It's the 18th of November, in my timezone at least, and that means it's the first anniversary of my Tumblr! (and the Tom A. Fox account in general) Now here's something I don't usually do: write a long blog post. I'll talk about some statistics of my art from the last year and about future plans.
Sorry if the formatting is a bit wonky, I'm not used to writing long texts and I'm copy-pasting this to both Tumblr and Inkbunny from a plaintext editor.
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Last year's schedule In January of 2018, I decided to make at least one piece of art per month and see how long I could keep that up. It's been pretty challenging, but surprisingly enough I did it - with two extra pieces as well! Now here's why it was so challenging to me: I dedicate little time to this blog. On top of my current education and my job, I'm applying to multiple art colleges. Both of them require me to have an art portfolio of their respective art form. (Animation/Live-action filmmaking) So, I have to make these videos too. I really don't want to combine the nudity from this account with my portfolio. I want them to be completely separate, so I have to make three portfolios, if you count this account as one.
My favourite piece so far is Campfire (July 2018) because of its combination of the 2D drawings and 3D environment. It looks like the two layers are actually interacting with each other for once, even though ironically this is the first piece in which the characters are not in the same place as the environment. I made a behind-the-scenes post for that image, if you're curious.
The boring statistics I really don't mind if you're skipping this bit, I don't expect it to be of much interest for people other than myself. (Link to the Tumblr version of this post, which includes a spreadsheet with some statistics.) I've wondered which pieces would be the most popular, so I'd know what to make more of in the future. I found it surprising that the popularity of a piece didn't depend on when it was released, as I thought that because I'd be better known now than on my very first day, my posts would get more views now than in the first few months. What I did expect however, is that my animation from August would get the most views. Because animations are rarer than still images on Inkbunny, it would appear for much longer on the New Animations tab. Because of it's popularity, it might have snowballed to the Popular tab to get even more views, but I don't know this for sure. This animation performed the same on Tumblr as the still images, though. This makes sense, considering Tumblr's system. Another success was Campfire. (Posted in July) It's the second-most popular most on IB view-wise. It's my favourite one, so I had it featured. People who clicked on my account from the animation saw that piece first. It also helps that it has multiple images in the same submission - people would be curious to what the other images could be, instead of scrolling past the image, which wouldn't count as a view despite having seen the image. Another surprise for me is that it also performed well on Tumblr!
Plans for the future I ran out of ideas for still images, so expect less of them in the future. I'm open to suggestions! I'm planning to make comics instead, featuring some stories about Tom and Sam. Tom's featured in all fourteen pieces of my current art, Sam is in only three of them. Keep in mind that even though I'm using Tom A. Fox as my persona (fursona if you will), they're all completely fictional characters and my real life is completely different from what I will be portraying. I will start with short comics consisting of only one or two pages, then move to longer comics if possible. If it turns out that I'm able to produce comics at a reasonable pace - which I don't expect to be honest - I might be able to move on to a long-form webcomic with new characters in a fantasy setting. I already have a vague story idea with some world building, but I don't want to start a long project only to give up on making it and leave it unfinished. There are enough unfinished projects on the internet already, I don't want my comic ending up like that! In any case, I hope to continue my once-per-month schedule.
Thanks for reading this long post, or at least part of it, I appreciate your interest! :)
