It's my birthday today! I have a bit of other news I'll share at the end of this post too, but I just wanted to highlight another set of underrated artists here first, caus it's been a while!

3D art has come so far over the last decade or so, but I'm still always surprised at just how much life some folks are able to squeeze out of the medium now. @kesiahh's characters and renders of said characters are so full of innocence and pure joy. I love them; they're delightful.

I'm in love with @wwiredweird's warm color palettes and mischevious looking characters, but when they do this whole "shattered stained glass" thing, it's pretty next level. The shapes and energy in those things are awe inspiring. 

We all know I love my lineless art, so as soon as I saw @jkmeilinh's stuff I had to immediately follow them. Their stuff is super clean and super detailed; it's kind of mesmerizing.

It's hard for me to pin down exactly what @CGonNewgrounds does best, because they're really good at that super inky comic book style AND that vibrant UPA sort of thing too. In any case, their art is very cool.

@thedansandoval has gotten a decent amount of frontpages before, but their art is so good and has such a wide appeal *cough* that I truly don't understand how they don't already have like 10K followers here. Genuinely one of the most polished and confident styles I've seen from anyone on this site.

So back to that "other news", first of all, I'm going to be doing a little panel at this year's NG Summerfest towards the end of the month that I'm calling "Writing Compelling Characters". I'll be honest, I haven't prepped a whole lot for it just yet, but I have a pretty good idea of what I wanna cover, and I'll get it all organized soon enough. I'm kind of excited about it; should be a good time!

And on that note, I'm also going to @Quarl's wedding here in just over a week! I'm terrified of the process of actually GETTING there because she literally lives in the middle of nowhere...but the bf and I are gonna figure it out, it's gonna happen! (Also, he's a lot better with directions than I am)

And then lastly, I've mentioned briefly before that I wanted to turn the short story I wrote for the writing contest/trans awareness day into a visual novel; I actually started that a few months ago, but I got so caught up with coding LMNG2 and working on Art Fight that I haven't really touched it since then. I'm coming back to that here now. It might just be more of a background thing until I finish it, but I'm excited about this one too. I've never really made anything so explicitly personal before, even if the events in it haven't actually happened. It's a little scary, but I like scary; that's how I grow. 

I'm one year older today too.