I asked for ideas on Bsky from folks cause I was wanting to see what other people might come up with, and Kaycee came up with this fantastic concept that added another clever spin on Soul's meta, fourth-wall-breaking fuckery.

Given my experience with art software it made perfect sense to me that Soul would use similar looking methods of doing exactly that, and I figured Kaycee deserved to be the one subjected to the treatment given that they suggested it to me.

I had a ton of fun with this.

As of today, I've been running my own crowdfunding site for 5 years! The Yeariversary was yesterday, but I can still celebrate.

Thinking back to when I first launched the Candy Shop, I remember very vividly struggling hard with expressing myself in ways I wanted to. I was terrified of scaring folks away with the things I wanted to make - kinky or otherwise - and well, now look at me.

I sadly haven't had the time nor presence of mind to focus my efforts like I did this time last year for Kinktober, but I've been prioritizing some important life stuff and making bigger plans with my art for when hopefully won't be long from now. I'll be back to business as usual as soon as I can manage, cause I do miss making as much art as I can muster for y'all, and not of any one genre either.

Given recent events with my FA suspension and cohost's closure, I've definitely been thinking a lot about our collective online presence lately. I'm really grateful that I'd divested myself from relying on any one platform by having this site going for so long, even if the continued upsets and frustrations still affect me.

I know I say this often in these kinds of celebratory posts, but it'll always bear repeating; thank you for believing in this crazy pipe dream of mine. I've had to claw my way up to here slowly over these past 5 years, and the fact that I've gotten as far as I have is not something I take for granted. I know I do things a fair bit differently to my peers, in ways that might not be all that popular, and I often lament scaring people away and stifling my own growth. However, if that were true, then those of you here genuinely believe in what I have to offer.

And that means the world to me.

Here's to another exciting year.

My friend Bianca offered to do a couple of trades with me as part of her advent calendar of TF art project.

Today's prompt was "Retro," and lemme tell you I struggled to come up with an idea for this that really resonated with me. Then I figured out what I wanted to do, and I struggled with making it too.

I don't remember the last time I've had to dig so deep to research the parts I needed for this piece, and I gotta give props to my friend Rulare who helped find an archive of VCL that included the exact page I needed to complete it. Those of you who got this reference are the real ones, lemme tell ya.

If you don't know what a VCL is; in a phrase, it was quite literally the oldest furry art gallery to ever get shut down. It kinda sucks how hard it is to browse its archives nowadays, but consider this my part in spreading a tiny bit of awareness about our community's history. With soft-core smut, of course.

I included the full size version of the drawing too, for your enjoyment, and you can see her half of the trade here.

You know I was gonna be gunning for the Meta card at some point, and getting to combine it with Accidents and Submission was a done deal for what I ended up going with.

Today's entry features a familiar purple skunk! Soro is one of my long-time patrons and they were a shoe-in for the spot; I really don't think I need to explain as to why. I think this also marks the first time I've ever featured myself (my realsona, to be specific) in a piece of kink art! I had considered including Soul Chocolate, but I can't let it have all the fun, can I?

I'm quite proud of this one, especially with how it went from prompt, to concept, to execution. It's nothing extraordinary, but the idea does most of the heavy lifting here (along with Soro's diaper of course), which I don't often feel is the case.

I really liked the drawing of myself so I made a couple of stickers with it too. The extra variant was inspired by real events that happened as I was working on this illustration too, but that shouldn't come as a surprise to my regulars.

For a while now I've wanted to revamp my themed, "branded" promotional artwork, and I was inspired while watching a stream vod where the streamer had their desktop on full display with a really cozy vibe to it.

That, combined with my love for things retro and synthwave led me to design a new template based on lots of old things instead. I plan on using this for a few different things, but I figured I'd put it through its paces by remaking my commission pricelists since they're overdue for an update.

Here's two of a set of four. I'm really quite pleased with how they turned out! While it's a little bit chaotic for the amount of information presented, I think it still makes for a nice balance where it's nice to look at, but still quite easy to understand what's being conveyed.

I got a little tired of my old avatar designs earlier this month, and figured it was a great opportunity to make appropriately pride-themed designs. They're a little busier than I'd have liked because it makes them harder to read when shrunken down, but I think they do the job well enough.

I think the part I had most fun with was picking out appropriate flags to represent each of my trio. Wasn't sure whether to go with trans or bungender for myself, but I'm happy with my choice.

I've been meaning to revamp some of the promotional artwork I was using on my various galleries for a while now; here it is, finished at last.

I posted this publicly ahead of my usual embargo because I really wanted to get it done and uploaded everywhere as my first completed project for the year. I uploaded it at an even higher resolution than usual, so you can pick out more of the details if you'd like. Given that 2021 was bringing with it a lot of new and important things for me, I felt some pressure to make the first drawing really count. I figured it'd make sense to work on something important that I'd been meaning to do for a while.

As you all know, unfortunately a lot of unexpected things cropped up last month and slowed me down a fair bit. Aside from that I also had to keep up with commissions and help with maintaining things around the house on top of all of that too. It didn't work out quite as planned, but I'm still proud of pulling it all off reasonably well.

With that out of the way, I'll be shifting focus back to my regular scheduled kinky programming as soon as I can. I'm really excited for it - as always, thanks for sticking around in the meantime.

Lines!

Now comes my faaaavourite part. I really want this to be my first finished and published piece for 2021 but we're already into February and I've got so much other work to juggle besides.

Might try fast-tracking this to get it out of the way and put it behind me. For now, you get to see the linework!

Several years back, I had made some art to promote my redirect page, as well as the fact that I'd set myself up on various different sites following the major FA outage that same year.

Since then I've been experimenting with other platforms as they've phased in and out (or effectively banned me off of them with policy changes), and it's high time that I make a new one for the job and to tie in with the new candy shop theme I've been repping for a while now.

The idea is a callback to the alchemy idea I had been playing around with for Choco years ago, as referenced in his original refsheet. I figured it'd be something that could work very well within the context of the candy shop, namely making and experimenting with new candies - especially ones with unusual flavours and, shall we say, interesting effects.

A while back I set aside some time to create some new thumbnails for use with general and placeholder posts and entries on my various art sites.

You'll already have seen these pop up on some relevant posts on this site, but here they are at a higher resolution for your enjoyment. At least, that's the idea. I might make more in future, but they took a fair bit of time to make and this set covers my bases fairly well.

In order, here's what they're mainly meant to be used for. I kept them a little generic for flexibility's sake, but this'll explain where I was starting from.

• Open for commissions notifications - this is for my commiss.io page to make it very clear when my queues are open for whoever decides to check the page directly
• Noticeboard - general news, updates, notification posts etc
• Poll clipboard - pretty much self explanatory
• Sketch paper - concept art posts or YCH slots for the YCH section of the site; namely ideas that can be bought but which don't have any premade artwork to show for it
• Diary - journal posts, also fairly self explanatory
• Closed for commissions - same as the open notification, but for when I'm closed.

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.

Last week, I spent a bunch of time finalizing my commission pricelist, making the last few adjustments and additions following the last batch I took. I now have my full set of standard options ready for business.

I still have some other work left to do before I'm in a position to reopen my queue, but consider this early-early notice that it'll be happening sometime soon. This'll let you decide exactly which option best suits your budget.

Please note that I've set a minimum price of €20 for any single commission. This should only come into play when applying discounts to the "Quickie" sketch tier and, in some cases, the Simple sketch tier. Do keep this in mind if you were aiming for one of the cheaper options.

My custom artwork tiers aren't anything new and work much like most other commission artists' tiers do, so I don't think there's much explaining to be done there. However, I've added a new category I'm calling "Lucky Draw," which has two (technically three) special tiers included:

"Grab Bag" artwork is pretty much a repackaged version of my old Patreon art rewards. For those of you who are unfamiliar, these are timed art slots based on simple prompts. You provide one or two characters along with a few basic themes or kinks with which I will come up with an idea for a piece of artwork. At Tier 1, I will work on the piece for half an hour; at Tier 2, I will work on it for an hour and thirty minutes.

This kind of commission is ideal if you're lacking ideas or prefer to leave it up to me, and often results in work at a higher level of detail than custom tiers of a similar price. You may later upgrade any of the artwork you get at this tier at my usual custom commission rates if you are particularly happy with the result.

"Quickie" sketches work much in the same way, only further simplified. You provide a character for me to draw and an optional theme, and I will draw a quick, loose character sketch based on that. These sketches cannot be upgraded.

Please let me know if you have any questions, and I will be happy to help.