A couple weeks ago, I uploaded a (somewhat botched) video of me drawing a gift for a friend. I figured I'd record it, since a few people have asked me over the years how I draw.

https://youtu.be/eyxqvfdEl3o

The reason I made this, and the reason I make timelapse videos in the first place, is because I don't think my process is really something I can ever teach people how to do. I don't know how to explain to people what I actually "see." I don't see contours or lines, my eyesight is just not good enough to process those reliably, I don't think. I see light and shadow, and I carve out sketches from those initial impressions instead of drawing the solid forms that are foundational to character art.

I don't know if I'm a good person to learn from, to be honest. My process works for me, somewhat. I don't know if it'd work for other people. I don't know how efficient it really is. I don't know if it'd be acceptable on a team, if you did art professionally. I somehow doubt it, because it relies so much on a visual library I largely developed as a compensation for being disabled.

Having said that, I think it can be learned. Or at least, I think people can glean something from watching my timelapses. That's why I make timelapses, instead of tutorial videos.

I couldn't redline someone's work if they asked me to. I can sort-of advise people on how to draw landscapes, but not characters. For that, you're better off going to a character artist. And to be honest, a lot of my landscape advice could be better learned by watching Bob Ross videos anyway. That's where I learned.

Not really sure if this is a useful post. I made it to answer a question but it's also pretty self-indulgent. Here's a link to my playlist of timelapse art so I can pretend this post is a resource:

https://youtu.be/R8mZL0fitUI?list=PLsl9NsrIZbsqb5rKowwIZ9nAdWJM02Gnk

I'm gonna be upfront about this: I do not give a toss if someone uses AI to generate art for their home-game of D&D. People were stealing all our art from Google images before anyway, and people generating images for free are not "stealing commissions from artists," they were never customers to begin with because those people might want images for free or cheap, but not the prices most of us would charge for a single character illustration. It's like how video game piracy isn't actually a lost sale. 90% of the time it's just some kid with no money, someone bypassing region lockouts, or someone who might pay $20 for a game but would never pay $70. (Or in some cases: a fucking subscription fee.)

You know what I DO hate about AI images though?

1. Google searches are now polluted with it. Finding references is a bitch and a half now. Unlike people just nicking images off search results, generating AI images indexes them in searches, and then scraper bots put those images back into the training sets, which, while deeply funny and basically free entertainment as these machines race to the bottom, also creates more AI-generated search results.
2. Beginner artists are having their work wrongfully accused of being AI. In the past ~2 weeks, I've had to explain to an ENTIRE MOD TEAM on a Discord server the difference in bad/novice art, and AI-generated art. Someone drawing hands backwards is making a human mistake. A machine being told to generate 5 anthro rodents and making one of those rodents have sexy human legs and ears in the wrong place while giving the others anatomically correct proportions is a computer making the kind of mistake a human would never make. Immaculately rendered cats with paint on their paws and colorful pawprints all over a sheet of paper that are obviously not the correct size of the cats' paws is a computer. Could a beginner also make those mistakes? Sure, a beginner could draw cat pawprints that don't fit the size of the paws, but a beginner who struggles with that would also struggle to draw an anatomically correct cat, other objects in the scene at proper scale, or render cat fur immaculately in Lisa Frank's style. AI art is not "badly drawn art", AI art is "badly photobashed images", the kind of mistakes a human cannot make, because humans have the power of relation and computers do not. TL;DR: If you run an art server, have a technician on your mod team for the love of god, or at least an ex-AI artist, or a current AI user willing to help you police.
3. Google and Microsoft ban potentially AI-generated art off their cloud services and they false-flag a LOT. This has me absolutely terrified because of how weird my art looks. If I didn't have the benefit of posting art online since as far back as 2007, a NG account as old as 2018, and a traceable footprint going back to 2016 on what accounts of mine remain (and probably more if someone's really willing to Wayback Machine me), I'd probably be accused of AI generation by humans. I can only imagine the horror of having to appeal an automated process, especially since I don't post my personal info online and frankly, I DON'T THINK I SHOULD HAVE TO. The only reason you fuckers know my first name is because it's my chosen name and not my legal name, but I think I'd go to some concerningly dark places if I suddenly had to abandon my anonymity to fight a stupid dispute with a corporate entity that I should not have to fight just because shitheads on the internet want to create consequences for the rest of us.
4. The technology's biggest advocates are the worst people on the planet. It's full of cryptobros, deposed apes, libertarians, and actual goddamn fascists. You could convince me of the value of democratizing image creation with a computer-assisted tool if the people who used that tool the most didn't use it to create art that promotes hate speech, fucking NFTs, or deepfake porn of real people. Says nothing about how the people developing this technology explicitly want to replace artists (while using our work, lmao. Go find your own dirt and quit using God's, losers.)
5. The tech is poorly-conceived garbage to begin with. It's a black box you put words into, You have no control over what it does. It takes ages to generate anything and you have to generate 50 images before getting something decent. You cannot filter for specific things, you cannot blacklist certain content, it has NO safety measures against including triggering content or peoples' actual personal information, and the biggest AI models are completely closed-source so there is zero oversight. It's a UX failure, a public health risk, and a fucking embarrassment to any developer who had a single iota of pride in their work. I would even bet money that if the source code to these things was ever leaked, every software developer from here to fucking Oz would rip into it, because I find it REALLY hard to believe that any person who disrespects the work of other people enough to make an image generator with a training set that is totally agnostic to the content it contains would have enough competence to create anything more than a mess of poorly-optimized undercooked spaghetti that you couldn't feed my dog.
6. It's basically just photobashing with extra steps. In the time a person spends generating AI images, they could acquire photoshop, watch a tutorial series on Youtube, steal some images off Google, and make their own photobash, and it would be 10x better than what a computer could do because they're making the damn image to their personal specs. Is it more work? Yes, in that it requires you to actively do something instead of stare aimlessly at Minecraft let's plays or scroll Reddit or jerk it to hentai or whatever else you do while a machine runs in the background, but I'm assuming the reason you're doing this is because you need an image for something like your home game or RP character or whatever and I can tell you right now that manually stealing art and splicing it together will get you a result that you will be much happier with longterm. Plus, unlike the search engine virus that is AI art, you manually nicking peoples' work and only sharing it among friends doesn't have any negative consequences for the rest of us.

I'm not some holier-than-thou elitist artist concerned with the lofty philosophical question about what art is. I personally do not consider photobashing art even when humans do it and I've blocked artists on Twitter and Newgrounds when they do it because I think they're lazy, beneath me, and unworthy of my respect. (Yes, even RJ Palmer who famously complains about AI art. I thought he was a hypocrite because he photobashes, but AI is actually really problematic and what he does is just shameful. I might not be nearly as good at drawing characters as he is but I put in real effort so I definitely feel entitled to my superiority. But hey, I guess the guy needs to pay bills, and "work smarter, not harder.")

But I do see a benefit in democratized image generation. Whether some artists like it or not, some people just want an image they can use, and that's fine. Photobashing is a skill even if it produces lazy results, and it's definitely not something everyone wants to spend time doing, so here's a few alternatives to doing that which I strongly recommend if you need quick images for personal use:

Picrew is a go-to for people who need avatars, especially anime avatars. Yeah, yeah, anime cringe, dont care didnt ask. I use this pretty often when I'm too lazy to come up with an avatar for freeform RP characters on forums or in Discord servers using tupperbox.

Heroforge is a popular go-to if you need a reference for a tabletop game character. It's meant for you to design something they can 3D print, but people online also use it to make portraits of their TTRPG characters for games hosted over a VTT. Honestly, I use this all the time. I also just find the tools personally really fun to use and it has a surprising amount of customization options.

Dungeonscrawl was a free independently-developed mapmaking tool for D&D and various other RPGs that is now owned by Roll20 (which I consider a double-edge sword but hey at least being owned by a big evil corporation has the potential for longterm support, unless they get bored of it one day and destroy it out of nowhere.) Plenty of lazy GMs swear by mapmaking software and this one hooks directly into the most popular VTT as a bonus.

Various legacy dollmakers on Flashpoint Archive which IMO tend to still be some of the best you might find for specific types of characters. (Because for some reason nobody has made a good Sonic OC dollmaker on Picrew yet.) Honestly, Flashpoint is goated for any number of reasons, including this one, and recommend people download it anyway, and I definitely wanted an excuse to shill it here, but seriously. People used to make dollmakers in Flash all the time. Hell, I wish Itch had that kind of culture. I bet a smalltime Itch dev could sell a fun and robust dollmaker app for a few bucks and make a decent chunk of pocket change, even.

Tiled and stolen spritesheets, baybeeeee! Stealing tilesets and splicing character sprites together was how my generation did things. It's way easier to edit pixel art than to fully learn to photobash and Tiled is actually pretty fun to use. This is actually my #1 go-to for making TTRPG assets. You think I drew that shit? Fuck no, like 5% of my Pokemon RPG homebrew campaign was my own art, the rest of it came from nicking other peoples' work and slamming it into Tiled. If stealing spritesheets off the internet rubs you the wrong way though, you can also just buy some off itch.io to support an artist, which I've also done in the past.

I do not advocate for, endorse, or excuse using stolen assets for paid RPGs. If you're a GM using stolen art for your campaign that people need to pay for, you can funnel some of that money toward an artist. This is just for people who need shit for their hobby and aren't distributing the work commercially. I am ethically against paid games to begin with (they ruin the spirit of the hobby) but I fully disavow people who profit off stolen content.

Which should probably also tell you how I feel about AI "artists" taking "commissions."

There's a reason, near the start of this tirade, I used the phrase "AI user" and not "AI artist." I don't care about stepping into the arena on philosophical waffling because I just don't give a shit, but I also don't think a person just generating images needs to call themselves an artist. People on the internet, for some god-knows-why reason, assign a kind of status to the word "artist," and the people who want to wear that title as if it means anything other than "person who makes art" by generating images are fucking insufferable. Not because they're stealing valor, but because they think there is valor to be stolen.

Look. You're an artist if you draw, or make 3D models, or make ASCII art, or build something cool in Minecraft, or made a neato pattern in your zen garden, or pissed your name on the wall in a stylized font. I don't care. Neither should you. It's not important to have the title "artist" because there is no value in calling yourself an artist, there is value in what you make, because you made it. My art has value to me, and I'm glad other people like it, but honestly, I don't think being an artist means anything except easy shorthand for a hobby I think is fun. If you're trying to chase some kind of clout, there is no clout to chase. The internet is saturated with people who make things, and what you get a computer to generate is rarely that impressive to begin with.

If you, personally, genuinely like an image an AI generated, cool. I've seen AI images I liked. I've seen AI images that have pretty colors and neato patterns and that make fun jigsaw puzzles. They're pretty images. They're not art, and I don't care. And neither should you. It doesn't matter.

And if the only thing AI did was generate a pretty image 20% of the time, I wouldn't care about that either. But it has real consequences for everyone, including the people using the technology, and I really hope I've made that clear.

I get tired of the bullshit discourse online, the pretentious, elitist artist takes infesting social media with their stench. That's not gonna convince the average joe who probably just wants a cool image of an elf woman for their D&D token or phone's lock screen. I'm not even sure my stance would shift the people who are already used to it, but I wanted to rant about it anyway and if this obnoxious diatribe convinces even a single person that the thing they're doing isn't worth it and actively makes the internet worse for everyone, including them, I'd consider that a huge win.

At the very least, consider using an alternative. My list is nowhere near exhaustive. People have needed easy image generation for as long as the internet has existed and probably also before that. Honestly, most artists don't give a shit if you're using our work for a desktop background, forum avatar, or tabletop home game. We can't stop you and some of us do that shit too. The people who get their panties in a twist about it online tend to be the same people who are obnoxious about other things that cause zero harm but they look super loud on Twitter, which rewards the loudest, dumbest take on any given day. Just don't profit off our work or distribute it en masse, don't use it to draw attention to your Patreon, don't take credit for making it.

And for the love of God, stop using it to train AI.

There. That's the whole screed. If there was ever going to be a proverbial, excessively wordy rope with which to hang myself, this would be one of them. I'm at that point in my life where I do not give a fuck how many bridges I burn, especially not with other artists. If I didn't think this tech constituted actual, meaningful societal harm, I would defend it the same way I defend all the other non-problems you people bitch about on the regular. But AI image generation threatens the internet in very real, provable ways and we're already dealing with its effects. I don't think it can be dealt with through regulation, I think the technology is a failed experiment that has done irreparable damage and now all we can do is fight to keep it from getting worse.

This might fit an M rating but honestly, kids should hear about this shit too, and kids are the most in-need of free online resources, given they have little to no income to speak of. That's my reason for rating it like I have.

It's been a while since I made an update post. I figure it's time for another one.

First, I've gotten my muse back with drawing. I don't always feel the need to post what I make in public channels but I do sometimes post things in private to friends and I've rediscovered the joy in creating something. I've been picking up a couple new skills on the side as well, and might have more variety of things to post in future.

Second, and this is a bit less related to my doings as a creator, but I want to talk about it anyway. (And it's my blog so I can do what I want.) I did end up starting a Discord server for board games. It's not big right now, but I like the people who are in it and I enjoy meeting up once a week. However, it mostly has Europeans in it, and our weekly meetup is at 3pm for me. I'd love if more Americans could join up and I can start up another meetup day that's more American timezone friendly.

If you've ever tuned into one of my streams and endured my painfully edgy queer dirtbag-leftist bend and zero tolerance for performative virtue signaling, that's the vibe of the Discord. I also largely play board games about nature and animals, big surprise. Here's the link if anyone wants it: https://discord.gg/aPwNFNT86g

Still a bit of a WIP, since it's only semi-public, but hey.

Third, it's nearing my birthday again (the 11th) which means it's almost time for the annual Spyro stream I do every year. I look forward to this every year and I hope my audience does as well. It's a pretty chill time where I play my favorite game (Spyro the Dragon) from start to finish, 100%, and talk to chat. Sometimes, friends of mine join the call too, though we might have fewer than usual this year.

And finally, building off that last thing: I'm planning on kicking up streaming again, but it's going to be a bit different this time. I'll either talk about it during the birthday stream, or if I stream at all before then, I'll talk about it then. But right now, the plan is to begin my new streaming plans after my birthday stream. I think what I have planned will ultimately be the best thing for me going forward.

This next bit is a summary of some personal things. The content update part of this post has ended.

Last year was hard on me. I won't go into why, but let's say that some things which had been building up since 2019 had finally resulted in exactly the kind of thing I was afraid of, and it took months to recover from. Although, I'd hesitate to call it "recovery," I'd more refer to it as an eventual apathy. It happened. I'll live. Sometimes, you can only endure something until it stops eating at you.

Maybe that's because it ran out of things to eat...

I think spending a couple of months feeling so empty inside gave me a kind of soft-reset, letting me reclaim the sense of self I'd lost in the process of trying to adapt to communities I didn't belong in to begin with, and giving me a new peace with myself about who I am and what I believe.

I remember how to sit alone and feel content.

This has also given me the strength to potentially improve my life. I'll probably always make things online, but my long-term goal is more independence than being a terminally online disabled creator allows, so my output might drop again this year, but this time, it'll be for a good reason.

Take care of yourselves and have a good year. I'll see you in the next stream, or whenever I upload a new image.

These are just a collection of tiny things related to my output.

First, streaming has gotten irregular, even the art streams. I don't have a good ballpark on a schedule, they'll just happen whenever they happen. My youtube will probably have stream VODs going forward though, and you can speed those up if you follow my art timelapses.

Second, my Discord server is pretty inactive. I'd like to do something like a board game or tabletop game night with it, but only one reg showed interest and that isn't enough for me to put forth the social energy. If more people would like to join, you can find the link on my main page.

Third, I haven't had the motivation to draw at all. This hasn't been a good year. My health is getting worse, my friend group has deteriorated almost completely, and I've cycled between depression and anger since last November. I have no idea when normal uploads will resume. My motivation to make art hinges on either art being a shared connection with a community, or working on a larger project. I have neither right now.

Fourth, following my Twitter has become shaky business because I'm pretty sure I got shadowbanned from how often drug bots follow me everywhere. It's pretty annoying, and I regret my username, but I can't change it on NG without paying them and I have no idea what name I would even prefer otherwise. Point is, if you follow my Twitter for updates, they'll probably get eaten. You're better off joining the Discord.

Fifth, I have resumed uploading unedited VODs to the youtube channel. I will probably put older VODs on there at some point if I don't feel too embarrassed by them as well, but that's not a guarantee. I will continue to upload timelapse art to it as it is created, since that's relatively low-stress compared to streaming, so it will always serve as (hopefully) a small educational resource.

Those are all of the updates.

TL;DR join my Discord, don't follow my Twitter, and expect very little art posts for a while.

I don't usually use my platform on here to talk openly about how I feel. I'm not a stoic, and if someone comes to me asking my perspective, I give it pretty freely. I've just avoided dumping whatever stream-of-consciousness nonsense into blog posts that I mostly use as updates.

But a lot happened in the last week, mostly in the online art community, and I'd appreciate my audience indulging me on letting me ruminate for a bit. Because, in the wake of the bird site burning itself to the ground, and that other huge social media platform that most of us have been using as a boomer quarantine throwing away all of its money on a worse looking Miiverse in VR, and all our scrambling to find somewhere new to migrate to... One thing's been made pretty clear to me.

I haven't felt at home on the internet in years.

I want to say it began in the mid 2010s when the lsndscape really started to shift. Even though we credit the early 2010s as the huge change in era with the advent of social media and the smartphone allowing a much greater diversity of people to use the internet, not even something as malleable as the internet can change overnight. It took a while for the effects of All Those Normies bringing their normie shit into the online culture to trickle down into my territory, and it was around this time that I just...

Disconnected?

I stopped being as active in public spaces between 2014 and 2017, only re-engaging with the wider community when I started to play Overwatch and wanted to stack with people of my rank. I think my experiences were still pretty normal at this time, mostly sticking to gaming spaces, and it was right before we all really had to deal with the aftermath of the US's trashfire election results.

The next couple of years were... definitely a change though.

During the Presidency of one Frito McCheese-Puff and his Cabinet of Ass-Clowns, the internet became increasingly more polarized as groups of people sorted themselves into 1 of 2 camps: The people who supported the blatant and continued assault on basic human rights, and the people who weren't really on board with that. And because human impulse decrees that All Shall Wear The Sorting Hat, we didn't just stop at sorting ourselves. We labeled everyone around us as being Pro-Cheeto or Anti-Cheeto based on extremely arbitrary criteria that would never actually map onto a serious pol-sci analysis, but this is the fucking internet, not a respectable environment for academia, so here we are.

It didn't just stop there either. Even when we managed to clean out the Dorito dust from the Presidential office (you know, after the boys came over for a spirited game of Smash Bros that one day in January 2021 that got a bit out of hand), we were all so used to what the online culture had become that we couldn't all just go back to the Shire where things were nice, and simple, and maybe even a little degenerate if the mood struck us. No, now we lived in the New Age, where there's a terrorist around every corner and pop-idol Corona-Chan is doing the kind of world tour most bands only pretend they care about doing. Says nothing for how the old raisin what replaced one of Willie Wonka's wagies in the White House was proving rather ineffective at preserving peoples' basic human rights.

Which means, we were still heavily encouraged to have the attitude of "You are my ally or my enemy." There was no in-between anymore.

And here I am, coming through all that nonsense with a deep, confused feeling of displacement.

I am a lot of things that don't fit easily into categories that tell you who your friends are at a glance. Often I find that, especially with younger people, others don't know what to make of me once they do get to know me. I've made a few friends in spite of that, but mostly, I think people just avoid me. And I avoid giving people a reason to, since I'm both a semi-working artist and also not enough of a dickhead to want to make other people feel uneasy. The last few years have been an exercise in considering others' comfort before my own.

So I end up feeling isolated, apart, displaced. Even unwelcome.

But I guess that also makes this easy, yeah?

I was used to moving around the internet before, and this rigid structure where a few sites own everything on it - and especially this culture that cropped up on those sites - have felt like some kind of prison for years, and the last week has left me feeling like I've finally found an escape route.

It's not that tragic to me, really, that a few billionaires are bringing about the end of an era via their own stupidity. The say fools and their money are easily parted, and I guess that's true here. I've already started shopping around for new places to be, checking out the common recommendations like Cohost and various Mastodon servers. Even revived my Tumblr, because why not? Pretty funny watching the mass exodus from the burning bird site back to the anti-sex hellscape tumblr became but maybe it's gotten fun in the last few years?

Hell, I'll probably even stay on Twitter until it dies, just because all the brands left en masse so now all that's left are journalists, shitposters, and the few artists/creatives who plainly do not give a flying fuck about anything going on in the world because they got bills to pay and an SEO gremlin to feed. It's honestly more fun on there now that funny car man has broken half of it anyway. Well besides the swath of emboldened dipshits who sub out having a personality for being bigots in others' feeds, but I guess Twitter refusing to kick out bigots is a pre-existing condition anyway. (Why do you think Muskrat Man was still there in the first place?)

Well, anyway, I'll make a more concise post that details wherever you can find me. I might also remove my Twitter from my NG page, but for now, it's a good way to verify my identity between accounts. And obviously, I'll still be on NG. I've had a lot more success here than I get on larger sites like dA. (And dA has gotten pretty creepy anyway.) For now, this is just some random blurb of thoughts I have about the state of the internet and my place on it.

Realize this is a pretty chunky read, appreciate whoever put up with it. It's just some stuff I've thought about for a while and wanted to get out there.

Now back to our regularly scheduled bullshit... (And by that, I mean procrastinating on this project that should've been done a month ago, heh.)

https://youtu.be/myIeNtznklw

I never thought anything I uploaded would do numbers like this, to be honest. I upload these mostly so the people who follow me here can get a better idea of my process, and as a way of condensing down stream VODs. I'm very appreciative that so many people saw my video and at least 33 people liked it, going by its likes.

What really surprises me is that I operate in a pretty saturated niche. I'm a landscape artist, and we're a dime a dozen today. Most of my recent uploads are also pixel art, and the only thing more ubiquitous on Twitter than landscape artists are landscape pixel artists, heh.

Anyway, this has bolstered my desire to focus on my YouTube content. I'm now in the process of adding commentary to my older timelapse paintings in the videos' Closed Captions, and I will post another update here when I have a few of those completed.

I still have some timelapses to put together and upload, but since I do stream art semi-regularly now, I'm also always recording more. Feel free to join me on Twitch if you want to see me in real-time.

I do link the timelapses in the descriptions for my posts here, but I wanted to remind my followers that they can see some of my process in this playlist:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsl9NsrIZbsqb5rKowwIZ9nAdWJM02Gnk

If you enjoy my content, please like and share these videos. It pleases the spooky algorithm monster and helps me grow my art platforms, especially since I also link the Newgrounds posts in the video descriptions.

I'm not good at doing calls-to-action, nor do I enjoy it, but it's how we do things today. I appreciate all the support.

I also appreciate all of my followers who like what I do already, regardless of whether or not they heed my calls-to-action. Just having people enjoy what I make is always a nice surprise to me, and since I've gone weeks without a health collapse at this point, I've been working on creating more art-related content on all my platforms. Having people who are always pleased with my creations, always leaving a nice word, always voting, offering advice, and generally, engaging with my work, continues to be a huge motivator.

I want to mention, as well, why I make timelapses at all. I'm not sure if I'll ever do anything 'big' with my art. I make art because I enjoy it, but I also recognize that I have some specialized skillsets that I had to learn through practice and iteration. I taught myself to draw by watching other people.

Now I stream and record my process, so future generations might do the same.

My one big goal for my art is that it inspires more people. That's why I've gotten more proactive about video content. I wanted to share that here, as well.

I hope my work inspires you. :)

It's my birthday today, which means it's time for me to do the thing I do every year - a 100% run of Spyro the Dragon on stream tonight! I've played through Spyro from start to finish every year on my birthday since I was 11, and when I picked up streaming, I carried the tradition over.

I also might have other people on stream, depending on who among my friends wants to join a voice call. Either way, it's a good way to interact with me in a low-stress environment, where I can have an honest talk about what the last couple years have been like and how I feel about my content and online presence in general.

I love doing this every year. It's good for my mental, and makes me feel some sense of continuity. I hope to see people having a good time in chat tonight. :)

Stream starts at 6PM EST, over on my Twitch channel, which you can find linked on my page. I'm MidoriMushrooms over there, too.

Been a hot minute since I posted a status. Several weeks ago, I took a break from streaming to take care of some things I'd let fall to the wayside, and I've started to stream content again.

The schedule is outdated now though. What it ends up being in future remains to be seen, but it will likely be more sporadic and focused on finishing one game at a time instead of switching between 2-3 games throughout the week.

I don't know when/if I will resume art streams. Drawing on stream causes me no small amount of anxiety and the only reason I really started doing them at all was to show people how easy it can be to make nice-looking environments. I'll have to figure out a format for art streaming that isn't just doodling once a week.

My uploads have dipped here because I've been fighting art block since probably May, and I'm finally able to power through it again. I'm not sure what happened, I guess I was just tired.

The final note here is that I have a Discord server which does host art challenges. We currently have a "map challenge" running where we each draw a quadrant of a map once a week based on the results of some dice rolls. There is also the monthly theme challenge, and I plan on doing more art-related things in future.

Feel free to join our community if you're interested in any of my content or you just want a place to talk about creative things.

https://discord.gg/DMffh7k

It's been a while since I really posted an update. I thought I'd let everyone know that today (Feb 11th) is my birthday and I have a tradition of playing through Spyro 1 every year on my birthday. I'll be streaming it at 11AM EST to 2PM EST, so if you're around, come in and say hi.

As for my shortage on art posts: I've been dedicating myself more to streaming games, mostly indie games I want more people to know about, as well as felting projects that are difficult to post on Newgrounds. I've also been playing in, and am gearing up to start running, a tabletop RPG once a week, and the setup for it has been an extra bite out of my free time. I'm also doing a few things for friends, and working on a commission. I do not know if I will be permitted to post it when it's done, since it is also for a larger project.

I will also admit, there are things that I draw, but never post. I think this is healthy actually. Not every single thing you make needs to be scrutinized on the internet, especially if it was something you made for yourself, because working on personal projects is its own catharsis. But it does lead to an output far below what the social media algorithm gremlins need to be fed to keep you in mind, so apologies if I seem to drop off the map sometimes.

Anyway, I have a Discord and small pleasant community if anyone would like to keep up with what I am doing, and you can currently catch me streaming on Wednesdays/Saturdays at 1pm to 5pm, or Tuesdays and Thursdays at 11am to 2pm. I also costream with a friend on Sundays starting at 1pm and ending at 5. (Updating the stream schedule, it has changed since I last posted it.)

I hope everyone is staying safe during this chaos.