Hey all!
If it’s been a couple of weeks since posting art or a journal, I’m at least going to try to post regular journals!
CURRENT STATUS, COMMISSIONS:
A while back, I said I was thinking about opening for commissions in early November. Early November has indeed arrived, and there are a number of things that have taken precedence. Long story short, I am NOT going to be taking commissions right now, and I am not sure when I will open them again. I am considering early December, but most likely I will open again in January.
Overall, I am doing well! My time is presently occupied with things other than art.
LEAVING TWITTER:
In case you missed it, I will be leaving Twitter by the end of the year. It has honestly been a long time coming. At its best it was moderately entertaining; at its worst, it's deeply traumatizing and feels awful. I have already been considering leaving for years at this point. The deciding factor is that when I avoid current popular social media entirely, I feel enormously better! Like, not just a little bit, but extremely, significantly better! Current events gave me the very gentle nudge I needed to make a final decision.
I am not pushing anyone else to stay or to leave. What you do with your time online is up to you; you know what is working for you, and you absolutely know what is not. For instance, I am a hobby artist who does not rely on Twitter to pull in income.
If/when Twitter implodes and something else takes its place, would I join? There’s a lot of “it depends” in that answer. We’ll see!
ALTERNATE PLACES TO FIND ME (AND ALTERNATE SITE ADVICE):
As always, you can find me here: https://arrjaysketch.carrd.co/ I post at LOTS of places!
While slowly going through folks I am following on Twitter and downloading art with tools like Bulk Image Downloader (https://bulkimagedownloader.com/download), I am seeing a surprising amount of artists who do not have accounts anywhere else! Or, if they do, they’re not easy to find!
It is always a safe bet that any given site will eventually be unavailable (hours, days, weeks) at a time. Sites that were previously a safe bet can and have had dramatic shifts in policy where previously acceptable content is now nuked on site (Tumblr, SheezyArt). Sites go down (Ponibooru, Yerf, the first version of FurAffinity, FurryArtPile, Furry Orlando Archive, Playmouse, PureYiff, Yiffy International, etc.)
ALWAYS have a backup! Have several, especially if you rely on your art as your income source. Advertise it well! Have a backup plan to seamlessly transition to your back plan site. Or backup-backup plan.
Once you have a few galleries set up (and some regular at least a minimum number of manual uploads) you can use the amazing and FREE tool PostyBirb to post to multiple websites at once! https://www.postybirb.com/
Once you have multiple websites, it’s honestly a pain to make multiple links on all your other sites. You can use FREE websites to make link compilations, such as https://carrd.co/, https://linktr.ee/, and https://www.wix.com/! Make a free website with all your links, and now you only have ONE link to update all your art gallery sites with!