I missed that somehow!

It has an OSU! logo so you know it’s the real deal

Where is this?

generally what makes insects creepy is long thin legs and scary mandibles. those that don’t have these features can be really cute. bonus points if they’re fluffy.

then again creepy can be cool depending on presentation

That’s true in most cases, but i’ve had a lot more success posting stuff to my furry-specific Mastodon instance than posting hte same thing to generic Twitter and Bluesky. So there’s something to the ability to have a specific audience.

But i genuinely have an issue when i go to upvote or reply and it tells me that i’m not logged in, and that’s when i find out that i’ve accidentally left my instance and am not logged in anymore. That kind of thing shouldn’t happen at all, it shouldn’t be this easy to accidentally land in a different instance.

One Lemmy and one Mastodon. I really like the fediverse promise of interoperability between instances, i hold it up to this promise, and i get annoyed when it fails.

There were going to be communities dedicated to talking animals on the internet, that much is certain. Just about everything else was shaped by early founders. Aside from the furry fandom’s very existence which may be inevitable, every part of its shape and characteristics were laid by people like Sysable.

Bookmark them all. And then you sort by “most recent visit” so you see the artists you haven’t checked out in a while

i want a turn in a femboy sounds good

i would have never thought of this in 1000 years lol

Yeah, i looked really hard and my city of 300k has maybe three furries in it. The neighboring city of half the size has a small convention.

There’s a 1% chance that the weird cousin who never comes to family gatherings might be a furry. That’s absolutely it.

The idea of having hobbies in common with family members seems alien to me - which i think, to quote the meme phrase, Says A Lot About Society.

They can be fun as you play with your fursona, you’re connecting with them by performing their species’ stereotypes. But nobody takes them too seriously and they’re dropped as soon as they go against something you wanted to do. Or they should be.

There’s also a lot of character traits that ‘feel right’ even if they’re not stereotypical, and i’m not just talking about subverting expectations. Lions IRL can be goofy, we’ve all seen them do something stupid in a documentary or whatever, so a goofy lion character feels fresh and truthful at the same time.

Circa 2010 i was feverishly googling “tiger girl” looking for pictures of elvish girl in the forest with her pet tiger, you know, that kind of fantasy art; and i found some obscure forum where someone posted a furry drawing of a tiger girl, and someone commented ‘can someone please draw a furry that isn’t trying to be sexy’, and i’m like ‘what’s a furry’

And i’ve been circling around the fandom ever since. A couple things happened to make me join: more SFW spaces opened up in the fandom, i got less sex negative anyway, and i dropped out of concept art school so i had nothing to do with myself anymore.

Just like last time, i think there’s basically no chance that this really is a furry hacker group. I don’t have any educated guesses for why they’re saying so.

I’m an artist, aka unemployed with a hobby.

Well i do notice a discrepancy there: 385 say they do art full time, but only 189 say that they do it for more than 30 hours a week.

But honestly, whether we compare it to 385 or 189, 33 is still a minuscule number regardless. And then you look at the prices of comissions under different parameters (auction, non-auction, how many characters, YCH).

I really hope that there’s some kind of selection bias, for example maybe this survey reached smaller artists more, or the least productive artists had more time to answer a random survey, or something

Do most artists draw art without expecting any money?

Definitely amateur artists don’t expect money, but as you get better and more popular people tend to start offering money. The furry fandom is more serious about this than other online spaces, they pay more and will rarely ask for free art.

Do most artists do it as a side hustle in addition to a regular job? Is that exhausting?

Artists very often have a day job, but we as the audience are more likely to notice full-time artists because they tend to be more active and prolific. Being a more popular artist makes it easier to make it a full-time job, and making it their full-time job makes it easier to get popular.

What sort of “salary” could one reasonably expect from being dedicated to full-time drawing [furry] art?

Oh there was a survey going around on this topic actually. Behold, graphs and a spreadsheet. Most artists i know are broke.

If it’s meant to be your only source of income, how does your job security feel?

It’s kind of a dream job and a lot of people want it, so supply is high and it can be hard to pay the rent with this. The quality standards are also pretty high. Add the fact that the economy isn’t doing great and a lot of people don’t have means to pay for as much art as they’d like. So no, i wouldn’t guess it’s a stable income.

Is it required to “get lucky”/“get noticed” in order to make any real amount of money?

My optimistic opinion is that putting out quality art consistently over time will get you noticed no matter what; i don’t think luck is a factor, if the goal is profitability then catering to the audience’s tastes is much more important.

The hard part is making quality art consistently. For one thing, not everyone lives in suitable conditions to work from home, that kind of luck is a factor.

If by “get noticed” you mean “get promoted by bigger artists”, then yeah that helps a lot, but it’s also possible to just grow on your own.

Is it fun, or does it become “work”?

It becomes work. Starting a drawing is a lot easier than finishing it, so it definitely requires discipline and work ethic.

But also, the kind of people with the inclination to draw for 8 hours a day are absolutely passionate about art and would do it anyway; and making art of a high enough quality to make a living requires the kind of practice that comes from drawing for 8 hours a day.

Any other interesting topics that I don’t know enough about to ask?

It’s relatively common for artists to not consider themselves furry, but they draw anthros and therefore have a furry audience. Membership in the community is not required, all that is required is anthro animals.

But, when it comes to making a living, i do think it takes a furry to know the esthetic expectations and how to subvert them, even with AI art. And a lot of artists stay away from furry because of the negative associations, so competition is not as stiff as it could be. This is especially true for NSFW furry art, that’s really a niche where you only go if it’s what you’re into.

It is not technologically possible to verify an internet user’s identity, there’s always a way to bypass it. Best you can do is raise the barrier to entry, which is definitely something but is not equal to it being impossible.

Having said that, if it was possible to verify an internet user’s identity, it would be necessary to make it illegal. Age verification being possible at all would be a disaster, we would need to invent ways to make it impossible so the internet can continue to exist.

I don’t know where to start without a reference

You can put together what’s called a mood board: a collection of pictures that are relevant to the concept. This species, these clothes, here’s a few pictures that give off the right vibes, this is the sort of house that they would live in, this is what they would drive, here’s a fictional character or someone else’s fursona that kinda has the right esthetic, etc

Just spending time curating this collection is pretty satisfying on its own, but then you can show this moodboard to an artist when you get your first commission, and they’ll have a decent idea. And that will be kinda the first visualization, and you can go from there.

This man needs to discover furries. Being walked on all fours is pretty weird even for furries, but he would definitely have some sympathy and less judgement than with normies.