Recently I got an email from Holly at Elysian Fields Archive. She had an old piece of my art from yeeeeeaaars back, and tracked me down online to get permission to share across her socials! Check it out:
I had not seen that piece in more than 10 years, y’all… I was shocked anybody still had any of my old art! That was from my former fanart site, All Night Noise… All that’s left of All Night Noise these days is a few pages on the Wayback Machine and my old DeviantArt account (please ignore the cringey-ass “art”!); everything else has long-since been deleted from my computer!
Seeing this piece again brought back so many memories. Fanart has always been a beautiful escape from reality for me. When I was a stay-at-home mom, stuck in a crappy marriage without much of a social life, my fanart community was my social life. I lost myself for hours in creating for myself, for art challenges, and fulfilling requests, and I made so many wonderful friends from it all. I miss those days… Everyone was so into it, and there was some truly amazing art that came out of that community.
I recently started making fanart again after a long hiatus. The last year of my life has been pure hell, and fanart helped me to find joy again. Creating art from things I love is fun, and it has helped me to learn and grow in my Photoshop skills. More importantly, it has helped me feel like myself again, after a year of feeling nothing but sadness and pain; I didn’t realize how much I needed that til one night while working on a new piece for Buffy: Elevated.
Should I do a new version of this piece?? I think that could be fun!
