I just wanted to let everyone know that I am not "back" in the terms of "posting art back", but I am however back to provide critique. I enjoy critique, and I admit to being a bit addicted to arguing semantics on the forums, so, here I am!

I'm not watching anyone actively -- I will add you to my watch list, but only as a form of bookmarking. I'm not actually "watching" your posting habits. Trust me, if I love your art, I don't need DA's buggy system to facilitate that.

While I enjoy the spirit of it, the site is just too buggy for me, which is another part of why I'm not posting art. Before you assume I am talking out my ass, I suggest you validate any page on DA through the W3C. I ran their XHTML and it came back with 400+ errors in code, and their CSS had more than 500 errors in coding. So, I'm not being an asshole, I'm just being honest. I can open the debugging window in Opera (or Safari, or Firefox, or Camino), and watch the scripting failures just pile up like a particularly nasty blizzard would over the roof of the car.

That's not to say that this site doesn't have a place, and isn't contributing -- it certainly is! I just prefer sites like ConceptArt, which I find has a much more mature userbase and more efforts to succeed. I have a sketchbook there, and it's brilliant the help you get if you're willing to accept that your art is not the alpha and omega of modern art. (Why do so many people I run into in DA seem to think that of themselves?)

So, I was hoping that I could help some beginner artists with things like anatomy, and critique areas I'm involved in actively in my life, such as graphic design. By far I am not any sort of master artist; I am just an amateur and I have a long, long, long way to go and a lot to learn. That doesn't stop me from being able to see through the problems other people have in their work, and unless they have a note that they do NOT wish to have critique, I see no reason why I should not offer it. This is what you expect in the artist community, and it is a sad fact that the majority of users on DA flip their shit for no reason if anyone suggests they're capable of improvement. If more artists got involved in critiquing work, then the community would definitely mature.

I will also make efforts to warn an artist if they are posting copyrighted work/screenshots/etc., before reporting them. So, if you get a piece removed after being rude about posting the latest cover to a book you like when I say something about it? Yes, I was probably the one who reported you. I get very little joy out of it; I just find people posting things like that to be rather rude to the rest of the artists who are posting their own work and putting themselves on the line by opening their creativity to criticism from the community as a whole. Posting the work of others (which is illegal anyhow) belittles that courage our peers display.

I will try in the future to stop being Mr. White Knight when it comes to people saying crazy things on Kristina's page, too, but half the time I am not attempting to White Knight in the least -- it's just a great place to debate.

If you disagree with anything I say in any comment I make to you on your page, or any of my ideas in general, I am more than happy to discuss that with you, whether it be on your page or my own front page. However, I do not like to harass artists if we disagree on THEIR page, so I will direct you to comment on my page instead, rather than drawing attention away from the original artist.