It's been a hot minute since the last Art Appraisal, and this one's gonna get a bit meta (go figure).

For CFz's online con in 2020, I took the plunge and did something I'd been wanting to for a very long time: I hosted a panel.

Finding a topic to talk about was a difficult task, and while I don't recall what other options I considered before settling on the one I went with, I know that my hesitation stemmed from feeling like I didn't have any "expert" insight that I could share - nothing I was especially good at that I could tap into my experience and knowledge of to impart to those attending.

So, perhaps rather appropriately, I decided instead to talk about the difficulties that I've dealt with as part of my work. I would host this talk barely half a year after I launched this site, and had also just spent a substantial amount of time grappling with Picarto, which seemed like plenty of material to go off of for an hour long show.

(Video Link) What I ended up with was a rather tell-all series of recent-at-the-time stories about something technical, something logistical, and something creative that I'd been dealing with in my career.

The video is quite long, but I strongly urge you to watch it through before reading on; especially if you're an artist yourself.

I hope that the talk is of some use to you, or that you at least found it interesting to know a little more about what goes on backstage, at least when it comes to my own operations. My intention was to give more transparency in this way, and if you think you know someone who might find it helpful, please do pass it on to them.

I needed to spend some time processing what the whole Patreon debacle did to me, personally, now that the dust has settled a little bit.

I've spent a couple of frantic days scrabbling for the best solutions I could suggest, posting them everywhere, and discussing them with folks trying to mitigate the harm Patreon inflicted on so many of our valued community members in one fell swoop. But now I need to disengage and let people handle it for themselves. They know where to reach me if I'm still needed.

I'm not sure what the optics will be of me making this blog post private, but frankly I don't want to seem like this is something most people ought to care too much about, especially right now. I'm writing for my own sake, and all of you who are subscribed to my site have shown an interest in seeing and supporting the things I create for myself, so it felt worth sharing with you especially since it's also relevant to this site's history.

I'll start from the basic facts; where it pretty much all started for me two days ago. I initially felt pretty badly put out by how many folks got hit by this. It was clear to me that my frequent warnings and having moved off the platform literally 4 whole years ago had fallen entirely on deaf ears. Some people revealed that they still hadn't even realized I had started my own website when they replied to my advice on what to do post-ban.

Furthermore, the transition process was especially agonizing (haha, trans analogies go brr), since I had to do it mostly without the help of any of my peers, and entirely thanks to a handful of close friends. They were really who came in clutch with figuring out how I'm gonna pull this whole thing off, but for a very long time since then it's felt like I've had to fight tooth and nail to slowly, gradually claw back my patronage.

Since so many people were hit so hard by this at the same time, suddenly the entire community was mobilizing to figure shit out together and follow their favourite artists wherever they may go.

Being completely honest with myself; the difference in the response still feels really alienating to me.

I did eventually come to my senses and figured it couldn't hurt to just post what I knew, if only for the sake of it. Frankly, at the very least I could sit with my own conscience knowing that I tried, even if it didn't really end up helping anybody. It felt too hypocritical of me to always talk a big game about practicing community solidarity, and then sit around moping cause I got ignored that one time. Plus, people were already dealing with enough without me being salty about it too - not that that mattered - but my chastising and complaints certainly weren't going to be useful to anybody right then and there.

Now, though?

Just last night, I celebrated my first day taking HRT (see, it was a relevant allusion), and it really served me well as a key moment; a milestone that got me to put my feet back on the ground and look back at how far I've come. Celebrating such an outwardly innocuous moment - taking a couple of pills - in such an overt and affirming way, made me consider how, despite having dropped everything to try and help out, I can just go back to my work two days after the hammer came down.

I was prepared for this fucking ages ago, and now I can spend my time feeling proud of what I achieved before anyone was even considering it, instead of running around with my head on fire.

I tend to feel like a bit of a renegade at times (I know that sounds melodramatic, just please let me have this right now) even within our rebellious and counterculture community, but that only makes me love and appreciate all the more this little niche I've carved out for myself, and especially all the debaucherous little critters I've attracted to my kinky-ass fuckin' powwow.

Today, the site is doing better than it ever has in its entire lifetime. I really want to take this moment to emphasize the fact that, despite all my frustrations with the community at large, you lot - every single one of you who can (but also might not) read this - are who made it all possible. It might not have been easy, but if not for your steadfast support and belief in me, I'd have given up long ago. I probably would've been watching this whole event unfold from even farther out on the periphery, having gotten completely squeezed out of the crowdfunding business before I had a second chance like everybody else.

Last month was the site's fourth Yeariversary. While I was too busy to acknowledge it directly, pumping out daily uploads of really good and fucking horny artwork that I'm very proud of is probably the best way I could think to celebrate it.

Thank you for joining in and stoking the flames so the party can keep on going. I owe y'all a lot, but for right now, I'm content to sit on my laurels for a bit and feel some pride in the fact that I can resume business as usual real soon. I saw this shit coming miles away and got the hell outta dodge, so now I get to reap the benefits for myself and relax a lot sooner than I otherwise would've been able to.

Hey, if you're relatively new to my site, I would like to invite you to join me in celebrating its history and check out some of the older content I've posted here cause there's quite a lot of it! Granted, most of it has been posted publicly by now, but it's at a higher quality and all in one neat and tidy place that's easy to browse. Enjoy!

Welcome to the first Art Appraisal! If you're unaware of what this is about, you can check out the Motivation & Intro post where I explain the motivation behind these self-reviews. In them, I talk about select pieces of my art and give insight into the process of their design and creation, the pieces' significance to me and my work, or simply what I like about them. I hope you'll enjoy it!

I did set the bar a little high with the first Appraisal by picking this one to start out with, but I genuinely couldn't think of a better candidate. Several of the things I think I've grown known for and that I take pride in from my work can be traced all the way back to this piece from 15 years ago (just earlier this month, too!). I may have started experimenting with these common themes and concepts prior to making this drawing, but I feel like this is the one that those who've known me for a while would remember the most clearly.

Likely the hardest part was deciding on what aspects I'd most like to discuss, so I figured; what better source of guidance could I defer to other than 20-year-old me writing the description for the original submission? We'll first start with the images, with the description to follow.

Gender TF Alt

1. Vibe and Attitude

The first and predominant thing that really struck me when re-reading the description was the energy I had around my art back then. Outright stating that I was "so fucking proud of myself" for making it still feels rather powerful so long after the fact, not least of all thanks to how that attitude has evolved to this day.

It's not to say that I was completely free of self-criticism then, nor that I'm incapable of being satisfied with what I create now, but even looking at other uploads around that time it's pretty clear that I was having a lot more fun with it back then. That really shouldn't come as any surprise, but it still feels as refreshing as it is melancholy to revisit those thoughts and feelings from so long ago, as if they'd never abated. I genuinely pine for rekindling that same sense of unabashed, shameless excitement about what I'm doing, and it's something that's very much been on my mind as of late.

Though the overall writing style feels almost naive in its purity, what really stands out to me in stark contrast is the subtle hint of apprehension about posting the piece and talking about it given its subject matter. Although ABDL folks still deal with a lot of prejudice and misunderstanding nowadays, back then it was nowhere nearly as easy to find information and like-minded people for mutual support. The extent of the outreach I had available to me at the time was a tiny handful of ABDL friends and a single chatroom on IRC, so it comes as no surprise that I felt like "almost all my friends [were] Nappyphobic" - a term I honestly gawked at slightly when I read it again. I mean, it gets the point across, but I doubt we'll see its widespread use any time soon.

I won't go into the exact details regarding my personal life and situation back then since it's beyond the scope of this discussion, but it's worth having a basic understanding of it to understand where I was coming from when I first posted this piece. It's fascinating to see that, amongst all the other hallmarks of my work, the description I wrote for Kitsune Dynamics even includes the self-consciousness, self-imposed restraint, and subsequent worry about how tapping into new fetishes would be received. It was, for all intents and purposes, my coming out to my audience as a babyfur/ABDL - it was likely as intimidating a prospect as it is now, and I still struggle with these kinds of thoughts even to this day. Although, had I not broken down that barrier with my first diaper-related upload then, I think I'd be on a somewhat different path now, years later down the line. It's really no coincidence that I'm also still friends with Locke, who featured in the piece.

If we comb through the rest of the description, we can find various aspects of my work which have carried on to this day to an almost uncanny degree. In it, I mention:

• My interest in a new fetish
• Drawing for someone else
• Explaining my work in detail
• "Bubbles with Pictograms" (eerily accurate descriptor for what I'd eventually call Pictobubbles)
• Early hints of Character Lore
• Explaining my work in even greater detail
• My interest in yet another fetish

I won't be delving into every single one of these since I'd rather not take up the rest of your day with this post, but you can already see some of the things I'm known for by now having taken shape even from back then.

2. All About the Details

The one major thing that stands out to me looking back on this piece is the detail - not necessarily in the artistic sense given its gestural, sketchy quality, but rather the sheer amount of context within and around the piece that I felt was necessary to explain at length even then.

Most of my work starts within the context of a setting or broader story, and over time I've learned to strike a better balance between what is implied and what is explained. It's clear that a lot of this was still very new to me at the time, though. I was either too excited to exercise restraint in my exposition, or still lacked the confidence in my own work to imply it clearly enough. I still sometimes wonder if I've landed in quite the right spot, but in any case, I've come a long way since then.

Regarding some of the artistic details at least, it's fun to note the similarities in the visual language that I still maintained to this day; the overall anatomical style, oblong shaped sparkles, and both the magical and expressive flashes and sweatdrops. I'm fairly sure I cribbed most of these from Anime, much like the basis of the rest of my art style.

3. The Obligatory Thing (i.e. Pictobubbles)

This is the first deliberate occurrence of pictobubbles in my artwork and it's honestly so cool to look back and see it feature prominently in the same piece that stands as such an early and typical - prototypical, even - example of my work.

If I'm not mistaken, this picture set the record for most pictobubbles in a single image (five of them!) right from the start. One of them was also referenced in Spellcasting at the Supermarket as a deliberate callback. I'm not sure if there are any pieces that have more pictobubbles in them (the one linked below matches it), but nor have I checked in any exhaustive fashion to find out.

While doing a cursory search to check if I could find any examples though, I was honestly quite surprised to see that they did continue to feature in my art somewhat regularly starting from then; even about as often as they do to this day. The only difference I'd note is that I took a very literal approach to the pictograms inside the bubbles - whereas I'd have something more representational like in this piece and several others like it, diaper use is expressed almost literally in this case. It's not all that surprising given that this was my first attempt at it, but that's not to say that they're necessarily worse off for it. I've sometimes found it a little tricky to make up abstract depictions of whatever it is I'm trying to convey inside a pictobubble, so perhaps allowing myself to be a little more literal from time to time should be the way to go.

4. Proto Soul Chocolate

The Tail was Soul Chocolate before Soul Chocolate.

This is where I started doing my own thing even though I loved the original concept of a kitsune in Japanese folklore; even back then, magical hijinks was unsurprisingly my favourite gimmick for the purposes of exploring fetishes and roleplay. While there isn't all that much to elaborate on, we can see the beginnings of the idea that my fursona is not simply one entity, and they aren't always operating in tandem with one another.

I vaguely remember using this dynamic during various roleplay sessions but it sadly never made it to any of my artwork to any real degree for quite some time. It's something I still would like to do more of even though it's featured in some subtle ways here and there ever since I eventually evolved Chocolate's design into a dedicated pair.

5. What I Like

I really like the gestural look of the piece as a whole. I remember struggling a little with getting the tools in ArtRage to work the way I liked, which is why (along with simply being inexperienced, let's be real here) it took me several hours to put together the piece despite it looking quite messy. That said, I do still think that it works in its favour as a finished illustration. It's something I've not quite managed to capture again from my style in my more recent work, since my eyes prefer the lines to be tightened up and closer to where they "ought" to be.

I love that despite the limitations of my style and abilities, the picture as a whole still manages to go quite hard and still has a similar energy to it that I manage to get in my art now that I'm better at what I do. I clearly enjoyed drawing what I did, and I feel like that excitement comes through with the poses and especially the pictobubbles and lettering. I'd been meaning to do a part two ever since then, but it honestly felt like I'd never get to capture the same vibe as with the first and none of the ideas I've come up with have really stacked up. I want to note that I'm not taking suggestions though, since I'd much rather it come from me since this is still a very personally significant piece.

So, there you have it. I hope you find this deeper dive into what is one of my most classic pieces of art as interesting as it was for me to revisit and explore in a way that I don't often do, and I look forward to the next one. They likely won't be quite so detailed every time, but I'd say this was as good a start to the series as any.

One of the myriad things I've been addressing with my therapy is my very strong and habitual tendency of downplaying and otherwise neglecting my own achievements. Every time I overcome a new challenge or milestone in my life, I quickly reframe all of my newfound skills and abilities as the baseline - my new starting point.

This consistently leads me to ignore the past steps I've overcome, taking them pretty much for granted just because the next challenge, the next hurdle is something I've never dealt with before - even if only a small part of it is unfamiliar to me. It's always the next thing that will trip me up. That'll be my undoing - even if I've felt the same way every time prior to that. That'll be when it all catches up to me.

I get so focused on what I'm unsure of, that I seem to forget that I might already know a great deal about what's ahead of me.

This habit more than likely came about as a result of a coping mechanism that I developed over time. I've dealt with a lot of frustration and insecurities about myself and my work for a while, but without going too far into specifics, it helped minimize some of the anxiety that they caused. As I already described, it certainly wasn't without its drawbacks.

The Idea

During our last session, my therapist guided me through a self-reflection exercise where we spoke about some of the bigger hurdles I'd managed to overcome in the past: leaving my first full-time job, making the leap from Patreon to my own platform, that sort of thing. In doing so, she helped me practice acknowledging that in myself a little better.

Even though I've already done this sort of thing with my art, particularly during special event streams, something about it seemed to click with me. In conjunction with my last livestream, which I spent replying to comments on my art, this brought back an idea I'd had floating around my head, and which I'd tweeted about in passing earlier this year.

I want to practice occasionally acknowledging and appraising my own work; looking back on what I've made, talking about what I like about it or could've done or wanted to do differently, and maybe even sharing a little insight into my process of creating it along the way. I believe it'll be good for me, and hopefully interesting to you too.

Originally, the idea was meant for Twitter, but I don't think that sat well with me given how fleeting the platform is; every single post would be quickly buried unless it was lucky enough to get picked up in a wave of attention. Quite frankly, I don't expect this kind of content to resonate with most folks, so why even bother with that while limiting myself to tiny chunks of text writing about complex ideas that I find interesting?

So, here they'll go. I'll be making these "Appraisals" whenever I feel like it - perhaps making up for a lull in creativity, or riding a high, or just because I need a boost in motivation. With a few exceptions wherever I see fit, I'll be putting them up as free posts so they can be shared around with whoever you think might like them. Please do, as it helps me out.

After this post I'll start work on the first instalment, so you can look forward to that. I really hope you'll enjoy them.

Earlier this year (on my birthday, as it turns out) I mentioned designing a system for idea prompt cards that I wanted to put to work as part of my creative process.

Unfortunately, the project had to be put on hold soon afterwards. While the cards' "system" was complete and technically usable in itself, there were a few more issues that needed tackling before I could call it done and get a set printed for myself.

I figured it'd be a good idea to write up a progress post and discuss the main design challenges I've been dealing with and have held me up since then. I'm finally getting close to having the first finalized versions ready to be made, so that I can start using them myself - at least testing them out until I can get around to making some to sell.

This will be a pretty long post without any kinky art to show for it (yet), so I totally understand if you prefer to give it a miss.

The first challenge was figuring out an easy way to distribute the combinations of each card's suit (the symbols in the corners, as shown below), number and colour as evenly as possible. This would improve the "fairness" of the values' randomization across the deck.

To this end, the size of deck I settled on was 120 cards, since that gave an equal number of each suit, number and colour of which there are 8, 10 and 6 of each value respectively. I also found a way to combine each of the three so that each card would be unique within a full deck.

Further to this, I also wanted to easily distribute these values as evenly as possible if a full deck is ever subdivided into different kinds of subcategories (i.e. species, personality, appearance, etc). In this way, each of them would retain relatively equal probabilities within each smaller stack. I got this done with generous use of spreadsheets, which streamlined all the number crunching while designing the different subcategories for the first prompts deck.

I will admit that since the cards are intended as an artists' tool for improvisation, getting the values for randomizing perfectly balanced wasn't essential for the design. That said, it was important for me to have as a part of this tool, and I feel better off having designed it this way. I do think it'll be more fun for me to use once I get them printed out.

The use of spreadsheets also lent itself well to solving the next problem I was faced with. Editing card designs in bulk was a massive pain, especially given how badly Illustrator handles text that's meant to be edited as part of the graphics. Reorganizing and changing around the different values on the cards wasn't much fun either.

Several years ago, when I was still deep into my board gaming hobby, I'd stumbled upon a handy piece of software called nanDECK. In simple terms, it allows you to generate graphics using a simple but capable scripting language, primarily intended for use in making card decks. I'd already made all the necessary graphics for each element and organized the data in a way that was easily readable by this code, so it was a perfect fit.

This not only generated all the finished card designs I needed within seconds after the code was written up, but also allowed me to make smaller changes far more quickly and easily. Generating an entirely new deck is also extremely simple with this tool, as it only requires a new copy of the deck template to be filled out whichever way that I like.

With that sorted out, I needed to figure out what to put on the cards. The original idea for this tool was to generate placeholder characters and prompt interesting ideas for kink porn. Coming up with the right 120 prompts for a whole deck was a challenge, but differently in either case.

Both times, I scoured lists of words and terms of whatever relevant categories I needed to populate, then whittled them down to size. The ultimate goal is to have as much coverage as possible within the set of prompts, while keeping the amount within a set limit. Spreadsheets once again came to the rescue here, allowing me to quickly move and change things around without having to wrestle with any graphics software in the process.

The first deck got split five ways. I started out with the original idea of character design prompts that I'd prototyped the cards with, but I had some extra room to fit in a set of my personal work prompts as well. Combined together, I could use them as a standalone and varied set of suggestions for improvised ideas, but with the category labels included on the cards, I can easily split them up into individual sets when needed.

I would apologize for the extremely liberal use of alliteration in the work prompt cards, but it does something to my brain that I can never get enough of - you could be excused for thinking that it could even be a fetish of mine.

With that awful segue out of my system, let's talk about the porn ideas deck.

Minor content warning; the pictures of progress work below include simple textual references to some pretty intense kinks, so discretion is advised.

In much the same way as the character cards, I started designing this set with a seed list of fetishes. The best and honestly only list I needed to consider for this was f-list's. Last week, I ran a stream where I grabbed the entire set off of their site, and started whittling it down to size. However, the whole thing consisted of 451 terms - a simple spreadsheet would not cut it for a task this size.

Wolfie helpfully suggested that I export this list into images somehow - and this is where nanDECK came in to save my hide a second time. I threw together some basic code, plugged in the list, and generated the images. Once they were imported into Illustrator, I got to organizing.

I'm not sure how long it took me to comb through the entire stack, but I'd hazard a guess at around 6-7 hours. While the organized map didn't highlight any patterns that I could use to narrow down the scope, it still helped by reminding me of all the different kinks and sexual preferences, and how they all linked and overlapped with each other.

As a brief but fun aside, a large part of my Masters' thesis involved an identical design process with which I made a deck of emotion cards for a similar purpose. If you've frequented my streams for long enough you'll have seen them featured from time to time. I'm not sure if I want to repurpose them for use as a set of these idea cards, but I just might. In any case, it was fun to realize that my very serious design and research thesis project was foreshadowing the creation of this deck of kink porn prompts.

Given that a set of 120 cards was nowhere nearly enough to exhaustively cover the minute distinctions between each individual entry in the source list, I had to take a different approach. Instead, I aimed to offer broad but clear coverage with each card, which could then be narrowed in scope by combining more of them together. While adjusting the list bit by bit, adding or removing terms, and replacing others with broader or more specific ones as needed, I kept a simple approach in mind: if a specific kink could be expressed fairly well using up to three cards (ideally two) at most, then I considered it to be included in the deck.

After about a week of tinkering with it on and off, I've gotten very, very close to the final version that I'd like to get printed. Although I'm still making some final changes to these, here's a select sampling of them for your early perusal.

All this talk about printing brings us to the final hurdle: money. Since these decks are personalized and also still technically prototypes, I only plan on having one of each made. While I'm still able to get this done fairly easily, it keeps the per-unit cost quite high. Luckily, I recently managed to save up a little, so I should be able to obtain my starting set soon after I've decided on what all the cards will consist of.

As for that, Tiff suggested a good name for them a while back, and I've not since thought of anything better. I'm inclined to go with her idea, which I think you'll also like.

Thanks for reading. I can't wait to show you the finished product and the art it'll inspire.