RatCreature's Journal

Grabbed from gwyn: I currently have 91 works posted on AO3. Choose a random number—no peeking!—between 1 and 91 inclusive (where 1 is the first work ever posted and 91 is the latest), and I will tell you three things I currently like about that work.

lilacsigil prompted: "Fandom and language for you: what fandoms did you experience dubbed into German, are you in any German-language fandoms, how does English-speaking fandom feel to you, things like that."

Well, as far as dubbed tv shows go, pretty much all my fandoms before I had fast internet I first watched in German. So all the series I felt fannish about before finding online fandom, and the things I watched in the late 90s when I first found online fandom too. Some of those I have never actually bothered to rewatch in the original (I don't rewatch things very often in general), like most of original Star Trek episodes I only watched on tv here, same for TNG. But for example the X-Files I first watched haphazardly in German, but later on I got the episodes in the original and rewatched.

With Buffy the video tapes came out with not too much delay (about a season iirc), so that was the same as watching them here, so I bought those from the UK soon. With The Sentinel I first watched dubbed German episodes, but after I found the fandom I managed to get tape copies from another fan, and the later third and fourth season I only watched in the original.

The dubbing for Sentinel made some odd choices, in particular that Jim and Blair stuck with "Sie", presumably because they called each other Ellison and Sandburg in the original, but who would address a close work colleague who is also a roommate with the formal you? But it is a tricky issue, because obviously if they spoke German, they would start out with "Sie" and then at some point a "Du" would need to be offered, which is a significant marker for a relationship. And obviously that doesn't happen on screen, so they would have had to switch suddenly and that would also be odd.

With Due South I watched the RayV seasons in German first, but managed to get the RayK seasons through tape trade.

Tolkien I first read translated, but then later reread in English. Actually, iirc, LOTR was the first English book I read in English outside of English class assignments (which at that point were still mostly short stories). It was a tad ambitious as a choice for someone who at the time was not fluent. I think I was fourteen or fifteen or so, so I had only four or five years of English classes, because when I went to school they didn't yet start foreign languages in elementary school, but only in fifth grade. So that was quite slow going, even as I knew what was happening. Eventually I had the German edition open concurrently as I worked my way through LOTR in English the first time.

It turned out though that deciphering Tolkien was still a better choice for first reading material than reading French comics in the original, which I couldn't really manage after four years of French later on (even before I forgot most of it again). Being able to read French comics was my major aspirational motivation to drop Latin eventually (which my parents had wanted me to take as second language) and pick up French instead, because so many great comics aren't translated. But with so little text as context for guessing words you don't know, and the text not explaining the images but conveying separate things, and being spoken language with jokes and slang, comics are quite far from easy literature.

Speaking of comics, with Carl Barks' Donald Duck comics the classic German translation by Erika Fuchs is really good and sometimes funnier than the original. I have an English language edition of Carl Barks' complete works, but I really like the German translation as much, and many German fans prefer it. Because Erika Fuchs translated so many Disney comics with inventive language she had quite an impact on contemporary German language use, btw.

Actually Donaldism is the closest I come to having a German-language fandom, with German fanzines I have and such. And general comic fandom too to some extent, though that is more a multi-lingual thing. And mostly offline fandom engagement.

I don't watch a lot of German tv. These days I mostly watch tv shows on the computer, and I'm not in any online German fandom. Generally my online fandom engagement happens in English.

I find it even somewhat awkward to talk about fanfic fandom in German, because so many of the terms are English, so that when you talk with another German fan about something, you end up talking Denglisch with every second word (at best, sometimes seven out of ten) or so being a direct loan. Which okay, on the one hand, I won't start saying Schmerz/Trösten or whatever it would be instead of h/c, but otoh at some point it just gets ridiculous.

If you take a fairly normal fannish sentence you might to say to someone while talking about fanfic, like "XY wrote a great gen h/c ficlet for a Mundane AU prompt on the kink meme." you end up with very few German words, and maybe one of them a noun. I mean, even those that have translations are difficult, like say "prompt": Would I pick "Stichwort" or "Aufforderung" for "prompt" in a kink meme? Both sound odd. Maybe just stick with prompt, even though only the adjective meaning is the same in German (I don't think prompt as noun got loaned yet). And sure, you can translate "mundane" as "alltäglich" but "Mundane AUs" are a thing, saying "alltägliche alternative Universen" might as well mean "common AUs". Similarly you could say Geschichtenschnipsel for ficlet, or half-translate it as Fic-Schnipsel (though honestly, saying "fic" in German is, well, it sounds like you say fuck only in German that word is more obscene, because normal German swearwords all are more fecal-based than sexual, as I explained at length in my intro to that topic), but you'd probably end up saying sentences like "XY hat ein tolles gen ficlet für einen Mundane AU prompt im kink meme geschrieben." Awkward.

On the flip side, when fandom first shifted to the blogging/journaling format from mailing list, I hestitated starting one, because doing anything journal like in a foreign language felt weird to me, because I had kept paper diaries before, and those had obviously always been in German. And while thinking about fandom stuff in English was quite natural by then (after years of practicing with maililng list posts), for most other things it was not. The very first post in my blog in 2002 (reposted on DW here) which I started before getting an LJ was about that issue, and the odd feeling. Obviously more generalized nattering in English has started to feel more natural with years of practice.

Though in a way it is still weird, because I've gotten out of the habit of keeping a paper diary, and I post more often about non-fandom stuff, but still in English, so by now it feels more natural to narrate my own life in a foreign language. But that is not really fandom-related.

Otherwise English-speaking fandom doesn't feel like anything particular to me, that I could trace to the language. Sure, you can ponder the pervasiveness of English on the internet and the relative dominance of English language pop culture, and what it means for language diversity and power in international fandom, but in the end having a lingua franca is a practical thing, even if it is not a neutral thing. I like German, and I don't think English sounds cooler or some nonsense, but I'm pragmatic about reaching fannish audiences, English is more common than German, and I speak it well enough to make communicating in it not a hardship. So English it is.

There haven't been many prompts for the talking meme, so I decided to drag out another meme: Character Roulette, but of course I do this with drawbles not comment ficlets.

You probably know how it works: I have a secret list of fifteen characters, then commenters suggest a scenario with the numbers, and I respond with what I think would happen, but as quick doodle.

But please keep in mind when prompting me that in this instance the response is supposed to be possible in a picture. Last time I did this results were mixed, because some prompts were hard to doodle, but it was also cracktastic fun.

astridv gave me the prompt "First online fandom, and first fandom overall (in case those are different replies.)"

(BTW, if you want to ask me a question or prompt me for the January Talking Meme, you can comment here. Most dates are still open.)

I have always been a fan. I've been collecting comics even before I could properly read, and I can't remember a time before I self-identified as a fan. And I don't mean that I did fannish things and had fannish feelings while not aware of fandom, but I always knew that there were other fans like me.

My biggest early comic love were definitely Disney comics, in particular the Duckburgh ones, but I've always read and collected other comics too, like Yps, and a bit later I started reading Spirou and Tintin and all kinds of Franco-belgian ones, which my sister collected too, so once I was old enough not to destroy her stuff, I was allowed to borrow those, and of course I read comics from the library too. Though I soon bought my own copies, even if I had read them elsewhere, because collecting comics as physical objects has always been something I loved.

So well before I found internet fandom I was in offline comic fandom. I regularly went to comic stores and collector meetings, attended comic cons, bought zines, read books about drawing comics and comic history, went to open university lectures about comics, and drew comics and cartoons myself. I still have the comics I did in fifth grade. They aren't very good of course, but I was never a "drawer production" person, so I was showing these to my friends. Unfortunately even then I had trouble coming up with interesting stories. Worldbuilding I could do, but not plot. The results were best when I could collaborate with someone, so I did comics together with my older sister and with classmates, but it was hard to find someone wanting to write comics, have it be the kind of comics I'd want to draw and also have them happy with my drawings. I even met with other local teenage comic fans in a comic drawing workshop, but the others there were also into the art mostly, so that wasn't for collaboration. Also quite hilarious in retrospect, this comic drawing group for teenagers was actually some sort of thinly disguised city social work for drug and gang prevention, I think. Only at the time I didn't realize that I probably wasn't the target audience.

I mean, I was of course in the sense that I was a teenager and wanted to become better at drawing comics, and I had seen this offer advertised at the central public library, and went because it was a free comic drawing group. However, the group leaders were an artist together with some sort of youth social worker, and we always met in these youth centers in slightly dodgy places, first some mildly dilapidated building near the central station, then in some sort of anti-drug youth project thing, where I (as sheltered comfortably middle class girl) would have never gone otherwise. I was somewhat out of place, one of the few girls and among the youngest too, but it was quite fun, I learned a lot, and we did a fanzine together and had an exhibition at a local comic con (though I'm still disgruntled that I never got my original art back from that).

That was the only comic fanzine I've had my comics published in, though I also had my comics as serial in our school paper, and did some cartoons for that too.

The first times I ever used the internet were also because of comic fandom. I think it was in 1993 or 1994. My older sister had access through the university, and had told me about this, and I wanted to find what fan resources there were. So I visited her, and browsed newsgroups and FTP sites with FAQs about comics, using Lynx and Mosaic and Gopher for searching, and then printed the pages for reading at home. I still have a folder around somewhere with a stack of these printouts, I think.

But accessing the internet that way is rather inconvenient, so I didn't get to participate in online fandom yet. When my brother got a Compuserve account, I also visited him to use that, and I tried joining a due South mailing list, but the list traffic flooded his mailbox capacity, and it turned out to be totally impossible. But as you can see I was kind of trying to join online fandom before I was online, so as soon as I had personal internet access, even if it was dialup and cost me per minute, I was in online fandom. That was late 1997, iirc, and by then there were already many web sites and lists and lots of infrastructure besides newsgroups.

My first real online fandom was The Sentinel. As usual episodes aired here were much behind the schedule in the US and initially I just wanted to find an episode guide to see whether it was continued in the US, and I found Nightowl's Nest, and found much more than just an episode guide. I read my first fanfic then, and promptly wrote a squeeful email to the author how awesome it was to have found fanfic and their story (it was probably odd, I never heard anything back, and unfortunately a hard disk calamity destroyed my carefully hoarded early emails, so I can't reread it now with hindsight to check how it comes across). But as you can see I wasn't shy, and not even everything being in English could deter me (it certainly increased my English language practice a lot).

So soon after I joined my first mailing list (Senfic), didn't bother much with lurking there either, but started to participate in discussions. Of course I was reading lots of fanfic once I had found it, only gen at first, mostly because I was confused by all the slash warnings, assuming they were for violence (as in "slasher movies") rather than sexual content, though I couldn't quite put together why TS of all things would inspire so much gore, but that didn't misunderstanding didn't last long.

As far as online participation goes I was almost a monofan for my first years in online fandom, though I did read X-Files and Star Wars and some other fandoms too. I wasn't drawing fanart, because it never really occurred to me that I could. It wasn't a very fanart friendly environment. Part of it was technical, with it being on mailing lists and bandwidth issues on archives, but the bigger part was that there was little diversity in styles, and it didn't seem like fanart was welcome. What little fanart there was, were mostly just collage type photomanips (often not very good ones either, so I didn't like what I saw of that art form) and the few illustrations were all aiming for a very photo-realist style, which is not anything close to what I draw like. I know now that even at the time there had been other fanart styles around for tv fandoms, but I didn't know that then. Very few artists showed anything online, and zines were expensive, so I only ever ordered a couple, and even those often did not have any illustrations at all.

Anyway, I thought to be accepted as fanart in live action fandoms art had to try for photorealism. So at that time I didn't even realize that anyone might be interested in the kind of fanart I could do.

For full disclosure of my firsts in fandom, eventually there was a Sentinel fanfic for which I couldn't resist drawing an illustration, but the result was really quite bad. I was too embarrassed to attach my internet identity to that, and incidentally was also for a story I did not want to admit to have liked under my regular pseud either. These days I'm much less embarrassed about my kinks. Of course like I said above, drawer works are not my thing, so I actually posted my first piece of fanart as a sockpuppet (in a way similar to daring to post in anon kink memes first these days). The author didn't react at all though to getting my illustration for her story, so that rather confirmed my impression that fanart wasn't wanted.

Sentinel fandom quieting down coincided with the shift towards LJ, and I became more actively multi-fannish there, and I got drawn into DC fandom (against all my expectations, I never thought I'd like superhero comics in my first decades of comic fandom). Unlike the live action fandoms I was in, it seemed less daunting to draw comic characters than to have to try for a realist style, and there was more encouragement for it too, and with LJ it was easier to post pictures. So I posted my first proper fanart only after being in online fandom for over five years already.

kass prompted: "Would you talk about how you created your Ratcreature avatar (did it evolve into the current recognizable form, or have you always drawn it this way?) and what do you enjoy about having a customizable avatar of yourself?

This is going to be a bit rambly, because the origins of my avatar are something of a confluence of things.

I got my LJ in September 2002, and at that time I already had chosen "RatCreature" as my pseud for my website and generally for posting in places that were indexed by search engines, though I had used my first name on mailing lists earlier. On my website I had initially a color-shifted picture of a rat as image to go with the pseud, but that wasn't very fannish or personal and I wasn't invested in that. Icons were an important marker to recognize people, so I wanted mine to be unique and recognizable (I didn't really think I needed more than one initially, little did I know, heh), and a picture of a pet didn't fit that. Also at that particular time I didn't actually keep rats, though I had before.

Of course many fans chose pictures of their favorite characters/actors and such, but I wasn't comfortable to represent myself through photos of other people or objects or something like that, I wanted my icon to be *me* and completely mine not just a rat, but I also didn't want to use a photo of my face, in part because my LJ was for my fannish pseud not about RL. On blogs and on LJ as well many artists choose a drawn self-portrait as avatar, so I decided to do that, even though back in 2002 I hadn't drawn any fanart. There was much less fanart then, and all the art I've seen for the online media fandoms I'd been in had been very realistic art, so not suited to my style or abilities at all.

But I had drawn goofy cartoons a lot in school when I was bored in lessons, which teachers generally tolerated because I wasn't disruptive and could still follow the material and participate even while getting a lot of drawing done. Being lazy by nature I appreciated that I could get good grades without much effort and had strongly resisted any suggestions that I ought to skip grades, and I liked my classmates too for the most part, so I got a lot of doodling done. Anyway, the things I doodled were mostly funny creatures with big noses, initially just with feet and no arms, and some had trunks like these in this very old drawing. I've also always loved anthropomorphic animals, and comics with them. Not quite a furry inclination (I've never been into cosplay), but the Mary Sue self insertion characters in my early teenage fantasies looked like this.

So I generally didn't draw cartoon humans, but anthropomorphic animals and odd creatures in my cartoons. By the time I was finishing high school I regular drew creatures that looked quite similar to my avatar to represent humans, not just me but humans in general, in cartoons for our school paper and such. So naturally in our end of high school yearbook ("Abizeitung") on which committee I was (and suffered much frustration) on my personal page I drew myself like that, rather than as a cartoony human resembling me.

Anyway, when I needed a default image for LJ a few years later I thought back to that, and pretty much took the image from the second panel from the old personal page above, removed the braid, because in 2002 my hair was short and I wasn't wearing a braid like in high school, and made it smile, but I didn't really start drawing RatCreature icons just yet, I had just modified that one picture.

So I had my first icon, and it was good as default, but of course fans did a lot of things with icons on LJ in 2002/2003, There were icon memes and icon makers doing certain themes and such, and being as much of lemming as the next fan, I wanted to participate and have icons like the other fans had, but I still wanted my icons to be unique and immediately recognizable. You can see how that is something of a problem.

One of the prominent icon things at that time that many people had were lanning's "zen fen", with calm pictures and such. I wanted one, but still didn't want to represent myself by an object, like a pond or a zen garden. Also, in kerfluffles I'm not actually very zen (then even lessthan now), so I thought it would be funny make mine a little different, and in February 2003 I drew my zen...or not icon. You notice how the angry posture is pretty much copied from the typical Donald Duck outburst, a scan of which you can also see on my personal high school page. I think I've gotten smoother drawing my avatar with practice since then.

That sort of broke a dam, because the same month I made my first fandom themed avatar, Batman!RatCreature, because I was very much into Batman comic fandom then, and posting about that, and it seemed easy to dress up my avatar with a Batman costume, to have a fandom icon and still a recognizable image that would be me. Sort of like virtual cosplay. Free LJs had three icon slots back then, iirc, and in the Batman GIP post I said "BTW, were I using this LJ and not my blog as main journal, and thus paid for a LJ and had more icons, I would have more different moods and actions with my cartoon personality." (I had started a blog on my own website earlier and was still posting there and on LJ).

Of course with other fans being awesome and enabling, I was promptly gifted with some paid account time, and drew Happy!RatCreature as a celebratory response the same day, and the next day followed Spiderman, Superman, and a tv watching RatCreature, and that has expanded to now 136 icons.

What I still really like about my decision to stick with my avatar in variations as icons, is that all of my icons are recognizable as "me" regardless of their topic or fandom, once you are familiar with their basic "premise", even if you haven't seen that particular icon before. I like that my picture can always be me yet still be flexible and express my mood, so I don't have to be a Sad Panda one day and a Grumpy Cat the next in my images, but I am sad RatCreature and a grumpy RatCreature etc. It does take a little more effort to make new icons and to adapt icon memes and such to my theme, so that can be a bit frustrating at times, but it can also be really fun, and it has been inspiring me to draw. I'm not sure I would have started to draw anything in fandom without first venturing into fannish drawing through these doodles where I couldn't really do anything "wrong" or not get characters right or anything like that, because it is just my avatar.

Almost a year ago I offered fashion meme sketches, and then between one thing and another never got around to doing any. However, here is one for lilacsigil, who prompted "Mystique and reformed dress! With bloomers!"

Better late than never, right?

( sketch behind the cut )

Gakked from astridv.

Pick a number from the list and I'll answer it in the comments.

1 - Your current OTP.
2 - A pairing you initially didn’t consider but someone changed your mind.
3 - A pairing you have never liked and probably never will.
4 - A pairing you wish you liked but just can’t.
5 - Have you added anything stupid/cracky/hilarious to your fandom? If so, what?
6 - What’s the longest you’ve ever been in a fandom?
7 - Do you remember your first OTP? If so who was in it?
8 - Do you prefer characters from real action series or anime series?
9 - Has the internet caused you to stop liking any fandoms? If so, which and why?
10 - Name a fandom you didn’t care/think about until you saw it all over tumblr your social network sites.
11 - How do you feel about the other people in your current fandom?
12 - Your favorite fanartist/author gives you one request. What do you ask for?
13 - Your favorite fanart or fanartist.
14 - Your favorite fanfiction or fanauthor.
15 - Choose a song at random. Which OTP does it remind you of?
16 - Invent a random AU for any fandom (we always need more ideas).
17 - A ship you’ve abandoned and why.
18 - A pairing you ship that you don’t think anyone else ships.
19 - Show us an example of your personal headcanon.
20 - Do you remember what your first fanwork was?
21 - Self-rec: What's your favorite fanwork you've created?
22 - Are you one of those fans who can’t watch anything without shipping?
23 - 5 favorite characters from 5 different fandoms.
24 - 3 OTPs from 3 different fandoms.
25 - A fandom you’re in but have no ships from.
26 - Just ramble about something fan-related, go go go.

I saw this meme in astridv's journal, and since it's always nice to see a fanart meme come by, I thought I'd participate too.

Give me a character and a time period from fashion history, and I'll draw the character in said fashion.

I changed the linked website to the wikipedia category for history of clothing, because I found the originally linked website impossible to navigate and badly designed, whereas wikipedia offers conveniently sorted links and a fair amount of nice pictures in the articles' galleries.

Fandoms on offer: X-Men, Star Trek, Merlin, SGA, HP, DC and Muppets

I've never really drawn fashion, so while this seems like an interesting challenge for me, I'm going to limit it to five people, because I'm not sure how much effort this is going to turn out. So for easier queuing I've bundled comments on my main journal on DW for this entry.

Your main fandom of the year?
Definitely X-Men: First Class in the second half, and probably rediscovering Highlander in the first half.

Your favorite film watched this year?
X-Men: First Class

Your favorite book read this year?
Possibly Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch. Though I was probably more invested in Ghost Story by Jim Butcher.

Your favorite album or song to listen to this year?
I don't listen to a lot of music.

Your favorite TV show of the year?
Merlin, like last year.

Your favorite DW/LJ community of the year?
I haven't been very active on any comms besides my own (obligatory plug: check out fanart_recs *g*), but perhaps the XMFC kink memes? But then I don't really like the kink meme format that much, it's just that I go where stories are to be found.

Your best new fandom discovery of the year?
X-Men: First Class again. Though I've been into X-Men before, so it's not strictly new. Then again the non-reboot media launches seem to get ever rarer.

Your biggest fandom disappointment of the year?
Hmm. I've not been really disappointed in a fandom in which I was still very invested. Perhaps that so far I haven't even watched SPN season 7 anymore counts? In fandom I've missed yuletart a lot. And as far as general infrastructure goes, I really wish Delicious hadn't self-destructed.

Your fandom boyfriend of the year?
I'm still not sure how to take this question. A character I really like? Someone whom I fantasize having a relationship with? In the latter case none, in the former, possibly Erik Lehnsherr (with the understanding that I want Charles and/or Raven to keep him occupied and far away from me).

Your fandom girlfriend of the year?
I don't think I fell in love with any characters this year specifically.

Your biggest squee moment of the year?
Uh. I actually have no real idea. Possibly Ghost Story arriving by mail?

The most missed of your old fandoms?
Like last year, when it comes to nostalgia I probably still miss The Sentinel most for the complete fandom immersion of being almost mono-fannish in a big and centralized fandom, that was very active with both fic and discussion.

The fandom you haven't tried yet, but want to?
I can't think of anything. Feel free to suggest stuff...

Your biggest fan anticipations for the New Year?
The next thing in the calendar I look forward to is the new Sherlock. Later 2012 there's the new Temeraire book (I wasn't that thrilled with the last one, but still hope for the next), the Legend of Korra, and later The Hobbit movie comes to mind as well.

Adapted from the drabble meme going around:

The first five people to comment in this post get to request that I draw a doodle of any pairing/character of their choosing.(*) In return, they have to post this in their journal, regardless of their ability level.

(*) Though it would probably help if I'm familiar with the fandom.

29 – What is your current project or projects?

Just counting things for which at least something exists as scribbles on paper or in digital files:

There is the piece I started for the SGA Reverse Bang, where I then had to drop out for RL reasons, and which I then stopped working on. It's a steampunkish team scene, where the team in costumes stands around a table in a library with a map open (they are planning for something), and a lot of mechanical gadgets doing something are arranged there too (like curios). Also for some reason Sheppard has a tiny dragon sitting on his shoulder.

There is that Sanctuary thing where wanted to do a creature encounter diary/file/portfolio for some abnormal (inspired sort of by the credits), and I had decided to do a Mothman (after I did a poll here), but then some similar creature appeared in canon, and my design ideas didn't work with that new canon, and I'm not sure what to do now after being kind of jossed. I.e. whether to continue this, or draw them like in canon so that it fit (though I'm not thrilled with that), or maybe switch to another creature. So that's stalled now.

Then there is the X-Men/Watership Down fusion for which I got the inspiration from a kink meme prompt, and I thought it would be simple, but it turned out rather hard to draw a Rabbit!Magneto freeing another rabbit from a metal trap, and I'm currently still stuck with a ton of thumbnails, a whole pile of photos of sitting rabbits as well as action shots of rabbits, and stupid photos of small, supposed-to-represent-rabbits models I arranged to figure out composition and perspective. Anyway, much harder than I thought, even though this premise already dodges my usual stumbling block of character likeness what with them being rabbits. (I really wish I had an eye for caricature to get likeness right. I think that is the art ability I covet most, but have no idea how to cultivate, short of the extremely labor intensive method of doing thousands of sketches of different faces trying to pick out the distinctive features, which makes my inner sloth recoil.)

The list of potential artworks that so far only exists as text description of ideas is much longer. Looking at my file that is a total of 35 fanart concept ideas in 12 different fandoms, but considering that some of them have been on that for several year now, I can't exactly count those as "projects".

30 – Do you have a favorite piece of fanart you've created? What makes it your favorite? And don't forget to give us a link!

Uh. This is hard. I'm quite proud how my Star Trek Reverse Bang art turned out. I think the atmosphere with the giant statues works and I did a decent job with a group of people. Also it was the first time I tried a painting without ink lineart for clarity, and I like the result.

25 – Music – Do you listen to music while you create fanart? Do you make playlists to get into a certain "mood" for art? Do you need noise in general? Or do you need it completely quiet?

In general I need quiet to concentrate and music distracts me. I don't use music to create a mood, don't have playlists, and actually I listen to very little music, because I can't read with music on in the background either. Depending on how frazzled I feel (I'm easily distracted, especially on the computer) sometimes background noise helps, so then I may have some tv on in the background, but mostly not.

26 – What is the oddest (or funnest) thing you've had to research for a piece of fanart?

I don't really draw research intensive things, like historically accurate costumes and backgrounds or such. I look for relevant references, whether screencaps for characters, or pictures of movement or postures or animals, but the closest I've come to "research" was getting a few books on machinery for the steampunk puddlejumper picture. You wouldn't think such a basically whimsical picture needed much research, but I still wanted the parts look like machinery, and the prompt this picture originated from was "Victorian steampunk AU" and I didn't settle on a mechanical pterodactyl right away. It turns out children's books explaining technology are quite good if you want detail pictures of machines. For my HP magical creature series I browsed through google books looking for scans of old encyclopedias to get an idea for the style I'd need to fake something like that. That was fun too.

23 – When you post, where do you post to? Just your journal? DeviantArt? Just an archive? Your own personal site?

I post to my personal site (since 1999), my art-only wordpress blog (which I use because category sorting there is easier with just art specific labels, than in a journal with everything mixed), my journals (DW/LJ/IJ), and I try to post to communities if I find one that fits. The last two years I've also posted to deviantArt. I would use the AO3 for my fanart (I have an account there for reading locked stuff, commenting and bookmarking) if it already had fanart functionality, but I don't see much sense to archive when I can't even archive the work itself, or have good browsing functionality for pictures. I mean, if I was killed by a falling toilet seat tomorrow and my webspace expired three months later, the archive would be left with a bunch of broken images if I just embedded.

24 – Betaing – Do you use art betas? Do you have a Beta horror story or dream story?

Yes, for more elaborate pieces I like to have art betas, usually to check over the pencils for glaring errors or get help on perspective and such. I didn't use to, because for a while I didn't even know that kind of thing was done for art too, probably because thanks to art betas in art headers are rarer than to fic betas in story headers, and also I didn't seek out more art-centric forums even after I started doing fanart, because all my early media fandom engagement (on mailing lists and such) was fic-and-meta-only.

I don't have any horror stories, or any dream stories either. My experiences with betas so far have been pretty much what you expect. I sent a scan of my pencils, sometimes pointing out an area I have trouble with, I then got feedback, either written or scribbled over the image (I rather like the latter method), and mostly heeded the advice.

Bundling the "bunny" question set.

18 – Where do you get the most inspiration for your art (aka "bunnies") from?

From stories or from prompts, sometimes art also happens because I want to try a technique I've seen. Sometimes discussions and non-fiction posts inspire me, though that happens more for my icons which I use in discussions.

19 – When you have bunnies, do you sit down and start making art right away, or do you write/sketch down the idea for further use?

It depends. If the bunny is for something quick and cracky that is very context and time dependent, like comment art, I just do a scribble. That doesn't happen all that often, but when it does I end up with things like Tim turned into a lesbian centaur, John and Rodney in Woody Allen sperm costumes, or Batman getting a time out. For most fanart however it doesn't go like that, because the impetus to make something is less immediate. So I have a file for fanart ideas, write down my idea and most just land there to rot. I usually think about an idea for quite some time, and just imagine it in my head, and only start drawing if the idea is compelling enough and I keep liking it for some time.

20 – Do you ever get bunnied from other people's stories or art in the same fandom?

Yes, definitely. (Though bunny should not become a verb.) I like illustrating stories. Other fanart inspires me more in the sense that I sometimes want to try techniques.

15 – Warnings – Do you put warnings on your art, and if yes, what do you feel it most important to warn for, and what's the strangest thing you've warned for?

I don't warn on my own website, but in part that is because I so rarely post anything that would need warnings in the first place. In my journal I use headers with a warning field because some of the newsletters and communities ask for that for linking, and overall I've come to see that kind of header field mostly as "content labels" rather than the more negative "warning". And with art that you see all at once there isn't even the issue of spoiling any twists.

What I think is most important to warn for would be anything that has sex/sexual nudity with underage characters, because in some locations such art can count as "childporn" even if drawn, and even if it is teenagers and not young children, so you don't want to download it accidentally. Also labeled IMO should be the fannish equivalent to shock images, and I think if there are preview pictures for such art they should not show that part of the picture but instead use text warnings. So I'd warn for extreme violence and gore, violent sexual imagery, and animal harm in pictures, and probably be specific about what is disturbing so people can avoid specific squicks, e.g. I'd label for "gory medical instrument torture" or "explicit eye injury" rather than just "gore".

Obviously I'd also warn for serious spoilers for the canon, especially if something is still new, as a fannish courtesy.

On the next level of importance I'd put labels for explicit sex, sexual nudity and such that's merely NSFW but not disturbing, and character death. Anything else I'd probably put more under useful, but optional, detailed content labels (anyone who has seen my delicious account will guess that I have a strong preference for detailed labels) to help fans find what they like and avoid what they don't like.

As far as warnings that I have actually used myself go, there haven't been many, and nothing unusual. My art is overwhelmingly harmless. I've warned for drug use once for regular fanart, and for animal harm twice I think in drawbles, and I tend to indicate nudity or sexual activity even when mild, e.g. "PG for clothed, sexual kissing". Really it's all very tame.