Stolen from  kinase

Where are you staying?
Maratim hotel.

Means of transportation?
I'll travel by car along with  kiantis and  kinase.

Sharing a room with:
 bedwyr-bedrydant

What is your gender?
Male.

Relationship Status:
Classified data!

How old are you?
33

How tall are you?
I can't remember... about 175cm?

Which languages do you speak?
Italian, English, a little bit of Spanish.

Where will you be most of the time during the day?
Probably at panels and events or at the bar.

Who will you be with?
Several other Italian friends.

Do you do free art?
No, sorry.

Do you do trades?
Nope, too stressful. X-P

Do you do commissions?
Not at the con.

Do you have prints/ CDs?
I'll have several originals for sale at the Art Show.

What suit(s) will you have?
No, at most I could be wearing a tail if I find a cute one to buy.

Can I dance with you?
I hate loud music and dancing.

Can I touch you?
As long as it's not "bad touch"...

Can I talk to you?
Sure!

Can I hug you?
Probably, but ask before.

Can I take photos of you/with you?
Yes.

Can I buy you lots of drinks?
Only if it's not a trap!

Do you drink Alcohol/Smoke?
No.

Can I give you lots of money?
DO WANT

Can I hug or snuggle with you?
Only if I already know you very well.

Can we hang out?
Probably yes.

Are you nice?
I hope so! Just don't be creepy with me.

Other cons you may go to?
The Italian furry con, Zampacon.

Attending any events?
Yes but I'll decide case by case which ones.

How can I find you at the con?
I'll have my FA icon as a badge.

Can we go out for a dinner?
I'll probably have dinners with my pals, but feel free to ask.

Are you buying art?
Only if there is something as awesome as that anthro duck painting of last year. You know, the small one which spanned several separate sheets. If you have seen it you remember it.
Like, forever.
FFFFFFFFFF why didn't I buy that on the spot?! X-P

What do I have to watch out for, when I am meeting you?
Wolves. They tend to stalk reindeer but they'll chew on other nearby critters if available.

What is the best way to contact you?
Talking to me, since I'm not sure I'll have email/PM access.

May I kidnap you to my room?
Only if you are a hot vixen or something like that. X-D

You look pretty tired, are you ok?
BRAAAAAAAIIIIINNNNNNSSSSSS

Last time/last con/last meet/last chat we talked so much and now you forgot my name? Why???
I forget all names, all the time. That's what badges are for!

Will you tell me your room-number and can I surprise visit you?
I'd prefer not to.

I have a personal question for the convention. May I ask you that?
Go ahead!

Wonderful  caribou is open for stream commissions this weekend, and as 4th of July/Anthrocon special she's giving the chance to get a color picture done entirely during the stream days, even in traditional media. Grab a spot now! She draws beautiful dinosaurs, dragones and deer among other things. :-3
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/10978309/

I just finished a load of work for the next painting exhibition in september. Now I definitely need to work on commissions but on the side I should also be able to make weekly pinups like the last few ones I posted. I must say sorely missed doing simpler pictures like these... I tend to get way too lost in experiments and mind-boggling personal stuff. Plus pinups are actually a great way to test palettes and learn how to handle the various paints.

Also bumping the last journal oiff the main page since the Italian furry convention Zampacon is now booked out, with more attendance than the past year. It's awesome to finally have a con near home in addition to Eurofurence. X-D

Reminder for Italian furries!

Sono ancora aperte fino al 15 maggio le iscrizioni per la convention Zampacon 2013, sul forum ufficiale trovate tutte le informazioni:
http://zampacon.forumfree.it/?t=65738036

 cadmiumtea (formerly  decolordomina) is holding a raffle:
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/4535947/
He has a wonderful soft style of drawing which deserves way more exposure. Come get a chance to win a drawing from him!

The early XIX century artist who painted these:
http://www.friendsofart.net/static/.....ad-message.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/F.....Lauscherin.jpg
also painted these:
(NSFW) http://www.zeno.org/Kunstwerke/B/Fe.....Nach+dem+Essen
(NSFW) http://www.zeno.org/Kunstwerke/B/Fe.....Badende+im+See

According to wikipedia he was well known for both kinds of art and on top of that he was a court artist who also made official portraits for nobles and stuff.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Fendi

Now I'm pretty sure a mix of furry porn and realistic portraits of heads of state would make for a cool art show. X-D

I haven't forgotten about the previous journal ( http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/3924770/ )! I'm just terribly slow and procrstinating when it comes to gathering thoughts and writing them down, especially on a complex topic such as this one. X-P But here is the followup at last.

When browsing pictures I hardly ever stop to wonder whether a picture counts as porn - I've become so used to see hundreds of images a day and saving anything I like that I gave up years ago trying to separate stuff into "clean" and "mature" folder. However there are situations where you need to know exactly what you're doing with nudity. For example I'm currently working on paintings which might be put on public display later, so I need to ponder carefully what I can or cannot show.

There are commonly accepted criteria to label a picture as porn, e.g. it's porn if it shows sexual contact or arousal, but what exactly makes a nude picture feel "tasteful" rather than sexualized? There is no magic formula of course, but I've been reading stuff and looking at tons of nude art from different cultures and turns out there are common rules of thumb for that. For example:

- Using relaxed, natural poses. This is surprisingly the most universal criteria, you can find it applied in European nudes, modest Ukiyo-e drawings, erotic sculpture from ancient India, and in pretty much any kind of nude art leaning towards realism. There has to be some very basic instict telling us that, even in a picture, nudity + tension = overtly sexual situation. But I think it's also because the most revealing poses are awkward in RL and they don't look very natural when frozen in time.

- Heavy stylization. This one is fairly obvious, very few people could fap to paintings such as this one even though it's technically an erotic scene:
http://www.susanamoo.com/wp-content.....ssingwoman.jpg
(Now waiting for "CHALLENGE ACCEPTED" replies...)

- Using composition to keep the attention away from the naughty bits. This sounds obvious, but in my experience if you really enjoy drawing erotica it can be hard to come up with compositions which do not bring to attention those body parts. I've seen a lot of furry pictures which I'm sure weren't meant to be porn, but end up feeling porny because the artist put more detail in the genitals than in anything else, or framed the exposed genitals with weird clothing drawing attention to them, or pur them in a very prominent spot in the picture.

- Not locking a character's gaze on the viewer, or not showing a character's face at all. This is a common trick in photography and modern painting. The result can still be very racy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Origine_du_monde
But a nude body with no face showing and a less revealing pose can feel almost like an abstract picture.

- Giving the character a very neutral/detached expression if he's looking at the viewer. In front of a nude picture a welcoming gaze is easily parsed by our brain as an invitation.

- Avoid butt presentation. Same as above, it's very easy to automatically parse a prominent butt as a sexual invitation. Franzk Frazetta knew this fact very well and exploited it to make his paintings quite erotic even when they didn't show full nudity.

- Drawing unattractive bodies. Duh. Unattractive is not the same as ugly though. I'm thinking of Lucian Freud's nudes here - his subjects are unattractive but not ugly, they just have unfit bodies, often with signs of aging and less than ideal proportions:
http://www.amadelio.org/volumes_ent.....ud_art_002.jpg

From what I've seen combining these tricks can erase the porny vibe even from an explicit sex scene. Try it out yourself!

I feel a bit silly for posting here a journal about methods to make a picture unfappable. X-D But I think it's an interesting topic and I hope it can give other artists some ideas to think about.

Reminder: I'm no longer opening a fixed number of slots each time, instead I'll keep a first-come first-served queue of 5 slots, so just keep an eye on my page to see if there are available slots at any given time.

Info and pricing:
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/2231347/

Just noting in advance as promised to severl watchers. From now on I'll be open for commissions all the time though: instead of setting a fixed number of slots each time I'll keep a first-come first-served queue of 5 slots, so just keep an eye on my page to see if there are available slots at any given time. (Any time the queue becomes empty I'll post a reminder in the journal.)

In the meanwhile please check the updated prices and conditions:
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/2231347/
Bondage no longer disturbs me as it used to do in the past so I've lifted the restriction on it, so now the only subjects I refuse to draw up front are gore and cub porn. I've also added an exception to the "no trademarked characters" rule since I'm fine with drawing OCs or original locations based on an existing setting.

I've been super overworked at my job and haven't managed to type the followup to the last journal yet ( http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/3924770/ ), I need to pick up that soon - in the meanwhile thank you again for all the well thought answers!

Also I got a Weasyl account:
http://www.weasyl.com/profile/scale
For now it'll be a mirror of my FA gallery but I'm considering posting the sketches only there because ZOMG IT HAS GALLERY FOLDERS!!!!1!

- How do you decide wheter a nude picture (furry or not) counts as porn?
- What exactly sets "tasteful" nudity/erotica apart from porn?
- Can you make some examples of nude art which feel absolutely innocent and non-sexual to you? Can you point out why?

I'll give my own answers later but first I'm curious to hear personal opinions on these topics - whether you have some specific rules of thumb, or you look at the general feeling of the picture regardless of what is shown, or you don't care at all about drawing a line.

Just noticed this journal from one of the artists who inspired me the most when I discovered furry art:
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/3780346/
I've almost never got negative comments about my own habit of leaving some construction lines visible in most sketches, but reading the above journal I realized I never mentioned why I don't erase them. There's actually a reason for that.

As an artists I'm entirely self-taught, except for a brief evening course on comics and illustration I did years ago and the occasional life drawing session. Nothing strange here but in my case there is a catch - when I was younger I couldn't draw at all. Seriously. I could do stick figures and little else. These are the drawings I used to do in my early teens:
http://animalshapes.it/temp/1980-19.....y_old_art.html

It's funny because on internet you can find lots of people who are in their early teens yet already have obvious talent and can produce nicely rendered artwork. Often they lack a real understanding of the basics or they are just copying an existing style, but either way it's clear that they have a lot of potential for improvement.

For me it's never been like that. Honestly, what would you say to a boy in his late teens who shows you the drawings above and tells you he wants to be an artist? Improving has been an uphill battle right from the start. I decided I wanted to draw more than stick figures only when I was about 16, but I didn't pursue art studies because I didn't believe I could actually go very far (there are other reasons too, but I'll spare you a huge rant on the Italian mentality about education).

The fact is I didn't enjoy the actual craft involved in drawing, because nothing ever came easy to me and it seemed to take an ungodly amount of work to put even the simplest idea on paper. For many years my learning process has neither been funny nor successful as I made lots of frustrating mistakes and hit dead ends all the time. But still I really, really wanted to show my fantasies in a better form. So I chugged along.

Then the internet evolved quickly. In the last 10 years or so things like ConceptArt.org and streaming instruction became a reality, I began to study art seriously and to find time to do the right kind of exercises. Eventually I've come much further than I thought would be possible for me. I'm actually at the point where I love the craft and drawing feels genuinely funny - the stuff I put on paper actually looks like what I wanted to draw and not a mangled mess! How cool is that? X-D

But all the trial and error has made me very very aware of the crutches I needed (and still need!) in order to draw anything. I have almost no natural talent to draw upon. I have no idea what drawing "effortlessly" means and probably I'll never get a taste of that. Every time it's like building a home by hand from the foundations up. But I learned to enjoy it and to be confident that there is always room for further imporvement, and that's why I leave the construction lines visible: they stand for all the effort I've put into learning the basics of drawing. I would feel uneasy pretending that my art is crafted out of magic.

http://rangifer.tumblr.com/

At first sight I hated tumblr because it looked terribly chaotic but I've grown to like the idea of images being reposted easily and with very little content restriction. It feels like an actual stream of consciousness and that's fascinating.

SOME OF THE POSTS ARE/WILL BE VERY NSFW, YOU'VE BEEN WARNED. But it won't be a high traffic tumblr so don't worry about being flooded.

Later I might use it to share some of the weird anatomical references I've been collecting for years, there's some cool stuff there and I've been waiting for a long time for a handy way of sharing it.

Check out the updated (and simplified) info here:
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/2231347/

Prices are the same as before, the main change is that at the moment I'm not doing pictures with very complex backgrounds such as cities.

I should also be able to complete commissions in much less time thanks to better organization.

Answer here or via PM, I'll look at the timestamp for priority.

Reblogging an awesome post by  sonderjen:
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/2981887/

I agree with every word of it, these are things every self taught artist has to learn in order to really improve and they can't be stressed enough.

The second point - sketch in large bursts - is especially important. I made my first real quantum leap in drawing skill when I realized that I was addicted to the eraser: I used to sketch in pencil and then correct the sketch over and over, trying to make it look better. More often than not the corrected sketch utterly fell apart instead of improving, and I wasted a lot of time.

So for a while I set aside the pencil and forced myself to draw using only pens and markers, I even picked crappy paper on purpose so psychologically it was easier to tell myself these had to be only throwaway sketches. This way I began sketching a lot more and actually acknowledging my limits instead of concealing them.

Now as a result I almost always do exercise and miniature sketches with a ballpoint pen, and I do a LOT more of them, though most of them never become full drawings.

Following the last point of that journal I might start posting some of my sketchbook pages in scraps soon. I wasn't too keen on it because my sketches are really random and messy compared to the sketchbook pages I see posted by my favorite artists on FA, but they could be interesting to share between finished drawings.

EDIT: all slots taken - thank you!

Prices and info here:
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/2231347/
Prices are unchanged, I've only updated a couple details in the conditions. Either post a reply here or send me a PM, I'll look at the date and time for the order.
(I'll post the slots and status updates in my main page and not here in the journal!)

From  dreamkeepers about making art and fitting it into your life, just thought it was worth sharing:
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/2374618/

Moved to the Commission Info page:
http://www.furaffinity.net/commissions/scale/

And the spotted red ones on top of that. X-D
http://www.pjonline.com/christmas/pj2010_723

No more slots for now due to daily work uberload, I'll probably reopen after Christmas.

I have time again and I'm looking for input, I haven't drawn enough characters of other people so far. I'm not setting a fixed number of slots for now, I'll write a note here if I need to stop to clear the queue or if the conditions change.

MEDIA AND PRICES:
At the moment I'm offering only full color acrylic paintings, starting at $ 200 (160 euro) for 25x35 cm. Price intended for one character with full background or two characters with a simpler background. For more than two characters, larger canvases or complex scenes please PM me for a price estimate.
Basic expedition (from Italy) is 24 euro for Europe and $ 30 for USA/Canada, may vary for larger canvases.
I accept Paypal, international checks or direct payment through bank.

CONTENT:
- no hardcore sex for this batch (nudity, snuggles etc. are fine, ask in case of doubt!)
- no bondage
- I reserve to refuse other subjects if I'm not comfortable drawing them

I tried to put up the Moodboard meme but it got axed because of copyright fail. D-: No big deal, but there's one item of the list which I really want to share to see if anybody else knew it.

"Story Teller" was an illustrated magazine of the early 80s which came with audio cassettes included and ran fables, poetry for children and a few serialized classics of children literature such as Pinocchio and Heidi. Luckily it was published in Italian too with top quality voice acting by theatre actors and others.
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images.....500_AA300_.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_Teller
http://storytellerwebsite.wordpress.com/

This thing had a *huge* influence on my tastes for stories and illustration and even for music. I just can't overstate it, probably I wouldn't even love anthro animals so much if it wasn't for it as it shaped the way I think of certain animals for years to come. I listened at the stories so many times as a kid that I still remember some of them word by word and I remember most of the soundtrack. There were many animal stories, and even some anthro animals. The cover above shows one of my favourite at the time - where else could you find a story with a polar bear and a peregrine falcon as main characters? The falcon in the Italian version had an androgynous voice which was just charming. X-D Though the most popular character was probably Gobbolino the witch's cat.

There was a wild mix of different styles and traditions, stories for boys along with stories for girls, etc. It's hard to imagine something similar published today with all the branding and targeting going on. But I'm sure people who had to luck to own this as children have not forgotten it. X-D

I normally don't comment on this kind of stuff, but... WTF? That's easily the most retarded initiative ever taken outside of 4chan. If only making the world a better place were as easy as making lulzy drawings to "show them we value freedom".

...besides, who would even want to draw Muhammad porn? There are no official images of him and no official iconography. It's not like a drawing of Jesus or Buddha which can be easily recognized. All you can do is draw some guy with Arab dressing and write "Muhammad" on the side.

Actually this fact is more interesting that the whole political debate about the drawings. In the West we are used to think that the public image of a thing or person is a super-important part of its nature and tells a lot of truth about it (even though it's exactly the opposite). But Muhammad has no image... and the Muslim culture in general shuns figurative imagery and doesn't try to illustrate all concepts the way we do. Which leads me to wonder wether advertising and superficial initiatives like this one can have in a Muslim culture the same strong effect they can have in the Western culture, and how much this difference pushes Western people see Muslim cultures as shady and impossible to understand.

Stolen from  kamui:

In no particular order, list FIVE artists (furry or otherwise, contemporary or historical) who you feel have greatly influenced your growth as an artist, along with a link to one piece by each that you feel represents their work! (For those who don't know the tags here, just type [ url = (the URL) ] the artist's name [ /url ], but without the spaces!)

Not easy because I'm not very good at recognizing styles and the set of artists I admire changed wildly with time. I guess the most influential have been:

1. Leonardo da Vinci
2. Frank Frazetta (NSFW) A relatively recent discovery, since I started painting. I think the influence doesn't show much yet but I learned a lot of what I know about color by analyzing his paintings.
3. Juan Zanotto
4.  stasisdelirium
5.  kyoht's older drawings, especially her design for anthros with a quadruped-like anatomy.

Also the unknown artists of some really cheesy cartoons from the '80s like My Little Ponies and Bravestarr. X-D And most fantasy movies of the same years, especially Legend, Willow, The Neverending Story and Labyrinth.

But I'd say most artists who have influenced me haven't done so with their style but rather with the philosophy of their work. Here I could list many, such as Osamu Tezuka, Milo Manara (NSFW), the early Go Nagai, Carl Barks, and many others...

So I finally moved my fluffy butt and started a new blog I have been planning for a while:

http://animalshapes.blogspot.com/

The first post contains some introduction but I plan to keep the blog very synthetic and do many small updates rather than a few large ones. My main inspiration for this is James Gurney's blog ( http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/ ), which is very synthetic but at the same time shares a lot of useful information. Of course I'm not nearly as skilled as him, but I hope sharing more of my notes can lead to interesting things.

Later,
Scale