Becoming more than explicit while wrestling with new and old ideas
Last year I looked over a lot of my artwork that I created since 2015 when I started to improve a lot with Poser before I moved over to Daz Studio in 2017. My artwork from 2012 was just a test to see where I stood in this hollowed out world I was attempting to create with a variety of different story projects. I didn't save a single image from back then because all of my 2012 artwork was terrible, it wasn't worth preserving unless I just wanted to remind myself how far I've come from then to now.
But if I want to remind myself of any progress I have made in terms of how well my scenes are enkindled from how realistic the lighting appears indoors...The one thing many artist utilizing 3D struggles with the most. I almost quit in 2018 because I was so damn frustrated with DAZ. I use to try to light my scenes the old way, using point lights...Until I master the art of extinguishing lighting. But you see I didn't just start out as an artist in 2012...No...it goes all the way back, as further back as 1993.
In 1993 my 3rd grade teacher introduced us to a program called Story Book Weaver. Story Book weaver was like Poser/daz for children, you couldn't create anything extreme with the program but it still gave kids a hell of a lot of freedom to get creative. The program gave you an assortment of characters to choose from, a wide variety of environments like houses, city buildings, everything. You could even compare it to The Sims in some ways except none of it was animated.
It made no sense, and I remember looking at the computer screens at all the other kids in class...I was jealous, bitter, and upset because their stories were so much cooler looking than mine with all the neat environments they put together all on their own...I was honestly embarrassed by my work compared to theirs..After every one completed their story assignment...The teacher made us show it off to the class, and I hated my story and I hated the art I created for it...The envy I had for others while scorning myself it was hard and a rough beginning....Now look at me today.....I challenge them to step up to the Dark Arts master now! And we'll see who's the greatest story teller to walk among this earth!
On December 23, 2023 I kept thinking how I was going to approach 2024 due to the growing censorship regulations all over the web. Censorship have always been a burden on freedom of expression so my ability to establish myself as a true artist would prove difficult in today's anti-fun climate. I would have to be able to unleash my full potential to go where I want to go.
I use to check out dark erotic romance novels a long time ago from the library because I was a avid reader of anything with a cool cover on the book. People say never judge books by the covers but I say that's a lot of hot air. Your cover is what creates curiosity, make a shitty generic cover your book is likely to get ignored. Not always but sometimes people will judge a book cover. I usually do that myself that's what attracted me to some of those RL Stine books.
A person can easily say, "Well Harry Potter books had nothing on the cover." True but Harry Potter also had a lot of damn marketing so people already partially knew what it was even before they bothered to read the books, same thing with Lord Of The Rings. JK Rowling didn't just write a story about wizards and shit and people automatically knew by default to buy the books. She had her work heavily marketed and because of that people were curious and bought her books, of course her books didn't need any cover art to prove anything. In fact all these authors Steven King included marketed their work really well and that's why people were eager to read their stuff.
Cover art on a book is like creating a resume and let me tell you, those dark romance novels know how to reach out to their target audiences. Generally these books are mainly aimed at women when you see a half naked man on the cover with a chiseled body and a woman caressing him but the one I picked up didn't have a man on the cover because I would never read a book with a half naked man on the cover -laughing-.
The book I picked up looked different than the others on the shelf because it had a sexy half naked woman on the cover walking down a dark street alone in the night. The book was about supernatural individuals they were sort of like dark elves. Anyway I remember being really amazed at how serious all the explicit content was in written context. The sexual parts in the books were well thought out and very detailed. I would then wonder how I too could become a serious story teller and a graphic art novelist if I wrote in a serious manner that involved explicit content.
Erotic novels don't need pictures but once they start unraveling all the steamy content, you can tell these authors are putting forth all this effort when they describe the sexual encounters. This is why I pursue darker ideas than the norm, I can come up with some dangerously interesting ideas. I'm not saying these romance novels encouraged me to write better, that was always a priority for me starting way back in 2003.
If I am unable to do this while challenging censorship then there is little reason to continue moving forward. But there are a number of other factors that gave me a lot to think about. I have made all kinds of unacceptable mistakes that I shouldn't have made if I just paid more attention to the creation process other than how well I create characters and build the world for them to fail or succeed in. I need to escape from this "It's just porn" way of thinking because my artwork is more than that. I don't even like using the word "porn" when describing or talking about my work. I don't like using it when I discuss the work of others either. I know I've said that before that I prefer to call it Erotic entertainment. It sounds better. Xrotica Entertainment, something along those lines.
Anyway I found myself very disappointed with a lot of the artwork I've made in the past because it failed to reflect who I was as a person that can conjure up ideas out of thin air and then turn them into something memorable. A lot of the things I was creating with Raizen Fury just didn't work anymore and the more I did it the more I wanted to stop doing it. Futanari's felt really out of place in such a world where the focus is centered around girls in street gangs. I kept feeling like futa's were just hurting the material....
Futa's and street gangs don't work unless you can come up with a way for it to work...And to me it felt strange. But not everything I create is story related or story driven either. So there are times when I can just use futanari for any and everything. The only time it worked in Raizen Fury really is during the Prison story. That's because the Warden was experimenting with their bodies and doing all kinds of bizarre things to them that caused them to sprout their member of torment -laughing-
Sure it's fun to use them in humiliation scenarios where some girl shoves her cock down another girls throat because she hates her rival or wants to teach her some kind of lesson. But in the end it's dumb, stupid, comical and looks out of place compared to other stuff where I made use of dick girls or in the case of my psychological action Horror Erotic thriller, Yurei Yokai.
The landlord is capable of altering his appearance to look male or female in the upper body region and just proceeds to play around with the sexuality of others. Taunting and humiliating them through seduction, force, and manipulation.
So one of her tenants fail to pay rent, to make her remember not to fall behind again. Nure-Onna decides to sexually humiliate a married woman by forcing her to submit to her masculine features. It was the first time I even bothered to mess around with NRT and I really hate that shit so I never made a habit of doing it. I have for the most part taken on the role of being a very experimental artist to see what works and what doesn't in specific situations or stories depending on what the hell I'm doing.
Although I was never a stranger with fornicating with different ideas, dark erotic material is where boring ideas get put to rest, and dangerous ideas are given the opportunity to prevail, only if you have the heart for it. I did this quite a lot back in my Poser Pro years where I experimented with a number of challenging themes. Over time I evolved into a much better story teller than what I use to be. But I also made a few mistakes again even as I moved over into Daz.
Sometimes I might think a bad concept is a good concept without taking into consideration that it isn't a good theme or project at all. That's why this year was very important to make changes to content I didn't like and improving the ones I did like. I feel that explicit content like a lot of material is becoming too reliable on what's "trendy." Nevertheless there aren't too many rules a person has to follow when producing erotic/pornographic material. Being as original as possible is key to separating yourself apart from the mainstream.
The idea I chose when I did the NRT scenario involving a Cross-dresser and a helpless wife was a rare occasion to test the freezing cold waters. I had to know just how deep it really was and how far I was willing to take a dive below the sea to find something rare on my end to explore before making up my mind on what direction I had to take in the future. I needed to find out if I wanted to go with old ideas that were still alien to me as far as understanding them or develop something new to avoid becoming a victim to the trendsetters. And that was never going to happen.
Antonio discussing some work related matters with Cindy.
I kept contemplating on whether or not futas in Raizen Fury should stay or be taken out of the equation when I went back to the story involving street gangs, dark comedy, and how far away I wanted to avoid anything feeling 2020 or mid 21st century. I have watched many films and observed television from the past enough to know that being a serious artist is what drives me to put all this effort into the characters and plots I build together.
In the case of Shadow Hill I get to explore all the seasons of the year like Halloween and Christmas. I tell people that it's always Halloween in the north and south of Shadow Hill in the east and west it's always Christmas. Now imagine these two special times of year combined into one and an entire town remains Halloween and Christmas every day. I'm sure a person might find it boring after awhile. But that doesn't mean other seasons can't be mixed together with it.
There were things I did in past that gave me a lot to think about. I kept making the decision to just remove and pull art from Pixiv if the theme no longer worked or blended well with everything else I was doing. When you start feeling as though your content is too damn close to the failure that is the late half of the 21st century instead of reflecting the golden age era that the art is intended to reflect well that's a problem for me. I try to remind people that even though the 90s and early 2000s is gone and we're never getting a generation like that ever again....It's okay to live it through fiction.
There are other times when I'm not focusing on story driven content and that allows me to freely break out of the nostalgia realm for awhile. But I don't want my art being a reflection of how bad things are today since I hate the modern age. You won't see characters in my art taking selfies or walking around glued to a cellphone. If they need to call someone there's nothing wrong with using a phone booth although modern tech and beyond does exist when I'm not restricting myself to a certain time period just to remain accurate to a specific decade. We had cellphones in the 90s, but they just couldn't do all that fun internet like stuff or texting.
Even so I have done so many things with my art that made me ashamed of it if it didn't compliment the rest of my work. Yesterday I was online looking around to see if anyone had posted any of my old art that I didn't like that I tried eliminating from Pixiv so I can have it all removed because there are things I just felt completely unsure about.
Another thing is that I don't want to feel as though I'm forcing ideas into my art that shouldn't even be there. I still make fun of the art I got rid of from long ago because some of it just had this weird dialog in it I couldn't even grasp whenever I tried to make a comic or graphic novel...It was just damn terrible. Some ideas were too much for me to take seriously. I don't think half of the artist that write content for their comics re-read any of their own work before they decide to publicly share it.
Whenever I did this I would just feel painfully embarrassed, and I would say "did I actually write that crap? Oh God...tell me I didn't just write that and publicly posted it!" I'm not saying these were my thoughts for everything. Because I'm content with myself when I mock something I hate. There were a lot of moments like that in those Prison graphic novels I did in 2020...I'm always harping on those all the damn time for how bad they were. If I went back and redid them again? Oh they would be so much better now.
And I told him that AI animations would never catch up with the old way of producing animations but it'll make it easy for anyone to get into doing it just like AI has made it easy for anyone to make still images with little to no effort. The day AI can imitate the work of Radroach or DesireSFM would be something...But I doubt it would ever get that good. I could be wrong, but still I doubt it.
Outside of Pixiv, people barely pay attention to AI content. I noticed on Deviant Art there's a lot of artist posting it there too, and the stuff gets outright ignored no matter how cool or neat the image looks. AI is just boring, and since so many people is using and abusing it, there's no way you can impress people with it at all when just about ANYONE can pick it up and produce the same results as the next group of people using AI to generate automatic images.
On Pixiv you can easily gain a lot of likes for AI content. I'm glad I never got sucked into doing AI art. I had a lot of confidence to achieve so many things this year with my work because I truly do feel like 2024 is the last opportunity to produce something before something big happens...I'm expecting it to, and I don't think it's going to be anything good. Since 2010 we've already had A LOT of censorship....Even Pixiv ended up changing on everyone, and it hasn't been the same ever since. Now they are deleting 3D artist just for realism in general.....Talk about a platform falling hard on it's ass.
