unassuming way and I think I just took for granted that she'd always be around so I didn't take as much opportunity to interact with her as much as I could. I think I was just grateful and comfortable to be around her when we gathered for family holidays. I wish I could have expressed these thoughts to her when she was around. I get the feeling that she already knew the affect she had on people and that the affection folks had for her was a reflection of the kindness she continuously gave in abundance. It's going to be really hard not having her around at future family gatherings. I'm just so grateful that we got to share time with her for so long, even if that time is so unfortunately short. She had just turned 52 only a month ago.

Folks, if you can, share your appreciation with the people you care about. Let them know you're thinking about them and that they make a difference to you.

I'll be driving up to Chicago on Thursday for MFF and I hope to see a bunch of you there! I'll be working at one of the staff tables in the Artist Alley so be on the lookout for one of the red tablecloths (along with my banner table-runner display) and you shouldn't have too much trouble finding me. I'll be doing my usual thing of taking commissions and offering up stickers and prints, along with a whole bunch of original art from my normal doodles that I've been uploading to this gallery as well as material that I've been sharing on my NSFW Patreon account (https://www.patreon.com/The_Bottom_Line). On top of that I'll have 23 pieces of original art on display in the art show, so please check it out and perhaps put up a bid if the images strike your fancy, eh?

Also, -dress warmly this weekend 'cause it's gonna be COOOOOLLLLD.

God, I just caught myself questioning whether it was actually 2024 or not. Oh well. I’m in Orlando currently and tomorrow begins the first day of the Megaplex convention (which in my head is still Pawpet Megaplex) and I’m delighted to be here and looking forward to seeing a lot of people and old friends. If you do make it to the show give me a thumbs up tomorrow as it’s a rather special day for me as I cross the milestone of 50 years. Quite interesting that it’ll be happening at a furry convention but I suppose with the amount of cons I’ve been doing over the past couple years the odds have been rising on that eventually happening.

Cheers to y’all and let’s have a great time!

Today is Wednesday August 7th, and tomorrow I will be making the 10.5 hour drive to Philadelphia for the Furrydelphia convention. Two weeks later I'll be making a 3 hour drive to Indianapolis for Indyfurcon. *One* week later I'll be making the 12.5 hour drive to Orlando for the Megaplex convention, and then I'll be driving 23 hours to get to Minneapolis for the Furry Migration convention. I'm feeling a mix of tired and invigorated just thinking about it. I *love* working conventions and drawing for people, I just wish that these events weren't scheduled so close to each other. One of the regrets over the tight scheduling is that I'm going to be turning 50 years old on the first day of Megaplex and I would love to actually do something fun in Orlando to celebrate ('cause it's SO easy to find something fun to do there) but because I'll only be in town for such a short time I won't be able to stay an extra day to go anywhere. I mean, I'll find something nice to do, but whenever I'm in Orlando I want to spend time actually relaxing there.

ANYHOW, please look me up at the shows I mention above if you'll be attending. It means a lot to me to meet people and share my enthusiasm for drawing so don't be shy!

I've been BUSSSSYYYYY for the past month and almost all of it has been spent getting things prepared for the summer conventions which will start in earnest in two weeks with Anthrocon, and then will continue in August with Furrydelphia, followed by Indyfurcon, Megaplex, and Furry Migration. I'm rather on pins and needles because I've been going deep into the realm of making stickers, decals, prints, and BIG prints. Essentially stocking up for what's forthcoming. I've been doing conventions since 1998 but almost all of my time is spent doing commissions, -which is great, but it also means that my ability to make sales is dictated by the speed at which I can execute those projects because once the con is over and I bring the remaining projects home my I go back to "normal life" where I can't spend the kind of sleepless break-neck hours doing art like I do at the conventions. Starting at this year's Anthrocon however I'm going to see whether I can actually do well with the kind of merchandise I'm good at: making imagery that is appealing and entertaining and I've got ALL MY FINGERS AND TOES CROSSED that this will prove to be a worthwhile endeavor. Merchandise has the virtue of being something I can sell QUICKLY... all the work is done up front, which means that while I'm in the midst of talking to folks about doing commissions I can ALSO make sales. There's a small part of my regular anxiety that says "What if I do all this work and people say it looks great but it's just not what they want to buy"? @_@ For the time being though I'm making stuff that *I* think is cool and would be a pretty snazzy way of decorating your wall, laptop, water bottle, guitar case, etc., and if you look me up at the aforementioned conventions I will be THRILLED to show you what I've been up to. Please let me entertain you!

Hey folks, I recently purchased a new printer that is capable of making 13 x 19 inch prints like some of you may have seen me offer at the conventions and I've got a couple questions I want to pose to y'all. When you guys are interested in buying prints does the larger size appeal to you? 13x19 sounds big, but until you actually see it and hold it it's sometimes hard to appreciate. That's well over twice the size of a normal letter-sized piece of paper that you'll typically buy a print on, which is really impressive to see in person. 8.5 x 11 inch letter-sized paper is pretty great for looking at at arms length, but 13 x 19 is something you can appreciate on your wall.

Now the thing is that when people are shopping at a convention the issue with 13 x 19 inch prints is: what do you DO with it during that in-between time where you have to transport it home? I ask this because I'm curious whether that issue is enough of a consideration that even if you WANTED to buy a print so large you would decide against it because of the hassle? Ultimately though is this big of a print just more than you would want? That kind of question relates to what people want to do with their prints. Personally I have a lot of prints but I put them all in a binder that rests on my bookshelf so I can easily store them and look at them when I want.

I'm in the midst of preparing for Anthrocon and this new printer has me really excited over what I can offer and this whole post is just me considering how much I want to invest in big paper and larger ink reserves so that I can have enough prints on hand... and then how to advertise that I've got these in the first place.

Hm... I suppose another possibility here is that I could make giant prints of the commissions I've done for people, -both future and past commissions. I take great care to make high quality scans of everything and so the prints I could make would look pretty awesome... and HUGE.

Hope y’all are ready for it! *I* hope it proves a strong event because it’s one of the closest events to my home… maybe I can make this an annual appearance? Come on down and say hi! This’ll be my last convention until Anthrocon in July and I’ve got lots to do before then. Holy crap how is it almost the middle of the year already?

Thank you to everybody who I got the chance to interact with at FWA this past weekend. It was a genuine pleasure to spend time talking with everybody, and it would seem that my voice is actually recovering now! It was loud and crowded enough that I found myself having to raise my voice and by mid Saturday I was getting concerned that I might be straining myself.

Man oh man was there a lot of people attending this year. I knew that FWA was one of the larger events on the annual calendar, but I didn't anticipate it leapfrogging into the busiest event around so quickly! I'm all in favor of increasing the audience attendance, but I seriously hope that the capacity can increase to keep up with it all. I kept hearing stories over the weekend of hours-long wait just to get into the Artist Alley and Dealers Den, along with my previous understanding of the huge numbers of people applying for the limited number of available tables for AA and DD. I don't know whether the lessons and observations from this can be applied comprehensively to next year's event, but I'm certain that the things that need to be addressed aren't lost on the decision makers at FWA. I had a great time and did the strongest sales I've ever had this year and I really hope that the money being made from attendee and dealer registration along with hotel room bookings and general level of peripheral money being spent in the Atlanta area can allow the convention to overcome the strained capacity that happened this year.

My next event is AnthrOhio in Columbus, OH which will be my first time attending. I'm looking forward to it and hope to see a bunch of people (new and old) there. In the meantime I've got a pile of work I need to do.

On Wednesday I drive to North Carolina to meet up with  bluecanary and then head out to Atlanta for FWA. You can find me in the Artist Alley each day where I'll be doing my best to draw all kinds of fun things for people on-site and as rapidly as I'm able. I hope to see you there!

Also... you may find some NSFW material too. @_@

One of the things I *LOVE* doing is drawing facial expressions and attitudes. To some extent I also love drawing body language but the nuance of that is less pronounced than drawing the face because body language is an outgrowth of your state of mind and the first place your inner thoughts become revealed to the outside world is on your face. More fun for me is that your facial expressions are the purest "picture" of your inner personality. Everybody can convey the same emotions, but the "coloration" of that emotion, the intensity, and the spark of your expression is going to be unique to how you think and feel. Drawing expressions and attitudes is inherently linked to the design of the character and the more design and exaggeration you put into it can further separate two characters that are otherwise doing the same thing but with different designs. Think about various live action and animated scenarios where two characters have their brains switched and suddenly you (as the viewer) need to be convinced that the same character personality traits are inhabiting a completely different body. That's also the fun of watching a good comic doing an impersonation of another well known character.

I think about this ALL this time and it's what I endeavor to learn anytime I'm asked to do a commission for somebody. I don't want to just draw a character's *design* I want to draw them *thinking* and *doing*, and to that end I often engage in long conversations with folks to try and get them to communicate what makes their character tick. It's important to know that personality is NOT backstory, though backstory can highly influence your personality. Personality is expressed in little moments of situational storytelling: how do you feel when you wake up with a pain in your ankle, what does your face look like when you've got a great secret and want to tell everyone but you made a promise, what are your movements like when you've been hard working for 8 hours but you haven't eaten in 12? Every character will look a little different in each situation and the same character might not behave the same way if they've slept well, eaten recently, or are now in a bad mood.

When thinking about personalities I usually suggest to people to think in broad baseline attitudes because that helps enter into your character's usual mindset. These baselines are your character's natural outlook on life: grumpy, suspicious, absent-minded, sunny, noble, naive, and so on. These baseline personality traits can sometimes be well known ("Man, Gary is always so emo about everything.") but for the most part real people downplay their attitudes in normal social interactions because that's how you avoid drama and get ahead in life. But when you're DRAWING characters and telling stories then it really helps to thinkin about these baseline attitudes and find ways to SHOW them. It pays off to be bold and exaggerated in these aspects so that the audience you're performing for can instantly see and understand the thinking going on inside the character's head.

Why am I writing about this? This is something I've been thinking about for a long time and it's a conversation I repeatedly have with people when getting started on character commissions and I thought some of you might be interested in the thinking behind it all. I'm ALSO writing about this because I just watched a video where Tom Hanks gives an entertaining acting lesson to an audience and ALL the things he talks about plays RIGHT into what I've been thinking about for years. It gets to the heart of why your character is more than just happy with a latent interest in being mischevious. Your character has desires, has experienced many things that shaped how they express themselves in moments of delight or frustration, and when you think about all the different ways your character can act in a specific way at a specific moment under specific circumstances then you'll start seeing your own art and the art you commission become a lot more alive and unique in personality.

Take a look at this video and enjoy the possibilities when you think about your own characters.

….starts today! I’m over at table E4 in the dealers room and will be delighted to talk and draw all day long so if you’re attending please come in over and say hi!

(copy and pasted from my Twitter post)

I've been trying off-and-on since I got my ipad to learn the ways of Procreate, and I'm just not finding the level of fidelity with the drawing tools that I want. I've downloaded a lot of different brushes both free and paid, and have tried editing them to the extent I know how.

My immediate goal is to be able to draw in Procreate with the same level of quality that I can achieve with pencil and paper. That should be achievable, right? Here's where things currently break down for me with every brush in Procreate:

Currently I cannot lay down a light semi-transparent stroke with precise control over the size of the line and opacity. The stroke inevitably is too small or too thick depending on the tilt of the stylus, and the pressure sensitivity controlling the opacity and thickness is off.

This kind of control is tightly linked to the way I draw and the process which I build a rough pose into a more nuanced figure and it's frustrating that the Procreate brush strokes behave inconsistently making it hard to define anatomical landmarks in perspective.

Am I asking too much? Plenty of people are able to draw just fine in Procreate and achieve better results than I can with the same tools, so maybe I just need to accept what it is and work within those limitations.

Except I know I don't have to because on the same ipad with the same stylus I *CAN* draw better by using Clip Studio, -my go-to drawing tool for years that I was first introduced to on PC with my Cintiq. When I use the same CS brushes on my ipad I can achieve a MUCH higher drawing fidelity.

Everything I've done in Procreate feels like using a big crayon, or a charcoal stick, or conversely a needle instead of the precise, dextrous pencil I use constantly on physical paper. Of course I can still get things *done* with the clumsy drawing tool, but it's frustrating.

Since I *can* achieve a satisfying level of precision using the ipad Clip Studio brushes I'm convinced it's not the hardware that's the problem, -it's either the Procreate software itself or the fiddly brush settings that make the experience different.

I would *LOVE* to learn more about the brush settings in Procreate in order to understand how to dial in these settings better. I want to use Procreate! I'm jealous of folks who can produce such amazing stuff with the program and I feel like I'm missing out.

If you understand what I'm talking about and have experience with how to manipulate the brush settings in Procreate I would love to hear from you and learn how to make things better. I'll watch and read recommended tutorials and install different brushes to try new things out.

I appreciate any feedback that can be offered. Thanks!

I'll be there, and you may also catch sight of Tracy  Calicougar too, -though she's going to be sightseeing in Pittsburgh for part of the time. We'll be setting up shop at table J14 which is relatively close and to the right of the main entrance of the dealer's room. I'll have my usual collection of original art (new stuff since you've seen me last time!) along with prints, stickers, and other things! Do check out the art show as well as I've got several new pieces up for bid.

Pretty much I try to deliver all my commissions at the convention I'm attending, but what I've been discovering over the past year is that by the end of the day Friday I'm approaching my limit to what I can complete by Sunday. I'll still do my best, but it's very likely that by mid Saturday anything new I take on will need to be mailed out after the convention is over. I **LOVE** drawing for people and look forward to meeting everyone and talking about all kinds of goofy things. Come on by and have some fun!

Hey there, -I need to apologize to the folks who've messaged me going back an embarassingly long time now who have been asking about my availability to do commissions. I've seen your messages but in many cases I've not responded because I just haven't had the time to do so, and more precisely I haven't been able to take on new commissions. For the most part in 2022 I had a queue long enough that by the time I worked my way through the list I would be attending a convention where the list would creep back up, and the cycle just continued on and on. The hard part has been that I really do enjoy, appreciate, and quite frankly *need* to take on more commissions to pay the bills and so I've been doing what I can to step up the pace of my work in order to fulfill all my obligations more rapidly. I've been making good progress but I'm still not finished yet. I am hoping to get a lot of my work done by the end of July (including the stuff I expect to bring home from Anthrocon in just over a week) and when I do reach that point I'll be absolutely delighted to start taking on new commissions. I'll be posting a note about that here on FA and also on my Twitter account (@Brian_Reynolds3).

For those who I haven't responded to yet, -I'm sorry... it's definitely nothing personal and I sincerely look forward to drawing for everybody. You guys always keep me entertained and I hope to be able to do likewise for everyone.

Well... huh. I've been on this site for a long time but it after I started taking my tentative steps into using Twitter back in early 2020 I kinda drifted away from using FA. It felt like Twitter had a bigger audience and the immediate feedback from the things I shared there was really pleasant. Seeing things I offered up being shared and appreciated on Twitter was pretty awesome and even though the site was an awful way of preserving work as opposed to a dedicated *gallery* like FA I still found myself using Twitter at the expense of FA more and more. I'm not the sort of person who stays glued to a site and regularly updating and interacting with people. I remember way back in my first AOL chat room experiences getting overwhelmed by the amount of simultaneous conversations happening. The urge to interact with people one on one is strong and the sheer *noise* of all the activity on Twitter and social media sites is deafening. I like to post things intermittently and then step back and do something else. I fear this may seem anti-social but it's more like I need to keep things slow so I can devote my attention to it all at a pace I can manage. Even now I have a collection of notes in my FA inbox and Telegram that I cringe in embarassment over because I haven't read them. I want to happily turn to everyone who messages me and share my personal time in abundance just as I do at conventions, but I would never get anything done. I want to click on everything that other people share whether it's artwork, essays, stories, jokes, or questions and let them know I'm interested and enjoy what they're offering. And yet I don't. And I feel weird and awkward about it. I feel extraordinarily grateful for the attention people give to me and I don't want to let anyone down... and I want to keep doing things that get more attention. There's a balance there I should try to find.

It's a strange situation to find myself in while looking at Twitter. I've often gone days or sometimes weeks without sharing anything there. I'll take a look often and enjoy the deluge of things people share however and feel like I'm *rubbing elbows* with friends and peers, but at the end of the day I'm still left feeling like I am much more at home and comfortable talking with all the people I see and visit with while traveling and attending conventions. If Twitter collapses I guess I won't be too bothered by it because I expect *something* will rise up to take its place... but I hope the replacement will be better and ideally as large of an audience. The thing that was so great about Twitter vs. Fur Affinity is that the artwork I shared would reliably reach people who never knew I existed previously. FA is a lot more insular and that's part of what lead me to not spend as much time sharing here. It's odd to think that FA might be the site with the most stability for posting and sharing?

Other people on Twitter have posted notes with extensive lists of where they can be found if the site goes under. I don't have very much to share. I have an account here, and that's just about it. I have started to make some random posts back on my old Live Journal account and that may be something I'll use from time to time since that's more of a place where I'm totally me and not necessarily trying to talk to an audience. I never had an account with Tumblr, Instagram, or DeviantArt. I still have an account on Facebook but I've pretty much exiled myself from there because that was the place where I only established connections with family and friends who I knew personally, and after the turmoil of the past few years it all became too much for me to bear, -constantly reading about the things people were angry with and the devastating amount of cynicism and rancor within people who I thought I knew better than that.

Soo... here I am. Wondering what to do with myself. I keep hoping that Twitter will stay around and still be useful, but if it gets broken in the process of making it all new then maybe FA will become the widest audience I have to talk to and share with.

To everyone who reads this, let me just say I'm terribly glad to know you find my output interesting enough to watch and to sit and read through all this. At heart I'm deeply interested in the people behind the text and pictures and I hope that comes through in all the communication I offer whether it's in person, the images I upload, the work I do for people, or the messages I send out on the internet. You guys keep me motivated and glad to be sharing.

So it looks like I'm actually going to be attending Anthro New England after all. @_@ Yesterday was spent rapidly exploring the logistics of attending and yeah, I'm going to make the trip out. I'm going to be putting a LOT of effort into clearing my plate of commissions before Feb. 17th so nobody is kept waiting for too long and I can comfortably put my all into the convention work proper.

Anybody here going to be attending?

Damn, it feels like forever.

I'm going to be attending MFF this weekend in Chicago and I am SO MUCH looking forward to it. After damn near a year of doing nothing during the pandemic I've more than made up for it in activity this year, but still, a big convention is something that's been missing for a long, long time. I am trusting to faith and vaccines that nobody is going to regret going to the convention this year and that we can all have a good time.

To that end you'll be able to find me at one of the staff tables in the Artist Alley for just about the entirety of the whole show. I'll be offering up prints, stickers, my art book, commissions, and a TON of original art for sale, including some... NSFW material (gasp!). I hope to see a lot of you there and look forward to visiting and just generally drawing for hours on end.

Be well and be safe y'all!

Well, it's been awhile since I last made any kind of visit here, and longer still since I was uploading things. There's reasons for that, but also just a culmination of activity that had me focusing on Twitter rather than here as my life got busy. I had thought I'd be keeping both Twitter and FA active but I kinda let that slide unfortunately. Then in April I found out that I'd need to make a bunch of life changes which ended up prompting me to just drop out of sight altogether for a long while as I packed up my home and moved out to a new place and, in the meantime also begin a road trip that took me about 10,000 miles clear across the USA and back again. All in all there's been a lot of ups and downs, and while there's a lot I wouldn't trade for anything there's going to be all kinds of pressure for the ongoing future to make good on my potential.

I'm about settled into my new apartment and am going to go back to doing regular art streams and commissions. I'm expecting for things to get going seriously on Tuesday the 31st, though I might do one or two art streams just for fun before then. I'll post notices here when I go online, but you can also check out my Twitter account to see notices there. I tend to be more active on Twitter anyhow... though that's a relative term to be sure. https://twitter.com/Brian_Reynolds3 As far as commissions go, there's a few obligations that I've agreed to that I have to do before I can start accepting new work, but my normal workflow is to try and complete jobs in rapid succession so it won't be too long before I can get down to business with new stuff. If you haven't attended one of my art streams before you can check out the link to my Picarto page at https://picarto.tv/ToonFoxTV. While there you can follow the link in the upper menu area that says "Videos" in order to see the most recent streams that were recorded.

In the meantime I'll be doing my best to upload a bunch of older work that I neglected to share here... there's some pretty fun character sketches that I really enjoyed doing.

So, that's where things are. I need to get in touch with folks who've sent messages to me over the past few months so that'll happen sometime in the next couple days. I apologize for the silence.

I apologize for not being active or visible lately. There's a number of people I'd been in talks with over commission projects who I need to get back to and I also had planned to be back doing regular art streams a few weeks back. Unfortunately I'm having to shift gears and make some alternative plans based on personal life events and that's had a big impact on how I've been assigning my attention. I do want everyone who I'd been talking to to know that I haven't lost interest in your projects or am intentionally avoiding you... right now I'm mainly trying to keep a whole lot of plates spinning while juggling too many balls in the air.

Hey folks, in about 20 minutes (7pm EST) I'll be participating in the BRFF Virtual Con event Artist Olympics. 7pm to 9pm and consisting of goofy drawing prompts for fun and entertainment. Check it out here:

https://www.twitch.tv/blueridgefurfare

I'm trying out something new this weekend and participating in my first "virtual" convention: Midwest FurFest. I'm still kinda vague on what actually is going to be done to make it a cohesive experience as a convention rather than a bunch of people doing their own thing via live streaming services and just being listed on the MFF website, but... it'll be fun?

For my part I'll be working my virtual dealers table in nearly the same way as I regularly do with my live streams. The only real difference is that I plan to be streaming noon to 11pm Friday through Sunday whether or not I actually have any commissions lined up in advance. Ordinarily I only stream when I have a commission already planned out and the coordinated with the other person so they can watch as I work, but for this weekend I'll have the stream running constantly and will be glad to accept jobs on the fly so long as I'm not otherwise already working on something.

Something I'll be able to do as well this weekend are Telegram stickers which I haven't done before but y'all got a preview of recently with the Gloria stickers I put up. I haven't put together an official description for them just yet because... well, I'm lazy, but also because I wanted to be clear about what I can actually do for the asking price of $25 per sticker. The source art for Telegram stickers is 1500x1500 and then after completion is scaled down to the 512x512 resolution required for Telegram integration, so you'd be getting both sets of images. I also can't do colored lines and hilights as the timing for that works out to be a lot longer than I can handle for the asking price. This is what it'll end up looking like: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/28894520/, but between that and this: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/38948885/ you should have a great idea of the inventiveness and entertainment value of having me draw your character.

If you'd like to coordinate with me in advance of the daily streams please send me a note, or just pop in during the streams and I'll see what my queue is like at the moment. I'll be streaming here: https://picarto.tv/ToonFoxTV and will be making journal messages here and on Twitter as I begin working.

Thanks for your attention!

Since I paid for the subscription to Picarto I think I should make use of some of the extra features available, and one of them is the ability to record and download the complete stream. Rather than upload the whole damn thing to Youtube (and Youtube would surely silence it because of all the unlicensed music I play) I compressed the time playback to just over 4 minutes down from the original 2 hours 30. If you haven't seen my streams before, or if you're like me and just marvel at seeing a drawing leap into existence over a rapid playback then check it out:

...I appreciate the comments people made on my previous post about Patreon. I'm still thinking about it and have just gotten caught up in things and not been able to devote much time to responding to the comments. I do appreciate it though and I'd love to read any further thoughts folks would share. :D

Something that I've been wondering about is the picture upload I've been making to announce when I'm doing live art streams. Everytime I upload that picture someone will favorite which has me feeling a little awkward since I end up deleting the picture once I'm finished doing the art stream. Does anyone care about this? I'm sure I'm overthinking this...

So for what it's worth I'm still looking for full-time work which has been difficult since so many studios are doing work-from-home and the casino business in general has been hit hard by the pandemic. I've been making lots of progress on commission work which I'm EXTREMELY grateful for, -thank you EVERYONE for that, and Tracy's been prompting me to consider doing a Patreon account as well to help make ends meet. To that end I really want to hear what people think about this because if I go down that path I want to know a little more about what people's expectations are for such a thing as well as what I can offer in that regard.

I imagine that everyone who reads this and will actually respond is fairly familiar with the work I do and the tonality of the content, so what I'm chiefly curious is if you were to actually put money up on a monthly basis what would you like to see? For as long as I've had a gallery here on FA the vast majority of the work I upload is commission material, so for Patreon work would you want to see more original character illustrations / sketches? Something entirely unusual like Adobe Illustrator renderings that I do on my professional job? As a Patreon supporter would you expect or be convinced to support if you received something personal every month like a personal sketch, sort of like a guaranteed mini-commission? If I were to subscribe to the Picarto premium service I could do private art streams, but would that make any difference?

I'm in a bit of a perplexed state because I pretty much do my art stuff in full-view all the time and the uploads consist of commissions that I just don't know what would compel people to support a Patreon account. I don't want to paywall the stuff I do, but at the same time what would make people think they were getting value for their dollar if they didn't have some extra content they couldn't see elsewhere? I remember reading a comment somewhere that if you approach Patreon as a means of selling premium content you're doing it wrong, -that Patreon is really about letting supporters help the people they appreciate do what they're good at, but how many of you folks out there actually go about the process from a charitable fashion?

I would LOVE to hear your feedback on all this, and if indeed you feel like you Patreon support requires a certain type of content to be consistently produced, be it lots of artwork, regular additions of certain quality artwork, or other things like tutorials, private streams, original source file documents, etc., then please share.

Thanks for the consideration!