This site exists as a way to be independent of any overarching art portfolio site. I used DeviantArt as the primary place to host all my art until the quality of the site descended significantly in the past 1-2 years. I can ignore AI generated slop being posted and winning art contests I do not participate in anyway, but when DeviantArt began to display AI generated explicit pornographic advertisements on the sidebar of my artwork, I can no longer ignore that and have to step away or risk exposing friends and other people to it. DeviantArt's 20 year reputation as being the fetish art capital of the internet was bad enough to deal with, but that is inexcusable and has literally forced me off the site.

The complicated part here for an artist is where do you go from here. DeviantArt has always been the single decent free art portfolio site on the internet until very recently. With it's degradation in quality there is really no other place to go for someone who wants to display their artwork online. ArtStation is the big contender but it is paywalled with file size limits and insists on plastering your real legal name all over the place. Newgrounds is an option but also suffers from DeviantArt's reputation as being a fetish art haven. I have no problem with NSFW artists but I do not make that kind of material myself and don't want to be immediately written off by being on those kinds of sites. For the most part, your only options at this point are tumblr, instagram or host your own site.

I first experimented with neocities in early 2023 and found this to be the best option for me. Neocities is just a free website host where you provide all your assets and source files, meaning you write and control the code to your own website. If neocities ever kicks the bucket or I decide to pay for my own personal independent domain in the future, the site will look and function the exact same because there is no neocities specific formatting or requirements. This site is written in plain HTML and CSS that I've learned in a couple weeks.

I use the program Krita as my primary and only piece of software for creating digital art. I started with GIMP but quickly figured out why GIMP is classed as an image manipulation tool like Photoshop and not a digital art program. I started using Krita in about 2020 and have not had a single complaint with it so far.

I settled on Krita for a few reasons. First and foremost is cost: Krita is free. Adobe's reign of terror over the digital creative landscape is crumbling as more people realize the free alternatives are just as good if not better than the things they're paying monthly subscriptions for. Artists who double as software devs contribute to Krita as it's open-source because it only makes sense to improve your own tool. Everyone wins in this feedback-loop situation. Another big factor in my choice is availability. I've used linux as my only desktop OS since about 2019 and the Adobe creative suite is simply not available for linux, they don't make linux binaries. I've seen cracked Photoshop running under WINE on linux, but Krita does the job just as well without having to jump through WINE prefix labyrinths. Finally, Krita's default featureset is solid. The default brushes are the best I've ever seen in a digital art program and every major version keeps adding more. The watercolor brushes look authentic, same goes for pencils. The creative tools are great.

I do not own and have never owned a drawing tablet, I draw with a mouse. Some people find this unbelievable because they've been told for years that you cannot produce any kind of quality material without using a drawing tablet. That's simply not true and I will point to video games to give an example for this. Learning to draw with a mouse is as easy as learning to play video games with a mouse. For those of us who grew up playing with controllers on consoles, the transition to gaming with a mouse was a shock, but after a week or so you got over it. The same goes with drawing with a mouse. The first week or two is awkward but after a month or so you stop thinking about it and it becomes just as natural as using the mouse to interact with the computer in any other way. Don't let people tell you that you have to spend $200+ on a drawing tablet if you can't afford it.

Understand however that drawing with a mouse is still different than drawing on a tablet. I can not produce smooth clean linework like other people can, a mouse is just too crude of a tool to do that with. I get around this personally by just not going for that kind of look. Charcoal and watercolor is messy, it's supposed to be. It doesn't matter if I'm messy with a mouse because it's genuine, it fits the style.