It is barely more than a month since I had the pleasure of celebrating the milestone of reaching 1000 followers. And today the count already stands at 2000, twice as many!
If we look at the development, it has proceeded exponentially over the past months:
On 13 March I celebrated 300 followers; just a few days earlier the number had been 250.
By 9 April it had already reached 500; starting from around 250 around 9 March, that constitutes a doubling in precisely one month.
On 3 May, again roughly a month later, the tally had climbed to one thousand;
and now, on 13 June, once more after about a month, 2000!!!
Throughout all of this, especially in recent weeks, a great deal has taken place, and much of it has surely contributed to this growth:
At the end of April I released my first personal LoRA, Textured Painterly Style. Initially for SDXL and Illustrious, and shortly thereafter also for ZImage Turbo. To mark the occasion I organized my second bounty. Almost simultaneously, Crystal Shades Androids (although this LoRA is capable of far more than simply freezing androids and robots!) brought my second LoRA into existence.
The turbulence surrounding the featured images, combined with my experiment of imitating the styles of the then most prominently featured users in order to land an image on the front page within roughly three hours, brought my name to attention in all sorts of quarters. That certainly played its part.
At the same time, precisely through this experience I significantly sharpened my profile and began developing several of my own signature styles. Even though scarcely any of the images produced in these styles reached the front page, a considerable number of them nevertheless attracted several hundred reactions within a single day without any external assistance, nor large collections.
And then, in mid-May, a wave suddenly arrived in which four images were featured simultaneously over the course of an entire week. That delivered an enormous boost. 🚀
My greatest milestone of late is without a doubt the fact that I succeeded, on my modest hardware setup with only 32 GB of RAM and an RTX 4050 with a mere 6 GB of VRAM, in bringing almost every currently hyped generative model that can be downloaded and run locally up and flying smoothly in ComfyUI. Besides ZIT, naturally ZImage Base (particularly Juggernaut Z, a splendid checkpoint!), Flux.1D and Flux.2 Klein 9B, and precisely one week ago even Ideogram 4.0, barely two days after its release. 💻
Since then I can finally experiment with a great many things locally, test the models, and try out wonderful style mixes that even go beyond what I was previously able to achieve with Grok Imagine; moreover, I have published my super-slim workflows optimized for GGUF, with which others who have similarly limited hardware can also make use of the same models.
Taken together, all of this has achieved one thing: you have become aware of me, you have realized that you like my works (whether LoRAs, workflows, or simply my visual language), and you have chosen to follow me and keep my images in view.
For that I extend my warmest thanks to every one of you; it makes me enormously happy that I can inspire so many people with the things I create. ❤️
Yet I do not wish merely to pat myself on the back; I would also like to highlight several users who are especially important to me, some of whom have accompanied me for several months already, and with whom friendships have formed in some cases only during recent weeks. In no particular order:
JRD_2212: your support with the two LoRAs, your moral encouragement while inventing and refining new ideas are simply worth their weight in gold. Your checkpoints and LoRAs are outstanding, and you deserve far more appreciation from everyone who uses your models than you receive.
BetweenFloors: I greatly value our chats, our exchanges, your support. I hope you will remain with us on the platform, no matter how rocky the road may be at times.
LumaRift: you are simply outstanding. One of the top three users, present on the front page almost without interruption for months now, yet so down-to-earth and modest, while at the same time being extremely helpful and supportive; quite a few in these ranks could learn a great deal from that example. The fact that you made your SeedVR2 sub-workflow available so I could refine my own workflows was simply magnificent, and our late-night chats in which we discuss ideas and motivate one another are something I would not want to miss. 🤝
Chumple: your collection, driven purely by creative input and steadfastly maintained for a long time, in which you include our contributions week after week, is one of the few and rare genuine pearls on the platform. Your collection has certainly contributed a great deal to the growth of recent months. A very warm thank you at this point!
MGHerder: my "mentor" from the early days. Since the beginning of May we have had little contact, yet with just two comments from you you once again gave me a major boost of self-confidence!
JustMaier and CivitaiOfficial: for featuring one or another of my images time and again in recent weeks, even though I had certainly not made their lives any easier with my criticism regarding exactly this featured section.
StolenTime, n_Arno, AutoPastel, helst0rm, bvga, tehalex86, KandooAI, calonal, pilsner_ai, Gulhik, lonecatone23, Liant, john_deere, EmmiAI, for_the_win, ElectricDreams, and especially _Wizz_: the placements in your bounties or your substantial tips are a genuine motivation and creativity booster!
In addition there are roughly one hundred users, too many to name individually, who show me daily with tips ranging from 10 to 200 buzz that you appreciate my works. I am extremely grateful to all of you, and honestly, back in December 2025 when I first became active here I would never have imagined in my wildest dreams that I would one day become so well known!
MY WARMEST THANKS TO ALL OF YOU; I LOVE YOU ALL! ❤️❤️
To celebrate the occasion I shall shortly be launching a new bounty. It will focus primarily on the Crystal Shade LoRA and will therefore be a purely ZIT-based bounty. As soon as I have the details finalized I shall inform you in another article. Every tip on this article here will flow into the prize pool for this new competition. You can therefore help make this new contest truly grand and rewarding! 🏆