The day is here,
folks, and I have no clue how to start this damn thing. I guess I should’ve
thought of this well before but hey, it’s not a school assignment, so fuck it. Instead,
I’ll just try my best to wing it, like always.
After 5:32 AM on this day
(March 3rd, 2018), it has been exactly
ten years since I first unveiled my erotic fan art online and roughly twenty
years minus several months since I started to draw cartoon women in various
states of undress, after seeing Dexter’s Mom prance around the family’s swimming
pool in the episode ‘Better Off Wet’ (and having my puberty kick off because of
that moment). While I always had a hunch it would last this long, I could’ve
never dreamed of all the wonderful things it has brought to my life. At the very
most, I simply assumed that I’d maybe find two or three people to occasionally
chat about all things cartoon erotica and maybe get some e-fame on places such
as Paheal and 4chan. However, I would’ve never imagined the magnitude of having such a hobby.
Some of those online
friendships that I formed back in March of ’08 have lasted to this day and
actually strengthened to the point that I’ve met some of these fine folk in
person and even had one so graciously accommodate me when I was on an extended
trip in his area. Some relationships had a rocky start, but still turned out good: thanks to the diplomatic skills of a mutual
friend, a former rival of mine ended up teaching me valuable Photoshop
techniques and as well as showed me how to differentiate between valuable
feedback and empty praise. Today, he is one of my best online friends, and we
have VoIP calls on a regular basis. I’m also happy to have still met some great
people after those early days, such as one of my regular commissioners whose
involvement in my life not only ended up getting my artwork seen by Ralph
Bakshi himself, but also scored me several major autographs from legendary
voice actors (most notably Grey Griffin, who signed a drawing I had made
featuring several of the characters she has helped bring to life). In addition,
I’ve also had a continuous email conversation with this person since 2012, most likely
spanning well over 1,000 replies and with no end in sight.
In short, my decision to post something on the Wacky World of Erotic Cartoons forums simply
to avoid having my third account get purged due to lurking completely
changed my life. Whoever implemented that rule, I salute you. And
while it’s likely to have simply sped up the inevitable decision to post my
doodles online, I’m quite certain that the path I’ve walked so far would’ve
looked very different. If anything, my art would’ve likely looked worse than it
does now, and who knows, maybe I’d have quit drawing altogether or turned into one
of those insufferable drama queens who keep deleting their old stuff and moving
from site to site and forum to forum.
The online communities available for erotic cartoon fans have drastically changed
during these ten years. Gone are dedicated web sites such as WWOEC and the
popularity of old-school PhpBB-style message boards, with smartphone-accessible
social media portals in their place. Paheal and deviantART are still here,
although the latter has lost a considerable amount of talent to the
poorly-coded Tumblr (which is one of the worst places to host fan art, but I’m
not going to get into that here) while the former has had to endure constantly
fluctuating national and international laws concerning illustrated erotica. It
was in June of ’08 that I set up this still-functioning Blogger page as a
temporary place to release my art outside WWOEC forums while searching for a
proper portal for an art gallery. Today, I have my long-standing deviantARTpage to hold my SFW and softcore material, which isn’t quite enough but certainly
better than nothing.
It is also this demand
of a thorough, well-organized gallery that gave birth to the
forever-in-the-making project better known as the art archive, which I’m SERIOUSLY going to get done this year.
Originally, I was hoping to have the first iteration of it done by 2009 (as ‘the art bundle’) but as fate
would have it, something would always prevent me from getting it to a
releasable state. Right now, it’s about halfway finished, with the biggest and
most arduous work of simply organizing everything in proper categories
thankfully behind me. My goal now is to just get it out there and then keep it
updated either three or four times per year. In some weird, poetic manner the
current archive will be closest to the original bundle, as it will likely have
very few extras and simply high-quality, high-resolution versions of all the
pictures I’ve published. All the bonus content will be added later via patches,
and if there are pictures I deem worth finishing first, I will do exactly that.
So, is there anything
else that needs to be said? It’s a bit tough since I've already covered quite a few topics during my earlier celebratory posts.
Hell, I already ran out of things to say last year! I suppose I should
reiterate that my life is currently at a turning point which makes it very
difficult for me to say what happens next. However, I still have passion for
doing this and I will, as long as it is possible, to keep at it. The day will
eventually come when I stop drawing for good, but I hope it will be the day I
die (or at least when I lose muscle control due to old age). Having said that,
it’s quite difficult to say how long this will go on and I obviously can’t make
any concrete promises… but I’ll try my best.
In closing, I guess I
could mention why I started doing this in the first place.
It was because I
thought I could draw my own fap material.
And before you ask, the
answer is ‘no’, at least when it comes to "short-term profits." It doesn’t really work as a concept because you end up
spending so much time trying to get your “steamy” idea stuck to the paper that
you get bored with it and simply move on – assuming you manage to even finish
it before losing interest. On the bright side, if you do manage to enjoy the
creative process itself, it will create you a drive to keep you drawing further
images. The online attention may also help, although you need to prevent it
from getting into your head too much, as it may create ego problems (hubris).
In the end, you just might develop into a better artist… and then, going back
to some of those pictures you created earlier, who knows: you just might see them arousing again after
enough time has passed by.
My nickname is dlt and
will likely remain as such until the end. I started my journey on a long-gone
cartoon porn forum and eventually found my way into deviantART. I still have my
old blog, dlt’s decadent drawings, even
though I barely use it these days. I still frequent on 4chan, although I tend
to post anonymously these days. I follow people’s comments about my art on
Paheal and welcome constructive criticism as I want to keep improving. And no, I
still haven’t seen the movie (The Night
Porter, 1974) on which I based my very first (awful) published drawing,
because I’ve heard it’s not a very good one.
Thank you to each and every one of you who have
supported my fan art throughout this decade! Whether or you’re a personal
friend of mine or someone who only once happened to stumble upon my art and liked it, I wish to
express my utmost gratitude for you (unless you’re a tracer, in which case you
should rot in hell).
Here’s to the next ten years.
