And what a year it has been!

I remember looking forward to 2020, with 2019 being an all round awful year. Christian Faber had been teasing Bionicle things for a very long time and eventually we even got a date for something. I was also going to get a chance at entering a 3D design course at a university, a possible career setting prospect. A long time friend was planning on making a visit to Copenhagen all the way from Romania. I had spent a wonderful new years celebration that time visiting the family of a beautiful girl. Yes, 2020 was going to be an improvement over 2019.

Then it started with SARS-COV-19. Everything went tits up. No classes, no Bionicle, no summer visits from friends, no holidays to visit my family in France. People getting knee-jerk panic reactions to the pandemic and emptying supermarkets of the most useless things. People not taking the pandemic seriously and endangering others. People flat out denying the pandemic is real, amounting the situation to yet another conspiracy theory. The effects of climate change setting everyone's back yards on fire amidst the outcries that climate change isn't a concern or isn't even real. Racist, corrupt policemen killing black people in the most fucked up way possible, resulting in a completely useless riot that achieved absolutely nothing. The biggest irony being the charities that popped up to help black owned businesses rebuild after the Black Lives Matter riots destroyed them. The areas that decided to police themselves but ended up in complete anarchy with literal murder happening. "Let's replace the police and be better than them" they said, while proceeding to be much worse than the police. China being China to Hong Kong. That's still happening, by the way. Star Trek still being owned by CBS, a company completely bereft of any inventive, inspirational and progressive talent of any kind. My potential future girlfriend parting ways because apparently what I had to offer wasn't good enough for her. That was shortly after I had spent two whole weeks of my life trying to create the most advanced painting I've ever made, testing my theories and pushing my skills to the limits, to make what was essentially a stylised portrait of her for her birthday. Not to mention the money I was saving to plan for a second date. That money went into bicycle maintenance.

I'm sitting here trying to think of something, ANYTHING, truly positive that has happened in 2020, but it's really hard... Nigh on impossible. Especially after the day before yesterday (at the time of writing) my bicycle got stolen right when I was starting my work shift. It was the last work shift of 2020, the potential for a nice fat bonus, ultimately securing my ability to upgrade my PC in January. But I need my bicycle for my job, and it got stolen in the 4 to 5 minutes I spent in a Lidl to buy a bottle of water.

No, 2020 was not a good year. Not for the world and not for myself. Nothing went right. Nothing went smoothly. Personally I've achieved very little of anything this year.

I simply... Made do.

For more neutral things:

I'm still working on a large commission for a Discord server full of Sergals. While the concept and payment was done in autumn 2019, actual drawing started at the start of 2020 in January. Before that people were still deciding where all the characters were supposed to go.

This means on the 1st it will have been in progress for a whole year. Barring some minor edits, I want to focus on actually completing it, so I won't be taking commissions until it's done.

Once the Sergal Server commission is done I'm going to hunt for a programmer. Something I was hoping to achieve much with this year was Nach, the game project I spent years struggling to bring to life. But I'm far better with designing and concepting than I'm with programming, so large portions of the time we're spent on banging my head against a wall.

Those are the plans for 2021. I so hope it's going to be a better year...

Today I'm 27 years old. I have survived another 365 days on the little wet rock whizzing about in space we call "Earth" (whoever was responsible for the naming of our planet wasn't the most inventive person for sure). 27 years old and I still... don't feel any more grown up then my age would suggest. One whole orbit was completed and I'm still alive, somehow. Considering what I've been put through in all that time it's quite the achievement.

But lets see what happened in all that time then:

- I've been rejected from university, twice. One digital design course (they said I wasn't talented enough) and one 3D design course (they no longer had any place left). Now with coronavirus haunting the 2020s getting into uni this year will even be harder.

- In Autumn of 2018 I was given the biggest commission to do I've ever been given. It's still not done. ^^;

However it's certainly something that lets me flex all my skills on.

- I got a place to live where I could set up my PC once more, retrieve my game files and restart my game project again. Now Nach has found a new home in the Godot engine, although it's still VERY early on and learning coding while also doing everything else on the game is a bit of a chore. But it's coming along, if slowly.

- Work has been... hard. I work for Wolt, food delivery by bicycle, and COVID-19 has made people lose most of their jobs and other incomes. These people have used Wolt as a fallback to keep afloat, which means a lot more couriers... but not enough work schedules to go around. Keeping afloat myself has been... tricky.

- In December, before the whole corona stuff hit Denmark, I asked someone out on a date! For the first time ever! It didn't go EXACTLY as planned but I had an amazing time and I believe so did she. Now I just need to figure out how to go on another date with her. First the COVID-19 stuff needs to go away, then I need to see if work gets better so I can save up again. And then... who knows?

Those are about the highlights I can think of in the 365 days leading up to my 27th birthday. That's... not a lot of stuff happening in a whole year but then my life isn't super eventful either.

But hey, I'm not complaining!

I'm still alive and I got plans on achieving things before the year is done!

Anyway, that's it from me.

Hope it's as awesome a day as it is over here right now!

Well, for anyone who cares, I got a Patreon page which can be found here:
https://www.patreon.com/Tattorack

One of my friends convinced me to open one so there it is ^^
I still don't think much will come of it, but who knows?
Anyway, what are the benefits of become a patron? Well, you'll get to see WIPs, sketches, be part of votes, get 3D files of my projects, get dev builds of projects... basically anything I can think of to make it worth while. At this very moment there is not a lot, but I've been posting some stuff already and will continue to do so as I work on my various projects.
Be advised, though, for those who might not know yet, I also make NSFW art which will most certainly be posted on Patreon earlier than everywhere else.

Posted using PostyBirb

Right, so I'm open for commissions! I will draw almost anything from SFW to NSFW art, but be sure to ask if something is ok first, there are some things I'm uncomfortable with drawing and many things I don't even know about yet.

Here's the commission price list (examples are given where applicable):

Headshots - $14 https://www.newgrounds.com/art/view/tattorack/commission-mleh

Full body/Vehicle - $30 https://www.newgrounds.com/art/view/tattorack/commission-leviatis-fafnir

Reference sheet - $50 https://www.newgrounds.com/art/view/tattorack/brair-oak-oakfist

Scenery/background - Between $30 and $50 depending on complexity https://www.newgrounds.com/art/view/tattorack/simple-background-example

I'm posting this journal as a personal reminder and hopefully as a form of motivation to get my character sheets done after I'm finished with my requests and commissions.

TERRANS:
-Alexander Ixe
-Xzan Shrew
-Lizzy Hammel
-Jack Hynes
-Helen Luke
-Natasha Luke

TERRASAURS:
-Sauren Etrek
-Garmagdon
-Aarik Scy

QURAUW:
-Felix Ixe: DONE http://d.facdn.net/art/tattorack/1528639019/1528638458.tattorack_felix_ixe.png
-Kawashitari Ixe
-Ketren

DRACONITES:
-Brair "Oak" Oakfist: DONE http://d.facdn.net/art/tattorack/1528456969/1528390831.tattorack_oak.png
-Iona Shadowfang Shrew
-Suraque The Swift

POLRUM:
-Mikilon

NAKIRI:
-Zachery "Z Groove" Miles

AI:
-NoChip

Those are.... a lot of characters ^^;
Lets just hope I don't get burnt out too quickly.

So, it appears I've survived another full orbit cycle on this planet. Another 365 days experienced in relatively good health.
This makes the 25th time I've achieved that. Or a total 9125 days, excluding the occasional leap year.
If I were to live till a hundred I'd say I reached my first quarter. But I don't know what the future will hold and how it will effect the longevity of me or the general population.
One can hope, at least.

Plenty of times we see this kind of drama.
Whether its on DeviantArt, Newgrounds, FurAffinity or some kind of roleplaying group in some kind of social media, there will always be an event where somebody points at something they recognise and call the original poster out on committing art theft.
The usual response being "But I found it on Google Images!" or "If you care so much about your art, make sure it can't be found on Google Images".
Either way, Google Images is usually involved somehow.

So what is this thing called "art theft"?
Well, its when somebody uses a piece of somebody else's art without the artist's permission.
I said "uses". This means things like: Using it as their roleplaying character, in their image edits, as part of their website, as part of their video or just plain copying/tracing it.
Generally it isn't considered art theft if somebody just shares the image in a "look at this cool thing" kind of way.

But then there are those that believe Google Images is a free market.
Everything on the simple yet powerful search engine that practically owns the internet itself MUST be free to use, right?
Wrong.
Anyone with a set of eyes and a tiny bit of awareness would know that's really not the case.
Type in any search term, open any image within the engine (you know, before going to the image source) and you see this written neatly nearby:

"Images may be subject to copyright."

Then why does Google have this image, then?
Well, you see, Google doesn't.
Google doesn't own a single one of the images you can find in the image search. It doesn't "have" any of them.
The Google Images search simply finds these images where they are and displays them on a grid for you to see. There is always the option to go to the website where the image displayed is from.

So when you're looking for art to use, regardless of its purpose, finding it on Google Images is not a free ticket!
You'll have to put some effort into actually asking the artist if you're allowed to use it.
That is, if asking the artist is even necessary.
Often an artist writes whether or not you're allowed to use their art on their front page. If that isn't there, check the image's Creative Commons licence, it'll tell you exactly if you're allowed to use it and how. If neither of those are present, its pretty safe to assume that, no, the artist doesn't like others using their art.

Whether you're allowed to use an image, or if you found a piece of art and you can't find out who it belongs to (which is kinda difficult not to. I mean, just use Google's linked/uploaded image search) then its always, and I mean ALWAYS still necessary to say that you don't own the art.
Yes, no matter how you edit said art piece, the only things that are yours are the edits and never the art itself.
Plenty of people I've seen saying that a certain thing is theirs simply because they switched the colours or added a misshapen blotch in MS Paint.
Tracing doesn't make it yours either. You're literally just running over lines that have already been made. Nothing original there.
These delusion that should just die.

There are ways of finding images that are completely 100% royalty free.
Free to use in any way or form you want. And one of the best ones is this:
search.creativecommons.org/

The creative commons search engine.
You can tweak what kind of commons you want to search for and on what its sources are based on, but you are sure that every single image you find with this has a free to use licence, some of them even for commercial uses.

I hope this helps for anyone who usually runs into problems being accused of art theft.