I first experimented with writing my own website sometime in early or mid 2022 as a side hobby. -- (babby's first site) -- During this timeframe, DeviantArt, the place I had been hosting my art for years, took a sharp nosedive in quality with more aggressive monetization and a torrential flood of AI generated images all over the site. Fast forward to 2024: These problems are now mixing and explicitly pornographic AI generated images are being displayed as ads on the sidebar of my artwork. I'm not trying to expose people that just want to look at my portraits/landscapes to that kind of stuff and there's no way for me to control what DeviantArt wants to display as ads on my showcase so I'm forced to find another site or write my own.

The problem here is there really is no where else to go as someone who just wants to put up their art in a gallery form on any other existing website. ArtStation is the big contender to DeviantArt, but it is paywalled with a monthly fee and file size limits. Newgrounds suffers from the same reputation of being a fetish art haven that DeviantArt does. Instagram and Twitter are the best chance at gaining an audience if that's what you're into, but they suck at making your artwork easily browsable. There's no where else to go other than write your own site.

A significant bonus to writing your own site however is permanence. I write and control the source code to the site, neocities is just a host with no code specification or requirements. This means if neocities ever goes under for whatever reason, I can easily just get my own domain or find another site hosting service and everything will look and function exactly the same as it does here. This is actually an insane bonus to stuff like DeviantArt or Newgrounds because I was always horrified that these sites were going to disappear one day and I would have just lost multiple years worth of work. I do not have that problem anymore with hosting my own site.

Having your own piece of the internet to put stuff onto is also cool. Other artist's websites that I frequently visit and that have directly inspired the development of this site are https://www.androidarts.com/ and https://clowncorps.net/

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.