Hope everyone is doing well and hanging in there at least! I'm very thankful for getting a Spotlight(!!!!) award! That made my day seeing that! :D
Timelapses on YouTube, PeerTube
Been making good progress on my timelapses, trying to get one out a week from my backlog. The main hiccup was finding out YouTube has started putting AI upscaling on Shorts, without the creator's consent. I only made the odd Short to test it out (or accidentally when I uploaded a short length video) and so it doesn't affect my regular timelapses, but I don't trust YT to start applying that to videos as well. We can only hope they'd add an opt-in/out option in the future, but what they' done is awful.
So I finally got around to setting up a PeerTube account on their MakerTube platform and am uploading my timelapses there too. I'm still uploading to YT as well but linking the PT video link and trying to spread the word. I'm also open to other video platforms, but I had been eyeing MakerTube for a while so it finally pushed me to start using it. It's been nice to use, and I like how your Account can have multiple Channels and you can subscribe to either one. Channels can be for different topics, like timelapses and art tutorials, and Channels can have Playlists for more organization.
Mentally it was more frustrating debating to drop YouTube but I do get an OK amount of views and recently the odd comment, so it's doing something. And with art being a source of income, I can't ignore it. Well, maybe if/when they start applying it to videos then I'll drop it. At least I'll have some timelapses on MakerTube so I'm not starting from scratch.
Art Stuff
However I'm behind on posting my ArtFight pieces here! Still making progress but slower than I thought it would be. Partially cause I'm also checking out Cara as well. It's also against generative AI which is great, so I want to try it out and support its usage. It does mean I'm posting to Yet Another Platform but if I either spend a small amount of time on it each day, or skip a day or two and then spend more time on it other days, I think I can reach a good balance. We'll see!
For September I have two pieces I need to get done. One is an "overdue" raffle drawing that is almost done! I'm hoping to finish it this weekend. The other is for a secret project that I don't think I can share outside of Tumblr until mid October. I've been a little bit nervous about meeting the deadline but yesterday I made good progress, so I hope I can keep that momentum going!
Once both of those pieces are done I'm looking forward to focusing on commissions and personal art again. I don't have any big plans for personal art, but it's been a while since I've drawn my OCs... so might see more of those!
However I did download Blender recently and have been wanting to get back into 3D stuff... who knows what I'll end up doing!
I've made good progress on the raffle drawing and my current commission, AND I finally got around to catching up on timelapses the last few days. I even worked on making the thumbnails and filler backgrounds on stream, so the rest of the work shouldn't be so bad.
I still have some ArtFight pieces from before I joined Sheezy I can upload. I started uploading my most recent commissions, so I'll start uploading some older but still recent commissions too.
Speaking of commissions, I'll probably make a journal post specifically about my commissions, but in short I offer mainly illustrations and chibis, but hoping to properly get into streaming services like VTubers, emotes and the like. While I do have VGen commissions opened, it is limited slots, so there's always the manual way of requesting using forms, DMs or email.
Other than that... Just gonna keep on arting and try to do some smaller pieces, like ArtFight, to help break up some of the larger pieces I'm tackling right now. Lately I've been having Spirit City on in the background. It's nice to go back to it and I've got to start earning more tickets again for the DLC coming Aug 25! Super excited to have a new area to customize soon.
ArtFight & July
First year participating in ArtFight, and it was pretty neat! I had:
- Attacks: 7, Friendly Fire: 2, Defenses: 7
Which was pretty nice! I was thinking I would do at least 10 attacks, maybe hitting 15, but sadly I didn't hit that goal since I burned out midway through. Part of the burn out was from making so many attacks at the beginning, but I also ran into the issue of wanting to attack some OCs but the permissions were intimidating or I ran into characters that I wanted to draw that were "joke" characters and the owner didn't actually want people drawing them except under very specific circumstances. Also I got art blocked when trying to do revenges in order, so next time I'll just draw them in whatever order I can and hope the block clears up before the end.
Strangely enough it feels like I didn't make a lot of art, and yet when I look back at all that I did in July, it was a lot more!
- I got a VGen code at the end of June, so I set up what services I could on VGen and hosted an opening sale
- I completed 3 VGen commissions and worked on another one during July
- I finished up one big Art Raffle piece and started working on the second one
So yeah, there was a lot of art stuff I did! The other thing I want to do for ArtFight next year is actually separate my attacks between stuff I want to super duper polish and attacks that are quick cute/cool pieces. I got into "make it very good but not polished good" mindset which made it a little difficult when scoring attacks. A lot of my pieces didn't have what I'd personally consider polished, but they were still very good... I dunno, I might be stricter on myself instead of what ArtFight expects.
August
Now for August, I have a commission and a raffle drawing to finish up. Plus I think I want to take part in VGen's Monthly challenge of Mirror. Lots of stuff I could make for it, but gonna sit on it and think about it. I also want to make some stinger transitions properly and see if they might be a cool YCH commission to offer... if not then I want to have fun making them for my own streams! Also wan to make for stuff for my VTuber model. So many projects I want to work on! I'm both sad and glad Art Fight is done so I can now do some things for me and go back to commissions full time.
Oh and I'm behind on timelapses for my commission pieces! Gotta play catch up with those!
I have no idea if I'll have as much time as I did this year for next year's Art Fight, but I would like to join again next year!
Sheezy
I'm getting more used to Sheezy! It's been generally nice. I am a little disappointed that info about things are probably Discord locked, but I haven't ran into anything I haven't been able to dig through journals of people asking what X or Y is. It's not that I don't use Discord, but I really don't like knowledge being locked behind Discord. Other than that, like I said, Sheezy has been really nice, and my next wish is I'm hoping both it and AF will give the ability to not autoplay gifs for avatars/profile pics and well, everywhere. Unless the animation is super subtle, it can be really overwhelming. I didn't realize how important it was to have this as an accessibility option until I had it and then started using places that don't offer it.
First journal entry and artworks posted let's goooooo!
I'd been missing the old dA and this site was brought up, so I decided to give it a shot and see how it goes! I was kinda using Ko-fi as a mini dA to follow artists to catch up with their artwork and life updates in a less chaotic manner than social media, but it still didn't feel the same. I'm still poking around the site and learning things here and there, checking out the settings and hoping to make whatever colours I chose accessible but also interesting. Tags will be another interesting thing to figure out, but at least they're easy to edit.
I think I'll mostly be posting my more recent art, any old artwork I'm super fond of, and probably commissions too? I'm kinda glad for the 5 upload per day limit cause then I can take it slow and not overdo it. (Until of course when I want to upload a batch that is more than 5 but it'll be fine!)