So I've been in London for the past couple of days, getting ready to start a summer art program! I'm moving into my student accommodations today, and then on Monday the course starts. It's pretty intimidating - I'll be commuting for something like 45 minutes to an hour each morning just to get across town to the the building the course actually takes place in - but I'm pretty sure I'll be able to figure it out.

The course itself isn't too intimidating, thankfully, since it's essentially a 6-week crash course in living in London and being formally trained in art (all my formal art experience is intro-level and only one course happened at university level haha) before I go on to... a single-year program aimed at teenagers to allow them to "try before they buy" lots of different art fields, heh. It'll definitely be helpful and fun for me, since I have vague interest in a wide variety of art areas, but mostly I want to figure out what's the thing I can see myself doing for the longest period of time, esp. if that will be beneficial to my skills as a fursuit maker. After that I'm hoping to go on to a three-year Bachelor's degree program (fingers crossed), but it's not set in stone yet!

I'm really hoping to get some fursuiting done, maybe not during my summer course, but hopefully at least during my year-long course that starts in September! Whether it'll be personal projects (bearselfsuit concept has been developing in my head for a while now, and I have a lot of good ideas for her padded bear bod thanks to BigJaw, Matrices, and some photo diaries of "proper" mascot suit construction), premades (BIRD DOGS... BIRD DOGLIKE THINGS), or commissions (you wouldn't believe how much I genuinely want to make a LOT of the characters in quote requests I've received) I can't be sure just yet, but I'm optimistic enough about it that I brought my clippers, favorite needles, and a small supply of pins/upholstery thread to get me started.

In the meantime, I'll also be working on FINALLY getting my website actually coded and functional (hoping to have an interactive quote form, which will be super fun!) and the faux fur reference/example blog I mentioned at some point on SDS. I've got most of the latter coded and I have templates for all the text (though the text itself is still only about half finished), but I accidentally used a name for it that's already in use by a fursuit maker, so I've got to come up with something different! Anyone have any ideas? I'd like something that's catchy (so not, like, "faux fur reference/examples") and not, you know, taken on tumblr haha.

Also, I was also thinking about potentially making Bean a character FA page at some point! IDK how much interest there might be in that, I don't know much about character accounts at all, but it seems like it could be helpful for organizing stuff that's specifically about him rather than trying to put it all here, since I don't really like flooding my gallery with any one thing (unless that thing is fursuits). What do you guys use character accounts for/is there particular etiquette I should be aware of?