nolanfa

[nolanfa]

All three hares together

And a front view of each of them below:

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👀 i would be interested in hearing the deviantart points rant

Alrighty, the deviantART points rant. For context, I had a dA account from the time I was 12 and used it steadily until I was about 20. I was also a volunteer moderator with them for about a year, and they even offered me a job at one point. (But there was no way in heaven or hell they could've paid me enough to move to southern California, and god forbid they offer remote work.)

dA was one of the original social media behemoths. Never quite to the level of Twitter or Facebook, but if you were an artist you were on deviantART. It was a fantastic site back in its heyday. Artists got their start on there, recruiters were on there, art directors were on there, the community building features were fantastic. Yeah, it had its share of weird shit, but point me to a website that doesn't.

Multiple famous artists got their start on deviantART. Back then, it was a place you got real, legitimate work from. A place you could use to build a real, legitimate audience. The titans of early 2000s digital art that pretty much everyone knows (in the West, anyway), the ones who still have a massive effect on art styles today, basically all got their start on deviantART. It influenced the entire western culture of what art looks like on the internet, and that bled out into what art looks like everywhere else because these people made beloved shows and comics and movies and books and everything else.

But one of the best things about deviantART was that it was created at a time before everyone decided social media had to be slimmed down to its barest bones. It was a complex site, and there was a lot to it. That made it really easy for all levels of artists (and just plain art enjoyers) to use, and easy for them to make it function in a way that worked for them. This fostered a great environment where people of all skill levels could interact, share knowledge, and just absorb skills from one another.

Now, one area deviantART didn't initially cater to people was built-in payment options. They had a print shop you could upload your work to, but it was like Redbubble or Printful; merch selling, not custom work selling. So if artists wanted to offer commissions, they'd have to take payments elsewhere. (Usually Paypal.) Which was fine! That worked great!

But, well. Corporations gonna corporate. I forget the exact year, but one day they launched a new feature called Points. Points were a site specific currency, and they were one of the first (if not the first) to have such a thing. There were also some other things launched with it, including the ability to accept commissions with points as payment. You could also use points to buy site subscriptions, badges, stuff from the print shop, etc., or you could gift them to other people. You could also cash them out for real currency, for a fee (I wanna say the fee was 10%, and less if you were a subscribed user, but I can't remember exactly).

The conversion rate for Points was 1 Point=1US cent. Which seems fine on the surface! But the problem was psychological, because what they didn't do was actually make it look like that. Points instead looked like dollars, because there was no equivalent to actual CENTS in the Points ecosystem. So, for example, lets say you want to charge one dollar for something. That would look like this:

$1

P100.

Or ten dollars for something:

$10

P1000

Or a hundred dollars for something:

$100

P10000

See the problem? They're the same VALUE, but points just look massively bigger. This was especially a problem for people who didn't know what the conversion rate was because they just didn't know, or they were from other countries and REALLY didn't know because it wasn't related to their own currencies at all. (I think there was also a max amount of points you could charge for a commission, like a couple hundred dollars worth maybe? It was low when you converted it to real currency, if I'm remembering correctly.)

It devalued the art market like a knife to the gut. People were suddenly taking commissions for literal pennies just because the numbers LOOKED bigger. And because deviantART was such a hub for the art community, it bled out elsewhere. Prices started to dip other places too, because people who DID understand the conversion rate knew they could go on deviantART and get shit for super cheap from the people who didn't know or care. Which made other people lower their prices to compete, and it just resulted in a spiral to the bottom.

Would the art market have still tanked in the same way without the introduction of Points on dA? Maybe. But Points were the first domino to fall, and they were a massive one. The art market has never recovered even though deviantART has been 90% dead for going on a decade.

So yes. There's my internet history rant on Points and art values. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

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[nolanfa]

So! Social media's control of our followers/content sucks (why oh why do you need to log in to see what's posted!), but I never will remember to check out multiple personal websites regularly, so RSS feeds are great. So I made an RSS feed on my website! In english: https://falano.github.io/feed/ceramics.xml; and in french: https://falano.github.io/feed/ceramique.xml (as you can see, it's for ceramics; I may make a different one later for 2D art, maybe for fanart) There's like three posts right now, and I post about once a month (ish), mostly what I've posted here but sorted by theme (maybe at some point I'll just sort it by date but I currently am not), so that people don't have to make an account on a platform to follow me.

I do realize the irony in posting about it here but. Well.

If you use RSS and like what I do please consider following me there for occasional pictures of ceramics, I won't be able to tell how many people do it'll be very relaxing.

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That one (clay snow leopard) had two passes: one regular smoking then one with temporary slip overlay for patterns, hence why the unsmoked dots/pattern is not white but greyish.

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When I played minecraft I absolutely loved the weird rules about colouring wool. I think about this game every time I interact with my small sheep.

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low-poly bisons The first version had the wool darker than the rest of the body and only on the shoulders/neck instead of the head too, and changing it after looking up references felt really weird. My brain was absolutely convinced the first version's colouring was right.

and bonus wireframe (left) and referenceless version (right):

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another hare (third one) The smoking turned out very brown, while it's usually much more grey. (I have no clue why. But I like it.) (it was smoked in the same batch where I tested out sugar and salt, so it may be related but I doubt it, since the sulptures sugar and salt were supposed to affect did not show much from it. Or it may be the sawdust?) It's also shinier, I think.

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Low-poly sharks

Bonus: what it looked like before I looked up references (on the left; I was doing it as a demo of low-poly modeling and for some reason I decided it meant I was not allowed to look up references), and the wireframe of the current look (on the right) (yeah I don't know off the top of my head what sharks look like; I was like aaaaand there probably are more fins somewhere? I guess? And what does the dorsal fin look like? This is an orca fin this is a dolphin fin this is a whale fin this is a fancy fantasy goldfish fin fuck it straight will do)

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So this is what I drew for @spagbol99 for @marveltrumpshate.

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timelapse of the lunar new year snakes (which you can find at the rainbow snakes series tag) (<- that's a link btw)