Happy Birthday dA - and my story

Since dA has asked for these, here's mine.

I became aware of dA in early March 2007, while "shopping" at Renderosity's Free Stuff.  Somebody mentioned that they had other goodies "at Deviant Art" and provided a link, so I followed it.

I quickly discovered the gray-bar "Mature content, you can't look" thumbnail, and of course I wanted to get around it.  The easiest way to do that was to join, so I did (March 9, 2007).  I quickly realized that this was an excellent place to post my own work.  It was a month before I actually did so (April 11) - one of my netiquette axioms was to wait a while and listen, before I jumped in with a contribution.  I think the advice was to wait two weeks - well, I waited a little longer.  

At first I couldn't quite decide whether to focus on photography or 3D renders, so my only two photo posts are among those first few.  But I knew I was going to run out of photos long before I ran out of 3D renders and/or ideas, so I've stuck with 3D since then.

I know it's not necessary to "specialize" like that, but I really didn't have much in the way of photos or photo opportunities, whereas I knew I'd be able to produce a lot of 3D work.  Drawing and painting were not totally ruled out, but mostly so, because I don't draw very well and it takes me weeks and weeks to produce a painting, and how do you scan something that big anyway?  (I know people do it, I just don't know how.)

So here we are, 7-1/2 years and 1387 renders later.  Another four years and my OCs will start to be of legal age!  (Pandora first appeared on my hard drive in November 2000.  Of course, in her backstory, she was born some time in the 80s.)

Many thanks to and , who sent me welcome messages during my first week and helped me feel like I really belonged.  Of course, now I'm an old-timer myself and belonging is no longer in question.  Plus, I've got many more people to thank for their support: 948 watchers, 35,011 favers and 27,581 commenters, as of 4:30 p.m. August 7.  (Watcher #1000, due in a few months, will get a kiriban.)


On thanking faves: I like to! Even when I run into curmudgeons who actually object to being thanked.

However, I have the problem of being popular! Well, sort of. Not, thank God, popular enough to make enemies, but popular enough that I can't thank every fave. So as a compromise, I thank everyone who faves and comments, and everyone who faves more than once during the period (typically four or five days) before the next time I go through and delete messages. So if you fave and don't get a thank-you, sorry, I thank you all!


The CSS for this journal was created with the help of the CSS Test at www.icyworlds.net/about/css . Thanks, Icyworlds!