db-spencer

  LIFE
Hihi everyone! How're you? Many of you have been concerned with my mood, my silence the past week or so, and the issues with my most recent image set. I thank and lerv you for all your loves and concerns. You've been asking what's been going on and why I've ended my current image set so abruptly. Here's as much of an answer as I'm willing to give right now, but it should help clear the air...
     I've always been open about my depression/anxiety. It's part of who I am, and any time I can get a chance to help others understand depression and anxiety through my experiences is always a good thing. Most of the time I'm a charismatic, spastic and unwavering force of nature, determined to defend, protect and help any and all around me. But I have a bad habit of not applying the same determination to myself. And from time to time it catches up with me. Usually this takes the form of "low days" and extreme bouts of the blahs. One such bout kicked in big time toward the end of last week. Unfortunately, many other external negatives happened to hit at the same time... 

I can normally sluff off trolls and negative nonconstructive criticism. It's all a part of being a publicly active artist. In fact, most of you know I adore using trolls as a focus of working out my own aggression. Trolls are such wonderfully moronic sources of stress relief. Unfortunately, my most recent image set has created an unexpectedly polarized love/hate for itself among most of my fans. Without going into details, the amount of nonconstructive hate and trolling I've received has been worse than Nipplegate 2017 was. Most of this negativity hit just as my most recent bout of "down days" began. It killed all of my inspiration, and put me emotionally in quite the spastic mess. The knobs and trolls have been blocked and dealt with, but the damage was done.
     I create my art for fun and therapy. I keep with an image set as long as I'm inspired to continue making it. The advantage to doing this for fun and not being stuck with deadlines and production expectations is that I can just drop a project when I choose to and move on to something new. The reasons for losing interest vary greatly, from achieving my goal of certain desired shots, to succeeding in figuring out the challenge of a new way of doing something, to simply losing inspiration for the project. The latter is the case here. If I dwell on the reasons, it will just bring me down and make it that much harder for me to move on to something new. I do appreciate the "Ignore the trolls...", "Ignore the hate and finish the set because you want to...", and even "Do the rest of the shots if for no other reason than to piss off the trolls..." styles of attempts to boost my spirits. Unfortunately without any inspiration for the project, any further shots just wouldn't be that good, and would lower that standard of the rest of the shots.
     However, I may still come back and do the BTS shots I was thinking of doing as a mini-set follow-up. I've been missing doing those.

I hope this explains things for everyone. (BLACK)LIGHT & SHADOW is done. I took on the challenge of creating lighting that reproduces the effects of black lights in Daz, without having to cheat with textures, and I beat the challenge. I'm proud of this. It's time to move on to the next challenge or source of inspiration. I hope you continue to join me in my endless experiments and weirdness. I love you all!

  COMMISSION/REQUEST STATUS (updated 2019-11-28):

CLOSED/CLOSED

It's been a much longer recovery break than expected, but as you can see by the new image in the header above, I'm back working on creative stuffs!

     Once my burn-out was mostly worked through, I realized that I'd gotten too comfortable. I'd gotten too comfortable being "normal" (or as normal as I'm capable of...). So this past weekend I sat my bum down and double-clicked on that intimidating Daz Studio icon on my desktop that had been haunting and taunting me since December. Over the past few days I've been, organizing my assets, setting up default scenes & lighting sets, and getting used to the Daz controls again. I figured since it'd been so long, both since I'd created anything and since "Digi-Me" had made an appearance, that I'd do some updating there as well. I'd never been happy with the skin I'd been using (the default Teen Josie 6 skin). I've never gotten around to updating it to something better, because I'd never originally planned to use "Digi-Me" much. So I've been adding moles, freckles, imperfections, and a more realistic bump map. Having been so long, and my own IRL hair having grown out again, I'm also considering changing "Digi-Me" 's hair to reflect that. We'll see what whimsy decrees.

     I've also found that my aesthetic tastes have changed a little during my five months away. To avoid burn-out, and keep myself challenged and excited, I'm going to try to be stepping back to being more experimental with styles, tools & tricks. I'm likely going to be tweaking the appearances of some of my OCs to reflect this. Don't worry. the changes would be minor- Minor shape tweaks, improved make-up, wardrobe updates (like above), etc. Some OCs may not have any changes at all. Again, it'll all be up to whimsy.  

I already have a short list of projects, which I hope to keep short at all times. Some of the projects are based or inspired by fan requests! A few of the projects are based on some canon I've been formulating around Hex, Jerica, and a few other characters you've not seen yet.

  COMMISSION/REQUEST STATUS (updated 2019-04-25):

CLOSED/CLOSED

Just a short update because... Ack! It's April already? I guess that means I need to get off my bum and start being all creative and shnit. I do have a short list of projects I want to play with, but to warm up, I think I'll do a mini-set with Goji (and perhaps a friend joining in on the fun!) Slushe also has a new contest coming up, with a "Spring" theme, so I may do something quick for that. We'll see. One step at a time.

While going through and posting all of my sets up on my Slushe account, I found a lot of unposted scraps and test shots. I might put together a compilation set of all of them for you all. For now, todays journal header image is one of the previously unposted lighting tests of Bailey's bum for the South of the Border set.

  COMMISSION/REQUEST STATUS (updated 2019-04-02):

CLOSED/CLOSED

Wow, how quickly time flies! I've not posted an official update since the Tumblrpocalypse of 2018 (aka mid-December). I'm here to break that hiatus, and hope to keep it from happening again, at least for a while.

Normally I take a break from being creative around January each year. This is to avoid burnout, as well as giving me time to work on non-artsy projects. Many things have led to one month turning into two, from rebuilding accounts on new social media after the "death" of Tumblr, to record Winter storms. To be honest though, a good chunk of the reason I've not opened Daz Studio since mid-December is... a heaping evil pile of artist anxiety. It's something I'm working on, and I won't dump on you with details, I will say...

GIBBS-SLAPPING THAT HORSE IN THE HEAD

I will be turning my bum right back around and taking a cricket bat to that shambling mound of worry-monster soon. Once I finish uploading the rest of my Tumblr galleries to my Slushe account, I'll be sitting down and figuring out what direction(s) I want to head this year with my 3DX to reinvigorate myself and my art. Be patient with me ^_^

HERE TO STAY!

So stick with me, mah awesome fans that I lerv so much! There may be some tweaking and adjustments, but I’m still here!

 

  COMMISSION/REQUEST STATUS (updated 2019-02-19):

CLOSED/CLOSED

Wow, how quickly time flies! I've not posted an official update since the Tumblrpocalypse of 2018 (aka mid-December). I'm here to break that hiatus, and hope to keep it from happening again, at least for a while.

Normally I take a break from being creative around January each year. This is to avoid burnout, as well as giving me time to work on non-artsy projects. Many things have led to one month turning into two, from rebuilding accounts on new social media after the "death" of Tumblr, to record Winter storms. To be honest though, a good chunk of the reason I've not opened Daz Studio since mid-December is... a heaping evil pile of artist anxiety. It's something I'm working on, and I won't dump on you with details, I will say...

GIBBS-SLAPPING THAT HORSE IN THE HEAD

I will be turning my bum right back around and taking a cricket bat to that shambling mound of worry-monster soon. Once I finish uploading the rest of my Tumblr galleries to my Slushe account, I'll be sitting down and figuring out what direction(s) I want to head this year with my 3DX to reinvigorate myself and my art. Be patient with me ^_^

HERE TO STAY!

So stick with me, mah awesome fans that I lerv so much! There may be some tweaking and adjustments, but I’m still here!

 

  COMMISSION/REQUEST STATUS (updated 2019-02-19):

CLOSED/CLOSED