500 posts.
25 models.
20 custom styles
3 checkpoints
1 character
1 recreation of an existing style
~#20 Style Creator ranking (got as low as 16 for a hot minute)
And now I'm approaching 1,000 followers.
All of this has happened in such a short time. It's been a wild adventure. I appreciate all of the kind words, support, suggestions, and even criticisms.
I never expected to appreciate AI Art. In fact, I hated it at first. I still hate it on some level.
I am a trained artist and cartoonist. I was an employed artist and was working on a comic at one point in my life. Then I got sick, and for nearly a decade I was unable to make art. My hands didn't work well enough. At the end of last year, though, that changed. New treatments gave me most of my mobility back, and I started working on my own art again.
That's how I fell into this rabbit hole. That's what started my four month AI Art binge. I was looking for reference images. I was trying to workshop a style to do my comic in. And I couldn't find what I was looking for. So I decided I would try to make it, using AI. To generate the reference images. Combine the art of artists I like to see what crazy things I could come up with. It's why my focus has always been making styles, and not so much on making the best, most artistic, well crafted pictures.
I only make the smut because it gets more reactions. And more reactions means more buzz. I rarely find anything around here that I think is appealing (in a gooner sense).
Somewhere along the line though, I got distracted from the initial goal. I stopped working on my art. Stopped making the comic. Stopped drawing, even though my hands work for the first time in 7 years. When I realized that, I decided I needed a change.
20 custom styles seems like a good stopping point. In a world filled with a bazillion nearly indistinguishable anime style loras and checkpoints, I like to think I have at least injected a smidge of western cartoon influence. A bit of what I wanted to do with my life before I got sick.
My output is going to slow down significantly now. Most of my time on this site will be spent refining the things I've already created. Making certain loras more distinct, improving the quality of my checkpoints, and fixing stuff that I've never been happy with.
If I get inspired, I'll still make something new. And I'll still post pictures, because I'm still a degenerate, and I still want that delicious buzz. But new styles and checkpoints will be fewer and further between.
And maybe one day I'll have a real comic made by my own hands, done with real art.