Every now and again, the Little Troubles team organizes a gift exchange for participating artists. It works just like a secret santa, and this time it was themed around Summer vacation. We each submitted our Summer experiences, past or current, which acted as the prompt for the art we'd get from our assigned artists. That art would then be made into cards to be printed as part of the game's set.

You can see more about the game over at littletroubles.com.

My assigned recipient was Plant Panda, whose prompt talked about the deserts near their parents house that they loved to explore, enjoying the plant life found there. I decided to play with the idea of a literal "Baby Saguaro," which poor little Plant fell afoul of just because of their curiosity.

As I later found out, they seem to have a knack for getting pricked by the cacti they care for, so the pieces were truer to life than I was expecting.

It also turned out that some other artists had to drop out of the exchange, which left Melly Moona without anyone to make their gift art. Basil kindly offered a bounty for someone to fill the gap, and not wanting to leave her with nothing, I went for it.

Her Summer experience was a long road trip, where she got to stay in and see various places. Seemed to make sense to me that long stretches of road would cause anxiety for someone who might struggle with potty breaks, which led to this idea.

She said that this is how she looks during car rides, so I'll definitely chalk this one up as a win as well.

And here's the set I got! BottleBear treated me and Garnet to an absolutely precious set of scenes that about perfectly summed up my experiences lately. I submitted Garnet's reference sheet along with my request because she was involved in many of my adventures this Summer, but I expected (and specified) that her inclusion was optional, and only nice-to-have.

Either way - and needless to say - I was extremely happy with what Bottle cooked up for us, and it gave us lots of cozy, sweet feelings to enjoy together. I especially enjoyed how he played with my bun-to-pup transition in both illustrations, and love how adorable I look snuggled up to her.

These were posted with permission, and you can find BottleBear over on SubscribeStar as well as many other places besides. Please do check him out.

A couple of weeks ago, I took part in a joint stream to celebrate Tato's birthday along with LilChu, Rocky, Fevee, Joe and Gemini - at least as far as I was involved, as there were others who joined in after I had my turn and had to sign off for the evening.

Each round was time-limited so the work isn't my most polished, but it was a fantastic time going back to the quick-fire format that I used to do back on Patreon. To start with, here were my entries.

LilChu was my first target, and it was certainly very tricky to strike the right balance for him! I know he's not into regression and belittling, so I figured I'd try a different approach by instead putting myself a rung above instead of only taking him down several pegs.

I've been toying with the idea of Chocolate being a kind of angel investor who targets businesses with a kink-related model. LilChu has been making some really lovely art revolving around The Smol Cafe, which is an appropriately named cafe with a littles and babyfur theme.

Needless to say, it'd be a shoe-in for a visit from Chocolate for potential investment, but Chu wasn't gonna get out of showing a little "team spirit" to help secure the deal.

Next up was Feeves, whose character is actually an adult male un(?)lucky enough to have been regressed and genderswapped after falling into a pool of enchanted water.

She tries hard to resist what comes naturally to her younger body, but tantrums sometimes get the best of her and hardly help her case.

The last round I participated in had me subjecting Rocky to some embarrassment, and I figured that the best way to pile on the humiliation is to involve as many people as possible, right?

It's certainly a mystery how they ended up in such a compromising position, but maybe it could lead to a different kind of career in streaming?

NB: After the stream, this sparked a conversation with JamieBun which in turn inspired a fun way to take this idea further, one that I'd like to expand upon later.

By the end of it, I came in third based on number of votes for the most humiliating artwork. Tato came first, and while their score was helped by participating in every single round, they still made some genuinely impressive artwork in very little time. LilChu eked out a second place position over me in the final round, no less thanks to the artwork he made of me.

In those same three rounds, I was the target of Tato (link includes all other art by them, which involves messy diapers as well as more of the above), Joe (involves cartoony hijinks) and LilChu (hasn't been uploaded yet). It was a fantastically fun event and we all agreed to set something like it up again in future, so you can look forward to that.