In my experience, before I was the holder of the skill I used to just doodle on paper. I love markers. I love whiteboards. Thick blocks of shaders similar to what you see in comics is my go-to style for traditional art. But ever since I became The Artist representing BOW, I learned digital art quite faster than the rest. It was tricky on my first try, like waking up a dormant muscle, but I managed. Once in a while I revisit styles learned throughout the years by my predecessors and improve them, learn a new one so if someone's interested in drawing they can claim it for personal use, or teach a friend to bond with their chosen style like a living book in our magical library if that's relatable. 😂
I'm curious. Do some or each of you have personal art styles? Are there friends who hold the skill, and, probably, consider it as a collective art style? Are you able to share the skill to those who are not used to drawing?
The questions are specific to one skill but it's also applicable to other skills you have like handcrafting, or writing, or a secret third thing perhaps! What have you! I'm happy to listen if you love to dive deep (haha) into the details, or not! Whatever you feel comfortable sharing if it sparks your autism.
Bonus question, free to skip: Cerberus or Hydra are suggested a lot when making a collective sona in and out of the plural community... Did you all vote for the cool bat (the one on your profile) as your collective sona? If so, were there other ideas thrown on the table before choosing the bat? If not for the collective, that's cool. Whoever the bat belongs to, I need you to know that I love it! Still curious about the process. 👀
I've been thinking about what ours could be, but our species differ on a wiiide ever expanding universal scale and nobody agrees to one specific form to represent us all. For sure, we have The Collective Symbol, but it's abstract in nature! We require at least a shape of a creature of some kind! Help! 😅😂 (I'm being silly, not serious! I'm not actually asking for advice but if you're happy to speak your suggestions, I don't mind. Honestly! I'm only invested in your bat - the colors and design are so cool, I love it so much - as someone who is comfortable under the ducksona rather than my human form.) (Sam Lake is a furry, confirmed. —Casey) (I don't know. I like ducks, and cats, and dogs, and deers, and fishes, etc... 😅😂)
Also, maybe it doesn't show but I'm anxious about sending an ask under my name and people finding out who I am but to hell with feeling spooked for simply existing. I consider this exposure therapy. Thanks to my peers support. And thank you to Vis for enjoying the Kesä/Jakala art, and to all the others who enjoy our art in general. My heart swells. OK, where am I going with this - it's getting too long. Excuse me for writing a wall of text. That's all. Please don't feel pressured to answer right away! I have no trouble waiting for months or years, in fairness. Thanks for sticking around reading to the last bit, haha. 🥹
!!!! Ok ok uh for the art related questions yeah a couple of us have different artstyles yeah! For the most part most of us frequent fronters share collective art skill and style as we tend to operate with multiple folks in & around front! But we do have some differences in art style and such, like uhhh Pom and Byte are way too good at art and need to be stopped, Horizon & Zone do linework and stylistic choices that somewhat different to how most of us draw, ❄️ & Sootly & NPC draw very angularly while most of us draw with very round shapes! Sometimes when people haven’t fronted in a while they need a little help drawing because its been a while for them, and other times they’re up to speed on our mostly collective current style already! We don’t quite have one art focused individual but the people i would point at for being the best at our craft would probably be Pom and Byte as most of our favourite pieces have been drawn by them!
Writing is a skill that not as many of us hold as drawing- Gnocchi & Biohazard needed a lot of help writing, while meanwhile our own personal coffee fiend wrote an essay for an exam very well & managed to not panic about it (thank you our coffee fiend,,, i know we all make fun of you for being obsessed with your favourite drink and the rest of us not always wanting it but your really a cool guy so thanks man)! I think Cake, Ark, Amy, and sometimes Timespiral are also some of our general writers, but again thats less of a skill for us in general I think!
Now onto the collective persona development rant >:D !!
Our profile’s little bat guy is actually a variation of our current collective sona, as inspired by one of our irl friends who drew us as a bat! We’ve been wanting a collectove fursona for a little while but were never really set on what to do other than a bit of a general shrug and going “maybe a protogen?” but not ideas other than that. Our irl friend drawing us as a bat made us design this lil guy, as a reflection of our current collective sona with an outfit more like something we might wear irl!
Heres our actual collective sona! Yes its very minecraft themed but in our defence Every Ancient City Is Our Hause !! Most of our past collectivesonas ended up becoming their own people (this actually happened with Byte- it was designed as a concept for a collective fursona and then it formed and now its here as its own person!), making their form no longer represent all of us, meaning that yeah, we fully understand the struggle of trying to make a design that represents most everyone comfortably and that won’t go ahead and form a new guy or just wont be fitting enough to everyone xD
To be fully honest we designed our collective character kind of on accident! It was originally designed for a fashion class we were taking, and then we kept thinking about this guy and at some point someone made him a minecraft skin, and then it got put into an art piece about our experiences with disability for an art assignment, and kinda from that point on, fae have been representative of all of us!
Heres the original sketch of our guy, the artwork in question, and the block version of our beast.
Our collective persona’s a little of a happy accident, but I think it fits us well :D ! Having a collective persona that was a Good Neighbor was incredibly affirming for a lot of us, as a large amount of us in here either are of that ilk or sort of lean slightly in that direction due to our collective perception of self! Of course not all of us are Fae, which is why this guys also a little of a shapeshifter for anyone who wants to draw the collective sona but tweak fae slightly so that its form can feel more fitting to themselves!
At some point, we decided that every Ancient City was our house thanks to a joke we made on our friend CharmLikeTheQuark’s twitch stream while they were playing on Art Of Survival smp, and that jokes kinda stuck around ever since!
The whole deal with our collective sona being a quantum superposition of an offshoot of a Fae court came later when hanging out with our friend Solar, who noticed that for some reason our username was displaying twice when we were playing on a server with them & a couple other friends of ours!
If you zoom into the first screenshot you can kinda see it but its more evident in the second one! But yeah, thats sort of probably why this sona has stuck to us so hard, the idea that it, as a vessel of expression for us, is multiple people too!
Overall, having a guy with themes that fit with things a lot of us enjoy as well as sort of thematically & literally being multiple guys is sort of how we went about realising it was a perfect fit for us, but collective sonas are hard! I send you all luck with designing yours! I guess some of the advice we could give is to go with themes & design choices that primarily stick with frequent fronters but can be slightly altered if need/want be to do so, that way even if it doesnt resonate with everyone, the general idea of “this concept is moldable or perhaps shapeshifter-y in its nature” could stick with more people overall!
so uh yeah thats about it! As stated before the bat variation came about as a variation of our already collective sona as inspired by an irl friends drawing of us collectively as a bat!
Fhew! That was a lotta text, ok! But I hope we answered and got to all of your questions Sam! This took a while to write and is somewhat messy as we’re still sleepy and still in bed, but HOPEFULLY ALL THAT MESS IS HELPFUL XD!
hoo boy did the persona bit take a while but thats ok, it was fun to try to elaborate on all of that!!!
thanks for the ask sam!!!! ahhh !!!! this was super fun to answer :D !!! <33 !!! i hope yall are havin a good day so far !!!!
