Before I get into the meat of the updates, check out this new artwork I did yesterday!

Title: D. Zaster (Censored version)
Time: 15 hours
Media: Procreate

This is the first fully rendered artwork I’ve completed entirely in Procreate. As may of you know, a couple months ago, Adobe did some irredeemable stuff, and I personally took it as the last straw. Over the years, Adobe has shown itself to be a more and more corrupt company aimed solely at leeching as much as humanly possible out of their customers, and I just got tired of it. Between moving to a subscription model, regularly increasing their prices without actually fixing buggy features, claiming art that was added to Adobe Stock for use in AI training without giving the submitting artists the chance to approve or decline that usage, an then attempting to change their terms to give them a commercial license to any art you put up on the Adobe Cloud, I just could NOT handle using their service anymore.

*If you want to read my 150 page artist-help ebook, that I spent a caffein-fueled week writing and editing after Adobe’s new ToS came out, in which I break down how best to avoid companies like this doing everything they can to profiteer off of you as an artist, as well as a slew of other useful information aimed at making sure artists can protect themselves and value what they do, check it out on Google Drive here. This link includes both the standard and the Dyslexia-Friendly version in PDF format.*

Because of all of the Adobe drama, I have transitioned to using Clip Studio Paint as my primary art software, and around a week ago, I was gifted a hand-me-down iPad and Apple Pencil from Bones, which I promptly installed Procreate on to start working with yet another new program. Since both of these programs are one-time-payments, I own them and will not have to shell out more money monthly to keep doing what I do! Which means that;

I was able to enact the first, and arguably biggest, website update. I finally pulled the trigger on a domain plan, which means the new official url of Ash Something, is http://www.ashsomething.art! This has been a long time coming; This was my old URL back in my wix days, and when I switched to WordPress I had to wait for awhile to claim the URL again; And when I was finally able to claim it, I was going through The Troubles™. Now that things have started to stabilize I was finally able to get the domain name again, and hopefully I’ll be able to kee it, going forward.

Along with the new URL, I’ve gotten a new email address! From now on, you can contact me at Info@AshSomething.Art, as well as my original email, AshSomethingArt@gmail.com.

But those weren’t the first changes that occurred! Prior to upgrading my host plan, I went through my Portfolio Page and updated it. Now, the primary portion of the page is a gallery that showcases my best and most recent work. The sections for style categories is now located below that, and I’ve also added a Published Works section below that, so you can now check out my portfolio in three different ways depending on what’s most interesting to you; My own focus, my breadth of styles, or my commission-specific work!

I also changed the gallery styles to tiled galleries as opposed to the previous slideshow setup, as the slideshows really don’t showcase what I do properly.

On top of this, I’ve finally landed on an Artist Stamement/manifesto that fits with what I intend to use my art for, going forward, and I’ve added that as a new section to my About Page.