bazilracoondog
Year 2024 Summary
Published: February 16th 2025, 1:37:34 pm
Finally it's time to share full summary of a very eventful year 2024 which should've been posted two months ago already but this thing was so big I simply felt intimidated to finish it although a majority of it was already written long time ago, I even had to break it on headers and sub headers to make it less confusing for those who dare to read it to the end, not really sure how many people here get enough patience to make it through though, I really outdid myself this time, I think this post is even bigger than this one pixel art related post.
PIXEL ART
2023 Pixel art vs 2024 Pixel art
First of all, I didn't think that majority of my progress in pixel art came all in 2024. Yeah, I know, if you sum it up as a whole, it all started much earlier in March 2023 with Volk concepts but for me it feels like first baby steps even though there were some real gems already, belly button fucking animation with Volk and Vityai is still my most faved pixel art on Furaffinity which climbed very high to being top 30th most popular piece in my gallery which is quite an accomplishment as I have about 400 publications there so far. The other most popular pixel art piece of mine is Fox McCloud commission which was my first pixel art comm and the only one done in 2023.
And there were already some good first OC pixel art concepts done at the same period. So it's not like 2023 has nothing to brag about in this regard but still it feels like just first attempts to approach that new medium for me before I entered 2024 which feels like a real bloom.
Mainly it's all because I had no idea about how to make anything hardware-authentic in 2023, I remember my first cringe attempts to apply Commodore 64 graphics to my Volk game concepts when I only started discovering this system for the first time and thinking just changing the palette makes it look "so authentic" while there was so much more than just palette swap. All I could do is just faux-retro designs so pretty much all my 2023 pixel art was either this or just free-style.
Learning much more in 2024
2024 is the year when I became a full-mode nerd, it was a big boom of discoveries starting with authentic CGA and Commodore 64 ideas at first months and progressing further with Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, PC-88 and finally Apple II in the end, I learned how to use Multipaint, Aseprite and 816/Paint on AppleWin emulator, it's so overwhelming it's hard to believe it all happened in just one year, turning from being nobody in a world of retro graphics to doing things never done by anybody before.
Getting more successful as a pixel art commission artist in 2024
And to get back to the comms topic, 2024 is the year when I saw myself being quite successful as a pixel art commission artist, whole 4 pixel animation commissions were done so far after just proving my skills to people for the first time with Fox McCloud as my first attempt. One commission was done for Tate with his fursona, one for Duncan with Chester Cheetah and two for an anonymous friend with Etemon and Arnold Pitbull. 4 commissions doesn't sound like much but you probably remember how complex every each of these projects was with very long elaborate animations, most of them had sound and were 3-4 minutes long so every each project felt like a big achievement and a testament of my growing skills. This also adds Sony Vegas to the list of programs I mastered this year.
OC ART
OC world development from 2023 to 2024
This excitement over studying retro graphics also went in parallel with my blooming love for my OCs. Again, their life started earlier in 2023 with May exhibition where its curator motivated me to finally let my OC ideas out instead of waiting forever for the moment when I get back to learning Blender to make Zed Vector 3D model. After this, they became my second motivational force to practice pixel art after Volk, it still feels like pixel art is my most favorite medium for them as very little OC art was done aside of it. And just as I already said, in 2023 it felt like just "testing the waters", the very beginning of my characters living a full life and becoming a part of me as common as my general R34 art. Very few artworks were done with them in 2023 and most of them are sfw. In 2024, I went horny all the way with my characters, doing a lot of inflation, fat and hyper cock stuff. Summer 2024 exhibition fueled this love a bit more when I got asked to make another big physical piece with Zed Vector which was my first attempt at making a fully 3-dimensional furry art instead of a wall piece.
Making two new OCs in 2024
One of the testaments of this escalating passion is the birth of two more personal characters after a long inspirational stagnation, not that I was really eager to make more characters as I thought it's better to focus on developing the existing 4 for now but still sometimes I couldn't resist these thoughts about expanding my universe even more although nothing came to my head until September when I created Astro the Something and then Vincent Frame, the characters I loved so much and whom I hope to keep developing in future.
Connection between OCs and pixel art
I can say, my OCs are partially the reason I went so overboard with pixel art, it feels like a vicious cycle of a two-way inspiration, I mean my characters is what inspired me to study retro graphics in a first place and studying it lead to new discoveries which inspired me to draw my characters more to put my studies into practice and this cycle went on and on over and over.
Thoughts on my OC art vs my R34 art
And I have to admit, the way how overwhelming it was and how obsessed it got me makes me feel a bit awkward. I couldn't stop thinking about how it overshadowed some other things I love and took a lot of my attention and time I could spend on other things which are way more loved by my followers. Comparing 2023 to 2024 again, 2023 also was very much the year of Volk where my love for him reached a very high level, a lot of Volk fan art was done at that period and promoting Volk with my art felt like my duty, my goal to be the best most devoted and most passionate Volk artist in fandom. I surely managed to get this status already as most people draw Volk just 1-3 times while I did 31 drawing so far and if you count pixel art and uncolored drawings from 2022 it will be even more, like, maybe 50 or so. Year 2024 wasn't fully absent of Volk content, there were two artworks, one for Pass a Gas Day, one for Father's Day, a whole 8 page comic and some more pixel art concepts but still it feels like I could do more, I'm not even talking about Tex Avery fan art, it's even worse, all I did in 2024 is that silly little Valentine's Day art in February, that's all, which is nothing compared to Tex Avery boom I had in my early years of furry activity when I did dozens of Tex Avery fan art with characters nobody ever cared about. Both Tex Avery characters and Volk are still deeply loved by me, I still have a plenty of ideas for them and it still feels like my duty to be the one promoting them to the world, who else if not me? And failing on these duties feels a bit sad. I just can't resist this excitement over finally creating a personal world of my own instead of working with other people ideas and characters, Zed, Mark and other boys managed to get way too close to what I really love and my ideals of a sexually and aesthetically perfect character, they allowed me to fully unleash my passion for so deeply beloved 80-90s culture. However, it feels like it's gonna get more balanced in 2025.
As I already said, retro graphics discoveries and the novelty of it was a big motivational overstimulating force but I'm slowly running out of new systems I can work with so it should tone down my OC obsession as well, surely I can make thousand artworks with what I already know, I'll keep working with C64 and other styles more but without this feeling of an absolute novelty it will never be as overwhelming to the point of an utter obsession as it was this year. At early times in 2023, pixel art felt like something I can do only little by little in-between when I get some free time after my more urgent art plans, in 2024 it became something taking 60% of my monthly work, it might get back to being at least somewhat more balanced in 2025.
Developing new personal art style in 2024
To finish this OC topic once and for all on a positive note, another remarkable achievement of this year is learning new drawing technique.
Starting with creation of my new 5th OC Astro the Something I decided to try a simpler fully digital drawing style, my goal was to simulate this feel of a classic airbrush style which was very popular in the 80-90s, especially in commercial art and maybe not 100% authentically but I managed to nail that feel pretty good, at least I felt very satisfied with the results. I don't have a drawing tablet so it's a bit more difficult to do with just PC mouse than it could be and I did only 5 such artworks since September so far but I think I'm gonna keep working in that style more. However, I'm not sure if I'll use this style anywhere outside my OC art, it feels like this wacky minimalistic technique is made only to work with characters as simple and wacky as my OCs.
TRADITIONAL ART
That's all about my pixel art and OC art achievements, now let's sum up the rest of what was done as there's also some interesting things to say.
Despite pixel art being so overwhelming and mind-consuming in 2024, there's a lot of good classic drawn art made in this year as well. Few of them were quite prominent and felt like big achievements.
Sequences
I made three big hot sequences, one with Leroy the Redneck Reindeer which I dreamed to do for a long time, one with Arnold Pitbull which was also a long time desired idea made to finally deal with this old face inflation piece from a random 2022 drawings series and a comm sequence with Legoshi and Jack which was undoubtedly a bomb of the year where every part of it reached the very top of my most popular pieces list on Furaffinity.
Volk comic
Another big art project of the year which is not a sequence but technically very similar was the fart-themed Volk comic. It's the first full-fledged comic coming from me, sure thing I had two tiny attempts before but, with only two pages and very little action going on in them, I can barely call them real comics. Here I went above and beyond like any comic artist would do, putting a lot of effort in character poses, expressions and most importantly page layout design which was a big weakness of my previous attempts in my opinion. This time I have nothing much to complain about.
It was also the first time I tried to do something in-between my regular art with complex pencil shading and later fully digital art style, here I chose to keep only outlines and some black elements drawn by pencil, similar to what people call "inking", and all the color fillings done digitally with very minimal shading. I chose it to make this project less time consuming but still it took a plenty of time and energy from me, even with mostly flat and primitive backgrounds, drawing comics is indeed very hard and requires a lot of dedication and patience! Honestly, the final look felt a bit questionable, using thin mechanical pencil is not the same as inking, the lines felt a bit messy and not expressive enough as bold ink lines, not sure if I ever get back to that technique again. But in general it looks like a nice comic which got quite loved by many people as it's far not the least faved piece of mine on Furaffinity.
Louis art
But going back to what was a real bomb of the year I need to pay special attention to my Louis inflation commission piece done for Komari Azuul. THAT was undoubtedly a real bomb! In just 9 months since its publication date it managed to gather a record number of 424 favs and overtake Mr Wolf and Sam pieces which held their championship of being my most popular works for a long time with almost the same number of favs, except it took them 2 and 4 years respectively to get that far. So this work is really a record breaker.
In fact, why not go all the way and share the top 33 list of my most popular works here to show what people actually love about me the most. As you can see, it's mostly furry bait stuff combined with hyper fat or inflation and if it's not furry bait stuff it's still something big and round anyway. Such statistics say a lot about what actually helped me the most to reach my current heights and it's a good proof of how drawing hyping characters is a very efficient business strategy for an artist but, as tempting as it is, I still can't succumb to this bait and do only popular furry stuff, I'm crazy about Legoshi, Louis, Mr. Wolf and other guys like that but it's still a mood thing, most the time I love to do things with guys nobody cares about.
HUMAN ART
And the last remarkable aspect of this year is my growing interest to human characters. It's another thing that started earlier in 2023 with my very first human art with Tarma from Metal Slug drawn as a comm for my friend Jakiboy who kindly supported my growing desire to get back to these roots. I mean, I was into humans for a big part of my life, then I did a 180 turn and completely lost my interest to them in favor of furry stuff but over the years my mind became more balanced and human characters started looking appealing for me again.
This growing affection doesn't look really prominent on a surface if you look at my art, the only R34 thing I did with a human character was Lucky Luke drawn for Jakiboy again but in fact I'm actually way more passionate to draw more humans and I have a huge list of them so far.
About favorite human characters for future R34 ideas
Just for the record and in case you're interested, the list of human characters I find attractive to the point of actually willing to draw them myself is: Marco and Tarma from Metal Slug, Lupin and Jigen from Lupin III, Ichigo and Renji from Bleach, Cyclops and Gambit from X-Men and Disney's Aladdin and Tarzan. DON'T ASK ME WHY THEY'RE ALL IN PAIRS, I HAVE NO IDEA MYSELF, it's really odd and purely not intentional.
Anyway, some of you might find such a choice a bit odd, like, some of these characters are way too ordinary and normal, for me who loves everything wild and weird it's strange to be into Cyclops or Aladdin, especially since I have zero interest in X-men, it would be way more common for me to love Spiderman as I had the 90s cartoon on VHS as a kid and loved it a lot but I never watched X-men, neither did I watch Tarzan, so it's strange but I'm just deeply attracted to these men just visually, the same way I love Legoshi and Louis without watching an anime or reading manga. As for them being way too ordinary nice men and your typical perfect main character, I think this is what makes them so tempting as horny fantasy subjects. I have a thing for horniness and perversion being something hidden in somebody you expect to be a pervert the least, a dark side hidden and suppressed behind the facade, sometimes against the character's will when they're forced by circumstances but then just break lose and give in to their worst desires. The idea of a noble superhero or just any heroic dude letting himself go and turning into a big fat ass, a total kink slut or something else like this is one of my most favorite classic tropes. And I guess my obsession over long faces and dark hair is the other reason why my choice stopped on such characters. However, furry characters still keep taking all my attention and never leave me enough free time to focus on my human fantasies no matter how desperately horny I feel, this is the actual reason I draw them so rarely. Hopefully it can change at least a bit in 2025.
Artworks with real life humans
Fantasies involving real life humans is a separate thing worth to mention. This realization came to me a bit later after admitting my interest to cartoon/videogame humans and for a long time it was limited only to hidden fantasies revolving around my human self instead of my fursona. Things started to change after a couple of comms done for my close friends where one featured my commissioner and myself as our irl selves plus a cartoon character and the other one was nothing but commissioner and me. The very idea of an artist drawing themselves together with their commissioner as their irl selves is quite a novel concept I haven't seen being done by anybody and for me it was a very intimate revelation. Seeing that I'm doing good with that kind of art and it feeling so satisfying set my love for human sexualization to a new level.
The second commission piece which followed my creepy Spooktober solo artwork as a sequel was another important milestone in my art. For a pretty long time, I think one year at least or so, I was indulging on my weird fetish for teeth and gums growth which can be also called a kink for freak stuff because teeth can grow in a different way but in my case I deliberately prefer it growing as ugly as possible. But all my indulging was limited to simple edits of normal artworks forever hidden as Patreon exclusive content, I didn't feel ready to share it publicly even among expired year old alts which I post on my Twitter and Bluesky. But Spooktober 2024 felt like a good excuse for finally revealing my insane sexual obsession over disgusting and freaky body transformations I never saw being done by other artists, especially to human characters.
Results of revealing my freakier kinks
Revealing such kinks online had mixed results, obviously both Beauty Potion pictures didn't receive a lot of favs (although I expected even less) and I lost A LOT of watchers in no time but in the other hand, I received a plenty of positive comments, way more than some of my other more popular works receive, no comments were negative with many people admiring this sexual aesthetic and admitting that they enjoy it and want me to draw more stuff like that, some people were very encouraging about it. To make things even more surprising, I got a lot of commission requests of the same type, three involving commissioner and myself as our irl selves turned into ugly freaks the same way, one involving commissioner's fursona turned as ugly as I can do and one involving two fictional human characters, Renji and Ichigo from anime Bleach that I mentioned as two of my favorite human characters. It's dumbfounding how big is the demand for this kind of content that I never saw posted online by anyone! It felt like nobody but me cares about something as gross as this but no. And it's only by just drawing a couple of artworks, imagine what kind of feedback I can get if I keep pushing this line further? But of course I'm not gonna go overboard with it, this kind of extremely horny stuff requires a certain mood and I still love drawing cute furry boys no less. It's just very exciting to be first at something novel and of course I can't just stop at the very beginning with just two works.
Improving folder system on FA
As a side note in the end of 2024 summary, I want to add that I improved my Furaffinity gallery this year by arranging a complex folder system. I created folders for the stuff I do the most and care about especially, like OC art, Volk art, Tex Avery art or Spooktober art. For a long time I also had just one general folder for pixel art but now as I became more nerdy I felt a need to create a sub-folder group where my pixel art is divided by the type of system it was made for and each sub-folder has a brief history of the system and its graphics described in a folder's header so now it's more convenient and well organized.
2025 PROGNOSIS
It became pretty hard to plan anything in advance even for the next month but there's still things that I'm sure gonna be done in 2025
Pixel art
Of course I want to get even better in pixel art, experiment more, do more projects, animations, maybe I can even FINALLY learn some game developing engine and evolve from just pixel artist with faux-game concepts into an actual game developer who can bring his fantasies to life with more interactivity.
At this point I mastered a plenty of 8-bit systems:
IBM with CGA graphics
IBM with EGA graphics
Commodore 64
Amstrad CPC
ZX Spectrum
Apple II
NEC PC-88
NES (although it's a part of year 2025 achievements already)
And I really don't know what else I can work with, maybe only MSX computer graphics but I'm not really interested in it and Atari graphics are sadly too difficult for me to comprehend for now, so I guess I'll focus more on working with what I already mastered from now on and start spending less time on searching and learning, thankfully.
Also I hope to deal with some of my recent wips this year, I had my attention way too spread between different animation projects and four of them are still unfinished so I can't even post them publicly for now. And of course I need to get back to Volk mini game project, its stagnated state feels especially upsetting with so much progress being done so far and so little being left to finish.
Maybe I finally try to learn 3D again this year but can't promise that it will happen.
Human art
My another goal for 2025 is to do more human art, more freaky shit similar to Beauty Potion pics and go even more extreme with my wild kinks. Hopefully I'll deal with all mentioned freaky human commissions sooner and then who knows where it can get me. But I plan to get really experimental with more varied surreal anatomy play and not get too fixated on the same set of freaky features seen in my first Beauty Potion pieces.
Making an AD account on Furaffinity
However, I plan to do something I was thinking about for a long time but started to really consider to do only recently after those two works. I need to create an AD account on Furaffinity and I'll do it right after I make another freaky human piece. It might rise two questions: why I haven't done it before and why do I need an AD at all?
Well, the reasons to create an afterdark account weren't enough to actually do it earlier. I was fine with keeping my scat art forever exclusive for Patreon subscribers only and post fart content publicly only once under the blue moon, mainly for Pass Gas Day. I thought that I maybe need some other special place to post my year old Patreon alts besides Twitter and Bluesky where they can be easier accessed as a library to advertise my Patreon content more efficiently because I really don't like social platforms like Twitter or Bluesky in terms of convenient content preservation, scrolling artist's media and look for a particular art burried underneath random life photos and memes SUCKS and there's no tagging system for the site's search to be efficient, at least barely anyone uses tags due to text limit. Furaffinity is very good but I didn't want to post alts on a main account. Sadly you can't rearrange the order of your submissions and posting alts to a work which was posted a year ago will turn my gallery into a confusing mess, I don't want to use scraps because some people simply forget about them and alt versions would be less noticeable this way. And creating an AD only for posting alts of the artworks from my main page sounded like a stupid idea and, as I said, not enough to be a reason. But now I got a real reason.
Losing so many followers after posting Beauty Potion pictures was a bad sign for me despite very nice positive feedback I got from it. Building bigger audience is very hard for me already with my contradicting content where big variety is both a blessing and a curse as some people can't stand certain type of fetishes and prefer to follow artists who do only one type of stuff, so losing even few is upsetting for me. Freaky transformations stuff is more conflicting because unlike farts or scat I can't hide it as just easy to do edits of normal artworks, here it's rooted way too deeply into the very idea of the artwork and adapting it for general audience would probably imply just drawing an entirely different separate artwork just to make it public without being afraid to lose followers, I'm not ready to put so much effort into it, nor do I want to lose followers by posting it as it is or hide it as a completely Patreon-exclusive content, I see a big novelty in these concepts that demands to be seen by more people and I see a certain big demand for it. This is how I came to a conclusion that it's time to make an AD at least for these works. And considering I got so many commission requests I'll probably be posting there pretty often, not just from time to time. I was afraid that I'm risking to get less attention for this content compared to if I post it on my main page with bigger audience but I think it's gonna be okay, I'll link my AD in my main page profile info.
And now with some special content being planned for this page I think it will be okay to post these old alts previously posted only on Twitter and Bluesky alongside. And MAYBE I'll eventually post just a bit of my very old scat alts there too. I'm not really motivated to reveal a lot of it, I'm too much used to it being one of those types of content that are 100% exclusive for my Patreon but I just need to promote this side of my content just a bit more widely to make people know what I'm actually suggesting on my page so they don't have to make their decision blindly. Also I feel a craving to reveal my real dirty self at least a bit more, if I went as far as showing my love for ugly teeth and nose hair and openly confirming my love for scat at least on words in my profile then why not go all the way, and also to socialize better with the audience of more dirty folks, it tempts me so much every time I see good filthy art drawn by somebody and I want to show off and brag with my own in a healthy way but I have nothing to show openly. But, as I said, I don't want to go overboard and I'll probably just pick some of my most favorite ones for the public release, keeping a majority of my Patreon content exclusive for my subscribers. Hope this strategy will work well as intended.
My other plans involve finally finishing these old forgotten drawings from 2022. There's still a lot of them and some of my newer followers maybe don't even remember some of it. And of course I simply plan to do more and more R34 stuff with various furry characters as usual, obscure and not so obscure.
ABOUT PERSONAL HEALTH
The last thing I wanted to say before finally finishing this excruciatingly long post is my productivity. It feels like I became very slow in 2024 and I'm trying my best to fight it but still without much improvement. I'm not suffering from depression, anxiety, apathy, art block, lack of inspiration, any personal crisis or something else like this so at least you don't have to worry about it but I'm having big problems with sleep schedule, time management, tiredness and procrastination. I can't stop going to sleep after 3am, often finishing new art at 5 or even 6 in the morning and even though some people say they feel fine living by such schedule and sleep during daytime it's definitely not my case. I sleep enough (at least most the time), about 6-8 hours, but I still feel tired and lacking energy, especially at night when my body wants to sleep already and I lean more to procrastinating activities rather than art most the time so it's BETTER for me to wake up earlier but I can't.
Procrastination and the lack of self control became a more common problem for me than it was before as well. I constantly distract myself with small things like video games, YouTube videos, answering countless furries who message me constantly in telegram and Twitter, doing horny role playing with chat bots and so on. The last one is especially a problem as it takes a lot of time and wastes my precious sexual energy which I should save for my own art.
People always tell me I should give myself some rest and take breaks but I think sometimes I give myself too much rest. Some artists are way more productive than me and there's people who work a regular job with a 8-10 hour long shift while I have days when I spend about just 1-2 hours on art in total, I just wish I had better and less distracting working conditions or just more self control.
I'm trying to fix it all, cutting the time I spend in socials and thankfully it feels like my RP addiction is dying off slowly as well but my sleep schedule is still a mess and I'm still not feeling very energetic. This really sucks because as I said I don't have art block problem and have soooo much things I want to draw both for myself and as commissions but I'm so damn slow and do only few artworks per month. It's February 2025 already at the moment of writing a 2024 summary which I started writing BEFORE New Year and it really shows how long it takes me to force myself to do anything. I even became less passionate about Volk vintage collecting, abandoned my collection update channel on Telegram and started buying less things just because I got tired of working so hard just to waste so much money all the time. It feels like I'm getting better though but it's slow and I don't know when I manage to become more productive.
PATREON GROWTH DIAGRAM
However, it doesn't look like it affects my Patreon business really terribly.
For the very end of this summary post I of course need to share the results of 2024 as a diagram.
I guess pretty much thanks to Beastars pics my membership growth was kinda good this year with just a little downfall in December but it's always like that in December. So it's nothing really horrible. 
Full diagram of my overall 4 year Patreon progress looks even more encouraging, I'd say it's one of the main things that feels convincing enough for my anxious self to actually believe that I'm a successful artist who still has potential for more personal growth and better life. Let's hope that all my efforts and upcoming art will help to reach greater heights. Of course it all would be impossible without all your help, I don't know where I would be now if I hadn't chosen this path and didn't join this awesome community. It's not only about financial support, it's also about shaping my mind, I learned a lot thanks to furry fandom, discovered a plenty of different rare cartoons, learned much more about old culture of the 80-90s, got into way more kinks and became way more open minded about my sexual desires, who knows, maybe some ideas would never be born without some motivation from aside. So, big thanks to everyone who supported me here, it means really a lot and I hope that my content still feels worthy of your support!